Religious and Legal Others: Identity, Law, and Representation in American Christian Right and Neopagan Cultural Conflicts

Abstract

Conservative Evangelicals and Neopagans in the United States have long engaged each other in public struggles over religious authority and power. This paper argues that these struggles are defined by their competing, and often fluid, interpretations of legal and constitutional norms concerning religious freedom. The result of these processes is a ‘polymorphous discourse’ whereby each religious community seeks to establish command over this range of ideas and issues in order to curtail or delegitimise the activities of the other. This ‘strategy of alterity’ shapes the way these communities understand each other, how they narrate American religious history, and how they experience political order. By balancing theoretical inquiry with case studies of local instances of Neopagan/Evangelical conflict, this paper seeks to contribute to enlarged understandings of contemporary religio-political conflict in the United States.

Keywords:

• Christian right
• Neopaganism
• religious freedom
• United States
• identity

Notes

1. My account of this incident comes primarily from Quillin (2000).

2. As I explore these issues in the following, I am not suggesting that manipulations of the rhetoric of constitutionality by religious groups—for the purposes of preserving their religious power and identity—are altogether new in American society. Certainly they are not, and indeed I have written about some other incidents in The Fracture of Good Order (Bivins 2003). I simply intend to map out a particularly illustrative, and wide-ranging, location for such discursive creations.

3. See Casanova (1994), Shadid (1995), and especially Asad (2003). Asad explores what he calls an ‘anthropology of secularism’, using methods roughly similar to those employed in Asad (1993). That is, from the ‘periphery’ of the discourses of modernity there are cultural realities that elude the scope of key categories such as secularism, rationalism, and modernity. With such observations, Asad calls attention to the historically and culturally constructed nature of ubiquitous concepts in the discourse of religions and laws.

4. My understanding of strategies of alterity has been informed particularly by Orsi (1992).

5. On the polyvocality and pluralism of ‘law’, see Fitzpatrick (2001, 2003), and various works by Peter Goodrich.

6. See, among other writings, Kant (1983), Locke (1980), and Mill (1975).

7. Rawls' several articulations of political liberalism represent the most sustained and significant articulation of these theories since the middle of the twentieth century. For Rawls, reasonable pluralism could only be stable and legitimate if the political system protecting it did not rely upon controversial metaphysical truth-claims (either moral or religious). If political institutions satisfied this negative criterion, they would therefore not demand of any of its multiply constituted citizens that they falsify any of their own truth commitments in order to participate in public life. Thus, political life could only provide a ‘thin’ theory of the good. See Rawls (1971, 1993).

8. See Alejandro (1996), Holmes (1993), and Wolin (1996).

9. Additionally, the First Amendment itself was hotly contested during and after its drafting. Most obviously there were heated debates about the presence, or lack thereof, of specific religious references in the Constitution. On Constitutional debates, see Carter (1998), Kramnick and Moore (1996), Morone (1990), and Wood (1995).

10. There have been many fine recent studies of the judicial implications of the liberal view of religions. Among these are Cookson (2001), Gedicks (1995), Peters (2000), Smith (1995), and Sullivan (1994).

11. On the ways in which communities may cohere around strategies of textual interpretation, see Crapanzano (2000), which provocatively compares ‘originalist’ orientations to the Constitution with fundamentalist orientations to Scripture.

12. See Bloch (1985), Lambert (1999), and especially Hatch (1989). Hatch, of course, ignores the extent to which this supposedly democratic religious idiom also constituted a set of social differences and acted to exclude women, African-Americans, Catholics, and others from the public sphere.

13. Clearly one of the main inspirations here was the classic Puritan reliance on providential rhetoric and imagery, found most famously in Winthrop (1998). The sources occasioning these changes, and the ideological divisions they helped create among Evangelicals, are too many to name here. Suffice it to say that the accumulated transformations of modernity—including, among others, the industrialisation of the economy, the growth of cities, the huge levels of immigration, and a series of powerful intellectual challenges like Darwinian theory and biblical criticism—demanded a recalibration of biblical orthodoxy for many Evangelicals.

14. Carpenter (1997) shows that this lack of political visibility is only part of the evangelical narrative, since from the 1930s to the 1960s the conservative subculture was becoming highly organised in the spheres of media, education, commerce, and communication.

15. See Kintz (1997).

16. See Smith (2000, 26–27).

17. See Hamburger (2002) . Hamburger addresses—in the context of a historical survey that seeks to temper the ‘strict separationist’ view of church-state relationships—the status of various religious communities in historical debates concerning public religion. On anti-Catholicism in particular, Franchot (1994) is particularly insightful, as is Jaher (1994) regarding anti-Semitism.

