![handle is hein.journals/lculh9 and id is 1 raw text is:
Law, Culture and the Humanities
9(1) 5-6
Editorial @ The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1743872112466490
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OSAGE
The specter of the sacred haunts law everywhere, even in contemporary secular
democracies. At the start of the twenty first century, as some in the United States
grapple with the seeming fragility of secular democracy in the face of threatening
religious fundamentalisms, the question of the relation between law and matters of
faith has gained a particular urgency.
In the United States, the proper role of religion in a secular state and the question
of what accommodations law should make for religion has been a question right
from the beginning of the republic. Thus Robert Bellah argues that religion, and
particularly the idea of God, played a constitutive role in the minds of the
American founders. They relied upon a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals
with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity that was never-
theless not specifically Christian in nature, and signaled a genuine apprehension of
universal and transcendent religious reality ... as revealed through the experience
of the American people. In addition, writing at the start of the nineteenth century,
Alexis de Tocqueville famously argued, Religion [really, Christianity], which
never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore
be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not give
them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof' by directing
mores and regulating domestic life properly. In this view, American public life is
grounded by and in Christianity as a regime of meaning and morality, and to the
extent that it underwrites the secular, the two are inseparable.
As William Connolly notes in his book Why I Am Not a Secularist, throughout the
world the dominant historical narrative commonly offered to justify the maintenance of
a secular public realm emphasizes the critical role played by secularization in promoting
private freedom, pluralistic democracy, individual rights, public reason, and the pri-
macy of the state over the church as an antidote to the destructive effects of religious
warfare in the early modern period. Under this stark theory of social organization, which
we assimilate to the phrase separation of church and state, the political world is one
evacuated of the sacred and the metaphysical in favor of reason, tolerance, and the pro-
motion of human well-being and justice in this life rather than the next. Connolly argues
that this thin secularist view represses a richer and more inclusive range of potential
intersubj ective relations and obscures the continuing subterranean connections between
religion and public life that Tocqueville noted.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lculh9&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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