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The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
Extract
God has made man with the instinctive love of justice in him,
which gradually gets developed in the world …. I do not pretend
to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye
reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete
the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.
And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Theodore Parker (1853)
A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the
revolutions of her … hurryings through the abysses of space, has
brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted
with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of
judging all the works of his unthinking mother. [Gradually, as
morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world begins to be
felt, [giving rise to the claim] that, in some hidden manner, the
world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus
man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of
what is and what should be.
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References
1. The Collected Works of Theodore Parker 48 (Trubner & Co. 1879). Parker was a Unitarian Minister and leading abolitionist in pre-Civil War Massachusetts.
2. A Free Man's Worship, in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays 48–49 (8d ed., Mayflower Press 1949) (1910)Google Scholar. Russell was a preeminent mathematician and philosopher in 20th- century England, and a peace activist during the Cold War.
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5. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965). The facts of the case are taken from the opinion of the Court of Appeals, 326 F.2d 846 (2d Cir. 1964).
6. 50 U.S.C.A. § 456(j) (West 2006). The words are the statutory definition of “religious training and belief,” which is the requisite source of a qualifying conscientious objection.
7. 326 F.2d at 848.
8. Id.
9. Id. at 848-49.
10. Id. at 853.
11. Quotations here attributed to Bishop Niemoller are based on my memory of his words.
12. Id.
13. Id.
14. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia 97 (Yale Univ. Press 1968)Google Scholar.
15. Although I believe that there are somewhat parallel beliefs in Islam as to the first “set,” and have the sense that there is also a (significantly more complex) version of the second, my knowledge of the Islamic tradition is so fragmentary that I shall not attempt to speak of it here. I make a similar disclaimer as to Orthodox Christianity, and am even less informed about Asian and African religions.
16. Perhaps the most influential scholar has been Karen Armstrong; see A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and islam (Ballantine 1994)Google Scholar; The Bible: The Biography (Gale Cengage Learning 2008); The Case for God (Knopf 2009).
17. There are of course many well-known articulations of religious belief and experience that exemplify departures (in varying ways) from those now termed traditional, some but certainly not all of which may justly be deemed “liberal.” Perhaps the most profound, in my judgment, is Reinhold Niebuhr's essay (published more than 50 years ago), As Deceivers, Yet True, in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History 1 (Charles Scribner's Son's 1955). See also Henry Wilder Foote, The Religion of an Inquiring Mind (Starr King Press 1955); Theology Without Foundations: Religious Practice and The Future of Theological Truth (Stanley Hauerwas et al. eds., Abindon Press 1994); Kaufman, Gordon D., The Theological Imagination: Constructing The Concept of God (Westminster Press 1981)Google Scholar; Mcfague, Sallie, The Body of God: an Ecological Theology (Fortress 1993)Google Scholar; Placher, William C., The Domestication of Transcendence 181–200 (Westminster John Knox 1996)Google Scholar; Tillich, Paul, Dynamics of Faith (Perennial Classics 2001)Google Scholar.
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21. He was paraphrasing a passage from a sermon given in 1853 by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, quoted in an epigraph to this article.
For a sophisticated, comprehensive, and careful development and justification of a conception of “God” in which developing (although not inevitably emerging) “moral progress” is itself a property of God, see Wright, Robert, The Evolution of God 444-59 (Back Bay Books 2009)Google Scholar.
22. The belief that moral norms are losing their hold on society has been expressed by tradition-oriented people in this country since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay colony.
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24. Of the many expressions of this latter thought, a foundational one is that described in Deut. 11:13-18 (preserved in Jewish liturgy as the 'yahafta). The meaning of these words is interpreted in liberal Judaism to reflect its understanding of the way that Divine norms influence human history.
25. The first Article of the Charter declared:
[N]o Person or Persons … who shall confess and acknowledge One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World; and profess him or themselves obliged to live quietly under the Civil Government, shall be in any Case molested or prejudiced, in his or their Person or Estate, because of his or their conscientious Persuasion or Practice.”
A plaque on the street comer outside the church memorializes this event.
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29. “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Gen. 1:3. The ruler of Persia was referred as the King of Kings, or the Great King. See Yamauchi, Edwin M., Persian and the Bible 71 (Baker Books 1990)Google Scholar.
