Religion as Justice

An interesting essay, at Public Discourse, by Susan Hanssen (University of Dallas), on the elusive "definition" of "religion."   She opens with this:

Twentieth-century religious liberty jurisprudence developed on the far side of a great historic chasm that separates us from the traditional definition of religion. Between Americans in 2012 and the American founders in 1776 stand William James and the beginnings of the “science of comparative religions.” If we are to grasp the founders’ idea of a natural right to religious liberty, we must perform a labor of historical imagination and recover the longstanding definition of religion that has been lost to us. . . .

Noting the move in the last century to an understanding of religion as "essentially experiential", she suggests that William James's definition, "which had a powerful effect on Progressive-era jurisprudence on religious liberty issues, would have shocked the American founders, who were steeped in an older and more comprehensive understanding of religion."  She then moves to this:

At the heart of justice there were, of course, those debts that could never be repaid—the debts to God, parents, and country. While most debts were of the minor sort payable in kind, the great moral tradition always acknowledged as the highest obligations of justice those irreparable debts. One could never repay God for everything—the cosmos—that surrounded one. Nor one’s parents for the gift of life, or one’s country for the sustenance that enabled one’s flourishing. These obligations of justice were obligations in the truest sense of the word—ligaments, the ties that bind.

As the key elements of justice, religion, filial piety, and patriotism expressed the most important rational insights into the human condition. To be human is to be a person—to face a network of pre-existent, causal relations. Without the creative, procreative, supportive ligaments that have drawn us out of nothing into bodily and social existence, there could be no moral agent. Someone who refused to acknowledge these ligaments could not be relied upon to honor the multitude of lesser obligations in life.

Of this triune core at the heart of justice, religion stood pre-eminent. Religion was justice. . . . 

Check it out.