Tag Archive for: liberalism

There is in American political life a strong tendency to see any social or political phenomena as rooted ultimately in individual choice.  States, churches, schools, families, all are said to be best understood by looking to the aims and goals of the persons who made agreements with each other to establish these entities.  The view of these organizations as essentially voluntarist in nature is one of the hallmarks of the classical liberal understanding of political and social life.

 

This liberal individualist approach has all sorts of consequences, but one particularly important consequence is how we understand rights.  In America, people generally understand rights to belong to individuals and not to entities larger than individuals: things like schools or businesses or non-profit organizations.  Rather, rights are attached to the people who establish these things, and not to the things themselves.

 

What does this mean for religious freedom?  First, in the liberal approach, there is strong temptation to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of conscience for individuals.  While a guarantee of freedom of conscience is vital, this reduction is a problem because religions by definition reach beyond individual conscience.  Even the decision a person might take to keep his or her religious beliefs private is itself a religious decision.  And in fact, most of the ways that people exercise their religion is within communities or organizations.  These people are unlikely to say they have thereby departed from the “religious” to the “secular”—indeed it is their religion that has led them to act at all.

 

The narrowly individualist view of religious freedom thus misunderstands what religion is.  But the individualist position also misunderstands what organizations are.  An entity such as a school is not an “accident”—it does not appear ex nihilo, based on the contracting wills of consenting adults.  Rather, a school is a thing: it has certain tasks and responsibilities that derive neither from the wills of individuals nor the mandate of a state.  As such, it can and must make claims on us and on other institutions as it goes about its work; indeed, we must begin to see that it too has rights—and even religious rights.

 

When we bring together this larger view of organizations with the larger view of religion described above, several implications follow.  Chief among them is the general principle that the state must proceed with a presumption in favor of religious freedoms for institutions, even if such institutions receive state support.  That means that states must demonstrate a compelling interest if they seek to limit associational freedom in some way.  And crucially, that compelling interest cannot be premised on how “secular” are the organization’s activities.  Such approaches are based on the narrow individualist account of religion.  Rather, state actions with respect to these organizations are to be justified by reference to the state’s own task, that of ensuring just social and political relationships among individuals, communities, and organizations.

 

It might be helpful, therefore, to see state restraint with respect to the education of Amish children or contraception in Catholic schools not so much as exemptions from rules, but rather the details of what the rule actually looks like when applied to the religious landscape of American life.  The language of “exemption” can be troubling because it suggests that those who understand faith in non-liberal ways are merely to be tolerated by the rest of us.  And in a genuinely pluralist democracy, the very reasons citizens understand and accept law are themselves contested—and reasonably so.  It should be enough that we know that our neighbors accept the authority of law; we should not require that they accept it for the same reasons that we do.

 

Is this compatible with the liberal version of constitutional democracy as we have come to know it in America?  Perhaps not, and liberal proponents of that vision may be dismayed with the loss of the privileged position that their version of democracy has enjoyed.  They may take comfort, however, in the fact that all are similarly disestablished.  Genuine respect for pluralism demands that liberalism, Catholicism, nationalism, secularism all be denied pride of place, and that our polity be understood to embrace all who reside in a territory, regardless of race, religion, gender, and all the other distinctions that divide.   Pluralism is here to stay; the era of liberal antidisestablishmentarianism must come to an end.