« What Next?--Part II: Avenues of and (Mostly) Revivals in Legal Scholarship | Main | Fact or Fiction: Firstborn Daughter = First Signpost on the Road to Divorce? »
Friday, November 18, 2016
Remarks on "The Future of Religious Liberty" at the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention
I participated yesterday in a panel discussion on "RFRA and the Future of Religious Liberty" at the Federalist Society's annual National Lawyers Convention. After noting that recent events had dramatically undermined any confidence one might have in my ability to say anything useful about "the future", I briefly discussed "one big-picture idea, two reasons for cautious optimism, and three causes for concern."
The big-picture idea (such as it is) was this: In any society where there is (a) religious and moral diversity and (b) an active, regulatory welfare state, there will -- necessarily -- be conflicts and tensions between (i) duly enacted, majority-supported, generally applicable laws and (ii) some citizens' religious beliefs and exercise. What Justice Jackson called "the uniformity of the graveyard" is not an attractive way to manage these conflicts and tensions; the toleration-and-accommodation strategy, however, is. RFRA-type laws are, in my view, effective and workable mechanisms for carrying out the latter strategy and so, yes, I think such laws are and should be part of the "future of religious liberty."
The two "reasons for cautious optimism": First, the (unanimous) Hosanna-Tabor case shows that the Court recognizes that religious freedom is not entirely about "balancing interests" but also imposes, in some contexts, real limits on the government's ability -- even when its pursuing important goals like reducing employment discrimination -- to interfere with individuals' and institutions religious decisions. Second, as the (unanimous) Holt case (among many others) illustrated, outside of a few well-known cases (e.g., Storman's) and hot-button-issues (e.g., wedding ventors), religious-liberty claimants are very often winning. The Becket Fund, etc., and the Department of Justice, do a lot of good work.
Next, three causes for concern -- that is, three demographic, cultural, and sociological facts and trends, or three things about the culture (and "law is downstream from culture") that were true before and are still true after the election: (1) the "rise of the nones" presents the danger that fewer people will see themselves as having a "stake" in the religious-freedom issue (when, in fact, we all -- whether or not we are religious -- do); (2) the relative decline in the role and footprint of religious institutions and communities (whether because of scandals, or atomizing individualism, or something else) reduces a sense of solidarity and makes it more difficult for people to resist incursions on religious liberty when they threaten; and (3) the increasing willingness of the government to shrink the civil-society space and to expand the "public" sector, by leveraging its licensing, accrediting, spending, grant-making, taxing, contracting, and social-welfare functions -- that is, by using conditions in addition to regulations to affect non-state actors' practices.
Then followed a lively discussion!
Posted by Rick Garnett on November 18, 2016 at 12:40 PM in Religion, Rick Garnett | Permalink
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.