Tag Archives: Church and State

Good-Bye to All That?

Posted on May 19, 2013 by | Leave a comment

A report in last week’s Telegraph suggests that British Christianity is declining more rapidly than previously understood. Initial reports about the 2011 census showed the number of people in England and Wales who describe themselves as Christians had fallen by 10 percent since 2001. But it turns out those figures included Christian immigrants, such as Polish Catholics and African Pentecostals. When one looks only at the native born, the percentage of people who describe themselves as Christians has fallen by an even greater amount–by 15% in the space of one decade. The decline is particularly pronounced among the young. At this rate, the Telegraph predicts, Christianity could become a minority religion in Britain within the next decade.

These numbers have worrisome implications for the future of the Established Church. In a country where only a minority is willing to describe itself as Christian, what would be the basis for maintaining state Christianity? A spokesman for the Church of England admits the census numbers present a challenge, but notes that recent attendance figures have been stable, and that the committed core “of the faithful remains firm.” Maybe so, but state churches, almost by definition, need to draw support from society as a whole, not only the people who attend every Sunday. Perhaps those respondents who said they weren’t Christians nonetheless think the established church serves a useful social function and want it to endure. But maybe not.

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Posted in Commentary, Mark L. Movsesian

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National Day of Prayer

Posted on May 2, 2013 by | 1 Comment

You might not have noticed it, but today is the National Day of Prayer. I should say, a National Day of Prayer, as that’s what the US Code calls it. Every year, by law, the President issues a proclamation “designating the first Thursday in May as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, or as individuals.” President Obama’s proclamation this year is rather moving. It stresses the comfort that Americans draw, in times of suffering, from the simple fact that other Americans are praying for them:

Prayer brings communities together and can be a wellspring of strength and support. In the aftermath of senseless acts of violence, the prayers of countless Americans signal to grieving families and a suffering community that they are not alone. Their pain is a shared pain, and their hope a shared hope. Regardless of religion or creed, Americans reflect on the sacredness of life and express their sympathy for the wounded, offering comfort and holding up a light in an hour of darkness.

The proclamation itself ends with a prayer: “I join the citizens of our Nation in giving thanks, in accordance with our own faiths and consciences, for our many freedoms and blessings, and in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection.”

The day is not without its critics. The Freedom from Religion Foundation once filed a lawsuit, dismissed on standing grounds, arguing that a National Day of Prayer violates the Constitution, and the American Humanist Association hosts a competing National Day of Reason every year. (You might not have noticed that, either.) Orthodox theists of various sorts might find the day objectionable as well. To whom or what are Americans being invited to pray? Doesn’t officially-encouraged prayer to a nondescript deity lead to confusion and least-common-denominator religion? Not everyone finds generic prayers so harmless.

I’m not sure what the answer is, except to say that designating a National Day of Prayer seems entirely American. Public religious references of a nonsectarian character have long been a part of the American tradition, for better or worse, and there’s no stopping them now. The wisdom of our ancestors is in such things, as Dickens once observed in another context, and if we disturb them, the Country’s done for. Purists, of the secular and orthodox variety, have to adjust.

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Posted in Commentary, Mark L. Movsesian

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Gay Wedding Cakes and Liberalism

Posted on April 22, 2013 by | 7 Comments

Over the past several years, there have been a number of reported incidents in the U.S. where a bakery has refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. In the latest case, a bakery in Gresham, Oregon refused to bake a cake for a wedding between two women, citing religious objections.  One of the aggrieved fiancées has filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, which is now investigating whether the bakery violated an Oregon statute prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.

This incident illustrates a wider phenomenon—unwillingness to pursue liberal values when it comes to the politics of sexual orientation.  By liberalism, I mean the strain of European political philosophy that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries partly as a reaction to the devastating religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, most particularly the Thirty Years’ War that killed eight million people in central Europe.  Liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill stressed individual rights, limited government, and freedoms of speech, press, religion, contract, and property as antidotes to such bloodshed.  They aimed to allow people with fundamentally different world views to contribute jointly to the projects of government, order, and civil society with minimum friction.  Liberalism is the philosophy at the heart of the enduring American constitutional order.

Alas, liberalism is losing out in the culture wars.  The gay wedding cakes battles are representative of a wider disease that infects people in both camps—invoking the power of government to endorse and enforce one’s world view on matters of sexuality and identity.  Rather than just saying, “I’ll take my business elsewhere,” the impulse is to call the attorney general’s office in support of one’s position, as though law and politics were the appropriate fora for deciding the morality of sexual identity and practice.

The predominant forces in both camps are pushing anti-liberal agendas.  In 2004, the Virginia Legislature passed a statute invalidating private contracts between gay people if they replicated the incidences of marriage.  Conservatives continue to resist political settlements on same-sex marriage that would shift marriage decisions from the state to individuals and private communities.  On the other side, progressives are fighting to enshrine their views in marriage and antidiscrimination laws and school curricula.  In the Chik-fil-A flap last summer, progressive politicians around the country threatened zoning prohibitions or other deployments of state power to fight the forces of “hatred and intolerance.”

Where are the liberals?  Where are the people willing to say: “As much as possible, let’s not decide these questions in the arena of the state.  Let’s let them play out in families, churches, religious communities, social networks, friendships, businesses, and private associations.  Let’s resist the impulse to make these kinds of divisive moral and religious questions political questions.  Let’s not fight another Thirty Years’ War.”

Let me try to preempt some likely objections with two concluding observations.

First, a liberal disposition cannot be confined to circumstances where one disapproves of someone else’s conduct but it causes no harm to others—because that’s an empty set.  It’s child’s play for lawyers, philosophers, and economists  to demonstrate that almost anything one person does affects other people.  When the baker refuses to make the wedding cake, it imposes real distress, humiliation, and inconvenience on the person requesting the cake.  Conversely, having to make the cake would impose real offense and moral indignity on the baker.  Liberalism doesn’t depend on a view that one of the parties really isn’t hurt, any more than free speech depends on a view that words can never be hurtful.  Liberalism is a disposition that says “the state must let pass these sorts of harm—they do not rise to the level of force and fraud where state intervention is justified.”

Second, to espouse liberalism isn’t to pretend that the state never has to make political judgments on issues of sexual orientation.  Since the state runs the military, it must decide whether gay people can serve in the armed forces.  Since the state regulates adoptions, it must decide whether gay people can adopt.  And there are of course other examples.  But the fact that it is sometimes unavoidable for the state to wade into these thorny issues does not justify the state wading in when it doesn’t have to.  The great project of liberalism is to strive continually for resolutions that don’t involve the state deciding divisive issues of  meaning and morality that require choosing between contending world views.  This isn’t always possible, but it’s possible much more of the time than it happens.

Calling all liberals . . .

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Posted in CLR Forum Guest, Daniel Crane, Uncategorized

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Marriage Privatization Won’t Be Easy

Posted on April 17, 2013 by | 2 Comments

Several years ago I wrote a “Judeo-Christian” defense of marriage privatization, by which I mean getting the government out of the business of deciding what marriage is and by what terms it should be governed.  As the cultural wars over same-sex marriage intensify, that idea has gained wide popularity across the political spectrum.  For example, in their popular book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein devote an entire chapter to advocating marriage privatization.

Many advocates of marriage privatization seem to think that disentangling the state from marriage would be easy.  They argue that the government should just stop issuing marriage licenses.  Marriage would then become a private ceremonial and contractual matter.  The state would enforce marriage contracts just like other contracts.

Although I remain an advocate of marriage privatization, disentanglement would be far from that easy.  The state is thoroughly intertwined with marriage; the Gordian knot cannot be neatly severed.  I’m currently working on article entitled How to Privatize Marriage that tries to work through these complex issues.  My bottom line is that privatizing marriage does not mean that the state would get out of regulating and recognizing intimate unions altogether, but that it would try to create a wider space for regulation and recognition by individuals and social and religious groups.

