Advocating Religion on Public Lands: Native American Practice or Buddhist Sermon?

Abstract

Loyd Burton's Worship and Wilderness is a multifaceted book. It is at once a critique of the U.S. constitutional religious free exercise doctrine, a plea for environmental stewardship, a cry for justice for native peoples, and a Buddhist sermon. Sometimes these various facets are in tension with one another. Indeed, that is the attraction of this volume. It is an easy read. Burton catches you coming around the corner whenever you think you have found a comfortable response. It is a wonderful and lively combination of idealism and common sense-a heartfelt plea to live lightly in the land. My brief response to Burton's book is organized around three topics: religion-American law-the First Amendment, and accommodating multiculturalism. Religion-American Religion This is a book is about religion in the United States, about religion generally. That fact is important because religion takes a certain form in the U.S. context, mostly for legal reasons. Religious ideas and institutions are domesticated and tamed by law. One can see that process when one uses classical categories of comparison. One such category, is a key concept for this book. Important theorists of including Eliade and Smith, have reflected on the importance of place for religion. Smith goes so far as to divide religions into two ideal types, and utopian (Eliade 1957; J. Smith 1978). Locative religions are related to particular places, places on this earth, holy places. Utopian religions are centered on life in the next world rather than on actual places on earth, and are therefore more easily portable. Both are always legally controlled, particularly in the U.S. context, as this book demonstrates. Most religions, of course, have both locative and Utopian aspects, but American religions, particularly American Christianity, has been peculiarly placeless. have, for the most part, been next-worldly in their explicit religious life, notwithstanding their famous Weberian tendency to invest worldly pursuits with sacred status. Imported American religions have tended to be utopian, in the main. Such a tendency is evident in many legal contexts. In cases in which I have served as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs seeking a legal place for for example, the experts for the opposing sides have characterized Christians generally (the unspoken implication is real Christians) as interested in places or things, and as therefore in need of legal accommodation for the use of such places and things.1 Indeed, in various contexts have had very little difficulty classifying religions that are interested in places and things as not religion, or at least as desirable or legally protected religion.2 In his classic volume of essays, The Lively Experiment, now almost 30 years old, Mead reflected on the rootlessness of American Christianity, comparing it with European Christianity (Mead 1976). He saw as having had plenty of space but no time. They were in a hurry. It was space that freed them from the authoritarianism of the European churches; it was space, place, that defined freedom. Space allowed freedom, in a sense, such as it is. One sees that desire for elbow room, for unbounded liberty, in the brash insistence of the climbers in the Devil's Tower case, as described by Burton in his book (p. 4). The growing sense that that space is unbounded has found unprepared, as Mead saw it: Americans become increasingly aware that their space is almost filled up and hence that their predominant conception of freedom is somehow and inadequate (Mead 1976:15). Mead suggested that there is unfinished work to be done in our understanding of freedom. Burton shows us some of the ways in which our conception of freedom is askew and inadequate and offers native religion as a corrective. Native religions have resources, it is implied, because freedom is so defined by empty space (p. …