One of the most influential books for me in trying to understand how the American system has operated in relation to “religious freedom” is Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. A lawyer, she recounts how the legal framework of balancing religious freedom and the conformity to law expected by the state arose in the United States in the context of a particular Protestant confessional framework. More precisely, the exact purview of religion was delimited in such a way as to be congenial with the cultural expectations of Anglo-American Protestantism, and what that implied as to the shape of what a “religion” was. Religious traditions in earlier centuries which did not conform to these outlines were subject to cultural censure, or even repression (for example, see Catholicism and American Freedom: A History). Once religious traditions such as Judaism and Catholicism conformed to the normative template of American Protestantism (e.g., self-identity as a congregation of individuals rather than an expression of corporate collective consciousness), tolerance and religious freedom were provided on a liberal basis. In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom the author argues that the emergence of religious groups which have a different conception of what it means to be religious, for example, emphasizing particular practices rather than creeds, is again challenging the ability of authorities to balance the need for conformity to universal laws and the particularities of religious identity.
It strikes me that the period between 1990 and 2010 was peculiar in the history of the United States. Though the nation was atypical in that its founding lacked the explicit imprimatur of a religious tradition, the culture of the United States and its elite was fundamentally derived from that of Anglo-Protestantism. In the 20th century Catholicism and Judaism were both absorbed into this framework (on the terms of Protestantism), reflected in Will Herberg’s post-World War II thesis in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. By the 1990s this consensus had collapsed, and a variety of religious denominations and liberals of a multiculturalist bent aligned together to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I am old enough and conscious enough of these issues to recall this piece of legislation. The old order may have collapsed, but religious belief was still normative, to the point that Bill Clinton was recommending everyone read Stephen Carter’s Culture of Disbelief. As an atheist it struck me as peculiar that religious beliefs were given special latitude in comparison to other beliefs. After all, all religious beliefs were founded on human fictions from where I stood. But, as an observer of human nature it did not strike me as strange, because it is simply a fact that religious beliefs are precious and emotionally fraught for individuals and communities, and have been for much of human history. Even if accommodation was not entailed by the principles of our governance (and it arguably is), it was a prudent action to mollify democratic sentiment.
But what’s happened in the past generation is that a massive wave of secularization swept through the culture. In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us the authors report on data which suggests that many people on the cultural Left have abandoned even nominal affinity to religious denominations and identity. Since the 1970s religious conservatives have been talking about “secular humanists,” but as someone who remembers being an atheist in the 1990s it was always obvious that this was a bogeyman with little substance. Only in the past few years have the warnings about secular humanism started to seem plausible, as a large minority of young Americans are actually unabashed secular humanists, with no fond memories of a religious upbringing. The old consensus is collapsing, and where the Left has won on the culture wars, such as gay rights, the lack of affinity with religious sentiments makes them very unfriendly to the arguments of religious conservatives that their sincere views deserve consideration.
This brings me to a post by Rod Dreher, Christians ‘Must Be Made’ to Bow, where he notes that some liberal commentators seem to be suggesting that religious truths should be updated in light of the Zeitgeist. As a religious believer of intellectual predilections Dreher believes that some truths are eternal, so changing them would be craven. As I am not religious I don’t think that this is true. Rather, religious sensitivities will eventually abate as older beliefs will be “contextualized.” In fact many American conservatives agree with this idea , except they agree with it for Islam, not Christianity. They assume that Muslims should reinterpret their religion to be more in keeping with liberal democratic norms of a plural and secular society, just as secular liberals do. The problem is that what is good for thee is not so congenial for me, even if Christianity in the previous hundred years was broken multiple times by the ascendant liberal democratic order.
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