The Overview (Tuesday, April 5)
Challenges to religious pluralism, the Supreme Court weighs in on religious freedom and capital punishment, the faith of Generation Z, and more.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at a research symposium in Arlington, Virginia. The symposium, titled “Religious Liberty in Diverse Communities,” focused on challenges to and opportunities for religious liberty in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic society.
My coauthor, Logan Strother, and I presented our ongoing research on how group attitudes shape support for constitutional rights. We’ve previously published an article on racial attitudes, but in this project we focused on attitudes toward different religious groups. Simply put, we found that people’s attitudes toward religious groups condition their beliefs that these groups’ constitutional rights had been violated in certain situations.
We developed a survey experiment wherein we presented people with a possible rights violation, and then varied the identity of the religious individual or group whose rights may have been violated. Consider this vignette people saw:
Last month a city government denied a group of [religious/evangelical Christian/Muslim/Jewish] residents the permits needed to build a new worship facility. The city argued that the facility could bring crowding and traffic to the neighborhood. Do you think this violated the group’s rights?
Using a feeling thermometer (0-100, with 0 being very negative and 100 being very positive), we also gauged how our respondents felt toward different groups of people, including the religious groups at the heart of our study.
As you can see from the above set of figures, we found that as people’s warmth toward religious groups (in this case, evangelical Christians) increased, so too did the likelihood of them seeing the group’s rights being violated. In other words, people’s support for constitutional rights is at least partially dependent on how they feel toward the group benefitting from these rights.
As for where we go from here, we have another study in the field exploring whether there are ways to control these effects. Specifically, we’re wondering whether getting people to think about tolerance before reading these vignettes will affect their responses. If so, this could be an important finding for promoting constitutional rights in deeply divided and diverse societies. Stay tuned.
With that, here’s a crowded Tuesday, April 5 edition of The Overview:
1. Christianity Today’s Megan Fowler asks an interesting question: Why are there no evangelical Christians on the Supreme Court?
For most of American history the Court was comprised solely of Protestants, but over the past several decades the Court has been dominated by Catholic and Jewish justices. Today, only Neil Gorsuch—reportedly an Episcopalian—is a Protestant, and the likely next justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, has described herself as nondenominational Protestant. Neither could reasonably be considered evangelicals.
One reason for the lack of evangelical justices has to do with where justices tend to come from:
The lack of evangelicals on the Supreme Court is partly a supply issue. While evangelicals make up a quarter of the American population, [research] found that they’re just 7 percent of the student body at the country’s top law schools. Harvard and Yale are seen as the Supreme Court “pipeline,” with eight of the nine justices—and nominee Brown—having attended law school there.
That said, it’s not that evangelical Christians (especially white evangelicals) are lacking ideological representation on the Supreme Court. The conservative Catholic justices have taken legal positions largely in line with most white evangelicals. Indeed, Amy Coney Barrett previously contributed to Alliance Defending Freedom, a stalwart defender of evangelical interests in the courts and perhaps the most prominent Christian legal organization in the country.
If you’d like to know more about why evangelicals tend to be underrepresented in elite legal circles, check out the excellent Separate But Faithful from political scientists Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Joshua Wilson.
2. Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas breaks down the Supreme Court’s recent decision involving the religious freedom claims of a Texas man on death row.
John Henry Ramirez was sentenced to death for his role in the 2004 killing of a convenience store clerk. Ramirez, who converted to Christianity in prison, argued that the prison should not only allow his pastor to be present in the death chamber, but that the pastor should be able to lay hands on Ramirez and pray with him as he is executed.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 8-1 decision, which included the following response to the state’s objection to the request:
“Prison officials could impose reasonable restrictions on audible prayer in the execution chamber — such as limiting the volume of any prayer so that medical officials can monitor an inmate’s condition, requiring silence during critical points in the execution process, ... allowing a spiritual advisor to speak only with the inmate and subjecting advisors to immediate removal for failure to comply with any rule.”
Justice Clarence Thomas (probably the most conservative member of the Court) wrote the lone dissenting opinion, arguing that Ramirez’s request amounted to a delay tactic and was “abusive and insincere.”1
3. Law and Liberty’s M. Anthony Mills critiques the trend toward illiberalism in the West, especially among some voices on the right. Using Russia’s invasion of (and increasingly bloody and indefensible conduct in) Ukraine as a good example of the dangers of illiberalism, Mills chastises those who have defended it in seemingly knee-jerk opposition to the cultural power of the left:
Since 2016, many of those affiliated with “post-liberalism,” “national conservatism,” and “the New Right” have come to believe that the Right’s association with liberalism was a Faustian bargain. Liberalism, on this telling, is a totalizing force that, in its inexorable expansion outwards, erodes community and tradition, leaving a hollowed-out polity of atomized individuals bound together by nothing but procedural norms that masquerade as morally neutral. Traditional conservative principles such as prudence, moderation, and devolved authority are no match against this Leviathan, so that strength, national identity, and even centralized, federal action come to be seen as necessary bulwarks against liberalism, Left or Right.
In this context, it is no surprise that some politicians, pundits, and intellectuals affiliated with the New Right have come to see such nationalist strong men as Viktor Orban or even Vladimir Putin as fellow travelers. They applaud these leaders’ willingness to “stand up” against the moral perversities of liberalism—Orban champions what he calls “illiberal democracy”—and unabashedly defend their countries’ own national interests against the liberal cosmopolitanism they see embodied in the European Union and NATO. Thus, in the days and hours leading up to the Ukrainian invasion, Steve Bannon praised Putin for being “anti-woke,” while Tucker Carlson opined that Putin posed no threat to Americans and characterized the tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a “border dispute.”
Mills concludes that while there are viable and legitimate concerns about liberalism as we move further into the 21st century, swinging the pendulum back toward illiberalism is not the answer. And, as regular readers are likely to know, I couldn’t agree more.
4. Speaking of debates over liberalism, Mere Orthodoxy’s Jake Meador offers a characteristically thoughtful and thought-provoking assessment of the tensions between liberalism and illiberalism in a post-Christian society. Part-historical and part-theological, Meador’s essay is a great example of the sort of reflection Christians (myself included) should be engaged in.
Consider how he sets the thing up:
A British politician once had said that “events, dear boy, events,” would define his legacy. Many thought that these “events” were at an end. Ushered into a brave new era by liberal democracy, we would have robust individual liberties, booming economies, and global peace forever, world without end, amen. To borrow another descriptor from Sayers, the world had entered the Kingdom of God, only without God. It turned out he wasn’t needed. We had the kingdom without the king.
But then came the stock market crash and Obergefell and Brexit and Trump and plummeting birth rates and COVID and, finally, Ukraine. The days of glasnost and the end of history had ended. Once again a power in the east rose and said, “we will bury you.” Once again a land war broke out in eastern Europe. The myth of the post-war west was that we could banish these strong gods, we could banish transcendence, and by doing that we could secure peace in our time—and security as well. That promise has failed. The strong gods are back.
From there, Meador suggests that 2015—the year that gave us Obergefell v. Hodges and unofficially ushered in a new era in America politics and culture—was not necessarily the beginning of our post-Christian society, but perhaps a further step on the journey that had actually been taking shape since the end of World War II. Here, Meador’s allusion to Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is crystal clear.
The whole essay is worth spending some time with. But the ending especially stuck with me, particularly as I continue to write Uneasy Citizenship:
A philosophy with no room for mercy cannot possibly be regarded as Christian. Rather, we do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way—which means that Christian businesspeople go about their work as Christians, politicians who are Christian are Christian politicians, artists who are Christian are Christian artists. And so their work will inherently be ordered toward the love of God and love of neighbor. To do anything less would be to betray their king. But precisely because their work is bound by the God who has saved them, it will be seasoned with mercy, patience, and kindness.
This, of course, leaves us at odds with the open society as well as being at odds with the new American right and the new American left. So be it. It is better to live with Christ in the wilderness than to enjoy the halls of power without him.
Amen.
5. The American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Cox shares new data on the faith habits and practices of Generation Z, and suggests what this means for the future of American religion. Three key findings:
“In terms of identity, Generation Z is the least religious generation yet. More than one-third (34 percent) of Generation Z are religiously unaffiliated, a significantly larger proportion than among millennials (29 percent) and Generation X (25 percent).”
“A majority (57 percent) of baby boomers report having attended religious services with their families at least once a week during their childhoods. Millennials and Gen Zers are much less likely to report attending worship services growing up. Less than half of millennials (45 percent) and Gen Zers (40 percent) say they attended church weekly.”
“More than three-quarters (76 percent) of Americans who belong to the silent generation and about two-thirds (68 percent) of baby boomers agree that raising children in a religious tradition is important. Only 40 percent of Gen Zers agree with this statement. Nearly six in 10 (58 percent) reject it.”
Social scientists have known for a while that religion in American is different from other developed, post-industrial countries. There are myriad theories and explanations for why this is the case.2 At the same time, data shows that Americans are slowly and steadily becoming less institutionally religious.3 Cox’s results here confirm a good deal of what we thought we knew, and shed new light on important questions of religion and public life.
I’m trying to imagine the outcry from some on the right if such language was authored by a liberal justice in response to a religious freedom claim. Actually, no, I’m not trying; it’s incredibly easy to imagine.
For a good overview of these theories, check out Chapter 12 of Religion and Politics in America, which I use when I teach my Religion and Politics class every other year.