Religion and Liberal Democracy

Abstract

It has been a while since Catholics were tarred and feathered or Mormons dispatched by militias and mobs on forced marches to Utah. True, hostility to minority religions has not disappeared entirely: Reverend Sun Myung Moon did time in federal prison for tax crimes, Shree Bhagwan Rashneesh left country one step ahead of law, and International Society for Krishna Consciousness lies largely bankrupt, to name a few examples. But contemporary claims of religious oppression -are typically subtler than claims of outright persecution. For example, Professor Michael McConnell, my opponent in this debate, laments what he depicts as a relentless pattern of in which serious religion-religion understood as more than ceremony, as guiding principle of life-has been shoved to margins of public life.' This secularization, he suggests, is a result of increasing displacement of religious functions by an expanding welfare state, coupled with two kinds of error by Supreme Court: (1) it has granted too few religious exemptions from public laws under Free Exercise Clause; and (2) it has too often excluded religion from public programs in name of preventing establishment. Professor McConnell would read both Religion Clauses as requiring government to respect a single baseline: the hypothetical world in which individuals make decisions about religion on basis of their own religious conscience, without influence of government.2 On this view, Court should mandate more exemptions and find fewer establishments in order to maintain religious pluralism. I disagree with both diagnosis and cure. To begin, I find any picture of rampant secularization difficult to square with numerous indicators of religion's lively role in contemporary Amer-

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