Who gets to decide what is and isn’t religious? This is a recurring issue in the field of religious studies, so much so that some (such as Timothy Fizgerald) have argued that the term is unsuitable as a category of analysis and that instead the uses of the term should be the subject of analysis: ‘Even attempts by scholars with a non-theological agenda to refine the concept of religion and make it work as a non-theological analytical tool fail, for meanings are not merely a question of definition but also of power.’
If academic definitions questions of power, so much more are definitions used in courts. Today I came across Winnifred Sullivan’s fascinating piece that gets at some of the problems inherent in a system that claims to guarantee religious freedom. (Worth a read.) Who gets to decide what is or isn’t religious? The courts?
There is a theatre of the absurd quality to all of this. One result of the application of this kind of process to determine whether a person’s actions are religious is to suggest that people do not really understand their own religion, and that the courts do. In the end, although Judge Ryskamp said often during the trial that Americans were completely free to believe whatever they liked, the federal court set itself up as a court of heresy, ruling eventually that plaintiffs’ practices were not sufficiently orthodox to deserve protection.
Is religion belief? Is it practice? Who gets to decide what is legitimate? It seems to me that no matter how good the ideal of religious freedom may be, its application in modern Western societies is a question of definitions, and definitions are a question of power, and whatever else it may be, freedom of religion is not free of constraint.
Photo: St. Patrick’s Cathedral sits in the center of New York. Credit: Gustavo Oliveira. (License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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