Over at Public Discourse, William Carroll has an interesting essay on the assumptions that the news media bring to questioning Rick Perry and other GOP presidential candidates about their views on evolution and global warming. Here's an excerpt:
My point here is not to enter into complex issues about various evolutionary theories and the scientific support for them, but rather to note the fascination that reporters like [Chris] Matthews have with raising simplistic questions such as: "Do you believe in evolution?" It continues to be easy to conclude that there is some fundamental conflict between "belief in evolution" and traditional religious faith: This conclusion is often shared by all sides in the controversy. But once one recognizes that evolutionary biology has as its subject the world of changing things, and offers explanations for change among living things on a grand scale, and that God's creative act is the source of the existence of things, not of changes in and among things, then much of the controversy fades away. God, as transcendent cause of being, is the cause of all causes in nature, including those causes at work in evolutionary history. This analysis, however, involves important distinctions in science, philosophy, and theology; it does not fare well in political debates or popular journalism.
Carroll later suggests that "[t]he candidates are asked such questions because there is the lingering suspicion that they inhabit a world long since left behind."
I have a hard time seeing how a reporter's question, "Do you believe in evolution?," reveals any particular conclusion about the inherent relationship between science and religious faith. The fact is that many voters in this country do not believe in (macro) evolution despite some pretty good evidence of the theory's validity, and some political candidates express similar skepticism. Especially in light of the federal government's role in education, this should be fair game for reporters. The fact that most political candidates both believe in God and believe in the theory of evolution -- and that this is apparently considered unremarkable by the news media -- seems to suggest that reporters don't cling too tightly to the notion of an inescapable religion-science conflict. Sometimes religion and science do conflict. If you're a "young Earth" creationist because you take Genesis 1 literally, you have to disregard science (or at least explain it creatively). We need to take the President's views on science seriously, whether they pertain to fetal pain, stem cell research, vaccines, climate change, or genetically modified foods. (This is not just the GOP's problem: when it comes to some of these issues,the left appears to be more skeptical of science than the right does.) Posing the questions does not necessarily suggest anything about the questioner's underlying view of the relationship between science and religion. And in those situations when the questioner implies skepticism about the compatibility of a particular candidate's religious views with the known scientific evidence, it might be because there is, in the end, a conflict.
In the new Commonweal, I review Paul Horwitz's The Agnostic Age. I'm not sure how far the book ultimately takes us in terms of sorting out religious liberty quandaries, but it raises some fascinating questions while providing a fresh take on the quandaries themselves. He asks us to acknowledge the possibility that the religious claim underlying a dispute could potentially be true before deciding the claim's legal weight -- i.e., taking an agnostic stance toward the claim's truth value. An excerpt from the review:
Horwitz thinks that greater empathy for religious claimants would lead to greater liberty, with constitutional agnosticism essentially putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the claimant. Thumb on the scale or not, we are still faced with the vexed question of how to balance the claimant’s interests against the state’s. Horwitz insists that taking the stakes of these cases seriously “does not demand that we go past our breaking point.” But his constitutional agnosticism does not help us identify the breaking point any better than any other theory of religious liberty. We can all agree that the state should reject religious arguments for child sacrifice, but most real cases are not that easy. In a few states, permitting Catholic Charities to exclude same-sex couples from its pool of adoptive parents went too far. The French state has decided that just wearing an Islamic veil in public goes too far. It is not clear how the empathy of Horwitz’s constitutional agnostic would bear on either case.
. . . . Constitutional agnosticism, he explains, “honors Pontius Pilate’s question—‘What is truth?’—but condemns Pilate’s shrug.” So what, the reader might ask, should Pilate have done as a constitutional agnostic? The crowd calling for crucifixion was making religious truth claims—that Jesus was not the son of God, and that describing himself as such amounted to blasphemy against the one true God. Should Pilate have deferred to the potential truth of those claims and ordered crucifixion with more enthusiasm and less hand-wringing? If Pilate had stepped in to protect Jesus, it probably would not have been because of empathy for Jesus’ religious-truth claims, but because of respect for a shared human value that is squarely within the earthly law’s ordinary domain: human life should be protected. More work to identify the bedrock values that define our “breaking point” would provide a more helpful—though still frustratingly messy—path through the maze of religious-liberty disputes than any effort to assume the truth of claims that lie beyond our collective grasp.
