THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM BY: WINNIFRED FALLERS SULLIVAN

The Impossibility of Religious Freedom by: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

Introduction

The Impossibility of Religious Freedom is an astonishing book. Winifred Sullivan once again demonstrates her flair for extracting a big lesson from a seemingly small event in this book, a controversy over the allowable style of grave markers in a public cemetery, in Boca Raton, Florida. To the town, the issue was the ease of mowing the cemetery and making it look tidy; for the survivors of the dead buried in the cemetery the issue was the right expression of religious faith. This case looks like a definite church-state controversy, but Sullivan (an expert witness in the case) deftly explains why the federal court and the First Amendment really cannot cope with the issues involved. Separating church and state requires defining what religion is. Sullivan offers a serious challenge to the comfortable assumptions to the regular propensity of federal courts to accommodate religion.

Sullivan's exploration of unofficial religion is elegant, moving, uncompromising, and profoundly important. By examining religion literally from the ground up, it challenges all of the familiar pieties about religious liberty in America. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan believes the religion clauses of the U.S. Constitution are incoherent. In her book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, she “considered the impossibility of isolating religion for the purposes of protecting its free exercise.” (Winnifred, 2005)

Discussion

The author makes the stronger (and perhaps more difficult to defend) claim that no right can be tied to “religious beliefs or practices.” That is to defend a religious “right” one has to defend a larger pluralistic right. The author sees it going a libertarian direction in which the state simply should not be able to regulate nearly as much as they do. I can also see it going a progressive way in which the state should be able to regulate, and that religious people should simply accept that the state can control their sacred performances.

The problem is as the author sees it, that often the state or even businesses regulate in ways that seem silly and unnecessary. Normally this is not an issue, but they can target minorities when they do this. Now those, not of the minority, clearly see the regulations as annoying, but it does not seriously affect them. But when it excludes a particular minority defined by religion then it seems to be worthy of investigation.

She thinks there can be no absolute right of religious freedom otherwise folks can simply do nearly anything and merely say it is religious. The minorities get targeted, and just as they need to look out for racial groups we have to watch out for religious groups. It is just far too easy to repress a group (perhaps unintentionally) because of their practices (Winnifred, 2005).

Laws that treat religious and other organizations equally are not much of a problem. In the U.S., religious organizations granted specific exemptions to such laws in only a handful of ...