Religious, Civil, and Economic Freedoms: What’s the Chicken and What’s the Egg?

This paper studies the relationship between religious liberty and economic freedom. First, three new facts emerge: (a) religious liberty has increased since 1960, but has slipped substantially over the past decade; (b) the countries that experienced the largest declines in religious liberty tend to have greater economic freedom, especially property rights; (c) changes in religious liberty are associated with changes in the allocation of time to religious activities. Second, using a combination of vector autoregressions and dynamic panel methods, improvements in religious liberty tend to precede economic freedom. Finally, increases in religious liberty have a wide array of spillovers that are important determinants of economic freedom and explain the direction of causality. Countries cannot have long-run economic prosperity and freedom without actively allowing for and promoting religious liberty.

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

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.