I’m still scratching my head over a story that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. Ace reporter Ethan Bronner, who has covered legal matters among others for many years, went out to Palo Alto for the kickoff ceremonies of a new law school clinic at Stanford Law School, the first of its kind, devoted to religious liberty issues. Here are his first two paragraphs:
Backed by two conservative groups, Stanford Law School has opened the nation’s only clinic devoted to religious liberty, an indication both of where the church-state debate has moved and of the growth in hands-on legal education.
Begun with $1.6 million from the John Templeton Foundation, funneled through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the school’s new Religious Liberty Clinic partly reflects a feeling that clinical education, historically dominated by the left’s concerns about poverty and housing, needs to expand.
Well, certainly this story gives “an indication” of where the Times thinks “the church-state debate has moved.” Evidently, for the Times, devotion to religious liberty is now a right-wing cause. And it’s not as though the newspaper went looking for devotees of religious liberty and found only conservatives. It assumed, throughout this story, that evidence of an interest in religious liberty is evidence of conservatism.
Take the Becket Fund, for instance. I know a number of the people at that organization. Some I know to be fairly conservative. About others, I have no idea. But the Becket Fund itself has no political commitments whatsoever outside the field of religious liberty, to which it is zealously devoted, no matter what the political views of its clients. The Fund takes no position on abortion, or same-sex marriage, or the debt ceiling, or gun control. It is all about religious liberty, and that’s it. And that makes it “conservative”? Huh. As for the Templeton Foundation, it is broadly interested in what it calls “Big Questions” at the intersection of faith, philosophy, and science. I don’t think Templeton has any “politics” to speak of, but if it is always and only “conservative” to take faith seriously, as the Times now seems to think, well, I guess that settles it.
Oh, and of course, clinical legal education, we’re told, has been “historically dominated by the left’s concerns about poverty and housing.” Conservatives’ only interest in “poverty and housing,” I suppose, is seeing to it that there are plenty of poor people to gouge for the rent in squalid slums. It would have been more accurate to say that clinical legal education has been historically dominated by the left’s belief in litigation and judicial activism to achieve the progressive agenda for poverty and housing that democratic institutions and voters are reluctant to enact.
Now Bronner, the Times’ writer, might be partially forgiven for framing the whole business this way, given what is said to him, on the record, by Stanford Law School’s associate dean for clinical education, Lawrence C. Marshall, a man whose bona fides are established by describing him as “a hero to liberals for his work to exonerate death penalty inmates when he was a professor at Northwestern Law School a decade ago.” (Conservatives, as we know, are in favor of executing innocent people as well as guilty ones.) Here is what Marshall says:
The 47 percent of the people who voted for Mitt Romney deserve a curriculum as well . . . My mission has been to make clinical education as central to legal education as it is to medical education. Just as we are concerned about diversity in gender, race and ethnicity, we ought to be committed to ideological diversity.
Astounding. Does Marshall hear what he is saying? “We know that Romney got the votes of everyone who believes in religious liberty. Some of those—let’s face it, incomprehensibly conservative—people come to study at Stanford Law School. They ought to have a clinic too, as a sign that we are as willing to patronize them as we are to patronize women, blacks, and Hispanics.”
When Bronner gets around to quoting the clinic’s founding director, James A. Sonne, he is equally careful to light up Sonne’s presumptive ideological profile with the clues that he “converted to Roman Catholicism while a student at Duke University” and used to teach at Ave Maria School of Law. Then the reporter writes that Sonne “acknowledges the political coloration of much of the religious-freedom debate but says he does not want his clinic to be seen as a program for conservatives.” Notice that when Sonne “acknowledges the political coloration of much of the religious-freedom debate,” no direct quotation is provided so we can see what he actually said in response to what was almost certainly (given the tone of this story) a loaded question.
Bronner also tells us that nowadays, “liberals tend to worry about religious establishment or imposition by government, while conservatives mostly focus on free exercise.” He might have noticed that, in the 9-0 smackdown of the Obama administration a year ago in the Hosanna-Tabor case on the “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination statutes, the friends of religious freedom relied on both the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the First Amendment—and so did the Court. One might say, with equal or greater accuracy, that “secular liberals tend to worry about what they call ‘separation of church and state,’ while religious liberals and conservatives alike mostly focus on the protection that both clauses of the First Amendment provide to religious freedom.”
