Academic

Gedicks on Fundamentalism & Church-State Relations in the U.S.

By Lawrence Solum

Frederick Mark Gedicks (Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School) has posted Fundamentalism, Spirituality, and Church-State Relations in the United States (Chapter in Multiculturalisms: Different Meanings and Perspectives of Multiculturalism in a Global World (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, Barbara Pozzo ed. forthcoming 2008)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The American constitutional doctrine of church and state deals with three classic problems of church-state relations: the problem of religious exemption or accommodation, the problem of government subsidy of religion in the social welfare state, and the problem of civil religion. Each of these problems can be understood as the consequence of a tension or competition between two opposing conceptions of religious belief, spirituality and fundamentalism. The resolution of problems of church-state relations in the United States reflects a preference for spirituality and, in case of civil religion, a distaste for fundamentalism. The relative attractiveness of spirituality in American church-state doctrine is the residue of postmodernism, and is evident in Europe as well.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 30, 2008 (boomark / email).