18. See, for example, Rozell and Wilcox (1996), a study of Home School Legal Defense Association founder Michael Farris' 1993 lieutenant gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. Farris' campaign often targeted ‘New Age’ and ‘paganism’ as sources of concern in public schools, courthouses, and elsewhere. For an even wider sense of NCR conspiracy theory, consult Pat Robertson's contention that ‘A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers’ (quoted in Marty and Appleby 1992, 44). On conspiracy theory in general, see Goldberg (2001).

19. These are commonly recognised features, but my understanding of them draws particularly from Pike, who explains many of these ethical features in her preface. Other sources from which I have drawn my general understanding of Neopaganism and Wicca include Adler (1986), Berger (1999), Campanelli (1989), Luhrmann (1989), Matthews (1995), Russell (1980), and Starhawk (1979).

20. This is linked to the oft-encountered definition of Wicca or magic as meaning ‘to bend or to alter’.

21. See Albanese (1990).

22. Both the NCR and Neopagans have availed themselves of Internet and web-based technology to craft a wider and more accessible public voice, particularly around issues of law and politics. The fluidity of cyberspace, the relative cost-effectiveness (as measured against traditional publishing) of maintaining a web presence, and the rapidity with which responses can be made to current events have proven instrumental to the maintenance of these religious identities. As Roof writes, ‘[s]ince the production of religion is preeminently a social activity, not only is face-to-face interaction of paramount importance, but, increasingly, as a result of advances in electronic communication, so are faceless exchanges’ (Roof 1999).

23. Regarding the contested status of the term ‘religion’, it is worth noting that it has become somewhat conventional in religious studies to acknowledge the impossibility that a single category such as ‘religion’ could encompass or even denote the vast range of practices and beliefs to which it ostensibly refers. It would be going too far, however, to suggest that NCR and Neopagan communities deftly avail themselves of the constructed nature of the term. See, among others, Fitzgerald (1999), McCutcheon (1997), Jonathan Z. Smith (1998), and Tweed (2002).

24. See Tabor and Gallagher (1995).

25. Heyrman (1997) is a key source for understanding the demonology of early American evangelicalism. See also Hall (1994) and Demos (1982). I am also currently working on a book-length project exploring the political and emotional uses of fear in contemporary American evangelicalism. Panic about specific bodily practices is a large part of the history of new religious movements in the United States, particularly in so far as such panics constitute occasions for exerting religious authority. On this topic, see Taves (1999).

26. Pike (2001) has documented such misunderstandings in abundance.

27. See also polemical websites (such as www.ptm.org/00PT/JanFeb/Witches.htm) that identify Neopaganism as part of the ‘radical feminist fringe’.

28. Reuters article. ‘Witches Say Christians Violated Their Rights’, 30 April 2002 (cnn.com).

29. Details of this incident are from the Asheville Global Report (No. 25, 8–14 July 1999), from the Religious Tolerance website (www.religioustolerance.org/divi_law.htm) and from the Black Ribbon Campaign website (http://members.aol.com/oldenwilde/gen_info/blk_rib/nclaw.html).

30. ‘Morning Edition’, National Public Radio, 9 February 2000. Selected excerpts transcribed in report available online (http://www.geocities.com/jaguillard).

31. See ‘Censorship Roundup’, The School Library Journal, 1 October 2002.

32. The organisation's website (www.ward-hq.org) contains valuable archives of the kinds of cases discussed throughout this essay.

33. Darla Kaye Wynne's ‘Editorial’ (www.ward-hq.org, 19 December 2001).

34. These kinds of cases are reported with great regularity in Neopagan circles, although they are less commonly circulated in mainstream media outlets. Here as elsewhere, Neopagans rely heavily on the Internet to publicise their concerns and to craft their public voice. See, for example, circlesanctuary.org and religioustolerance.org, two of the most reputable and reliable sources for such reporting. Both sites report that, as of mid-2003, the ACLU is involved in several religious freedom cases involving Wiccans. The most alarming of these cases involves Brandie Blackbear, a high school student accused of casting a spell on one of her teachers, leading to his hospitalisation.

35. Even basic informational outlets have taken to describing the features of Neopagan practice and belief in reference to the normative discourses of church, state, and religious freedom. See Emick (2002).

36. Many local and state legislatures have not only conformed with federal recognition of Wicca and Neopagan religious practices, they have begun to listen to Neopagans themselves describe the formal properties of their religious practice (so that they may avoid being subject to harassment).

37. Lincoln (1989) has helpful insights about these kinds of historical appropriations.

38. There is, of course, an enormous amount of literature on the public sphere and on civil society, a related but distinct area of theoretical inquiry. See, among others, Jurgen Habermas (1991), Cohen and Arato (1992), Appadurai (1996) , Fraser (1989), and Robbins (1993).