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Notes -
Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty
I've been thinking a lot lately about how the definition of religious liberty has morphed in my lifetime. The legal definition of religious liberty seems to be expanding outward legally, while at the same time the feeling of liberty of belief for actually existing religious people feels like it is shrinking. These expanding protections feel necessary to maintain a degree of freedom, rather than expanding it. But so much of it is that the model of public faith has changed. The two quotes above give me my model of what religious freedom was, and how the context has changed.
The framers envisioned a society of men with three hearts when it came to religious liberty: a false secular heart in their mouths in public spaces, a sectarian religious heart in their chests that they shared with their friends and family and coreligionists, and a real true heart of their beliefs that they were entitled to keep private and that no one could punish or penalize them for. One's true personal third heart might be atheist or animist or deist, one's sectarian second heart might be Catholic or Quaker, but everyone agreed their first public heart would be secular and nonsectarian and that no one would be punished for their other beliefs. This view of religious liberty envisioned a country in which men could hold any religion, in which men would collectively acknowledge a kayfabe of secularism in public so that no one creed predominated, while all men would hold a private religion together with their friends, and where all men had the right to believe or not believe anything in their own heart without punishment or censure.
This is distinct from other visions of religious liberty historically. Many empires allowed variants of a different kind of religious liberty, confessional liberty, freeing the second heart but restricting the first and the third. Groups had some right to practice their own religion privately (second heart), even allowed to punish their own apostates (third heart), but in public they had to acknowledge the divinity of the imperial faith (first heart) and had no freedom to contradict it.The Jews under Roman rule could practice their religion amongst themselves, but they must engage publicly in worshipping and acknowledging Caesar Augustus, because the Roman cults were the public religion Jews would always be second class citizens. At the same time, individual Jews like Jesus were subject to punishment under Jewish religious laws for their own private beliefs, there was no individual right to freedom of worship.
In America, Quakers and Babtists and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and even a few Jews and hey maybe a couple Muslims too all worked off the same system. None really believed in the secularism taught in schools but they would go along with it and agree with it., because everyone knew that everyone else went to church/synagogue/meeting on Sunday and learned something different that we agreed or disagreed about it in parts that weren't worth arguing. And it was understood that atheists were probably in those pews as well, but no one was going to launch an inquisition against them, that was their own business.
But in the 21st century, fewer and fewer Americans are actually operating on three different hearts. The rise of the "Nones" or secularism or wokism or successor ideology or whatever you want to call it, is the combination of the first and the second hearts. Max Lynn Stackhouse, when defining religion, called a religion "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted." Wokism meets all those criteria, while failing the Merriam-Webster definition of having supernatural elements (arguably). Because Wokes skirts the traditional lines of "religion" they are able to advocate everything they want in the public sphere, where traditional religions are restricted to only advocating half their beliefs. Wokism is, in many ways, a religious memetics that has evolved to avoid being restricted by traditional freedom of religion law. It offers answers to universal questions that feed the need for the sacred which all humans possess, while also being entirely within the rules of public discourse.
That is what Roberts, Barrett, Scalia (RIPower, King) are groping towards but not yet saying out loud. Traditional religions are fighting off the back foot, they aren't allowed to advocate in the public square because traditionally that was a method to avoid religious conflicts and persecutions. But Wokism has adapted to that circumstance, and now provides a full binding metaphysical moral vision in public that must be bowed to, Wokism seeks by monopolizing the first heart to destroy the freedom of the second and third hearts. For traditional religious pluralism to survive against this evolved competition, as the founders envisioned, we have to allow religions to fight on an even playing field. The religious freedom advocates on SCOTUS are groping towards this, but are restricted by their textual originalism, they are looking at the text of the constitution when what matters it that the circumstances have changed, the founder's vision is no longer possible when one competitor has adapted to the rules. So much like the NFL or MMA will change the rules of the game when a strategy emerges that ruins the spirit of the game, so freedom of religion must be changed to allow for the competition envisioned.
So how do we level the playing field, without shredding the constitution in ways we'll regret later when we live in Rick Santorum's Iran? I'm interested in all ideas. Here are a few I see.
School choice seems like step one. Religious schools already deliver better results at a lower cost, offering vouchers to as many students as want them would allow religious schooling to exist on a level playing field with secular schooling, and see who wins the Trans-Black-Lives-Matter School or the Sisters of Perpetual Ruler Snapping.
Restrict Atheist speech in the same way that religious speech is restricted. One should be just as loathe to say that there is no God as one is to say that there is only one. The traditional point of conflict is Biology class, which I think is a case of religions failing to adapt to facts, one can make evolution about the way the world works rather than how it started quite easily.
Restrict claims of religious faith to those who hold genuine religious beliefs more strictly. The phenomenon of fake religious trolling by atheist-Jews claiming that abortion-on-demand is a religious rite, or fakakta Satanists putting up statues of the Dark Lord because someone else put up one of the Ten Commandments, needs to reined in. How do we do that without instituting Santorum-Iran? I'm not sure.
Make and allow for more non-sectarian expressions of religious belief. I was an Eagle Scout, and for years the Chaplain's Aide of our troop, I've given tons of prayers in the name of a faux-Lenape "Great Spirit" that stood in for the member's of my troop for our personal beliefs in God, Allah, Jehovah, or Krishna. That worked, we all understood what was meant. How do we develop that secular stand-in that would work universally? Maybe we choose to honor Amerindian beliefs as a nation, invoke the Great Spirit? We should expect our presidents and our politicians to invoke a God, and assume everyone has the maturity to understand that it also means their God. Make America Believe Again.
