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Life at the Margins: Religious Minorities, Status, and the State
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Discussed: Representing God: Christian Legal Activism in Contemporary England. By McIvorMéadhbh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 200. $120.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper); $29.95 (digital). ISBN: 9780691193632.
American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. By StolzenbergNomi M. and MyersDavid N.. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 496. $35.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper); $35.00 (digital). ISBN: 9780691199771.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2023
Abstract
This essay examines the claims-making practices of conservative evangelical Protestants in England and Satmar Hasidim in the United States, communities marginal to two contingents of leftist academic discourse today: scholars who see liberation as an anti-statist project and others who imagine religious diversity as a common good facilitated by the state. The author suggests that one way forward in the critical study of law and religion is to examine communities with political commitments that differ from our own—who shape their worlds alongside and through the state yet are unconcerned about a common democratic future. By showing that no liberal (statist) or liberatory (anti-statist) framework holds either the Satmar or evangelical Christian legal claims, the author identifies generative problems for thought that challenge current approaches to understanding religion-state entanglement in the contemporary world.
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
References
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20 Critical scholarship in law and religion and adjacent fields often draws on the work of James C. Scott to explain the relationship between states and the communities they manage. Jeffrey Redding, for example, claims that “the coercive secular state in India has depended on non-state Islamic legal actors,” analogizing this “secular need of the Islamic” to forest management and the production of commercial timber described in Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Yet in attributing to the state an invariably coercive character, likening the lumber commodity market to legal pluralism, Redding suggests that it has fabricated a social order with little basis in reality. He acknowledges yet minimizes the complementarity of state and non-state forums for dispute resolution (chapter 1), on one hand, and Muslims’ simultaneous recourse to Islamic and secular law to achieve just outcomes (chapter 4), on the other. Redding, Jeffrey A., A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 4, 149–50Google Scholar; Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
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35 Kiryas Joel continues to grow. The population of Kiryas Joel increased from 25,000 in 2021—when American Shtetl was published—to about 39,000 as of July 2022. The July 2022 estimate was the most recent at the time this essay was written. US Census Bureau, Quick Facts: Kiryas Joel Village, New York, last accessed September 22, 2023, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kiryasjoelvillagenewyork/PST045222.
36 The vastness of what can be denominated law and religion is discussed in Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers and Yelle, Robert A., “Law and Religion: An Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: MacMillan Reference, 2005), 5325–332Google Scholar; Oraby, Mona and Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, “Law and Religion: Reimagining the Entanglement of Two Universals,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, no. 16 (2020): 1–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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39 In the latter camp are political theorists and philosophers and legal scholars of law and religion, many of whom and are committed to a political liberalism in dialogue with John Rawls. See, for example, Laborde, Cécile, Liberalism’s Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maclure, Jocelyn and Taylor, Charles, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, trans. Todd, Jane Marie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dworkin, Ronald, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. On US law, see, for example, the following: Laycock, Douglas, “Religious Liberty as Liberty,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 7, no. 2 (1996): 313–56Google Scholar; Eisgruber, Lawrence, Shragger, Richard, and Shwartzman, Micah, “Against Religious Institutionalism,” Virginia Law Review 99, no. 5 (2013): 917–85Google Scholar; Tebbe, Nelson, Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Koppelman, Andrew, “Religion’s Specialized Specialness: A Response to Micah Schwartzman, What If Religion Is Not Special?, 79 U Chi L Rev 1351 (2012),” University of Chicago Law Review Online 79, no. 1 (2013): 71–83 Google Scholar. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has written extensively about the work of defining religion for the purposes of law. See, for example, “Why Distinguish Religion, Legally Speaking?,” San Diego Law Review 51, no. 4 (2014): 1121–33.
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41 In this they are not alone. As Nicholas H. A. Evans shows in his study of the Ahmadiya Jama‘at in northern India, considered the minority among a minority of Muslims, “many Ahmadis—despite their enthusiastic participation in pluralistic societies—remain uncompromisingly convinced of the absolute primacy of their own religious truths, and the corresponding wrongness of everybody’s else’s.” Evans, Nicholas H. A., Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 3 Google Scholar.