by I enjoyed Steve’s post on the culture wars, although I’m sorry (and a little impressed — now there’s a conscientious and serious thinker!) he’s losing sleep over the issue. I also found the comments incredibly interesting, although to my gentle mind somewhat disturbing. (I must also add, in response to Robert, that based on my [...]
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On the New Republic’s blog, Jonathan Chait has a short post that is overdone but makes a valid point. He notes that Sharron Angle, the tea-party-backed GOP Arizona senatorial candidate, in an interview with the National Review, credits God (and Mark Levin) for her primary win, saying that “[m]ost everything has a providential side in American [...]
Read the full postI spent some of the weekend rereading Steve Smith’s fine new book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. It made me think of two other works, both of which I think have been influenced by Steve. One is unpublished, so I won’t say too much about it: it’s Marc DeGirolami’s excellent work on what he calls “tragic minimalism” or “tragic historicism” in Religion Clause jurisprudence and theory. The other is my own forthcoming book, Constitutional Agnosticism, which argues that law and religion, both in theory and practice, is bedeviled by its inability to avoid confronting the question of religious truth, and advocates a so-called “agnostic turn” (although I have something in particular in mind when I use the word agnosticism) in thinking about law and religion. I also argue that although constitutional agnosticism may be a good step forward in thinking about law and religion, neither it nor any other theory of religious liberty can ultimately completely dissolve the tragic conflicts between religion and liberal democracy.
Read the full postI am thrilled to contribute the occasional musing to this blog, which so far has been the subject of some very productive conversations. I thought it would be useful to start with a lament.
There’s a whole lot of consensus in the law and religion field these days, at least among those in the American legal academy who focus on these matters. I know that statement risks overstatement, but I think it is largely true. Steve Smith once wrote a fine article about what he called the “de facto disestablishment.” Well, it seems to me that these days we’re in a kind of de facto Era of Good Feelings (maybe that should be Era of God Feelings) in law and religion. Many of us who write in this field, whatever our personal beliefs, do so from a position of high regard for religion, relatively low regard for any approach that would marginalize, privatize, or sideline religion, and approval of accommodation of religion, whether as a constitutional or a legislative matter. Of course we argue over little details, like whether a theory of religious liberty is possible in the first place. And of course there are ongoing doctrinal disagreements, especially on the Establishment Clause side of the ledger. But on the whole there is a strong sense that we are all pulling in more or less the same direction.
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