Religious paradigms and the rule of law: thinking in red and blue

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(06)39003-5
• Pages: 57-72
• Published date: 26 September 2006
• Date: 26 September 2006
• Author: Sheila Suess Kennedy

RELIGIOUS PARADIGMS AND THE

RULE OF LAW: THINKING IN RED

AND BLUE

Sheila Suess Kennedy

ABSTRACT

Lawyers and political scientists focus upon explicitly religious compo-

nents of American political polarization. A robust scholarship illuminates

the nation’s religious history. Nevertheless, we fail to appreciate the ex-

tent to which conflicting policy preferences are rooted in religiously

shaped normative frameworks, or the extent to which scholarship in re-

ligious history, sociology, social psychology and culture might be synthe-

sized to inform our understanding of contemporary policy disputes. Like

the blind men and the elephant, we encounter different parts of the animal.

We see a tree, a wall, a snake – but we fail to apprehend the size, shape

and power of the whole elephant.

It is the thesis of this paper that, while the influence of religion on political

behavior is widely recognized, (1) the extent to which theologically rooted

norms, and the elites who hold or are influenced by them, frame and shape

American policy choices is not sufficiently appreciated; and (2) disciplinary

‘‘silos’’ have prevented scholars from developing a sufficiently comprehen-

sive synthesis of existing scholarship to adequately describe the nature and

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 39, 57–72

Copyright r2006 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(06)39003-5

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effects of the religious underpinnings of contemporary political disputes.

While lawyers, political scientists and others certainly recognize the more

explicitly religious components of America’s current political polarization,

and a long scholarly tradition continues to illuminate the nation’s religious

history, we nevertheless fail to appreciate the extent to which conflicting

policy preferences are rooted in religiously shaped normative frameworks,

or the extent to which existing scholarship in religious history, sociology and

culture might inform understanding of particular policy disputes. Much like

the blind men and the elephant, we encounter different parts of the animal.

We see a tree, a wall, a snake – but we fail to apprehend the size, shape and

power of the whole elephant.

SOURCES OF MEANING

A ‘‘paradigm’’ is a pattern of received beliefs that we use to make sense of the

world. Originally a linguistic term, it owes its current popularity to Thomas

Kuhn, a physicist who – in the course of research for his dissertation– picked

up Aristotle’s Physics and found that it made no sense to him. Since Kuhn

assumed that neither he nor Aristotlewas stupid, he concluded that they were

operating from such different, and incommensurable, realities that commu-

nication was not possible, and he proceeded to write a book about the

meaning and use of these conceptual frameworks and the way science adapts

or ‘‘shifts’’ paradigms (Kuhn, 1962). Paradigm theory has been applied,

misapplied and criticized in a number of contexts, and there are varying

claims about how paradigms operate.

1

It has been suggested that anomalies

falling outside one’s paradigm, or frame of reference, are simply unseen –

that is, if a fact is encountered for which there is no place in one’s conceptual

framework, that fact will not be willfully ‘‘disregarded,’’ its existence simply

will not be recognized. Whatever the difficulties with paradigm theory (or the

blind-men-and-elephant analogy), it is one useful way of thinking about the

normative belief structures that help humans make sense of the realities we

encounter. Such worldviews need not be rigid (or even coherent) to perform

this interpretive function; with respect to theologically rooted worldviews,

evidence suggests that the filtering effect of normative paradigms may well

persist in individuals who no longer consciously embrace the theologies that

originally shaped them.

2

As Daniel Bell has written, ‘‘every theology em-

bodies, either implicitly or explicitly, a mythos, a vision of how human com-

munities ought to be organized’’ (Bell, 2004, p. 423). Because this is the case,

theology and theologically based worldviews are inevitably political.

SHEILA SUESS KENNEDY58