The Dyer consequences of ‘weaponized’ religious liberty for religious minorities and for the majority

The Dyer consequences of ‘weaponized’ religious liberty for religious minorities and for the majority April 8, 2015

In recent years, the religious right has commandeered the language of “religious liberty.” Now they’ve begun commandeering the legislative tools created to defend the liberty of religious minorities.

David Watkins has described this as the “Weaponization of Religious Exemptions” — a way of turning “religious convictions [into] a cynical political tool to be wielded against one’s political enemies.” And argues that such cynical, scorched-earth politicking has turned us into a society poorly suited for “expansive religious exemptions” to accommodate the practices and traditions of religious (or non-religious) minorities.

Like it or not, in other words, the far right has seized the language and the tools of religious liberty, leaving the rest of us without the language or the tools needed for an expansive protection of the freedom of conscience for those who lack political clout.

If we concede that point, then we’re left at the point of despair so aptly described by Justice Scalia in the majority opinion for Oregon v. Smith back in 1990:

It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

Religious liberty for minorities, that says, is an unattainable fantasy. It is an “unavoidable consequence of democratic government” that the majority will control the political process in ways that privilege themselves and “place at a relative disadvantage” those who are in the minority.

It’s theoretically possible, under such a system, that the privileged majority may prove somewhat benevolent and deign not to place excessively burdensome disadvantages on religious minorities. Perhaps the majority will choose, out of the kindness of its heart, to be gracious to the Amish and the atheists, allowing them some approximation of tolerance that might make their disadvantages less acute.

MaryDyerCommonsBut in practice, such tolerant benevolence is unlikely. The system discourages it. This system requires religion to engage in a zero-sum political process — a political struggle with winners and losers. The system pits factions against one another, rewarding winners and punishing losers. Any hoped-for benevolence would be a competitive disadvantage, and such a system discourages any such disadvantage.

“Leaving accommodation to the political process” is thus a Very Bad Thing for religious minorities — making their religious liberty contingent on the ballot, where they face a numerical disadvantage. But it can also be a Very Bad Thing for the religious majority — reshaping their religion into a function of the political process, into nothing more than a politicized weapon that functions primarily for the seeking of political and material advantage and privilege.

The weaponization of religious liberty has Dyer consequences for those it privileges.

That’s not a misspelling. That’s a bad pun — a reference to Mary Dyer, a Quaker in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. Dyer was a religious minority in Puritan Boston, where her religious liberty was left to the political process and, thereby, placed at a relative disadvantage.

Meaning she was hanged.

The execution of Mary Dyer obviously had rather extreme consequences for her as an individual from a religious minority, but the consequences of that execution for the religion of the Puritan majority was even more extreme. It required that majority religion to take the shape of a political weapon. And it meant that this function as a coercive, weaponized tool of political power trumped any other consideration of creed or dogma or doctrine.

Weaponized religious liberty ultimately reduces the majority religion into nothing more than a political weapon. And that, I think, is the inevitable end result of any system that leaves the religious rights of minorities to the vagaries of “the political process.”

 


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