I’m still working through these issues and won’t try to offer a comprehensive solution yet.  For now, I’d  like to raise three difficulties with marriage privatization that need to be addressed as part of any privatization proposal.  They correspond to functions currently served by state marriage regulation and recognition.

First, the state uses marriage as a marker for the dispensation of state benefits and the extraction of obligations owed to the state by individuals.  This is most obvious in the taxation context, but occurs across a tremendous range of state activities. (I’m using “state” in its broad sense to include all governments).   For example, selective service (i.e., the draft) has typically differentiated between the married and unmarried.  The rules of evidence create “marital privilege” allowing spouses not to testify against each other.  If the government were to stop issuing marriage licenses, it would need to account for the thousands of ways in which laws draw distinctions based on marital status.  If marriage were a purely private creation—anyone could call themselves married according to whatever criteria they chose—these thousands of legal categorizations would collapse.

Second, the state has traditionally regulated marriage to prevent certain kinds of abuses.  For example, prenuptial agreements are not enforced as routine contracts because of the potential for unfairness and imposition by the strong on the weak.  The easy “pro-privatization” answer is that civil courts would continue to enforce marriage contracts only if they were fair.  But what if the married couple had agreed, for example, to be bound by principles of Christian marriage and to have any disputes within their marriage resolved through a process of conciliation, mediation, and arbitration within the Catholic Church?  Nominally, a civil court’s job would be to enforce any arbitration award coming out of the Catholic Church, as courts currently do under the Federal Arbitration Act.  But now imagine the entanglement problems when, for example, the wife challenged the arbitration award as unconscionable or against public policy because the arbitrators had discriminated against her because she was a woman or had left the Catholic Church or wanted to use birth control or had come out as a lesbian or any number of other potentially objectionable reasons.  Having civil courts scrutinize religious arbitral decisions for fairness and conformity with public values raises severe establishment clause and free exercise problems.  And having courts simply rubberstamp such arbitration awards means that the state would have to abdicate its traditional function in preventing various kinds of abuse and unfairness within marital relations.  Just to raise everyone’s hackles, imagine the proceedings to enforce a Sharia divorce judgment in a family court in San Francisco.

Finally, state recognition of marriage plays an important role in facilitating market transactions between private parties.  For example, car rental companies typically allow a married renter to add  his or her spouse as a driver at no additional charge.  Insurance companies set premiums for all kinds of policies based on marital status.  And there are many other examples.  In certifying who is married, the state performs a function that markets value, much as the USDA does as to various kinds of food certifications.  This is not to say that private organizations couldn’t replace the state’s certification role, but, to play law and economics for a moment, that might greatly increase various kinds of transaction costs.  This last point is one that I don’t think has been widely appreciated, but is quite substantial.

I believe that there are answers, which is why I remain an enthusiastic marriage privatization proponent.  But privatization advocates need to start engaging more systematically with these thorny problems.

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Posted in Daniel Crane

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McKnight & Modica (eds.), “Jesus is Lord, Caesar is Not”

Posted on April 15, 2013 by | Leave a comment

3991Last month, InterVarsity Press published Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not: Evaluating Empire in New Testament Studies, edited by Scot McKnight (U. of Nottingham) and Joseph B. Modica (Eastern U.). The publisher’s description follows:

The New Testament is immersed in the often hostile world of the Roman Empire, but its relationship to that world is complex.

What is meant by Jesus’ call to “render unto Caesar” his due, when Luke subversively heralds the arrival of a Savior and Lord who is not Caesar, but Christ? Is there tension between Peter’s command to “honor the emperor” and John’s apocalyptic denouncement of Rome as “Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots”?

Under the direction of editors Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica, respected biblical scholars have come together to investigate an increasingly popular approach in New Testament scholarship of interpreting the text through the lens of empire. The contributors praise recent insights into the New Testament’s exposé of Roman statecraft, ideology and emperor worship. But they conclude that rhetoric of anti-imperialism is often given too much sway. More than simply hearing the biblical authors in their context, it tends to govern what they must be saying about their context. The result of this collaboration, Jesus Is Lord, Caesar Is Not, is a groundbreaking yet accessible critical evaluation of empire criticism.

