by Patrick Appel
Waldman notes the America’s unusual religiosity for a wealthy country:
The relationship is pretty clear: countries with higher levels of development are less religious and more accepting of those who don’t believe in a deity, with two outliers. China is obviously where it is because of communism, and the United States? Well, we’ve always been the most religious of the wealthy countries, which is the product of multiple factors but can largely be explained by the fact that unlike in European countries, where a sclerotic state church lost more and more adherents over time, we’ve always had a dynamic, competitive religious marketplace. Like just about everything when it comes to religion, on this question we’re the exception among similar countries.
Ross Douthat argues that, “relative to many other countries and cultures, we’ve managed to reap the benefits of religious idealism – through our many religiously-motivated reform movements, from the abolitionists to the populists to the civil rights movement to (or so I would say) the pro-life movement, and then also through the social, civic benefits of a thriving religious marketplace– without enabling the worst forms of religious intolerance.” He fears that America’s political relationship to religion is changing:
My general anxiety, underlying the specific religious-liberty issues that we’re debating these days, is that this achievement may be slipping away from us – that as the country has become somewhat less religious overall, and as the two parties have become not only ideologically but religiously polarized, a sort of Europeanization of American church-state issues has become visible in our politics. You can see this on the religious right, in the appeal of an ahistorical nostalgia for a Christian America that never really was, and then you can see it on the irreligious left, in the appeal of an ahistorical view that the Constitution somehow bars religious people from bringing their theological convictions into politics. And I think the latter impulse is pushing liberalism in an increasingly anti-clerical direction, toward a narrowed view of religious freedom in which that freedom stops when the Sunday (or Saturday) service ends, and a narrow view of religious pluralism that sees religious schools and charities and hospitals mostly as potential threats to individual liberty, rather than important non-state servants of the common good. How far this impulse will take liberalism I don’t know – you should ask a liberal! But I don’t think current trends are good news for what Robert Putnam calls the “grace” that religious freedom has offered our society these last few hundred years.
But Katherine Franke believes that the new religious liberty cases are pushing the envelope:
In many respects, the people or companies who claim these religious exemptions are asking that they be entitled to travel through life—both their private life and their public life—surrounded by a bubble that defines their faith. What does it mean to be a citizen if you can say, “My bubble basically inoculates me from having to answer to your law”? But in the United States, we say everyone is governed by the same law. To say “my religious law trumps your secular law” is a radical idea.
Emily Bazelon makes related points:
[R]ooting against Hobby Lobby or anti-gay bills doesn’t have to mean rooting against religious liberty. When Congress passed [Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993], liberals helped take the lead. The law was a disapproving response to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the case Employment Division v. Smith, a suit brought by two drug counselors who were fired after taking peyote in a Native American religious ceremony and couldn’t get unemployment benefits because their use of the drug violated state law. Could the state do this, or did their constitutional right to religious freedom mean they should be allowed to use peyote in a religious ceremony without penalty?
The Supreme Court said the answer to that question was no: The employees didn’t have the rights here. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that since peyote is illegal, and since that law is “neutral” in applying to everyone, the state could impose it. At the time, the ruling read as insensitive to the lack of power religious minorities have relative to the majority. “In law school, I saw Smith as a conservative decision,” Brooklyn law professor Nelson Tebbe remembered when I called him this week. “And when Congress passed RFRA in response, it was about protecting potentially persecuted minorities. But now, in an amazing shift, it’s the most powerful religious organizations in the country that are invoking this law—the Catholic Church and Protestant evangelicals.”
The Dish 