Bronner does paraphrase Stanford’s Michael McConnell, who conceived the idea of the new clinic, as saying that “the divide today” in this area of controversy “is between those who are religiously committed and those who are not.” Does Bronner notice McConnell’s non-ideological description? Or does he simply identify the left with those who lack or even are hostile to religious belief, and the right with those who hold religious beliefs and defend religious freedom? Since he sees fit to call up that tireless separationist and ideologue Barry Lynn (of Americans United for Separation of Church and State) for a canned hostile response to the clinic’s creation, maybe so.
In the Age of Obama, this is increasingly what the world looks like, the left reflexively hostile to faith and freedom, the right defending them. But are we quite there yet? Maybe not quite. When Bronner tells us that “leading conservative scholars” celebrated the creation of the new clinic, one of his three supposedly conservative examples is not a conservative at all, Stephen Carter of Yale. And the keynote speaker at the clinic’s opening? That was Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia, a liberal through and through (though Bronner seems not to know it), and one of the great champions of religious freedom under the First Amendment, who argued and won the Hosanna-Tabor case on behalf of the Becket Fund and its client.
The world is still a more complicated place than the Times’ template can explain. Is it moving in a direction in which that template is more accurate? I fear it may be. But does the Gray Lady have to give it a push with such tendentious reporting?
UPDATE: For video of the law clinic’s opening ceremonies, see http://bit.ly/SCqXbu.
January 23rd, 2013 | 4:17 pm
I have worked with a number of organizations dedicated to religious liberty including the Beckett Fund. Unlike some other groups I have worked with I never considered the Beckett Fund to be a conservative group. I would add that they make it there mission to defend the freedom of people of all faiths. It is very sad that liberals seem to have determined that some rights are no longer worthy of protection.
January 23rd, 2013 | 4:35 pm
Of course religious liberty is a conservative issue. We don’t need that any more. Forward!
January 23rd, 2013 | 7:25 pm
Sorry, but the Becket Fund and Templeton are both conservative organizations. Becket Fund, for instance, takes clients that want their religious liberty protected (e.g. Hobby Lobby, battling the HHS mandate). It’s liberal counterpart is the ACLU which generally is for stronger “separation” of Church and State–i.e. secularization of the public sphere. Religious liberty is definitely a conservative issue.
January 23rd, 2013 | 8:37 pm
Hello Lucy,
Seems to me that you aren’t disagreeing with Mr. Bronner: “liberals tend to worry about religious establishment or imposition by government, while conservatives mostly focus on free exercise.” In other words, freedom *from* religion, not *for* religion.
If that’s the case, we are led to conclude that liberals now view religion as a threat.
January 23rd, 2013 | 9:47 pm
Dear Lucy,
I understand by your message the following:
“The Becket Fund is conservative because it protects religious liberty. Therefore, because the conservative Becket Fund deals with religious liberty, religious liberty is a conservative issue.”
Incidentally, the ACLU has, at times, supported religious liberty.
January 24th, 2013 | 2:09 am
How conservative is the Beckett Group?
Years ago I heard Seamus Hasson speak about how he founded the Beckett Fund to defend freedom of conscience. He cited the case of a Quaker woman in colonial America that risked life and ears to preach in Puritan Massachusetts. What an inspirational example of a person willing to suffer for conscience!
But what an odd example. Surely we all know of more famous examples of people willing to suffer for conscience. Socrates? Moses? Martin Luther? Bonheoffer? Thoreau? Gandhi? MLK? Jesus?
It was then I realized what a radically conservative group the Beckett Fund was. Because none of the famous martyrs of conscience exemplified what Hasson wanted to defend. Hasson is driven to defend people acting according to the dictates not of conscience per se, but of traditional, organized religion.
So, in the case of The Sanhedrin v. Jesus of Nazareth, the Beckett Fund would gladly intervene – on behalf of the Sanhedrin. After all, the Sanhedrin’s job was to defend the rights of observant Jews to condemn those who work on the Sabbath, to stone adulterers, etc. How dare this Jesus fellow interfere with their religiously-prescribed practices!
January 24th, 2013 | 7:40 am
Hello nobody,
“So, in the case of The Sanhedrin v. Jesus of Nazareth, the Beckett Fund would gladly intervene – on behalf of the Sanhedrin. After all, the Sanhedrin’s job was to defend the rights of observant Jews to condemn those who work on the Sabbath, to stone adulterers, etc.”