30. I do not intend my use of the word, submit, to carry any inherently pejorative implication. Nor do I presuppose a simplistic, or indeed any specific, interpretative stance. See, e.g., law professor Timothy D. Lytton, writing of the Orthodox Jewish tradition: “The Rabbis believed that the Bible is, on the one hand, a divinely inspired text and, on the other hand, a fundamentally cryptic document…. Indeed, [this] combination … makes the need for creative and multiple interpretations all the more urgent.” “Shall not the Judge of the Earth Deal Justly?”: Accountability, Compassion, and Judicial Authority in the Biblical Story of Sodom and Gomorrah, 18 J.L. & Religion 31, 33, 55 (2002)Google Scholar. See also the view of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (as he then was) regarding the “clarity” of what he terms the “Creation Narrative”:
One must distinguish between the form of portrayal and the content that is portrayed.
The form would have been chosen from what was understandable at the time-from the images which surrounded the people who lived then … [Ojnly the reality that shines through these images would be what was intended and what was truly enduring.
‘In The Beginning . . .’ A Catholic Understanding of The Story of Creation and The. Fall 4–5 (Boniface Ramsey trans., Eerdmans, William V. 1995)Google Scholar.
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34. Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod has articulated a challenging assertion of the inherent secularity of the claim of a necessary place for human discernment in moral decisionmaking:
[Contemporary man insists on knowing why the good is good and evil, evil. And once such knowledge is obtained,… the need for a commanding God disappears entirely.
For if the commanding God forbids that which is anyhow inherently evil and commands that which is anyhow inherently good, then his forbidding and commanding add nothing at all… . This discovery, first made by Plato in the Euthyphro, substitutes an autonomous moral realm for a commanding God …
Abraham's Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations 55 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ'g Co. 2004)Google Scholar.
35. A classic articulation is by Robert Cover: “The basic word of Judaism is obligation!,] bound up in the myth of Sinai. … It was a myth that created legitimacy for a radically diffuse and coordinate system of authority. But while it created room for the diffusion of authority it did not have a place for individualism.” Obligation: A Jewish Jurisprudence of the Social Order, 5 J.L. & Religion 65, 66, 69 (1987)Google Scholar.
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37. Jer. 31:33-34.
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40. See infra pp. 331-32.
41. Analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga-and in this he has millions of co-believers-so describes the God that he terms “real.” Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism, in The Rationality of Belief an the Plurality of Faith 191, 192 (Senor, Thomas D. ed., Cornell Univ. Press 1995)Google Scholar.
Of course, I recognize that many theologians have a less reductionist understanding of God's interventions in human history. For a treatment that I find especially helpful, see Tracy, Thomas, Enacting History: Ogden and Kaufman on God's Mighty Acts, 64 J. Religion 20 (1984)Google Scholar.
42. Compare the compact assertions of two of the 20th-century's most esteemed religious figures, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Paul Tillich.
“As a report about revelation, the Bible is itself a midrash.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism 185 (Octagon Books 1976)Google Scholar. (Midrash is a narrative intended to illuminate the meaning of a Biblical passage).
“The Bible is a document both of the divine self-manifestation and of the way in which human beings have received it. [T]here is no pure revelation. Wherever the divine is manifest, it is manifest in … a concrete, physical, and historical reality, as in the religious receptivity of the biblical writers.” Tillich, Paul, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality 4 (James Nisbet & Co. 1955)Google Scholar.
43. Roman Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson says of humans, “we experience ourselves as beings who constantly reach out beyond ourselves… Quest for the Living God 34 (Contiuum 2007). Jewish feminist scholar Judith Plaskow has described the experience in these words:
[A]s we join with others, in a way that only human beings can, in shared engagement to a common vision,… we find ourselves in the presence of another presence that is the final source of our hopes and intentions, and undergirds and sustains them. [I]t is through the struggle with others to act responsibly in history that we … come to know God in a profound and significant way.
Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective 157 (Harper & Row 1990).
Academic theologian Gordon Kaufman offers an extended analytic articulation that I find congruent with these expressions. Kaufman, supra note 17, at 31-57.
44. Rumi, supra note 3, at 114.
45. William James describes the “divine” as “only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.” The Varieties of Religious Experience 42 (Vintage 1990)Google Scholar. Martin Buber famously expressed a similar thought in these words: “We hear no You and yet feel addressed.” I and Thou 57 (Charles Scribner's Sons 1957). Compare Green, Arthur, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition 91–98 (Yale Univ. Press 2010)Google Scholar; Wright, supra note 21.
