Seamus Hasson, the indefatiguable chairman of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has a new book out: "The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America." Seamus is a friend and, in my view, a real religious-freedom hero. Here is the blurb:
The same war breaks out every December. Some angry group sues to have a nativity scene and menorah taken down from city hall, while another angry group agitates to have them put up. And it’s not just holiday displays that causes this conflict. From public school curricula to zoning permits, no area of civil government seems safe from the ongoing struggle between those who say only the true faith belongs in public and those who say that no faiths do.
Who are the people behind this battle? Kevin Seamus Hasson thinks of them as “the Pilgrims” and the “Park Rangers.” Pilgrims believe that their truths requires them to restrict others' religious freedom. Park Rangers believe that their freedoms require them to make sure others' religious truths remain private. Together, these groups are responsible for the impasse over the role of religion in our public life.
The Right to be Wrong explains why the Pilgrims and Park Rangers are both mistaken. A partisan both of religious expression and personal freedom, Hasson takes the reader on a tour of the American tradition in pointing the way toward a pluralism that grounds religious freedom for all in the truth about each of us. You'll never look at the culture wars quite the same way after reading this book.
Actually, Seamus is the first one who really got me thinking about what it would mean to think about religious freedom in Dignitatis-inspired "anthropological" terms.
Here is a recent interview with him, about the book. Here is an excerpt:
NRO: What do you think is the biggest threat to religious liberty in the U.S. today?
Hasson: The biggest threat comes from people who think that religious truth is the enemy of human freedom — that the only good religion is a relativist one. When Andrew Sullivan says something called "fundamentalism" is the seedbed of terrorism, he's making this fundamental mistake. At a more amusing level, when school officials ban Valentine's cards (because after all, the holiday is named after St. Valentine), but tell schoolchildren they can still send each other "special person cards," that's the same basic error. In Lansing, Michigan, public-school bureaucrats worried that the Easter Bunny isn't secular enough, now offer "Breakfast with the Special Bunny."
Practically speaking, the threat comes from lawyers, judges, and political elites who think that nativity scenes and menorahs are like secondhand smoke — something that decent people shouldn't be exposed to in the public square.
This theory of our Constitution is not only wrong, it is inhuman. If we frame the battle for religious liberty correctly, both the courts and the vast majority of Americans — and not just Christian conservatives — will be on our side. . . .
Hasson: The second biggest threat is believers who let themselves be goaded into accepting the same false dichotomy between truth and freedom, only on the other side. They fall into the secularists' trap and think that in order to defend the truths of faith they have to oppose the whole idea of human freedom. Like the bureaucrats in a Cobb County, Georgia, jail who tried to prevent Catholic priests from ministering to prisoners because they were afraid some Protestant prisoners would decide to convert. A threatened Becket Fund lawsuit fixed that, but the episode still provided secularists with ammo for their argument that there should be no such things as official chaplains at all.
When people of faith go that route, and accept the secularist premise that truth is opposed to freedom, we surrender the high ground in the culture war.
My goal in The Right to Be Wrong is to persuade all Americans that we can end the culture war honorably. There can be "pluralism without relativism": A vigorous commitment to religious liberty that is not based on the notion that all religions are somehow equally true, but in the truth that all human being have rights. It is moral truth, not moral relativism, that underwrites our freedom, including our religious freedom.
By the way, this is a big issue the Muslim world is wrestling with: Thoughtful Muslims are struggling to understand how they can have an Islamic society without the state imposing Islam coercively.
Some people say they need a Reformation that separates mosque and state. I've argued that what they really need is a Vatican II: They need to discover within the roots of their own tradition the human truth that undergirds religious liberty: Coercing conscience is wrong, because human beings are born with an innate thirst for transcendence, a demand to search for the true and the good, and the need to express that truth in public, not just private. And that can only be done with integrity when it's done freely. That development within Islam would go a long, long way towards guaranteeing the religious freedom of people in Islamic countries. Muslims and Christians can't agree on who God is, but we can agree on who we are.
This is great stuff, I think.
Rick
This post, at the Volokh Conspiracy -- about internet companies' complicity in China's . . . well, evil policies, is well worth a read:
[T]here appears to be no way to be an ethical Internet company in China today, just as there was no way to be an ethical supplier of spy equipment to the USSR or Nazi Germany. Corporations are generally supposed to maximize their profits, but there is a point at which a particular form of profit maximization becomes unethical. It's ethical for companies to make barbed wire, but it's not ethical for the company to sell barbed wire to a regime which the company knows will use the barbed wire to build concentration camps.
The American Internet companies which do business in China are assisting the creation of the world's most sophisticated architecture of repression. No company should make profits at such a terrible cost to human rights. After American companies left, the Chinese tyrants would undoubtedly find other, inferior, foreign companies to provide Internet services and assist with the suppression of liberty. It would be better, though, if China's architecture of repression were built by inferior, less efficient companies, rather than by the best minds of the world's best computer companies.
Relatedly, if you have not read A. Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle," you should.
Rick
Thought some MOJ readers would be interested in this new paper: Victor C. Romero, An "Other" Christian Perspective on Lawrence v. Texas.
