"Is Religion Any Good?"

Andy Koppelman asks, over at Prof. Balkin's blog, "is religion any good?"  More specifically, he asks, "[i]n what sense, if any, is it permissible for the state to treat religion as a good thing?"  This question is particularly puzzling, he suggests, because "[t]he Establishment Clause 'mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.' . . .

But the Court has also acknowledged that “the Free Exercise Clause, . . . by its terms, gives special protection to the exercise of religion.” This generates a puzzle. It is not logically possible for the government both to be neutral between religion and nonreligion and to give religion special protection. Some justices and many commentators have therefore regarded the First Amendment as in tension with itself. Call this the free exercise/establishment dilemma.

Given this dilemma, Koppelman contends, "[i]t is . . . necessary to revise our understanding of the scope of the Establishment Clause.  The most promising approach is to define the Establishment Clause less abstractly than the Court has, in order to permit the special treatment of religion that is mandated by the Free Exercise Clause."

In my view, Koppelman's law-and-religion work is some of the most helpful and interesting being done.  Check out the post.

On this blog, we might also bring to conversation this, from Dignitatis humanae:

The religious acts whereby men, in private and in public and out of a sense of personal conviction, direct their lives to God transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs. Government therefore ought indeed to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor, since the function of government is to make provision for the common welfare. However, it would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious.