Incorporating the Establishment Clause, Wrongly
The structural guarantee of the Establishment Clause can be preserved even with protections that prevent restricting individuals' religious liberty.
Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, left, chats with Justice Clarence Thomas following Purdue’s swearing-in as the 31st U.S. Secretary of Agriculture at the Supreme Court, April 25, 2017. (USDA Photo / Alamy Stock Photo).The Clash of Traditions
Professor Samuel Huntington photographed in his office at Harvard University. (Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)The late political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous book The Clash of Civilizations (1996) argued that culture, not economics or ideology, was the key to understanding world affairs after the Cold War’s end. Different civilizations, he argued—he identified nine, including the Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Sinic, and Hindu—with different histories, religions, and values, were now reasserting themselves after a brief period of quiescence. These different civilizations would inevitably clash with one another and with liberalism, an ideology that presumed itself universal, but which was actually the product of one of those civilizations, the Western. To expect non-Western civilizations to reject their own cultures and adopt liberalism wholesale, he argued, was folly.
Divine Rights and Human Rights
Who Threatens Whom? Which Religion Needs Protection?
In response to: Reimagining Religion’s Distinctiveness in American Law
Many of my undergraduate students have trouble understanding the threat that religion might pose to the state. Often when teaching the Investiture Controversy, the 11th century contest between Pope Gregory VII and King Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, over the appointment of bishops, I put to them the anachronistic question of whether the Pope has more power than the President of the United States. Most think the answer obvious. Since the President is the leader of the free world, presides over one of the most powerful nations in human history, and is the commander-in-chief of arguably the most potent military in…
More Responses
Kathleen Brady’s book The Distinctiveness of American Religion in Law: Rethinking Religion Clause Jurisprudence is a fascinating exposition of the changing role that religion plays in a rapidly secularizing society. What’s so special about religion? Why should courts treat it differently from non-religious belief systems? Why do we still mostly speak of religious free exercise…
I would like to thank D.G. Hart and Ilya Shapiro for their thoughtful comments on my essay. Together their observations provide me with the opportunity to clarify some aspects of my account of religion’s distinctiveness and the implications of this distinctiveness for our understanding of the First Amendment’s religion clauses and other constitutional liberties. Professor Hart…
John Adams and Religious Liberty: What Our Second President Can Teach Us About Constitutional Compromise
John Adams’ name is in the news again. And once again he is being misrepresented. As in life, so too in death. In the past few month, then noted historian Rosemarie Zigarri wrote in the Washington Post that (in the Post’s words) “John Adams believed that the state should provide support for ministers.” In a much discussed essay on Ricochet, the distinguished historian Paul Rahe recently made the same claim.
Everyone knows that Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and everyone knows that Article III of the Constitution’s Declaration of Rights created a church establishment. QED, it would appear. The trouble is that Adams did not write Article III of the Massachusetts Constitution. Indeed, he refused to write it because, in his words, “I found I could not sketch [it], consistent with my own sentiments of perfect religious freedom, with any hope of its being adopted by the Convention, so I left it to be battled out in the whole body.” In that refusal lies an important story of democratic statesmanship.
