Theorizing religion, constitutionalizing religion: Taylor, Connolly, Habermas, and the U.S. Supreme Court

My dissertation asked whether the U.S. Constitution's singular treatment of religion in the First Amendment remains justifiable given post-World War II changes in how Americans talk about rights, organize their politics, and negotiate pluralistic private and public interactions. I proposed a re-interpretation of the Religion Clauses responsive to three exigencies: constitutional principles and established jurisprudence; a legacy of inequality based on legal instantiations of racial, gendered, sexual, and other taxonomies of difference; and the imperatives of a normative theory of justice. My analysis detected three principal modes of constitutionalizing religion: religion/secular dichotomy, universal ethical capacity, and identity politics. Analyzing over fifty Supreme Court cases, I traced these shifts in reasoning and narrative resonance by attending to concurring, dissenting, and controlling opinions and by integrating historical literature illuminating the everyday articulations of religious meaning and practice overflowing legal categories. I framed this reconstruction and critique of constitutional arguments through the three contrasting theorizations of religion of Charles Taylor, William Connolly, and Jurgen Habermas. From this integration of empirical and interpretative methodologies, law and theory, my dissertation concluded that a pluralizing identity politics has made strict religion-state separation problematic: Drawing comparative equivalencies between religion and other identities is unavoidable given post-Sixties changes in political claims making in which a civil rights logic demanding equal treatment irrespective of difference confronts a politics of recognition logic demanding respect for identity uniqueness without the price of coerced sameness. Nonetheless, destabilizing religion/secular separation necessitates new constitutional and theoretical articulations of the limits to a right of now pluralized, participant-defined ethical autonomy. From the standpoint of an intersubjective justice pragmatically transcending unilateral perspectives, identity claims are not automatic constitutional trumps. I urge balancing First Amendment ethical freedom with Fourteenth Amendment equality guarantees, recognizing both principles as crossing and reworking public/private boundaries. This pairing interweaves insights from Taylor on the entangled depth of ethical life, Connolly on a proliferating relational identity politics critically resistant to rigidification, and Habermas on locating these twinned commitments to ethical freedom and pluralization within a dialogical interpretative framework of constitutionalizing not religion but justice.