46. A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith 83 (HarperOne 2010).
47. To similar effect are two expositors of the Jewish tradition:
[W]hatever the most recent rabbi is destined to discover through proper exegesis of the tradition is as much a part of the way revealed to Moses as is a sentence of Scripture itself. It therefore is possible to participate even in the giving of the law by appropriate, logical inquiry into the law.
Neusner, Jacob, The Way of Torah: an Introduction to Judaism 43 (Dickinson 1974)Google Scholar.
“[P]reoccupation with the interpretation of received texts creates community across time.” Teutsch, David A., A Guide to Jewish Practice 241 (Reconstructionist Rabbinical 2011)Google Scholar (cmt. by Rabbi Donna Kirshbaum).
48. “Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods.” Russell, supra note 2, at 48.
49. For an illuminating discussion of the meaning of the assertion that “God is real,” see Ogden, Schubert, The Reality of God and Other Essays 37-39, 55–59 (Harper & Row 1963)Google Scholar.
50. They were plainly influenced by the constitutional infirmities of a statute protecting some but not all religious grounds of conscientious objection. Indeed, in a subsequent case, Justice Harlan recanted his willingness in Seeger to accept the surgery that the Court performed on the statutory language, but went on to conclude that the statute as written was unconstitutional. Welsh v. U.S., 398 U.S. 333, 344 (1970).
51. Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law, 1979 Duke L.J. 1229, 1230-32 (1979).
52. Exod. 20:1.
53. Luke 1:26-38.
54. Exod. 3:10.
55. Exod. 3:13.
56. Bones, Joseph's: Understanding The Struggle Between God and Mankind in The Bible 108 (Riverhead Books 2007)Google Scholar. “I shall be what I shall be” is a common alternative. Martin Buber, through his long-time translator, Maurice Friedman, beautifully (and profoundly) renders the phrase as “I shall be there.” Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy 62 (Humanities Press Int'l 1988)Google Scholar.
57. I believe that Arthur Leff plainly recognized as much, although there is no short quotation that accredits my understanding him so. See Unspeakable Ethics, supra note 51.
58. Roman Catholic theologian Chester Gillis aptly observes: “We cannot hope to render the Transcendent transparent. Indeed, if we were able to do so, that which is described [would be] no longer transcendent.” Pluralism: A New Paradigm for Theology 179 (Eerdmans 1993).
59. Compare the slightly different rendition attributed to St. Teresa by Harvey, Andrew, The Essential Mystics: The Soul's Journey into Truth 206 (Castle Books 1996)Google Scholar.
60. Waldron, Jeremy, The Circumstances of Integrity, 3 Leg. Theory 1, 13 (1997)Google Scholar. Chester Gillis is to like effect: “[W]e do not know the Transcendent in itself, we only know our perception of the Transcendent.” Gillis, supra note 58, at 179-80.
61. Job 19:25. Apparently, the Hebrew refers to a mediator between Job and God, but I nonetheless have treated its reference to Job's “Redeemer” as the Deity, as I believe it has been so widely understood by the laity, supplying a uniquely powerful, poetic-and succinct-avowal as it does.
62. Arthur Leff again remains persuasive: “[A] fully considered moral position, the product of deep and thorough intellectual activity, one that fits together into a fairly consistent whole, [may] deserve more respect than shallow, expletive, internally inconsistent ethical decisions [but] labor and logic have no necessary connection to ethical truth.” Unspeakable Ethics, supra note 51, at 1238 (emphasis at original).
63. Love's Knowledge, in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature 261, 265 (Nussbaum, Martha C. ed., Oxford Univ. Press 1990)Google Scholar.
64. “There is no Truth unless first there be a Faith on which it may be based.” See, among many secondary sources, Steinberg, Milton, As A Driven Leaf 13 (Behrman House 1939)Google Scholar. Rabbi Yohanan led the re-fashioning of what came to be called Rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion from Jerusalem.
65. Challenging those whose “knowledge” of God was not based on direct personal experience but on the witness of others, even if grounded in Scripture and attributed to ones who Fox regarded as History's highest witnesses to Truth, Fox famously asked: “‘The scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ's and the apostles‘words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord… what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the spirit that gave them forth.’” The Testimony of Margaret Fox, in The Works of George Fox: Volume 1 49, 50 (M.T.C. Gould 1831)Google Scholar.
