{"id":1367,"date":"2013-06-19T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T07:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/06\/america-does-not-have-a-religious-identity.html"},"modified":"2013-06-19T07:15:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-19T07:15:00","slug":"america-does-not-have-a-religious-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/06\/america-does-not-have-a-religious-identity.html","title":{"rendered":"America Does Not Have a Religious Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><ul id=\"bookInfoContainer\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;margin: 0px 0px 10px;padding: 0px\">\n<li id=\"bookTitle\" style=\"font-style: italic;margin: 0px 0px 2px;padding: 0px\">The Constitution of Religious Freedom: God, Politics, and the First Amendment<\/li>\n<li id=\"publisher\" style=\"font-size: 13px;margin: 0px 0px 2px;padding: 0px\">by Dennis J. Goldford<\/li>\n<li id=\"publisher\" style=\"font-size: 13px;margin: 0px 0px 2px;padding: 0px\">Baylor University Press , 2013<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"dropcap\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;font-size: 15px;line-height: 21px;margin-bottom: 15px;padding-bottom: 0px;padding-top: 0px\"><strong>What inspired you to write\u00a0<em>The Constitution of Religious Freedom<\/em>?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div class=\"p2\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;font-size: 15px;line-height: 21px;margin-bottom: 15px;padding-bottom: 0px;padding-top: 0px\">At a practical level, I have been fascinated by the rise of Christian conservatism, and particularly the claim of what some call Christian nationalism, that America is a Christian nation, as a major factor in American politics. At a theoretical level, I have always thought that, at its broadest, politics is the process by which we negotiate our differences. In particular, liberal democracy\u2014a political order in which majorities rule but not over everything\u2014is an institutionalized agreement to disagree. My concern is the question: what happens, and what do we do, if there are some things about which we cannot agree to disagree? Prominent on that list is religion.<\/div>\n<div class=\"p2\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;font-size: 15px;line-height: 21px;margin-bottom: 15px;padding-bottom: 0px;padding-top: 0px\"><strong>What\u2019s the most important take-home message for readers?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div class=\"p5\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;font-size: 15px;line-height: 21px;margin-bottom: 15px;padding-bottom: 0px;padding-top: 0px\">The central argument of the book is that the Constitution does not protect religion\u2014it protects religious freedom. The latter is very different from the former, and understanding the distinction enables us to understand the political meaning of the religion clauses of the Constitution. Specifically, I argue that the meaning of the religion clauses is that the locus of religious identity is the individual, not the nation; that the American political order does not have a religious identity of its own, but, rather, is a political order that allows and encourages individuals and groups of their choosing to have their own religious identity without having one of its own.<\/div>\n<div class=\"p5\" style=\"background-color: white;font-family: Georgia, sans-serif;font-size: 15px;line-height: 21px;margin-bottom: 15px;padding-bottom: 0px;padding-top: 0px\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.religiondispatches.org\/books\/rd10q\/7108\/america_does_not_have_a_religious_identity\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Constitution of Religious Freedom: God, Politics, and the First Amendment by Dennis J. Goldford Baylor University Press , 2013 What inspired you to write\u00a0The Constitution of Religious Freedom? At a practical level, I have been fascinated by the rise of Christian conservatism, and particularly the claim of what some call Christian nationalism, that America [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>America Does Not Have a Religious Identity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Constitution of Religious Freedom: God, Politics, and the First Amendmentby Dennis J. 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