Mirror of Justice

A fascinating church-autonomy case

MOJ-friend Prof. Michael McConnell shared with me a brief he and some colleagues filed in the Supreme Court of the United States in what strikes me as a fascinating neutral-principles/church-autonomy/religious-questions case.  The case is called Ming Tung v. China Buddhist Association and Michael's brief is available here: Download Ming Tung cert petition.  Also, here's a write-up that Prof. Friedman did, at Religion Clause, a few years ago.

Dr. Russell Moore's lecture, "Can the Religious Right be Saved?"

Dr. Moore's Erasmus Lecture is now available, in print, at First Things.   I recommend it very highly.   It was delivered before the presidential election but is no less timely or important for that.  Here's just a taste:

A religious conservatism that sees politics as important but not ultimate is necessary even for our public policy goals. Take the issue of religious liberty. Some, in secular circles, assume that an emphasis on religious liberty is a merely defensive move. Many on the religious right think the same. One pastor told me that he’s all for religious liberty, but wishes that we could do something “more proactive” rather than “merely defensive.” Religious liberty is not a reactive, defensive move. Religious liberty reflects a positive vision of the limitations of the state and the dominant culture, one that frees religious communities to carry on their work. To think otherwise suggests a vision of power and influence in which statecraft is more important than church-craft. Statecraft is important, but good cultures and good laws, important as they are, merely put more resilient shackles on the Gerasene demoniac. The depravity of humanity can be mitigated by law, but humanity can only be renewed and transformed by something transcendent. It’s not just our religion that teaches that; our politics teaches that also, if in fact we are in any meaningful way “conservative.”

Religious liberty is a means to an end, and the end is not political. The Gospel frees consciences that cannot be coerced. The end we rightly seek is a society in which religious communities are free to serve and to persuade. If we are to be honest, the threat to this freedom comes as much from the collapse of cohesive church communities, especially in what once was the Bible Belt, as from Washington, D.C. When faith is not shaped by community, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out, religion becomes politicized and politics become religionized. The collapse of well-defined, disciplined congregations in the South has been politically disastrous, and not merely theologically disastrous. Consider the way Latter-day Saints have approached the moral questions raised by the 2016 election in contrast to Evangelicals, even when the voting patterns were not substantially different. The difference between the two rests, I believe, in the contrast between intentional, cohesive, conscience-shaping communities of identity and social solidarity, not only in Utah but in the Mormon minority communities around the country, and Evangelical communities that are too often influenced by raging pundits, talk radio, and TV shout-shows—and these voices sometimes drown out the pastor’s. A Christianity without visible churches is backward-looking and seething with rage. Christianity loses its Gospel-centered character, Marilynne Robinson tells us, indeed any religion loses its distinctive identity, “when its self-proclaimed supporters outnumber and outshout its actual adherents.”

Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church (and Lawyer)

Reposting from 2011:

Thomas More is, to my knowledge, the only common lawyer ever canonized by the Catholic Church, but a number of civil and canon lawyers have been. Today is the Feast of Saint Ambrose, one of the four great doctors of the early Church (along with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), who was trained in the law and an imperial governor under Valentinian before he was elected bishop of Milan by acclamation in 374 (Ambrose was a catechist at the time, so he was baptized and ordained bishop in the course of just a few days). In addition to his important contributions to Christian theology (particularly the refutation of Arianism) and music, he was also instrumental in the conversion of Augustine, who wrote that Ambrose "was one of those who speak the truth, and speak it well, judiciously, pointedly, and with beauty and power of expression" (On Christian Doctrine, IV.21).

Remarks on the "Future of Religious Freedom"

Here's a link to the video of the panel discussion, at the recent Federalist Society conference in Washington, on "the future of religious freedom."  My remarks -- about 10 minutes long -- start at about 15:45.  There was also a lively Q & A session.

Fr. Stanley Rother, First U.S. Born Martyr

An Oklahoma farm boy has been declared a martyr by Pope Francis, making him the first U.S. born person to receive such designation. To read more about this humble farm boy, read Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda's biography, The Shepherd Who Didn't Run, which was published last year.

 

The High Church Temptation

Among the many interesting features of church-state political and social relations probed by Anthony Trollope in his novels are the various temptations to which adherents of the several Anglican groupings in mid-19th century England might become prone. The following passage from "Barchester Towers," which tells of the early scholarly and ecclesiastical career of one Reverend Francis Arabin (now rector of a small parish called St. Ewald's), describes very effectively one of the chief temptations for High Churchmen...eventual collapse into Roman Catholicism. Note, in particular, Trollope's reference to Sir John Henry Newman (and his favorable comments about schismatics!).

And what of Low Church temptations? In what might those consist? That is for another post. Here is Trollope on the Rev. Arabin (from Chapter XX):

He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at any rate calls attention to subject, draws in supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think upon religion. How great an amount of good of this description has followed that movement in the Church of England which commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!

As a young boy Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and dressed, and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree, and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable amount of academical éclat. He had occupied himself too much with high church matters, and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with high churchmanship, to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first. He was not a double first, nor even a first class man; but he revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double firsts out of fashion for the year, and laughing down a species of pedantry which at the age of twenty-three leaves no room in a man's mind for graver subjects than conic sections and Greek accents.

Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr. Arabin within the lists of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and most comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young champion of a church militant. Mr. Arabin was ordained, and became a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was chosen professor of poetry.

And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental struggles, and an agony of doubt which may well be surmised, the great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic. Mr. Newman left the Church of England, and with him carried many a waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for a while that he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.

Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely to himself. Every thing was against him: all his worldly interests required him to remain a Protestant; and he looked on his worldly interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives. Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him: how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that of forsaking everything for a true church, had for him allurements almost past withstanding.