(The paper will appear in the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2005 (formerly The Catholic Lawyer). Here's the abstract:
The so-called "Religious Right's"
reaction to Lawrence v. Texas has been both powerful and negative,
characterizing the case as an assault on the traditional conception of
marriage and family life. This essay is an attempt to present a
different Christian view. Modeled on the life and teachings of Jesus,
this perspective celebrates the Lawrence case as consistent with God's
call to social justice for the oppressed. It also outlines a Christian
sexual ethic that lifts up genuine, monogamous, committed love between
two individuals, whether of the same or opposite sex.
To download/print this paper, click here.
_______________
mp
I've long enjoyed the Wittenburg Door, the satirical rag sometimes called the "Mad Magazine [or National Lampoon] of the evangelical Christianity." They've been skewering televangelists -- admittedly an easy target -- and other creatures in the bestiary of American religion for nearly 30 years now. (Often hilariously, though sometimes missing the target, as most all satires do.) Check out, for example, the account of a Sotheby's auction of memorabilia associated with C.S. Lewis, the "evangelical saint."
More seriously, the Door also runs good interviews with a variety of figures, and this month's online is with Philip Jenkins (The New Anti-Catholicism, The Next Christendom, etc.). It touches on the priest sex-abuse scandals, the Jesus Seminar, Christianity in the developing World, religion in America vs. Europe, etc. A couple of excerpts on the last two subjects:
DOOR: What's the big picture? What will the mass of Christians look like 50 years from now?
JENKINS: My argument is that one of the big factors will be ethnic. In the United States, looking at the whole population, something like a third of Americans will have either Latino or Asian roots, and the vast majority of those come from backgrounds, which are presently Christian. I think it's quite likely that those people will still continue to be Christian and they will certainly be very dominant voices in the Catholic Church and probably most of the mainstream churches.
Globally, Christianity will be much more of a black and brown religion. The figures I suggest, with all awareness of the queries about numbers, somewhere between four fifths, and five sixths will be in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or from migrant communities in the West. Non-Latino white Christians will represent only about a fifth or sixth of the whole, so Christianity will be much more a black and brown religion.
. . .
DOOR: What do you think of the argument [explains America's greater religiosity on the ground] that America's separation of church and state has caused religion here to be an organic extension of the people, while in Europe it's seen as part of the state, or something that came from the state?
JENKINS: The argument doesn't work very well if you compare [the U.S. to] Britain, because although the Anglican Church was an established church there, it's been a couple of hundred since there was any real enforcement. So there's no real reason why people shouldn't go off and become Methodists or Baptists, and many did. And they lived in those church set-ups and then the secularization thesis kicked in and those churches faded away to insignificance—as they should have done in America but didn't.
So, I genuinely don't know. It's not a religious freedom argument or a separation of church and state argument, because separation of church and state, in most European countries, was always pretty much a formal thing. You were always pretty free to be a Methodist or a Baptist in Britain, so I think you've got a real problem there for sociologists of religion.
Tom
To deflect some of the heat she is going to take for her 1989 questionnaire answer vowing support for a pro-life constitutional amendment, Harriet Miers can point out that, a mere two years earlier, she served as chair of the advisory board of Girls Incorporated of Dallas. Girls Incorporated is the group currently at the center of various pro-life boycotts. As stated on the group's website,
Girls Incorporated affirms that girls and young women should make responsible decisions about sexuality, pregnancy and parenthood.
We recognize the right of all women to choose whether, when, and under what circumstances to bear children. Reproductive freedom and responsibility are essential to other rights and opportunities, including pursuit of education, employment, financial security and a stable and fulfilling family life. Restrictions of reproductive choice are especially burdensome for young women and poor women. Girls Incorporated supports a woman’s freedom of choice, a constitutional right established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe vs. Wade.
Perhaps this policy came about after 1987, or perhaps it has been openly defied by the Dallas chapter; if not, Miers' involvement with Girls Incorporated could certainly provide another interesting line of questioning at the confirmation hearings.
Rob
Thanks to Patrick for his posting of earlier today on Dignity in the Classroom. All of us and Patrick’s students might reflect on a dimension of sovereignty that often gets overlooked or forgotten, and that is popular sovereignty. For almost a decade I have been involved in international debates amongst diplomats concerning sovereignty. In these contexts, sovereignty often has a negative meaning associated with it. Of course, the illustrations or examples that come up in discussion are typically of some repressive or totalitarian regime. But the sovereignty of peoples in the exercise of their self-determination is usually absent from the discussion or debate. I think that Catholic Legal Theory has a wonderful opportunity to contribute to the misapprehensions about sovereignty when it is takes place in the context of a self-determination of people who choose to come together and live according to a set of principles and norms that are wholesome. One does not hear about such sovereignty in the popular press or the halls of diplomatic conferences. Since it does not, I realize that the idea of subsidiarity is not in the vocabulary of these influential people. So, I humbly suggest that CLT has an opportunity of which it can take advantage and educate the world. Or to use a phrase of our Lord, to go forth and make disciples of all nations! RJA sj
Evangelical human rights activist Gary Haugen takes President Bush's Christian supporters to task for not speaking up on the Administration's treatment of detainees. He asks, "Where are the voices of transcendent moral principle from the President's friends of faith?"
Rob
