What If Religion Is Not Special?

Micah Schwartzman

Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

For helpful comments and discussions, I thank Charles Barzun, Christopher Eisgruber, Chad Flanders, Richard Garnett, Abner Greene, John Harrison, Andrew Koppelman, Jody Kraus, Douglas Laycock, Matthew Lister, Christopher Lund, Charles Mathewes, James Nelson, Saikrishna Prakash, George Rutherglen, Fred Schauer, Seana Shiffrin, Lawrence Solum, Mark Storslee, Nelson Tebbe, Pierre-Hugues Verdier, Xiao Wang, Free Williams, and audiences at Brooklyn Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Nootbaar Institute’s Annual Conference on Religion and Ethics at the Pepperdine University School of Law. I owe special thanks to Leslie Kendrick and Richard Schragger, who read and commented on multiple drafts. I am also grateful to Adam Yost for excellent research assistance.

Leading accounts of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses fail to provide a coherent and morally attractive position on whether religion warrants special treatment as compared with secular ethical and moral doctrines. Focusing on two central issues involving whether laws must have a secular purpose and whether religious exemptions are constitutionally mandatory, this Article rejects existing theories as either theoretically inconsistent or substantively mistaken. If religion does not warrant special treatment, then it is important to ask what our attitude should be toward the constitutional text. Under originalist theories of constitutional interpretation, the Religion Clauses should be considered morally regrettable. Under nonoriginalist theories, there may be interpretations of the text that allow for the possibility of moral reconciliation. Either way, rejecting the idea that religion is special requires reassessing our understanding of the Religion Clauses.

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