Recent Threads

[Newsom Michael]

I wonder if there is a "surge" of people reporting no religion.  The
Baylor study -- an extraordinary piece of social science work -- that
came out a year ago shows that 89.2% of Americans have a religious
affiliation, and of the remaining 10.8%, the study characterizes them as
"persons without a religious preference, denomination, or place of
worship."  One cannot fairly say that the unaffiliated necessarily have
no religion, for it is possible to be an unaffiliated Christian, and
even if one could say that the unaffiliated have no religion, how is
10.8% a "surge?"  It would seem to me that to be a "surge" one would
have to have good data that showed, for example, that 25 years ago, the
"unaffiliated" constituted something under 5 or 6% of the American
people.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the "unaffiliated" have been
around for a long time in the United States, and in numbers not that far
removed from 10.8%.

-----Original Message-----
From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Douglas Laycock
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:05 AM
To: religionlaw at lists.ucla.edu
Subject: Recent Threads

Some Christians proselytize; some don't.  Same with atheists.

There is clearly a hostile secular reaction to evangelical activism and 
political influence; it is visible in our politics and in some of the 
resistance to free exercise claims, and it shows up statistically in a 
surge of people reporting no religion in surveys about religious 
belief.  It's not a reaction to the Christian Reconstructionists, who 
are numerically trivial.  But many of the folks having the reaction 
can't tell the difference between the conservative values voters and 
the Christian Reconstructionists.

The mission is a central religious experience in Mormonism. What Fred 
Gedicks described is the social understanding of the faith.  The 
reality of any religion lies not in formal doctrine but in the social 
understanding, practices, and lived experience of its faithful.  That 
smart people on this list can doubt whether the Mormon mission is 
religious dramatically illustrates what is wrong with the 
compelled/motivated distinction.

I agree -- and have testified -- that the religious motivation must be 
substantial or primary and not just lurking in the background 
somewhere.  That means the resulting line is one of degree and not a 
bright line.  But to say the Mormon mission is not distinguishable from 
any other reason for taking a year off is like saying that because 1 
isn't much different from 2, and 2 isn't much different from 3, and so 
on -- that 1 is indistinguishable from 100 or a hundred trillion or any 
other number.

Douglas Laycock
Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
  734-647-9713

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