Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs and political and cultural commentator, discussed the dangers an overemphasis on religious liberty can have for social conservatives at a Faith and Law presentation on Friday, March 4, on Capitol Hill.
The danger religious liberty holds is that it may lead to a ghettoization of religious communities, who then forget that they have a message of a better life for the wider society, Levin said. What we need to help protect religious liberty is not only advocacy of religious liberty and laws, lawyers and legal service organizations to act in court, but a revival of the middle layers of society: church, family, clubs, schools, i.e., civil society.
There is now a pressing need for religious liberty, Levin conceded, because “we see a sudden turn to intolerance in our society”. The tradition of religious toleration is old, stemming in significant degree from the liberalism of John Locke and the American Revolution, he said. In 1774, James Madison recorded his profound dissatisfaction with religious persecution in Virginia against religious dissenters from the Anglican Church. Madison said “pray for liberty of conscience to revive.” Today, there is a similar attack on the liberty of conscience of religious conservatives; it is difficult people who are pro-life or advocates of the natural family to fully participate in American society, Levin noted. He said the response of religious conservatives has been to lean on the doctrine of religious freedom. But while the free exercise of religion is guaranteed in the Constitution, more needs to be done than just defend religious liberty, but not less.
Levin pointed out that the American jurisprudence of religious liberty has focused on individual liberty. It arose to keep religious belief out of public life based on experience with an established church. Non-Anglican religious groups had been excluded from public life, and the English religious freedom doctrine was an attempt to overcome that. It was a very select religious liberty, granted only to dissenting Protestants and Jews, but not to Catholics. The main idea was that there was no reason to ban beliefs; anyone could believe what they wanted. But institutions are not necessarily free to be religious. John Locke, the late seventeenth century philosopher of religious liberty, “intended this to be a problem” for the Catholic Church, Levin said. The Catholic doctrine of “the freedom of the church” held that the church and its subordinate corporate religious institutions should be free from any temporal authority that conflicted with Catholic teaching. Locke’s idea of individual religious freedom was incorporated into the Act of Toleration, passed by the British Parliament after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.
This idea of religious liberty “very much informed” our own idea of toleration, Levin said. Religious liberty practiced by groups is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of religious liberty, he maintained. It is a tradition which “does not give friendly answers to contemporary advocates of liberty of conscience” against liberal public policy. The Obama Administration’s definition of religious liberty is “eerily familiar” to the definition of Locke, Levin noted. It does not protect organizations – even professedly religious organizations – that serve the public. It does not protect private organizations that are owned by religious people. Accommodation in law for religious individuals are common in American law, but accommodations for religious institutions are “rare,” and accommodations for organizations owned by religious people are “rarer.”
But there is another strand of the tradition of religious liberty in America that begins with James Madison, Levin pointed out. It is found in the “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” a declaration against non-sectarian state funding for clergy in Virginia. The declaration includes the crucial statement that “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the General Authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.” Levin characterized this as a religious liberty which is not a “liberal liberty,” but a freedom to “do what you must. Society must retreat from any obligation that precedes civil obligation.” Liberal society should make room for a constraining obligation. Here, liberalism itself is understood as oppression unless it is restrained by such pre-political obligation. This kind of religious liberty also stands in opposition to the establishment of religion. This, Levin said, is not simply an extension of Locke’s idea. This kind of religious liberty understood as religious duty is really the essence of the religious liberty claim of wedding vendors against having to contribute to homosexual ceremonies. Here people are required to affirm things that they disagree with. Infringement of this kind of religious liberty is a result of the fact that we are now dealing with “a new civil religion,” Levin said. The culture leaders of the Western world are advancing a new “moral order” with the assumption that it should have institutional support in western countries. The establishment clause of the Constitution “will not help traditional believers in this conflict,” Levin said. Only the free exercise clause will help. Public sanction to institutions will be withheld from those institutions not supporting the new moral order.
While there is a reasonable appeal to the religious duty argument of Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance against such a new civil religion, Levin said that it is also true that Madison assumed that religious controversy between competing religious sects would happen in a “common soil of moral agreement.” But the erosion of this “common soil” is now our main problem. There is now a difference concerning the fundamental moral premises of society. Freedom now requires “the carving out of space for a dissenting way of life.” This kind of disagreement in society is “much more than Madison might have imagined.” Yet ‘a free society assumes a moral culture.” However, the foundation that Madison established can be used, Levin believes. Here we need to be “practical, not conceptual.” The various conservative religious groups who have not accepted the social revolution growing out of the 1960s must “work at filling the space that we are fighting for.” Community life is a problem today, Levin asserted. A way of life appealing to ultimate truths must be given form. Religious liberty is controversial because a morally meaningful community is in direct challenge to the reigning moral doctrine of expressive individualism, which holds that each individual’s true self should be the source of meaning and value.
National battles about religious liberty must indeed be fought, Levin said. But we must be more than defensive. Social conservatives are advancing moral truths which are universal, and thus are good for all of society. “It is in the nature of what we are doing” not to approach our neighbors in a purely defensive posture, only concerned with protecting ourselves. The “religious mission is outward looking.” Advocates of traditional morality are “defending the propriety of life under moral restraint.” He said “it is an argument about the instruction of American society.” We must turn toward everyday lives. We must “build more than protective walls but thriving communities.” In focusing only on religious liberty, “we could be losing what we are trying to protect in the act of protecting it,” Levin said.
In response to a question about the accusation that religious conservatives are seeking a parallel culture, Levin said that the alternative is no culture at all, since expressive individualism really does not allow for an overall culture. Progressives hold to the twin poles of individualism and centralization in determining how a society should be organized. Anything in between – intermediate institutions – is held to be “undemocratic and a loss of freedom.” President Obama’s second inaugural address essentially says that the centralization of society is necessary for progress.
The alternative to centralization is subsidiarity. A vision of the good life must be an understanding a person’s of obligation to God and man, not merely state regulation for the purpose of individual gratification. Levin believes that “the way we are called on to live is ultimately communal.” We can draw people in to our communities by having attractive communities, but again, we must be careful not to turn inward so thoroughly we only ask for toleration.
A final concern was the entrance of Islam into the religious/cultural conflict in the West. Here Levin observed that Islam is well integrated into America, with 3 million adherents, but not well integrated in Europe. He said that concerns about safety with respect to the presence of Muslims in the West should not limit religious freedom. It might be added that the challenge of Islam in the West shows the need for minimal common human values for all of society, in order that different faiths may live with one another and appeal to their truths in instructing the wider society, while still maintaining the ultimacy and uniqueness of their own understanding of truth.
No comments yet
