This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Irresoluble Implications of Pluralism

David Mills in a Mere Comments post, makes an important point. He is reflecting on a press release from the American Jewish Congress who've gone to bat in an amicus brief in appeals court for a Home Depot employee whose beliefs require him to have Sundays off as the observance of the Sabbath. Under previous management, these beliefs were accomodated, but the new manager would not accomodate those beliefs as before and only allowed time off for church (but not the whole day) or reduction to part-time status (which resulted in a loss of medical benefits). AJC's argument is that by attempting to accomodate the employee's beliefs by allowing time off for church but not the whole day off, Home Depot was in effect saying it could determine the employee's beliefs and that it could determine what was accomodating to the employee's beliefs and what was not.

Mills notes that this case brings up sticky pluralist issues, particularly in terms of the recognition and accomodation of all religious beliefs. He writes:

We have, up till now, been shielded from the real implications of pluralism because the society has not in fact been very pluralistic. While until recently Jewish and Christians could usually get their employers to respect their days of worship, Muslims who wanted Fridays off could not always get it, and anyone else might as well not have bothered asking. (I generalize, but I think this true.)

Most religious people who asked for some sort of special treatment didn't ask for much, and what they wanted didn't upset the consensus. If some Christian didn't want to work on Sundays, others Christians did, and so did Jews and the unreligious. A Jew could observe the Sabbath because some Christian would work in his place.

But now, and more and more in the future, what the minority religions will ask will upset that consensus and, more difficult in practice, a business's actual work and the conditions under which everyone there does his job.

My own guess is that as the costs of accomodating the wide diversity of American religion becomes greater, the corporate answer, eventually approved by the Supreme Court, will be to treat everyone alike by giving no one a right to special treatment. This is, after all, what secularists want, and what many businessmen want, even those who go to church every Sunday.

And if I may pile on here: It will also result in a strict privatization of all religion. The First Amendment has already been largely interpreted in this vein, and it will only get worse. Since the private sphere is already heavy-laden as the locus of all free choice (abortion, sexual practices, and so forth), this will only get worse. Religion--or all religions in competition with secularism--will be finally and fully marginalized. It will be Rome again, and again Christianity (and some other religions) will be religio illicita.

Long before then, I think, the open authorization of persecution will have begun. It won't necessarily mean lions and racks and beheadings. But it may mean IRS punishments, incarceration, deprivation of wider liberties, enforced removal of children from biological parents, enforced abortions, reeducation programs, etc. Those religions which oppose secularism will become punishable crimes.

Posted by Clifton at June 10, 2005 08:13 AM | TrackBack