66. Buber's understanding of Revelation is described by a contemporary Conservative rabbi in these words: “[R]evelation at Sinai was not a matter of words; it was a revelation of God Himself. All of the words of the Torah are simply a record of how the people who participated in the revelation at Sinai (and many people thereafter) understood its nature and implications.” Dorff, Elliot N., Medieval and Modern Theories of Revelation, in Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary 1399, 1401 (Lieber, David L., ed., Jewish Publication Society 2001)Google Scholar.
67. “There is no truth that truths itself.” Bellah, Robert, At Home and Not At Home: Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth, Tfie Christian Century 423, 425 (Apr. 19, 1995), available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=241.Google Scholar
“Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.” Davidson, Donald, A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective 137, 141 (Oxford 2001)Google Scholar.
“To rely on [revelation] is to have faith in the prophets who communicate the revelation.” Luban, David, A Theological Argument Against Theopolitics, 16 Report From Inst. Phil. Pub. Pol'Y 10 (2006)Google Scholar.
68. On the wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is inscribed: “I have sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
69. Plantinga, supra note 41, at 200 (emphasis supplied).
70. Problems of Religious Diversity26 (Blackwell 2001)Google Scholar.
71. The one so believing will assert the defense of truth as a justification, which the other will regard as compounding the felony. That this leads to an indefinite regress is a problem, but that observation is not a solution to the problem.
72. For the classic statement of the traditional Jewish wariness toward “dialogue” with Christians, see Soloveitchik, Joseph B., Confrontation, 6 Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 5 (1964)Google Scholar. Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote just as momentous changes would begin to appear in the Christian world. See Borowitz, Eugene B., A Nearness in Difference: Jewish-Christian Dialogue Since Vatican II, Commonweal, (Jan. 12, 2006), http://commonwealmagazine.org/neamess-difference-OGoogle Scholar.
73. Compare Frankel, Marvin E., Religion in Public Life Π Reasons for Minimal Access, 60 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 633, 639 (2006)Google Scholar: “Why … the proliferation of committees and public officials insisting that creches be placed … on the public squares?,” and answers: “The reason … is exactly to show those others who's boss. This is Christian country. If you don't like it, as you presumably don't, you know what you can do.”
74. Sacred Fragments, supra note 39, at xvii.
75. Bendall, Kurt & Frederick Ferre, Exploring The Logic of Faith: A Dialogue on the Relation of Modern Philosophy To Christian Faith 66 (Ass'n 1962)Google Scholar.
76. However, some rituals embody, more or less centrally, an understanding of “belief’ as a set of prepositional avowals. Liturgical recital of the Christian Creeds is perhaps the most prominent example. That they are not invariably so understood, however, is illustrated by Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister. In Search of Belief 1-3 (Liguori/Triumph 1999).
77. Clifford Geertz refers to “the collection of notions a people has of how reality is at base put together as their world view, [and] the way they do things and like to see things done [as] their ethos.” Religious rituals serve as symbols that “link these in such a way that they mutually confirm one another. [They] render the world view believable and the ethos justifiable,… by invoking each in support of the other.” He goes on:
The world view is believable because the ethos, which grows out of it, is felt to be authoritative; the ethos is justifiable because the world view, upon which it rests, is held to be true. Seen from outside the religious perspective, this sort of hanging a picture from a nail driven into its frame appears as a kind of sleight of hand. Seen from inside, it appears as a simple fact.
Geertz, supra, n.14, at 97.
78. Compare ProfessorWildman's, Wesley J. friendly critique: “Unfortunately, most liberal theologians have been better at naming and theorizing the problem than at articulating [a] constructive alternative …” Symposium: the Return to History in Religion, 32 Am. J. Theo. & Phil. 43, 50 (2011)Google Scholar.
79. Jacob, Robert, The Challenge of the Catechism, First Things 46, 46 (1995)Google Scholar.
80. Id.
81. Footnote to AII Prayers, in Poems 129 (Hooper, Walter ed., Harvest/HBJ 1964)Google Scholar.
82. Recall the wryly critical observation: “The only trouble with seekers is that they rarely find anything.”
83. Faith, Reckless: When The Church Loses its Will to Discern 50–51 (Crossway Books 1994)Google Scholar.
84. Berger, supra note 19, at 10 (emphases in the original).
85. Footnote to All Prayers, supra note 81.
86. In Defense of Religious Moderation 67 (Colum. Univ. Press 2011)Google Scholar. Quoting Dante Alligheri, Isidore concludes that God “can be spoken of only by metaphor or analogy, for we can know only his traces.” Id.