ETA: Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. If you don't celebrate it, I recommend it. A feast of gratitude towards the almighty is a positive tradition, and should be exported.
Your history is off. You may be basically Madison's and Jefferson's views and the policies of Virginia, but you are not describing the early republic as a whole. Individual states were allowed to have official state churches, Massachusetts had Congregationalism as established and taxpayer supported up until the 1830s. Religious tests for office (requiring office holders to sometimes be Christian, other times Protestant) lasted into the 20th century. School teachers could actively teach religion in class up until at least the middle of the 20th century. The original idea behind the First Amendment was simply as a truce between the religious sects that were dominant in various states, the states could intertwine religion and government but the federal government as a whole would not choose sides and enforce one particular sect upon the entire country.
But by the late 1800s state constitutions banning "sectarian support" was starting to be used as anti-Catholic cudgel. State support of protestantism was ok, because protestant was not sectarian, according to this logic, but Catholicism was sectarian so could not be taught in a local public school.
By the 1950s and 1960s the First Amendment became a cudgel to use against mixing of any Christianity with government at any level. The novel "incorporation doctrine" was used to apply the First Amendment down to even a local public school of a town of a 1,000 people. The federal government was being used to quash the religious choices of a local community which was the exact opposite the original intent. At the same time, the hegemonic ideology of the United States shed its last connections to Christianity, and thus mutated to make itself immune to First Amendment charges. This hegemonic ideology -- an ideology that has no name, and defies all attempts to be labeled, any time a name is placed on it it tries to shed its name -- gained tremendous state support not only financially but in law (Civil Rights law has morfed into becoming a speech code and ideological test for high-status employment).
This isn't new to "Wokism" -- I wrote a school paper 20 years ago about how "Civic Americanism" basically had almost all the properties of what we normally call religion. Moldbug wrote the same back in 2008 in his "How Dawkins Got Pwned Series" -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ I'm sure other people noticed the phenomena before.
Who is "we"? The powers that be quite like being able to suppress the ideologies that traditionally code as religion, while being able to turbo-charge their own ideology with funding and legal support. They don't want a level playing field.
Fundamentally, I think the idea that religion could ever be separated from politics was an error. Politics at the end of the day depends on raw military power, and raw military power depends on people willing to risk their life for their God and their Sovereign. Politics also is all about making sure various groups and people get along, thus needs to teach a common morality, or at least a meta-morality. Politics is about forming durable group alliances -- which is what much of what religious ritual and sacrifice is about. "Religion" can only be separated from politics if you basically water down religion to just meaning a random grab-bag of stuffy old superstitions. Historically, and even in many contemporary societies, there isn't really an equivalent of our concept of "religion" that was separable from just life itself (in the same way American schools that teach "values" don't separate this value system as a separate category from just life itself.
My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a "deity" versus "universal principles") is that a "religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe." Things like creeds, stories, beliefs about ultimate meaning, rituals, sacrifice, are all components that help bind the group together and enable it to take collective action. I am unsure whether I would call "American hegemonic ideology" or "wokism" a religion, or a cancerous and metastatic mutant form of a religion, that is out-competing and strangling real religion.
I think the problem with this definition is that it defines garden variety civic nationalism as a religion. In theory, I could agree with that, but if we define my actions as a citizen (voting, jury duty, taxes to pay for social and defense spending) as a binding agent with my fellow Americans -- which I unironically believe, then the entire idea of separation of church and state is nonsensical to members of the Church of American Democracy.
Honestly I do somewhat agree with you, but I think it doesn't resolve the ambiguity of where "church" ends and "state" begins. I certainly don't see an obvious line of delineation despite wanting one to better define policy.
With excellent timing, a federal judge struck down Florida's anti-woke law while approvingly calling woke college professors "Priests of Democracy"
So I think you're probably right that no distinction between religion and ideology is possible.
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Yes. I believe that the "no establishment" clause has failed and no longer makes any sense. If it ever made sense, it was only in a historical context coming out of the post-reformation wars of religion, where a general truce between sects was desired. It made sense in an era where Christian or at least Abrahamic belief was assumed, the federal government had little role in education or ideology, and thus the First Amendment was merely the government not taking sides among Abrahamic sects. Ever since the rise of communism, fascism, liberalism, American civic liberalism, etc, and the main faultlines and fighting lines were among things that no longer coded as "religions" the First Amendment no longer makes sense.
Back in 2007 Moldbug bit the bullet and said that to really make a delineation that makes sense, you would need complete separation of state (ie, the organization with monopoly on force) and information -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/separation-of-information-and-security/ He later changed his mind in the opposite direction and basically accepted that control of information/ideology/religion is simply a fundamental property of sovereignty and cannot be split off. I have made the same intellectual journey myself and come to the same conclusion.
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This is a bullet that I bit a long time ago. The “religion vs. ideology” distinction is fake, and is a result of Enlightenment thinkers who believed, incorrectly, that humanity could rise above religion and replace it with something fundamentally different that would act as a coordination mechanism for society. I think that on a primal evolutionary level, anything that can function as a large-scale non-physically-coercive coordination mechanism for non-kin individuals is indistinguishable from a religion. Whether or not one decides to deploy discussion of transcendent/supernatural elements as a rhetorical device is irrelevant to the underlying structure of the coordination mechanism.
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