Religious Diversity and the Constitution

• Author: Sanford Levinson
• Pages: 2180-2181

Page 2180

In their 1993 book One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society, sociologists Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman analyze the most extensive survey of American religion ever conducted. More than 113,000 Americans answered questions about their religious identity; nearly 90 percent identified themselves as religious, the overwhelming number (86 percent) as Christian. The remaining 3.3 percent, representing about six million Americans, included not only Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, but also approximately 23,000 Taoists, 18,000 Rastafarians, and 6,000 Shintoists, not to mention 8,000 Wiccans. One ought not, of course, believe that "Christians" represent any kind of monolithic community: 46,000,000 Catholics (26.2 percent of the American population) and 34,000,000 Baptists (19.4 percent), the two largest denominations, are joined in the category "Christian" by no fewer than 40 other groups, none of them containing more than 8 percent of the population. These range from such well-known groups as the Methodists (8 percent) and Presbyterians (2.8 percent) to Mormons (1.4 percent), Jehovah's Witnesses (0.8 percent), Christian Scientists (about 0.15 percent), and even smaller groups such as the Quakers and component groups within the broad category of Christian evangelical or pentacostalist churches. And, of course, one could easily point to dramatic differences within the approximately 2 percent of Americans who are Jews, as one places members of the Reform and Conservative wings of Judaism next not only to the Modern Orthodox, but also to the various Hassidic sects.

There are at least two inferences that one can draw from this list: First, it assumes that we know exactly what we are talking about when we identify persons as "religious" rather than, presumably, "irreligious." But what is it, precisely, that joins together the Evangelical Protestant, Reformed Jew, Buddhist, Scientologist, and Wiccan? It surely is not, for example, belief in a supernatural divinity who commands various behaviors at threat of divine punishment. Perhaps all that unites them is that they ask their adherents to think deeply about the purpose of life.

Why do we care what, if anything, all of these groups have in common? One answer is simple: The FIRST AMENDMENT guarantees in its text only the "free exercise of religion," as against, say, a general right to follow one's own moral precepts derived from Kantian...