The Beckett Fund concerns itself with cases where the state is acting to limit the free exercise of religion.
I don’t know how you can put the Sanhedrin’s attack on Jesus Christ in that box. The conflict wasn’t between the Sanhedrin and the Roman state.
I presume that the example of the Quaker woman was picked because it was an American example of freedom of religion.
January 24th, 2013 | 8:50 am
Over at Commonweal, David Gibson makes fun of this post with his usual shtick of adolescent snickering that misses the point. E.g., commenting on a post complaining that many liberals care about religious liberty too, Gibson brings up the First Things post and says, “of course the NYT bankrolled the rightwingers behind this rightwing project so they could write that rightwingers are behind it.”
Well, the Becket Fund isn’t right-wing, as this post argues, and as Gibson can’t answer. The only way you can call the Becket Fund right-wing if you DEFINE “right-wing” as “interested in religious liberty.” Which, of course, just falls right into the stereotype of religious liberty being an exclusively conservative cause. So in addition to being wrong on the facts, Gibson was unwittingly confirming the very stereotype that his co-blogger was so worried about.
January 24th, 2013 | 9:18 am
Let us remember that “religion” is itself a *liberal* concept. Prior to Hobbes and Locke there was certainly Church and Crown, but there was no such thing as “religion” distinct from “politics”.
American liberals have been moving in a strongly secularist and frankly anti-clerical direction since the 1970s and their goal is the same as that of the elites of the French Third Republic — the complete elimination of Christianity from the public sphere. The US Northeast and West Coast are a bit behind the vanguard of laicite, but they’re trying to catch up as fast as possible.
In short, as a sociological point, the Times is right — “religious liberty” has indeed become a conservative cause because liberals have decided that “religion” (viz. Christian churches) should have no public influence or authority any longer. Consider how Obama now always speak of the “freedom of worship” rather than the “freedom of religion”. As Peter Berger has recently said, liberals now believe “religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in private”.
January 24th, 2013 | 9:49 am
nobody.really — the Quakers preaching in Puritan land was hardly an example of “traditional, organized religion.” In that century, Quakerism was neither traditional nor organized — traditional, organized religion was represented by the Puritans. I think you’re reading it entirely backwards.
January 24th, 2013 | 11:45 am
Perhaps; you can read Hasson’s account in his book, The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War of Religion in America, Chap. 2, “Pluralism, Conscience and Community – reflections on the Pilgrim’s lack of progress” and Chap. 5, “Heavens No, We Won’t Go – reflections on how the Quakers invented conscientious objection.” (As the chapter titles suggest, Hasson is a very engaging writer!) There, he disparages the Puritan’s unwillingness to make accommodation for a Anne Hutchinson and other Quaker “conscientious objectors,” and alleged that Quakerism was sufficiently organized to have developed doctrinal prohibitions on military service, taking oaths, sacraments, ordained clergy, and much church structure – but not prohibiting proselytizing. But maybe Hasson’s wrong; beats me.
Anyway, this story prompted Hasson to found the Becket Fund and to defend “believers of nearly every tradition you can imagine….”
And that’s great. My question is, what makes contentious believers in traditions more worthy of defense than contentious objectors that blaze their own trails (and perhaps, like Jesus, are starting new traditions)? When Hasson defends some people’s consciences and not others, it appears that freedom of conscience is merely a smokescreen. His real interest is freedom of conformity — defending a person’s right to conform to dictates that can be documented from external sources. An external source, no matter how much I may embrace it, is not the same as my conscience.
January 24th, 2013 | 12:03 pm
Thanks for the fuller explanation, nobody. I’m still not quite getting your point, though — Gandhi was not in a tradition? His struggle was fundamentally on the level of religious practice? Neither of those seem correct to me.
I think Richard’s account is more reasonable — Beckett exists to defend religious exercise (not anything else) against the power of the state (not against other forms of interference.) It is not other than what it is. Is that somehow objectionable?
January 24th, 2013 | 1:15 pm
During his speech (and also in his book), Hasson claimed to be motivated to defend freedom of conscience. So I listed people who famously suffered for causes of conscience. I listed Gandhi because he adopted non-violence as a matter of conscience, breaking from India’s tradition of violently resisting British rule. And Gandhi suffered as a result.