87. “What Can a Lawyer Learn from Literature?,” in From Expectations To Experience: Essays on Law and Legal Education 216-18 (Univ. of Mich. Press 2000)Google Scholar.
88. Gen. 3.
89. God, Where Are You? Rediscovering The Bible 14 (Orbis Books 1995)Google Scholar.
90. Dulles, Avery Cardinal, The Orthodox Imperative, 165 First Things 31, 33 (2006)Google Scholar.
91. See In The Beginning, supra note 30.
92. For a penetrating, lucid development of this thought, with respect to the task of understanding the Parables of Jesus, see Bartlett, David L., The Shape of Scriptural Authority 65–78 (Fortress 1983)Google Scholar.
93. The Path of the Law (1897), supra note 23, at 469; The Path of the Law (1997), supra note 23, at 1001.
94. As quoted (among many other places) in Patai, Raphael, The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology 294 (Wayne State Univ. Press 1996)Google Scholar.
95. See Alpert, Rebecca & Staub, Jacob, Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach 29 (Reconstructionist 1985)Google Scholar, which uses this line, attributed to Kaplan, as a chapter title.
96. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus eloquently articulated the principle that “the Catholic believes that… the bishop of Rome is Peter among us … that the words of Jesus, ‘He who hears you, hears me,’ have abiding historical applicability until the end of time.” Neuhaus, Richard John, The Persistence of the Catholic Moment, 52 Catholic Univ. L. Rev. 269, 277, 278 (2003)Google Scholar. Of course, many who claim to be authentically Roman Catholic believe something significantly less univocal about the primacy of the Pope.
97. No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995 40 (Yale Univ. Press 1996)Google Scholar.
98. Id. at 85.
99. Brian McLaren's suggestion, that we think of the Scriptures as a “Community Library” rather than a “Legal Constitution,” is an imaginative and thought-productive counter-example, putting forth a conception of Scripture that meaningfully guides one's approach to its epistemic value. Supra note 46, Ch. 8. I have briefly described above, pp. I 13-14. my own effort to articulate a stable-enough point of rest that slides only part-way down the slippery slope.
100. I do not mean thereby to ignore or dismiss the substantial body of scholarship seeking to demonstrate that an even older tradition in fact supports the approach of present-day liberal religion, especially with respect to the interpretation of Scripture. See, e.g., Armstrong, supra note 16.
101. See ch. 4 of MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Penguin 2009)Google Scholar. He notes: “The advantage of creedal statements was that almost anyone was capable of learning them quickly to standardize belief and put up barriers about speculation or what was likely to be a boundless set of disagreements about what the Christian scriptures actually meant.” Id. at 129.
There is a similar story to be told about the Orthodox Jewish response to the rise of Reform Judaism in 19th-century Central Europe.
102. Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan, writing of “The Theological Roots of Reform Judaism's Woes,” makes a related warning: “In the absence of a strong theological basis for making religious demands, the members [of a religious community] lose interest and wander off.” Jewish Daily Forward (Feb. 16, 2011), http://www.forward.com/articles/135476/the-theological-roots-of-reform-judaism-s-woes/.
103. A Protestant Ethical Approach, in The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives 101, 103 (Noonan, John T. Jr. ed., Harv. Univ. Press 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
104. Id. at 108-09.
105. Id.
106. On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns, in Grounding for The Metaphysics of Morals 63–66 (Ellington, James W. trans., Hackett Publ'g Co. 1993)Google Scholar.
107. Google Books.com has several entries that attribute these lines to Sartre, but without citation of a source.
108. Steinberg, supra note 64.
109. The best brief treatment of this question that I am aware of is by Thiemann, Ronald F., Beyond Exclusivism and Absolutism: A Trinitarian Theology of the Cross, in God's Life in Trinity 118 (Volf, Miroslav & Welker, Michael eds., Fortress Press 2006)Google Scholar. Fuller development of his approach appears in two earlier books, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise, 72–82 (Univ. Notre Dame 1985)Google Scholar; Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma for Democracy (Georgetown Univ. Press 1996).
110. The moral status of any resulting action is a separate question. Since action may impinge on the lives of others, more than what would suffice to justify belief is required to justify an action based on it.
111. Interestingly, the dismissive term, hocus pocus, may have originated with an English cleric as a parody of the holiest moment in the Roman Catholic Mass, when the celebrant lifts the Host and recites the (Latinized) words of Jesus, hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body”).
