Wednesday, May 06, 2015

Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality by Martha Craven Nussbaum

Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality by Martha Craven Nussbaum

I earlier published a review of Professor Nussbaum's The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. That book skims through arguments she fleshed out in greater detail and with different historical examples in Liberty of Conscience.

I want to reproduce a few passages which described some aspects of U.S. history which I'd never heard.


For [Francis] Bellamy, the Pledge of Allegiance was crucial both because it affirmed the moral basis for nationhood in a world of greed and also--and inseparable--because it affirmed the values of a Protestant, Northern and Western European America against the subversive values vaguely associated with new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and their Catholic faith. For that reason it is not all together surprising that the pledge itself expresses liberal ideals, while the ritual of compulsory school recitation that Bellamy associated with it expresses a less lofty set of values, creating an imposed order into which all new customers would be inserted their peril. P 201



If you are not familiar with religious freedom issues at all, start with Liberty of Conscience. If you are interested in the applicablility of Nussbaum's ideas to contemporary ideas about Muslims, read New Religious Intolerance.

Check out other blog entries tagged "Religious Freedom."
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