TOLERATING RELIGION

Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("Known as 'Robert Injuresoul' to his clerical enemies, he raised the issue of what role religion ought to play in the public life of the American nation for the first time since the writing of the Constitution, when the founders deliberately left out any acknowledgment of a deity as the source of governmental power." Id. at 2. "To the question that retains its politically divisive power today--whether the United States was founded s a Christian nation--Ingersoll answered an emphatic no." Id. at 4.  "The other cultural issues that divided Americans in Ingersoll's time are equally familiar and include evolution, race, immigration, women's rights, sexual behavior, freedom of artistic expression, and vast disparities in wealth. In the nineteenth century, however, the issues were newer, as was the science bolstering the secular side of the argument, and the forces of religious orthodoxy were stronger. The overarching question in Ingersoll's time was whether any of these issues could or should be resolved by appeals to divine authority. To this Ingersoll also said no, spreading the gospel (though he never would have called it that)  of reason, science, and humanism to audiences across the country. It is not an overstatement to say that Ingersoll devoted his life to freethought, the lovely term that first appeared in England in the late seventeenth century and was meant to convey devotion to a way of looking at the world based on observation rather than on ancient 'sacred' writings by men who believed that the sun revolved around the earth." Id. at 6-7. "Ingersoll used every possible public platform to remind Americans why the founders had written a godless constitution in the first place. In response to one of the many ministerial pleas for a godly constitution since Lincoln had evaded the issue in 1864, Ingersoll noted that 'if there is to be acknowledgement of God in the Constitution, the question naturally arises as to which God is to have this honor.'  [] Ingersoll had two major concerns about separation of church and state. First, he feared that in an expanding and expansive society that included people of more varied cultures and beliefs than the founders could ever have imagined, the most retrograde representatives of orthodox Protestantism would attempt to solidify their political and economic power by laying claim to a religion-based political authority denied by the Constitution. Second, he anticipated that the Catholic Church would press for more laws in conformity with its doctrines as the number of American Catholics increased.... Ingersoll saw the Catholic opposition to free public schooling and its suspicion of science as particularly harmful and noted that the Vatican respected the religious liberty of others only in ares where Catholics were a minority." "But Ingersoll also had a low opinion of the curriculum in American public schools when it came to teaching students about either freedom of conscience or the separation of church and state in American history." Id. at 139- 142. "The connection between old-time religion and politics, however, was the reverse of today's close relationship between religion and economic conservatism. Bryan was the leader of the entwined forces of economic and religious populism until his death in 1925 (shortly after the Scopes trial). His famous 1896 'cross of gold' speech had embodied the philosophical linkage between turn-of-the-century evangelical religion and the desire for economic (though not racial) justice. Bryan would undoubtedly have been astonished had someone told him in the 1890s that a century in the future, Americans who upheld the literal truth of Genesis would be equally committed to the idea that the rich should pay lower taxes and that corporations should be treated as people." Id. at 149-150.).

Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("The central puzzle in this book is why the state should have to tolerate exemptions from generally applicable laws when they conflict with religious obligations but not with any other equally serious obligations of conscience." Id. at 3. "The important fact here, however, is that religious commands--whether rightly or wrongly understood--are taken categorically by their adherents. [] Is religion really alone in this regard? One respect in which Marxism may have been justifiably called a religion is precisely that in some of the historical contexts just noted, the only other groups as categorically committed to resistance as the religiously inspired were communists, who led resistance to Nazism, as well as apartheid in both South Africa and the United States, long before other groups joined the battle. More generally, of course, one might think that all commands of morality are categorical in just this way. Does that mean, then, that religion is not special after all, since it shares the property of categoricity of its commands with Marxism and with one common understanding of morality?" Id. at 37. "Let us recap. There maybe compelling principled reasons for the state to respect liberty of conscience--the conclusion established by the Rawlsian and Millian arguments of chapter 1--but there is no apparent moral reason why states should carve out special protections that encourage individuals to structure their lives around categorical demands that are insulated from the standards of evidence and reasoning we everywhere else expect to constitute constraints on judgment and action, even allowing that those demands may figure in systems of beliefs that have some utility-maximizing effects (e.g., existential consolation). Singling out religion for toleration is tantamount to thinking we ought to encourage precisely this conjunction of categorical fervor and its basis in epistemic indifference, and that we should simply bite the speculative bullet. If matters of religious conscience deserve toleration--a they surely do given the arguments of chapter 1--then they do so because they involve matters of conscience, not matters of religion." Id. at 63-64.).