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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.
This is an absurdly broad definition of "religion." Under this definition why isn't utilitarianism, for example, a religion? Libertarianism? Heck, philosophical liberalism? Kantianism? Virtue ethics? If your definition of "religion" is so broad that it contains not just those things thought of traditionally as religion but functionally any normative system I have to question the utility of your definition.
What about people whose sincerely held beliefs cannot be easily squared with the facts of how evolution works? Is school biology class required to be scrupulously neutral between "Animals evolved the way they did due to natural selection processes without any divine input", "Animals evolved the way they did in accordance with a plan set out by God", and "There's no such thing as evolution, all the evidence of it is a lie told by Satan"? And what about non-Christian or non-Abrahamic accounts of how animals and the world came to be? Are schools required to teach all of them equally?
I am in need of clarification. Do you think putting up statues of the Dark Lord or a religious rite for abortion on demand are things that cannot, due to their nature, be sincerely held religious beliefs or merely that no people who claim they are sincerely held beliefs are being truthful? If the former, what about them means they cannot be? Especially if "wokism" is a religion, entitled to all the protections you mention here. If the latter, can you give me the evidence you apparently have of insincerity by all the people espousing this belief?
More generally, do we really want courts (more) involved in the question of sincerity? It seems like this could easily go in a direction that would be against what you want. "We find defendant's beliefs that his religion requires him to avoid entanglements in gay weddings to be an insincere cover for his hate for gay people. Bake the cake bigot."
From my atheist perspective there is no such thing as a "non-sectarian" expression of religious belief. Their are perhaps ones that are more or less inclusive of various kinds of beliefs but there is no such thing as a religiously neutral expression of religious belief.
Welcome to the world of legal disputes when it comes to question of religion. For instance in 1961 during Torcaso v. Watkins the Supreme Court indeed defined religion very broadly in the famous footnote number eleven.
I like how James Lindsay thinks about religion as defined by its theology. The role of religious theology is to organize related epistemology, sociology, axiology and cosmology in one united view, it gives it a direction and coherence. In that sense theology incorporates ontological definitions of what is reality and what is human, it explores people's moral duties and ways to organize in society including in accordance to its system of knowledge. So for instance in Christianity the world and people were created by god, they have moral duty in accordance to god's laws as revealed in holy scripture, they should organize themselves in churches overseen by clergy that provide specific guidance for local policies and they should study scripture and god's creation for further expansion of knowledge of god and the world.
If I would take upon myself constructing similar "woke" theology, it could look as something like this: Our [social] reality is a social construct imposed by society that was is in turn created by man in his attempt to bring his ideas into practice - The Theory and Praxis dichotomy. Our current [social] reality is very imperfect as it was created by privileged people who posses privilege of certain class, race, sex, sexual orientation in their various intersections and who oppress the population in order to reproduce this imperfect society. Our moral duty is to criticize the current society, center the marginalized people who posses both slave and master side of the knowledge in order to promote Social Justice. In that sense the knowledge as well as other things needs to be looked upon through lenses of power relations of oppressor/oppressed. Our society should organize so that we create special departments to promote Social Justice and promote Social Justice in holistic approach ranging from schools to corporations in order to engage the population in the process of conscietization where everybody will able to engage in dialectical Theory/Praxis process where they act and then reflect upon results of their action through The Theory to perfect the society.
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