Should we be concerned by this exchange about the death penalty from last night's debate? Should we be troubled that a GOP front-runner for President has never even struggled "at all" with the possibility that one of the 234 human beings whose executions he has presided over may have been innocent? More significantly, should we be troubled by a political climate in which the mere mention of those 234 executions draws cheers from the crowd?
Victor Muniz-Fraticelli has posted an interesting new paper, The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty. Here's the abstract:
The model of religious freedom in diverse liberal-democracies has been mistakenly incorporated into the multicultural paradigm. The wholesale incorporation of the religious liberty paradigm into the multicultural paradigm is an institutional, historical, and conceptual mistake, and it distorts our understanding of the institutions that enshrine religious liberty and underlie our justification of them. The Western paradigm of religious liberty is a complex product of diverse historical conflicts and political traditions, and only contingently overlaps the multicultural argument. The purpose of this essay is to differentiate religious liberty from multiculturalism as theoretical categories, and to at least identify some of the consequences of this differentiation.
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.
Get Religion offers a helpful thought experiment to capture how misguided some of the media coverage of "Roman Catholic" groups can be:
Let’s say that a bunch of retired journalists from the Los Angeles Times got together and, with a few converts who yearn for the good old journalism days in that great city, form a news organization that we will call, oh, the Society of St. Otis Chandler. This group rents itself some printing presses and, using a template of a vintage masthead of the Los Angeles Times in 1965 or so, start publishing a newspaper that they call — wait for it — the Los Angeles Times.
This makes some people confused, especially when the leaders of this new-old Los Angeles Times start making pronouncements that directly contradict those made by the leaders of the real Los Angeles Times.
Is everyone following this? Good. Hang on.
Now, the leaders of the actual Times clearly have the right — like it or not — to say who works for the real Times and who is aligned with this pretend Times. So how would these editors feel if major news operations kept writing stories about statements by the Society of St. Otis Chandler and calling its members Los Angeles Times journalists in good standing?
Now, unfortunately, there is one more complication. Suppose that some of these splinter Times people decide that the leadership of the Society of St. Otis Chandler have not gone far enough. Suppose that they start yet another group, one that claims that the leaders of the new-new Los Angeles Times are not only wrong on key issues, but that they are not even journalists in the first place.
Now, do you think mainstream journalists would go so far as to say that these people, the members of the splinter group that left the larger splinter Times, are, in fact, Los Angeles Times journalists?
The case for same-sex marriage follows directly from Lawrence’s potent recognition of the right to dignity and equal respect for all couples involved in intimate relationships, regardless of the sex of each individual’s chosen partner. Sounding in the constitutional registers of due process and equal protection, Lawrence sought to secure a fundamental and yet fragile dignity interest whose boundaries necessarily extend far beyond the bedroom door. Notwithstanding a few half-hearted qualifications that Justice Scalia quite rightly dismissed as inconsistent with its underlying reasoning and as trivial barriers to same-sex marriage rights, Lawrence is thus incompatible with state and federal laws that refuse two men or two women the full tangible and symbolic benefits of civil marriage.
He may be right, though I still think that there is potential ground on which courts can choose to distinguish between the liberty interest presented by intensely private conduct (Lawrence) and more "public" child-rearing relationships (marriage). The "child-rearing" nature of marriage and the empirical basis for preferring the child-rearing facilitated by traditional marriage versus same-sex marriage present their own disputed questions, of course.
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, wants to dig deeper into the religious faith of the GOP candidates. He explains:
This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.
I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890). Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.
So does transubstantiation count as "baggage" or just bizarre? And putting aside the fact that Rick Santorum is Catholic, why does evangelical Christianity raise concerns about the separation of fact and fiction? I'm all in favor of more conversation about faith and politics, but let's be careful that the call for conversation isn't just an excuse for tut-tutting about those silly religious people.
I've long been depressed by the abortion-rights litmus test that operates in the Democratic Party, though the GOP seems to be racing to expand their own list of litmus tests, including a degree of skepticism toward the possibility of human-caused climate change that vastly outpaces the evidence. Rick Perry's latest volley appears to be par for the course. For a party with a proud history of environmental stewardship (see, e.g., Theodore Roosevelt) and a membership that includes many religious believers whose obligation to care for creation is God-given, this development is troubling.
