David Brooks has a column today about the problem of American decline and the need both for government and private intervention to improve the situation. It's a generally unremarkable column but this paragraph toward the end caught my eye:
Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.
The call for government and religious/community groups to engage in "serious activism" to regenerate the "social fabric" of the family left me with this question. If we are interested in this kind of re-generation in order to solve what Brooks sees as the problem of "segmented societies," don't we also have to have a fairly firm idea of what we mean by the family? If there is disagreement -- perhaps even deep and irreconcilable conflict -- among government agencies, religious, community, and other groups about what a socially healthful family structure looks like, why should Brooks predict that activism from all of these quarters to re-generate the family as a social structure would serve to alleviate the problem of the "segmentation," and possible fragmentation, of America? Wouldn't exactly the opposite be true -- that as groups with increasingly different ideas about the healthy family become more active in expounding their respective views, social and cultural segmentation would increase?
[Please restrict comments to the specific point of the post, and not to the underlying merits of the competing visions.] X-posted, CLR Forum
Earlier this week, I visited Atchison, Kansas to give the annual Convocation Address at Benedictine College. I knew little about the College prior to my visit. Wow, was I impressed! It is a very special place. The institution is suffused with a love of learning. One senses it among faculty and students alike. It is confident in its Catholic identity and at the same time enthusiastically engaged with the larger intellectual culture. It is attracting excellent applicants and recently enrolled the largest freshman class in its history. Its leadership is bright, dedicated, deeply faithful, and remarkably youthful. If Benedictine College and schools like it are the future of Catholic higher education in the United States--and I believe they are--then the Church and the world will be very well served indeed.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Many of our conversations on MoJ relate to religious liberty, and we should be concerned about how our legal system's commitment to religious liberty is carried out across faith traditions. My colleague Greg Sisk has a new paper out (with Michael Heise) examining the data regarding religious liberty claims by Muslims. Here's the abstract:
In our continuing empirical study of religious liberty decisions, we find that Muslims asserting free exercise or accommodation claims were at a distinct and substantial disadvantage in the lower federal courts for the period of 1996-2005. Holding other variables constant, the predicted likelihood for success for non-Muslim claimants in religious free exercise or accommodation claims was approximately 38 percent, while the predicted probability for success for Muslim claimants fell to approximately 22 percent (with the disparity being slightly higher among court of appeals judges). In sum, Muslim claimants had only about half the chance to achieve accommodation that was enjoyed by claimants from other religious communities.
Drawing on insights from legal studies, political science, and cognitive psychology, we discuss alternative explanations for this result, including (1) a cultural antipathy to Muslims as a minority religion outside the modern American religious triumvirate of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; (2) growing secularism in certain sectors of society and opposition to groups with traditional religious values; (3) the possibility that claims made by Muslims are weaker and deserve to be rejected on the merits; and (4) the perception that followers of Islam pose a security danger to the United States, especially in an era of terrorist anxiety. Presenting a new threat to religious liberty, the persistent uneasiness of many Americans about our Muslim neighbors appears to have filtered into the attitudes of even such well-educated and independent elites as federal judges.
For Greg's earlier posts on the topic of Muslims in America, check out this or this.
Great stuff, as always, from Steve Smith:
The Plight of the Secular Paradigm
Steven Douglas Smith
University of San Diego School of Law
San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 11-062
Abstract:
For many it has been axiomatic that liberal democratic governments and the laws they impose must be “secular”; this assumption pervades both constitutional law and much political theory. But there are indications that this secular “paradigm of legitimacy” is losing its grip; thus, while urging a rehabilitation of secularism, Rajeev Bhargava suggests that “[o]nly someone with blinkered vision would deny the crisis of secularism.” This essay considers that crisis.
Part I of the essay discusses the nature of a “paradigm of legitimacy.” Part II outlines the strategies of assimilation and marginalization that historically have supported such paradigms and considers the paradigm shifts that can occur when these strategies prove ineffective. Part III illustrates these observations by reviewing the process by which, beginning in the fourth century, a Christian paradigm replaced an earlier Roman one and then in turn declined in favor of a more secular view. Part IV, the longest in the essay, discusses the rise of the secular paradigm, the strategies that have supported it, and the increasing futility of those strategies that have led to the present distress.