NB: Peter Leithart reviews the book at First Things.

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Posted in Andrew R. Hamilton, Scholarship Roundup

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How Would Jesus Rule on Same-Sex Marriage?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by | 25 Comments

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to rule on same-sex marriage, Christians on both sides of the issue continue to invoke Jesus in support of their position.  Or, more precisely, they invoke a vision of ethics and morality (i.e., inclusivity vs. traditional moral values) that they associate with Christian teaching.  But how would Jesus actually have responded if asked “how should the Supreme Court rule on same-sex marriage?”

That’s anachronistic, of course, but it’s the kind of question that “teachers of the law” routinely flung at Jesus, usually with the intention of entrapping or discrediting him.  The legal elite of Jesus’ day peppered him with hot button legal and ethical questions like “should we pay taxes to Caesar” and “to whom do I owe neighborly duties?”  Often, these questions involved marriage and sexuality:  May a man divorce a woman for any and every reason?  How should a woman caught in adultery be punished?  If a woman marries seven different husbands in succession and then dies herself, which one is she married to in Heaven?  It’s not hard to imagine CNN legal analyst Jeff Toobin cornering Jesus and asking him, “Hey Jesus, how about same-sex marriage?”

It would be presumptuous of me to say how Jesus would answer that question, so I won’t.  But I will offer three observations from things Jesus actually said in response to similar questions.

First, Jesus would likely have faulted both sides of the debate for an excessively materialist perspective.  On one side, we hear that marriage is about procreation and child rearing.  On the other, that it’s about love and companionship.  But Jesus did not understand marriage primarily in terms of its temporal or material effects.  For Jesus, marriage was a spiritual representation of divine relationships.  According to Jesus, God created man and woman—male and female—in the image of God, mirroring the unity and diversity within the Godhead.  Jesus and later apostolic writers referred to Jesus as a bridegroom and the Church as his bride.  Jesus explained that in Heaven people would not be married to one another, since they would be in perfect union with God.  Thus, the ultimate good of marriage was not that it served immediate material needs but that it celebrated the eternal nature of God.

This understanding of marriage has precious little purchase in the contemporary, hyper-materialist world.  Even those who recognize marriage’s “spiritual” component usually mean that psychosomatically—marriage feeds long-term emotional and pyschological needs.  We’ve lost any sense of human institutions as good because of their correspondence to divinity.  Across the ideological spectrum, we’ve given in to Richard Posner’s wish of “unmasking and challenging the Platonic, traditionalist, and theological vestiges in Enlightenment thinking.”  It’s safe to say that Jesus would have had a different take.

Second, and in some tension with my first observation, Jesus might have responded to a question about same-sex marriage by distinguishing between the spiritual ideal and pragmatic legal rules.  That is what Jesus did on divorce.  When asked whether a man should be allowed to divorce a woman for any and every reason, Jesus responded that Mosaic law allowed for divorce because of the hardness of people’s hearts, but that things weren’t that way from the beginning.  Jesus was not advocating a change in the law, but a change in people’s hearts.

Christian thinkers have long debated the distinction between legal and spiritual marital norms.  When Britain was liberalizing its divorce laws in the 1940s, my two favorite Christian writers, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, took different views on whether Christians should advocate that secular legal institutions mirror the spiritual ideal.  Tolkien opposed the divorce reforms on the grounds that the spiritual should inform the legal.  Lewis argued for a pragmatic differentiation between the spiritual and the legal.  In my view, Lewis was closer to the position staked by Jesus.

Finally, chances are that Jesus’ answer would go to issues far beyond the narrow question presented.  This was almost invariably Jesus’ pattern when confronted with hot-button legal issues. He always found the question itself less important than the darkness it exposed.  Thus, he turned the question about paying taxes to Caesar into condemnation of his questioners’ failure to honor God, the adultery penalty question into an indictment of his interlocutors’ self-righteousness, and the divorce question into an exposé of spiritual hardness.  I shiver to think of how he might turn the same-sex marriage question back on us.  All of us.