112. See, among many witnesses to this phenomenon from within the religious tradition, Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith (William B. Eerdmans 1993). I have summarized the effect on my own outlook in Listening for God: Religion and Moral Discernment 14-16, 43–46 (Fordham Univ. Press 1998)Google Scholar.
113. Recall the efforts of Catholics and Jews-initially Quakers as well, more recently Evangelical “home-schoolers”-to maintain separate schools for their communicants. With the rise of State-supported education, the question of eligibility for governmental support gradually transformed an effort that simply sought to insulate one's children from mainstream influences into one of the more enduringly divisive public questions, with each side claiming the status of being taken advantage of.
114. In his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 586 (2003), Justice Scalia perceived one-half of the problem quite clearly, but (characteristically) the other not at all. He sympathetically described those committed to the preservation of legal constraints on gay equality as “protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive,” id. at 586, but he contended that the fact of such a concern justified the imposition of sanctions (indeed, in the case at hand, criminal sanctions) on those whose personal lives may be thought to be contributing to accelerating changes in social norms. (Of course, he found warrant for this selectivity of concern in his understanding of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment).
For my brief reflections on the difficulty of finding a neutral way of deciding “who started” the gay-equality disputes, see Religion In Legal Thought and Practice 349 (Cambridge Univ. Press 2010)Google ScholarPubMed.
115. By this latter term, I mean to refer to those who simply find themselves unable to accept any non-naturalist understanding of the world, but do not actively regard religion as per se a malign force in the world. For recent examples of carefully articulated positions approaching near to the boundary, see Ledewitz, Bruce, The New New Secularism and the End of the Law of Separation of Church and State, 28 Buff. Pub. Interest L.J. 1, 19–26 (2009-2010)Google Scholar; Alkin, Scott F. & Talisse, Robert B., Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief (Prometheus Books 2011)Google Scholar.
116. The Religious Lawyer in a Pluralist Society, 66 Ford. L. Rev. 1469, 1500 (1998)Google Scholar.
117. Sacred Fragments, supra note 39, at 34.
118. The moral responsibility not to impose on others requires more in the way of justification than a quasi-ethical, quasi-intellectual responsibility to have warrant for what one says or does. Evangelizing “all nations” (Matt. 28:19) or “rebuking” one's neighbor for moral failings (Lev. 19:17) present major examples of the beginnings of something more. For a perceptive brief engagement with the contemporary intractability (yet diminishing salience) of the question of Christians evangelizing Jews, see Synan, Edward A., The Popes and The Jews in The Middle Ages: an Intense Exploration of Judaeo-Christian Relationships in The Medieval World 160-61 (Macmillan 1965)Google Scholar (quoted in Religion and Legal Thought and Practice, supra note 114, at 570). For a recent example of that intractability, see id. at 563-70.
I owe to Professor R. George Wright (in personal communication) the realization that “it may promote scandal in ways implicating one's responsibility to fellow congregants” for a Roman Catholic to present oneself for Communion in circumstances when many others present would believe he or she was not eligible for it. Whether one has sufficient warrant to do so if acting out of a conscientious belief that Church teaching on the matter in question is seriously wrong, is not a matter about which I feel qualified to ruminate.
119. William James emphasizes the special salience of individual reflection, out of which the “total drift of thinking continues to confirm” a hypothesis. The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy 12–17 (Harv. Univ. Press 1979)Google Scholar. Ronald Thiemann makes a similar point, in Revelation and Theology, supra note 109 at 173 n. 11: “Christians ought to seek what John Rawls calls ‘reflective equilibrium’.”
120. For a complex, penetrating analysis by a New Zealander philosophy professor, see Bishop, John, The Philosophy of Religion: A Programmatic Overview, 1 Phil. Compass 506 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
121. Russell, supra note 2, at 48.
122. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice 23 (Routledge 2002)Google Scholar.
123. The poem is set out in full in the Appendix, immediately following.
While this article was in production, The New York Review of Books published an excerpt from the first chapter of a new book by Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God, which is scheduled to be published later in 2013. Ronald Dworkin, New York Review OF Books, Religion without God (Apr. 4, 2013), available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/religion-without-god/?pagination=false. The book will plainly be a major contribution to thinking about questions like those I have sought to address here. Most significant, in my judgment, is his challenge to the traditional line drawn between religion and secularity: “the phrase, ‘religious atheism,’ however surprising, is not an oxymoron.” Id.
124. Rumi, supra note 3.
125. A legendary Prophet, associated with the Biblical Elijah.