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At some point I may have time to respond in detail to Michael's long post. For now, suffice it to say that what the CLS chapters are asking for from the state universities is the ability to form a group, to reserve a room, and to put up posters advertising their meetings. None of that goes beyond what other campus groups want, and none of it is "overweening importuning."
Members of CLS chapters may do other things that Michael does not like, such as initiating conversations with other students in an attempt to convince them to "come to Christ." But none of that other activity has anything to do with whether students have the right to form CLS groups, reserve rooms, and advertise their meetings. The state does not have a right to be hostile to a religious group because that group seeks to spread its faith. If the means used to spread faith are unprotected (e.g., true threats, harassment of various sorts, indiscriminate use of loudspeakers), then those means can be prohibited or regulated. But the government cannot determine that a particular religious group is not entitled to associate, to meet, and to publicize its meetings on an equal footing with other groups.
I can't believe Michael really believes that the state university can allow a Catholic group to be formed and to meet, an environmentalist group to be formed and to meet, and a feminist group to be formed and to meet, but refuse to allow a CLS group to be formed and to meet. (By the way, I believe Catholics are welcome along with Protestants to participate fully in CLS groups and do indeed participate. I don't believe there is anything in the CLS statement of faith that a Catholic Christian would find objectionable. See http://clsnet.org/clsPages/statement.php. I will ask about this point at the annual CLS conference to be held this weekend in Naples, Florida, which seems to have survived the hurricane.)
Michael is right to be unhappy about the history of de facto Protestant establishment in the public schools and about the resistance of Protestants to funding of alternative Catholic schools. Wasn't Americans United for Separation of Church and State once named Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State? Anti-catholic, anti-immigrant sentiment was a key factor in our legal history. But that does not mean that the government now may act discriminatorily against Protestant (or more broadly Christian) groups.
Mark S. Scarberry Pepperdine University School of Law
-----Original Message-----
Mark, we may disagree as to the facts. I take evangelical Protestantism seriously enough to have faith, if that be the word, in the desire of its adherents to proselytize all of the rest of us. The unique history of the English Reformation -- perhaps better described, as I have elsewhere, as the Anglo-American Reformation -- gives evangelical Protestantism its distinctive character. Evangelicals have been exasperated, for centuries now, by the fact of Anglicanism, and their inability to turn Anglicanism into "purified" evangelical Protestantism. The desire to "purify" English or Anglo-American Protestant religion lies at the core of the spirit and force of evangelical Protestantism.
I cannot accept, therefore, without ignoring almost 500 years of history, the notion that CLS is not interested in doing what Anglo-American evangelical Protestants have wanted to do for 500 years - covert everybody to their religion, "purify" Protestantism, Anglicanism in particular, but, while we are at it, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and various and sundry non-Christian religions. This constant, steady and unyielding desire to "purify" is precisely the "overweening importuning" to which I referred. It doesn't end with the posters, to which you referred. It merely begins with them. Furthermore, I cannot believe that something that has been deeply engrained in a religion for half a millennium has somehow dissipated, or, as the Bard might have put it, thawed, melted and resolved itself into a dew.
CLS is not just like a chess club or a drama club or the Young Republicans or Young Democrats. One has to overlook history to argue that CLS is somehow analogous to these other groups.
Resistance does connote hostility. But you draw a conclusion that finds no warrant in American history or experience.
Those of us who are satisfied with our non-evangelical Protestant religion (or lack thereof) and have no interest in being "purified" are, I think, entitled to be hostile to persistent efforts to convert us to a religion that we do not want. If evangelicals would leave us alone the level of hostility should decrease substantially. But it is not, I am afraid, in the nature of evangelical Protestantism to leave non-members alone. And, to make sure that we keep this within the parameters of this listserv, it is not in the nature of evangelical Protestantism to eschew the use of the law, legal institutions and public institutions in its endeavor to "purify" the rest of us. Put affirmatively, evangelical Protestants have pressed and pressed - persistently -- to gain as much room as the law will allow in their efforts to "purify." The doctrines that some on this listserv defend are doctrines that give evangelical Protestants more room than they had as a result of the discrete historical developments that started no later than with the Scopes Trial and the collapse of National Prohibition. Don't you think that this persistence would, in the natural order of things, engender resistance and hostility?
Consider the following. If you were a Catholic parent who objected to your children, enrolled in public school, being compelled to participate in what are essentially evangelical Protestant prayer services or reading of the KJV of the Bible, wouldn't you have been somewhat hostile to the persistent effort to subject your child to this "overweening importuning?" And, perhaps, might you not have brought a lawsuit to try to stop these religious practices. And note, the Catholic parent has not said that public school children should be subjected to Catholic religious services. The whole thrust of the litigation, Mark, is that the resisters merely wanted to be left alone, left to their own devices in tending to the spiritual formation of their children.
The truth is, for better or worse, evangelical Protestants engender a lot of hostility. They believe, as their religion teaches them, that they have to run that risk because they believe that they are called upon to evangelize, to proselytize, to "purify." That's fine as far as it goes. But it only goes so far, and the result is, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, a continuing pattern of persistence and resistance. Their persistence, in a word, generates conflict.
Some of us are tired, and have been tired for well over a century now, of evangelical Protestants trying to convert us to their religion. Whether we are hostile or not, we want to be left alone. Evangelicals might view our desire to be left alone as an imposition on their religion, and I am sure that some do. But if it is an imposition, our religious freedom requires it. Evangelical Protestants have no special privileges - or maybe they believe that they do because they believe in the continuing reality, hope, and promise of the Protestant Empire.
In real world terms, the privileges that evangelical Protestants seek are unique and special because no other religion seeks them. (Mormons are the only possible exception to this.) In real world terms, given the theology of evangelical Protestantism, it has no choice but to seek special privileges. It can point to the reality of the Protestant Empire as some kind of warrant for those privileges. Those of us who want to be left alone, resist those privileges. And if we are serious about our resistance, we also object to the Protestant Empire.
You might say, not entirely without reason, that we want something more than to be left alone. The problem is, however, that if we want to be left alone, how else can be obtain that objective than to "impose" on evangelical Protestantism, and restrain its "overweening importuning?"
If evangelical Protestants cannot, at some level, respect our right to be left alone, then what are we to do?
Review the cases that have been brought over the last 150 years. Which ones came out more or less right, and why? What is your grand understanding of the law as it has developed both before and after Incorporation? Should the Catholic parents have won? Did the strict separation cases, like Engel and Schempp, come out wrong?
How should the law deal with this continuing pattern of persistence and resistance? |
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