Perhaps it’s just a labeling/expectations thing: As I say, I think it’s fine to defend people’s ability to practice traditional religions. I just note that it’s different than defending freedom of conscience.
And it’s different than defending freedom of religion – because all religions originate at some point. At the point of origination, practitioners of the new religion must, by definition, deviate from prior tradition. That’s the point at which religious observers are most vulnerable; that’s the point at which their practice can be said to most closely conform to conscience (and not merely to tradition); and that’s the point at which the Becket Fund would extend no assistance.
In sum: No, it’s not entirely accurate to say that the Becket Fund defends freedom of conscience or religion; it’s more accurate to say that they defend freedom to conform to religious tradition. That’s a fine thing to do. But no one should misrepresent what they do.
January 24th, 2013 | 2:16 pm
Beckett exists to defend religious exercise (not anything else) against the power of the state (not against other forms of interference.) It is not other than what it is. Is that somehow objectionable?
pentamom,
I think the point is that “free exercise” is only part of religious liberty as guaranteed by the First Amendment. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is really The Becket Fund for Free Exercise. As nobody.really says, that’s a fine thing, but (I say) they really aren’t defending religious liberty in its fullest sense. They’re defending the rights of religious believers. They are the flip side of the coin, in a way, from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Of course, everyone here hates FFRF (and I am not too fond of them myself), but the First Amendment protects believers and nonbelievers alike.
January 24th, 2013 | 10:46 pm
David –
I have a friend who’s owns a plumbing business. If I asked him to send his guys over to fix my wiring, I assume he would inform me that they don’t do that kind of work. If I then asked him why he lacks concern for the integrity of all the structures of my home, since he claims to be someone interested in maintaining people’s houses, I suspect he would give me a confused, if not worried, look.
The Beckett Fund does one thing and not another. Why do they have to handle all possible matters that could impinge on the First Amendment in order to prove to you, nobody.really, or anybody else, that they’re consistent in their view of rights?
January 25th, 2013 | 10:08 am
Great. But does your friend give lectures advertising himself as a general maintenance man, or as a plumber? They’re both fine professions. But if he wants to avoid confusion, your friend might pick his advertising accordingly.
For example, imagine your friend advertises himself like this: “For the past 15 years we’ve provided prompt, reliable emergency services, as well as high-quality contractor work, because we believe everyone should have access to plumbing that is not merely code-compliant, but quite, efficient and reliable. We’re proud to offer our services to white households in the Tri-County Area.”
Now, your friend presumably has the skills, resources, and professed interest to offer services to households regardless of color. If he chose to restrict his practice in this fashion, I suspect people would notice.
Hasson has the skills, resources, and professed interest to defend people’s freedom of conscience. Yet he chooses to restrict his practice to defending only certain people’s consciences. I notice.
January 25th, 2013 | 12:12 pm
” Yet he chooses to restrict his practice to defending only certain people’s consciences.”
He chooses to defend people’s consciences from a certain kind of attack.
How often do your religious trailblazers suffer at the hands of state power in the modern era? Can you give me an example of a religious trailblazer whose rights were specifically impinged upon by state interference, that the Beckett Fund has declined to support since its inception? (I know little about the subject, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can come up with an example, or even many. But to find your objection plausible, I’d like to know that there really is person-based discrimination going on, rather than type-of-conscience-violation discrimination, which seems more like a specialization than a form of discrimination.)
January 25th, 2013 | 12:47 pm
Look, I don’t mean to flog a good soldier for not being perfect. I admire Hasson’s work.
But I think you’re not getting my point. No, Hasson is not choosing to restrict his practice based on the kind of attack.
Imagine there are two employers who refuse to buy insurance that meets the standards of ObamaCare, and who refuse to pay the prescribed penalty. One insurer argues that the law’s provisions on birth control offend her deeply-held religious views, and object on the basis of conscience. The other argues that this type of government intrusion into interpersonal relationships offends her deeply-held libertarian views, and objects on the basis of conscience.
Government would bring the same kind of attack to each employer. As far as I can tell, Hasson would defend only one.
I have no knowledge of anyone the Becket Fund has declined to serve. I suspect disclosure of that information would be restricted by attorney/client privilege.
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