Religious Liberty?
Alexandria, VA. Vast and even incalculable quantities of ink have already been spilled over the issue of the HHS mandate that religious organizations purchase contraception as part of their compliance with the Obama health care plan. It would seem that little remains to be said.
I have read and pondered this issue as it has unfolded. I have signed a document, with many other scholars, objecting to the recent “compromise” on the grounds that it does not resolve the basic issue of forcing a religious institution to provide a service that is incompatible with its doctrine and belief. I am largely in agreement that this issue represents a profound and disturbing encroachment upon the internal ordering of religious organizations.
However, I am disquieted by the way in which the issue has largely been framed – not only by the Left, but perhaps more by the Right. The Right has sought to defend “religious liberty” on the grounds that the HHS mandate would represent an abrogation of the First Amendment’s right to “free exercise” and that it would violate the “conscience” of religious adherents. By these appeals to the “rights” of religious organizations to hold certain religious beliefs – whatever those may be – and by an appeal to “conscience” informing that belief – no matter what it may hold – critics of the HHS policy have framed their response in the dominant privatistic language of liberalism. Their defense rests on the inscrutability and sanctity of private religious belief. It borrows strongly from sources of private religious devotion that lays no claim to public witness, in keeping with liberalism’s dominant mode of allowing acceptable religious practice so long as it remains outside the public square. The appeal to conscience, while lodged at the level of institutional belief, subjects itself easily to the same claim by adherents within that religious order who might similarly object to a religious mandate (e.g., the prohibition on artificial birth control) on grounds of “conscience” to aspects of that belief (think Martin Luther. Or Andrew Sullivan.). The public response of critics of the mandate essentially cede to liberalism most of the ground that they would need to mount a serious case against the individualizing, relativizing and subjective claims that lie at the heart of the mandate and, more broadly, liberalism itself.
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