How Anti-Discrimination Became a Religion, and What It Means for Judaism

[Valin]

Mosaic:

Currently, Jews are among the most popular religious groups in the U.S. As the liberal left’s commitment to religious liberty fades, how long will this consensus last?

David E. Bernstein

Aug. 8 2016

 

Richard Samuelson’s essay, “Who’s Afraid of Religious Liberty?,” offers a sobering look at how religious liberty has come to be devalued by American liberals, especially when it conflicts with the liberal attachment to anti-discrimination law. Progressives see adherence to many traditional religious teachings, particular those concerning sexual morality and the status of women, as mere bigotry to be stamped out by government authorities.

 

In what follows, I’ll address three issues raised by the essay. How did we get here? Is the situation as dire as Samuelson suggests? And, finally, what does it all mean for the future of Jews and Judaism in the United States?

 

There are several reasons why traditional religious perspectives are increasingly losing out to legal challenges mounted under the rubric of anti-discrimination. The first is the gradual transformation of the primary rationale for anti-discrimination laws. These started as part of an effort to redress the exclusion of African-Americans and others from mainstream American life. Because of that relatively defined goal, the framers of early civil-rights legislation, as Samuelson notes, were content to provide exemptions from its stringencies for minor economic players, such as landlords who were living on their own property.

 

Over time, however, Americans gravitated to the notion that discrimination, per se, is immoral and harmful and must be forcibly suppressed, even if the economic consequences are minimal or nonexistent. We have reached a point where, if even one out of hundreds of local wedding photographers declines for religious reasons to photograph a same-sex wedding, that lone photographer is seen by many to have committed a grave offense deserving of punishment.

 

Another factor favoring anti-discrimination laws over religious liberty is that the left, which traditionally fought for both religious liberty and non-discrimination, has made a virtual religion out of the latter while largely abandoning traditional religion. The left also once enjoyed a substantial religious base; today it has become dominated by secularists who simply fail to understand the perspective of religious traditionalists.

 

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[Valin]

Who’s afraid of religious liberty? An introduction
Scott Johnson
August 11 2016

Professor Richard Samuelson’s closely argued Mosaic essay “Who’s afraid of religious liberty?” is must reading. In it Professor Samuelson explains the assault on our religious freedom under the ever expanding regime of anti-discrimination law and practice. I urge readers who care about the subject to read the whole thing; there is no substitute for it. I invited Professor Samuelson to write a brief introduction for Power Line readers. Professor Samuelson writes by way of introduction:

Perhaps way to introduce “Who’s Afraid of Religious Liberty?” to Power Line’s readers is to describe where it came from. This essay was spurred by three observations. A colleague noted in passing a couple of years ago that we have not grasped the full implications of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Pondering that, I began to wonder if the legislation was best understood as almost certainly necessary to combat Jim Crow, but was a tragic necessity, that, in time, could have adverse consequences for American liberty.

 

While pondering that I happened to be at a conference in downtown Indianapolis the weekend of the protests against religious liberty protections. Religious freedom protections passed easily in the early 1990s. What had changed? Had there been a turn in the American understanding of political right and wrong, at least in part, and was it a consequence of the impact of the new civil right regime on how Americans understand liberty and the job of government?

 

The third observation is that, thus far, the cases of concern, with which Power Line readers are no doubt familiar, have mostly involved the liberty of Christians, and not Jews. Even so, the legal principles and practices would, no doubt, apply to Jews and Jewish institutions as well. First they came for the Christians?

 

If trends continue, it is likely that what David Bernstein calls the “religion of non-discrimination” in his response to my essay (highlighted in Paul Mirengoff’s post) will soon begin to squeeze the American Jewish community, particularly as it grows more and more orthodox — as present demographic trends suggest.

 

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Ya know this attack of Faith may turn out to be a good thing. I say this because up until fairly recently (here in The West) there has been no cost to being a believer (Jew, Christian, Hindu, Muslim...whatever). Those days may be passing, soon there maybe a real cost to being a believer....wheat from the chafe.

 

That said remember what that old Jew once wrote down in a letter "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

 

Welcome to the counter-culture

[Valin]

The Rise of the Secular Theocracy
The push to establish and enforce a national secularist creed is undermining traditional faiths’ right of free exercise.
Wilfred M. McClay
Aug. 15 2016

Religious liberty, the subject of Richard Samuelson’s powerful essay in Mosaic, seems fated to be a central point of contention in the 21st century. This is self-evidently the case in the international arena, where many of the world’s most intractable conflicts involve believers of various stripes and the nations and communities within which their respective faiths are rooted. Those conflicts take a particularly heavy toll upon the liberties, not to speak of the very existence, of vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities.

 

In Europe, the ability of Jews to perform the traditional rite of male circumcision has come up against intense legal and political pressure in ways suggesting the entering wedge of a more comprehensive anti-Jewish sentiment: the return of the repressed, one might say. In Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, age-old Christian communities are suddenly faced with extinction at the hands of Islamist militants. In India, the enduring and often violent enmities between majority Hindus and minority Muslims have been rendered more volatile and dangerous by the political rise of Hindu nationalism. In Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the very thought of any official recognition for religious pluralism is inconceivable. Meanwhile, in some parts of the West—including our own, as Samuelson details—the preaching of traditional Christian moral teachings about human sexuality and marriage has been labeled a human-rights violation and proscribed by courts.

 

It seems that the respectful tolerance needed to underwrite a free, robust, and uncoerced expression of divergent religious beliefs is becoming a rarer commodity. In some places the cause of the trouble is militant religion; in others, aggressive anti-religion. Caught between them, the generous ideal of religious freedom, with its emphasis upon the integrity and dignity of every individual conscience, finds itself vulnerable where not altogether abandoned.

 

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