Freedom of Religion and the Freedom of the Church: My Response

Over at Law & Liberty, I have a reply posted to the three very thoughtful responses authored by Donald Drakeman, Paul Horwitz, and John Inazu.  Here's the reply (and you can access the original piece and the responses there).  A bit:

. . . Drakeman’s [response] serves to underscore the importance of insisting that there is more to religious freedom than an accommodations-and-exemptions regime. After all, such a regime always and inevitably (and understandably) involves the balancing, by the state, of the costs and benefits, to and for the state, of accommodations and exemptions. A political community that loses sight of the many ways that religious institutions’ and actors’ religious and religiously motivated activities serve the common good is going to be less likely to accommodate and exempt. It is important, then, to emphasize that a moral and legal commitment to religious freedom also involves an appreciation and (enforced) respect for the limited but still real “autonomy” of religious institutions and actors as well as for the limits on the state’s regulatory authority. . . .

Paul Horwitz – whose important book, First Amendment Institutions, has both shaped and challenged my thinking about the subject under discussion – is right to remind readers that “religious institutionalism” is “not necessarily a libertarian position”; it does not require or even invite “disdain for the state”; it is does not reflect or imply “complete skepticism about or outright hostility to government.” It does, I think, necessarily involve (as Horwitz says) the ungrudging acceptance – indeed, the welcoming – of non-state authorities and of occasional “incongruence” (to borrow Nancy Rosenblum’s term) between, on the one hand, the rules that govern and the goals that move the liberal state and, on the other, the practices and values of non-state groups, communities, associations, and institutions. As my colleague, Robert Rodes, has put it, there is a “nexus” between religious and political authorities that involves both cooperation and contestation, mutual support and resistance. . . .

. . . Inazu . . . expresses some doubt – friendly doubt, I think, but doubt nonetheless – about the “constitutional” and especially the “theological” limits on what I called the “translation, not transplantation” of the “freedom of the church” into present day law and practice. He writes, “The freedom of the church is first and foremost a theological argument. Some theological arguments are at least partially translatable; indeed, we have seen examples of this kind of translation unfold within American law through concepts like conscience and forgiveness. But other theological concepts are less susceptible to translation from the theological perspectives out of which they emerge.” I take the point, but would respectfully maintain that Inazu is underestimating the political, legal, and social dimensions of the idea and therefore overestimating the theological limits to translation. To be sure, Christians and Christianity have an account of what “the Church” really is that is not political and that is about the “reality of Jesus Christ”, not “the special nature of ‘religion.’” They – we – are called to bear witness to that reality and not to – in Inazu’s words – “domesticat[e]” it or make it more suitable to moderns or comfortable to liberals. Nevertheless, I continue to think that there is plenty of content in the “freedom of the church” idea, argument, proposal, and struggle that is not only translatable to, but urgently needed for, the this-side-of-Heaven project of ordering our lives together.