Behind the Prejudice Against Educated Clergy

Among Quakers (many congregations of which refuse to record ministers), some evangelical congregations, and other faiths such as Baha'i (which does not have a clergy), there seems to be an underlying anti-intellectual bias regarding ministers educated in theology and ministry. I think the prejudice is out of anger, whose root is the errant assumption that knowledge, even in faith seeking understanding, causes the educated person to think he or she is better than others. Relatedly, expertise is assumed, falsely again, to bring with it a more general elitism. These flawed assumptions give rise to the prejudice that being educated in theology and ministry are not of much value, as being uneducated or self-educated in the field are actually preferred qualities in cases in which ministers are used (e.g., many evangelical congregations). All this is a slap on the face to those of faith who have spent years of their lives in seminary or university, and such passive aggression goes against Jesus's message on how to treat others.

The full essay is at "An Intellectual Bias against Educated Ministers."

American Federalism: Christianity as the Official Religion in North Carolina

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or preventing the free exercise thereof.” Congress. The writers of the First Amendment of the U.S. federal Constitution were obviously excluding the state governments. Even so, the U.S. Supreme Court has established that the amendment applies to the states as well as Congress. From Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the Court gave us what is known as the Lemon test. State funding for parochial schools (e.g., Catholic schools) must have a secular legislative purpose (e.g., education), neither advance nor inhibit religion in its consequences, and not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.” Yet the leap in claiming that the amendment bears on the states must deal with the explicit language that “Congress shall make no law.” Even so, it did not seem constitutional to many people in 1913 when the North Carolina legislature tried to make Christianity the republic's official religion. Even so, because the United States is essentially a federal empire of fifty republics, care ought to be taken when applying a one-size-fits-all approach as it does not take into account interstate political, religious, and cultural differences. Much is made of these in the European Union, but not in the United States. 

The full essay is at "Christianity as a State Religion in the U.S." 

The Ministerial Exception: A Religious Right to Discriminate

In early 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized, for the first time ever, a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, saying that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference. In his written opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “The Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution] prevents the government from appointing ministers, and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.” The wrench in the works here concerns the matter of delimiting the exception, given the inflation in what constitutes “ministerial” in terms of tasks.

The full essay is at "The Ministerial Exception."

The United States as Religious and Secular Societies

E pluribus unum, or “Out of many, one,” is a motto for the United States—the American States that are united. The many can refer, I suppose, to the sheer number of inhabitants stretching across a continent and beyond. The word could also refer to the diversity of people living even in a large American city. Finally, the word could refer to the Union consists of many different socio-political societies, or republics—again possibly referring to the number of states or the fact that they differ so from one another.  It is the last interpretation that I want to explore here, for it alone gets at the fact that the U.S., like the E.U. and China, are at the empire-level (or scale) in twentieth-century (rather than medieval) terms (i.e., scaling).

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.