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Posted in CLR Forum Guest, Commentary, Daniel Crane

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Himes, “Christianity and the Political Order”

Posted on April 12, 2013 by | Leave a comment

HimesThis April, Orbis Books published Christianity and the Political Order: Conflict, Cooptation, and Cooperation by Kenneth R. Himes (Boston College). The publisher’s description follows.

Beyond electoral campaigns and government structures, the relationship between the political realm and Christianity has always involved the important questions of how we ought to live together, and how we should organize and govern our common life. As the author notes, politics—and the political choices we make—must be “guided by considerations of national and global justice and peace and, for Christians, by the teachings of Jesus,” as interpreted by tradition.

Himes examines the relationship between Christianity and politics from the teachings of the Old and New Testaments through the patristic and medieval eras and the age of reform to the age of revolution, and throughout the twentieth century into the third millennium. He takes on questions of the role of the church in politics, responsible voting, concerns of globalization, and issues of human rights and war and peace.

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Posted in Jessica P. Wright, Scholarship Roundup

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Waggoner (ed.), “Religion in the Public Schools”

Posted on April 10, 2013 by | Leave a comment

This month, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers will publish Religion in the Public Schools: Negotiating the New Commons edited by Michael D. Waggoner (University of Northern Iowa). The publisher’s description follows.Religion in The Public Schools

Since September 11, 2001, the profile of religion’s role in our global society has increased significantly. Religion has long been a force in people’s lives as numerous studies and polls show, yet we continue to struggle with understanding differing religious traditions and what they mean for our common life. There are few places where Americans can meet together to learn about each other and to share in the common construction of our futures. One such place for many is public education.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the complexity of the social, cultural, and legal milieu of schooling in the United States in which the improvement of religious literacy and understanding must take place. Public education is the new commons. We must negotiate this commons in two meanings of that term: first, we must come to mutual understandings and agreement about how to proceed toward a common horizon of a religiously plural America; second, we must work our way through the obstacles in these settings in practical ways to achieve results that work.

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Posted in Dylan W. Sherwood, Scholarship Roundup

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Sowerby, “Making Toleration”

Posted on April 4, 2013 by | Leave a comment

The Glorious Revolution is one of the most important events in the political and religious history of the English-speaking world, providing the context for liberal Lockean ideas of government that influenced the American Constitution a century later. I’ve always had the impression that the Revolution was essentially a Protestant rebellion against the last of the Stuart Monarchs, James II, who seemed poised to restore Catholicism in England.  A new book by Northwestern historian Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (HUP 2013) , apparently revises the traditional understanding of the Revolution, characterizing the event as an essentially conservative reaction to James II’s liberalism. The publisher’s description follows:

In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment.

Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby’s groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II’s reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.

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Posted in Mark L. Movsesian, Scholarship Roundup

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Gordon on Church and State in the Early United States

Posted on March 13, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania Law School) has posted State v. Church: Limits on Church Power and Property from Disestablishment to the Civil War. The abstract follows.

Debates over the rights of religious organizations pit those who argue
for “church autonomy” from state interference against those who argue for
strict separation. In battles to exempt religious employers from providing
birth control to employees, to debates over parishioners right to secede from a central denomination and take their church property with them, defenders of religious institutions argue that individual interests or local congregations should not determine the outcome of disputes. They argue that the rights of religious institutions have long held a key place in American life. This article challenges that claim by investigating the legislative and judicial implementation of disestablishment in the states from the 1780s to 1860. Widespread legislative and constitutional limits on the capacity of religious organizations to acquire and hold property, coupled with the imposition of lay control of church affairs through the election of trustees, imposed strict limits on the scope of religious power to protect individual freedom of conscience. After disestablishment, state involvement in church affairs increased, in other words. In this environment of intense regulation and oversight, religious life flourished and lay involvement increased dramatically. Taking seriously the focus on individual freedom of belief as a key component of disestablishment, this article rebuts the argument that American history supports broad autonomy for religious institutions. Instead, it reveals a legacy of strict oversight combined with concern for individual liberty of belief.

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Posted in Dylan W. Sherwood, Scholarship Roundup

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