James Madison on Religion and Politics: Rhetoric and Reality
Thomas Lindsay
American Political Science Review, 1991, vol. 85, issue 4, 1321-1337
Abstract:
The recent Oregon v.Smith decision's shifting of the burden in free exercise cases from legislatures to minority religious claims has brought fierce opposition, most conspicuously from leading nonpreferentialist Richard J. Neuhaus, who sees in it the foundation of majority tyranny. Against Smith, Neuhaus employs Madison's “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” which is universally read to argue that the superiority of religion to politics proscribes majoritarian hegemony over religious practices. I contend that the Memorial's appeals are better understood as rhetoric than as reflecting Madison's true view. I find Madison hostile not only to religious establishments but also to religion itself. This hostility was the basis of his rejection of the nonpreferentialists' utility-based argument for government support of religion. In this light, I uncover a curious historical irony: the nonpreferentialist Neuhaus seeks today to protect religion from hostility by adhering to a position that was originally animated, in key respects, by hostility both to religion and to its nonpreferential support.
Date: 1991
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:85:y:1991:i:04:p:1321-1337_18
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().