Contending for the Future: Overcoming the Pfefferian Inversion

Abstract

“One area of intense controversy concerns the First Amendment Religious Liberty clauses, whose mutually reinforcing provisions act as a double guarantee of religious liberty, one part barring the making of any law ‘respecting an establishment of religion’ and the other barring any law ‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof. … Religious liberty is the only freedom in the First Amendment to be given two provisions. Together the clauses form a strong bulwark against suppression of religious liberty.”— The Williamsburg CharterWe are contending for the free exercise of religion in a democratic and pluralistic society. We would not be contending for it if we thought the free exercise of religion is adequately understood and protected at present. Critical to this contention is rethinking the religion clause of the First Amendment, and the larger part of this article is devoted to that rethinking. I will then offer some observations on the forces shaping this contention in the public arena today, and comment on the goal of a religiously informed public philosophy for our society's democratic experiment in republican governance.