Rousseau, American Laicite, and the Future of Religious Liberty in America

Abstract

There is a growing cultural tension between religious orthodoxy and the prevailing form of progressivism which centers the modern self in such a way that would please the eighteenth-century Romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau’s priority of the self led him to embrace a particular view of church and state as well as religious liberty, which, if implemented, would be a new experiment in the American context. What are the implications of this ascendant version of progressivism for religious liberty as it has been understood in the American context, vacillating as it has in the past between strict separation or accommodation? What would the emerging progressivism do with religious liberty given its philosophical commitments to a this-worldly immanent frame and rise of the psychologized self (expressive individualism)? I argue that religious liberty, in its robust paradigmatic American form, cannot survive any of these outcomes without undergoing radical redefinition, and instead a new paradigm of religious liberty, which I call American Laïcité, must replace the older version. With American Laïcité, as Rousseau would have it, though religion is a rather fixed aspect of human nature, only religion that sacralizes the immanent, one centered on self-expression and never practices or teaches any form of exclusivism or inequality can expect to be either accommodated or tolerated within society.