Whose Conscience? Which Complicity? Reconciling Burdens and Interests in the Law of Religious Liberty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Flanders ◽  
Sean Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Religious Liberty ◽  
The Law

Religious Liberty and the Law in Botswana

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. D. Nsereko
Keyword(s):  
Religious Liberty ◽  
The Law

scholarly journals The Law of Religious Liberty in a Tolerant Society

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Moral Ideal ◽  
The Law ◽  
Tolerant State

This chapter confronts the question of what to do about our Sikh boy and rural boy discussed in the introduction if there really is no reason to tolerate only the former's claim of conscience for carrying a weapon in places where that is ordinarily prohibited. It argues that both boys should be out of luck: that there should not be exemptions to general laws with neutral purposes, unless those exemptions do not shift burdens or risks onto others. It also considers whether the moral ideal of toleration, as articulated and defended in this book, is incompatible with state establishment or disestablishment of religion generally. The chapter argues that it is not, and that a tolerant state could, in principle, be either a religious or antireligious one.

scholarly journals Religious Liberty Sacralized: The Persistence of Christian Dissenting Tradition and the Cincinnati Bible War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Linda Przybyszewski
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
School Board ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Bible Reading

In 1869, the Cincinnati school board ended a forty-year tradition of Bible reading in the schools in an attempt to encourage Catholics to use them, thus provoking national controversy and a lawsuit brought by pro-Bible advocates. Scholars regularly cite the Ohio Supreme Court decision in favor of the school board as a landmark in the legal separation of church and state. This article interrogates the meaning of the secularization of law by examining expressions of juristic, pedagogic, and popular consciousness in the multiple levels and spaces where individuals raised and resolved constitutional questions on education. Dissenting Christian tradition shaped the legal brief of Stanley Matthews, the school board's lead attorney. Matthews' sacralized the religious liberty guarantee found in the Ohio Constitution within a post-millennialist framework. Ohio Chief Justice John Welch hybridized Christian dissenting tradition with deistic rationalism in <u>Board of Education v. Minor, et al</u>, thus appealing to as broad a constituency as had the right to elect justices to the Ohio Supreme Court. The limited, technical ruling allowed for a metropole/periphery divide in educational practice, so that Bible reading and prayer in Ohio public schools continued well into the 20th century. Far from a landmark in secularization of the law, the Bible War case demonstrates the persistent power of religion to frame law, including the law of religious liberty.

How Should We Treat Religion? On Exemptions and Exclusions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier ◽  
Michael Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
Applicable Law ◽  
Relative Attractiveness ◽  
The Law

The law of religious liberty in the United States tends to treat religion as special in two ways. It does first by offering religious citizens certain exemptions and accommodations based on their religious objections to otherwise generally applicable law. Second, it enforces certain exclusions of public expressions of religious doctrines or values. But this special treatment is unwarranted since states should recognize religious principles of action as legally equivalent to a variety of sectarian secular doctrines that people affirm as a matter of conscience. This essay argues for the coherence and relative attractiveness of (i) robust protections for both religious and secular conscience, and (ii) weak restrictions on noncoercive establishment of both religious and secular doctrines.

Why Respect Religion?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Belief System ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Legal Regime ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
Moral Basis ◽  
The Law

The analysis has so far assumed that the moral foundation of the law of religious liberty is to be found in the idea of principled toleration. But are we entitled to that assumption? Martha Nussbaum, for example, has recently argued for the attitude of “respect” as the moral foundation of religious liberty. However, her account is ambiguous between two senses of respect. In one sense of respect (“minimal” respect), it is compatible with nothing more than toleration of religion; and in a different sense (“affirmative” respect, and which Nussbaum appears to want to invoke), it could not form the moral basis of a legal regime since religion is not the kind of belief system that could warrant that attitude.

Contending for Religious Equality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Equal Citizenship

In the new United States every state included a bill of rights guaranteeing religious liberty. But the meaning of those guarantees varied. Though Rhode Island and Pennsylvania had no established religion from their beginnings, most colonies had possessed a Protestant establishment, and most states retained official preference for Protestantism. Catholicism was generally tolerated, but Catholics, like Jews, were denied equal citizenship rights in several states. But over the course of two generations Americans adopted Virginia’s model of equal religious liberty. Hard-fought contests led to disestablishment everywhere, and to virtually complete religious equality before the law.

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