Secularism and the Freedom to (Self-)Regulate: A Response to Michael McNally's Defend the Sacred

Abstract

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and discuss this provocative and deeply learned new book. With Defend the Sacred, Michael McNally has produced an immensely valuable work that combines meticulous explanations with strong, creative, and, above all, useful arguments. I am a religious studies scholar who is often critical of religious freedom, and this book is just what I needed to read. McNally grants the legitimacy of the critiques raised both by many interested parties and by religious studies scholars. And he generally agrees that religion is a colonialist category; religious freedom privileges individual believers; it perpetuates racial liberalism; and Native Americans almost always lose free-exercise cases. This book is not a call to double down on the narrow protections of First Amendment free exercise claims, hoping that the protection of sacred sites, for instance, will eventually be regarded by federal judges as a matter of ensuring the protection of sincerely held beliefs. Indeed, McNally takes the failures of free-exercise claims not as an occasion to abandon religious freedom but as an invitation to think more capaciously, creatively, and strategically about what religious freedom is and can do. Other contributors to this forum are better equipped than I am to assess the plausibility and promise of McNally’s suggestions. In many ways, McNally thinks like a lawyer (here, I mean that as a compliment), which is to say, strategically, in order to accomplish his aims. In so doing, though, he is not doctrinaire or pedantic; he has a pragmatic will to try, to collaborate and experiment and see what works. This is an approach to law and religion that is too rare, and I found it a refreshingly practical, sensible, and grounding book to think with. Leaving the more fine-grain analysis to those with more expertise, I respond to this book by discussing three related clusters of thoughts it provoked. In what follows, I first put McNally’s work in conversation with secularism studies and ask what this book can teach us about how secular governance works in practice. Second, I think with McNally about spirituality and sincere belief. And finally, I conclude with some brief thoughts on the postsecular and the sacred.