Treating religious claims as strictly experiential-expressive can help carve out a space for religious free exercise, over against its cultured despisers. But this is a profoundly unstable space. For one thing, it generally abandons the possibility of giving a normative account of the good of religion as such. One can point to the meaningfulness of religion in the lives of its adherents, but it is denied any possibility of relevance to reality itself. And, of course, one forfeits any principled reason to claim that the Satanic Temple is “not a religion”—even though, by any standard definition, it clearly is not.

Last month, a grotesque little display popped up in the Iowa Capitol: a shrine to the horned god Baphomet, erected by the “Satanic Temple.”[1] To be clear, the Satanic Temple doesn’t revere a literal Satan. It’s a secular-progressive organization with a 1980s edgelord aesthetic, swiping at conservative appeals to religious liberty.[2] You say you want religious freedom? Well, that means freedom for us Satanists too. See how you like it now!
The display didn’t last. Ex-fighter pilot Michael Cassidy tore it down (and was later arrested).[3] Since then, much of the conversation surrounding the incident has focused on whether Cassidy did the right thing—and whether any legal rationales for the Temple’s use of the space can justify having a Satanic display set up in the halls of governance.
Those debates are noteworthy. And yet, beneath the surface of these arguments is a much deeper question: what is a “religion,” and who gets to define it?
Most people naturally intuit that to the extent it exists solely to mock other faiths, the Satanic Temple isn’t a bona fide “religion.” Its “fundamental tenets” are nothing more than banal left-liberalism, such as the claim that “[b]eliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.”[4] There is nothing here of divinity at all, and decidedly no affirmation of an actually existing Satan to whom one swears fidelity.
But the category of “religion” becomes slippery whenever such notions are invoked. For instance, insisting on belief in “a Supreme Being” as the sine qua non of religiosity would seem to exclude traditions widely understood to be “religions.” Could such a definition extend to the “emptiness” lying at the core of Theravada Buddhism, or the theologies of immanence that characterize modern neopaganism?[5]
Plenty of academics have thrown up their hands and declared the question simply hopeless. As Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm notes, “most scholars trained in Religious Studies today now consider it naive to presume ‘religion’ as a concept. . . . in many quarters the rejection of ‘religion’ as an analytical object approaches the consensus view.”[6]
Such a rejection, though, is a discipline-specific luxury. The First Amendment flatly declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The category of “religion,” for all its conceptual instability, is firmly embedded in American constitutional law (and echoed in a myriad of statutes). Justices and judges can’t simply make the postmodern move and refuse to answer the question—at least not if they want to keep their jobs. Somehow, “religion” must be defined—and yet, supposedly, it cannot be.
To be clear, this is not a theological-philosophical problem that can be resolved in the space of a single article. What this piece aims to offer is something far more modest: a direction of inquiry that judges and Justices might consider when (inevitably) they are forced to reassess the matter. As appeals to “religious liberty” grow more and more contested, the Satanic Temple, or its imitators, will keep coming, pushing at the boundaries of the concept. The ultimate goal seems to be that scandalized Christians eventually settle for some sort of laïcité and a sterile public square. Christians ought to seek a better world than that.
Begin by clearing away some jurisprudential brush. Some might argue that the question of defining “religion” can be deferred indefinitely through consistent application of originalist methodology—that is, by pointing to historical examples of what counted as “religion” at the time of the Founding, which the First Amendment clearly protects.
The point is well taken. Courts can in practice make this move and avoid the deeper question. The Supreme Court, with its power of discretionary review, need not entertain cases likely to disrupt its existing precedents.[7] (The same is true of many state supreme courts.) From a public-order perspective, there are probably good reasons not to reopen the issue.
But from a theoretical standpoint, this is not especially satisfying. And it leaves questions unanswered that are not clearly resolvable within a narrow historical frame.
It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment’s protections are not limited to Christian (or even Abrahamic) faiths.[8] But there is ample reason to believe that the eighteenth-century drafters of the Constitution, like most other Westerners of the time, would have superimposed Western Christian conceptual frameworks upon religious traditions that in principle diverged sharply from the Jewish-Christian tradition. For example, assuming arguendo that Native American religious practices were originally cognized by the First Amendment, when these traditions speak of a “Great Spirit,” are they referring to a transcendent Creator (e.g., the God of the Abrahamic faiths), or referring to an immanent life-giving power not metaphysically distinct from the world?[9] If the latter, would those Native traditions count as “religions” at all? In the same vein, John Adams’s remarks on Hinduism suggest that he interpreted the tradition through a decidedly Western/Abrahamic lens.[10]
Hence, the deeper question can itself be transposed into an originalist key. To what, exactly, does the First Amendment’s protection for free exercise extend: a religious tradition as such, or the Founders’ inapt understanding of that religion? Is there principled room in the First Amendment for “religion” that does not in fact fit an implicitly Abrahamic paradigm?[11]
In general, the Founders were not what are today called “theologians of religions” or “comparative religionists.” Their use of a familiar theological-philosophical category (that is, religion) was an unanalyzed use (though understandable given the limits of the time). But now, when confronted with more challenging cases and the benefit of deeper knowledge of theological traditions, judges are not exempted from the responsibility to think through this question more systematically.
And that is, in fact, what the Supreme Court has tried to do—for better or worse.
Today, the vast majority of religious liberty cases heard by the modern Supreme Court do not involve fringe groups. The highest-profile court battles usually involve clashes between defenders of traditional Christian commitments and advocates of contemporary views on sex and gender. These cases are selected precisely because they offer clear opportunities for unsettled legal questions to be resolved and (for the most part) avoid getting bogged down in messy procedural issues or questions of disputed fact.[12] In this context, there is simply no reason to reopen questions regarding the nature of religion as such. Nobody seriously contends that Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam) is not a religion for First Amendment purposes.
But in at least two particular contexts, the question becomes much more difficult: cases involving the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), and determinations of conscientious objector status. As relevant here, RLUIPA (enacted in 2000) protects the rights of prisoners to their free exercise of religion while incarcerated. In practice, this often looks like providing special diets or other exceptions to standard prison practice (such as, in the case of a Muslim prisoner, the privilege to grow a short beard).[13] In making such determinations, courts must evaluate whether a prisoner’s supposed religious practice is in fact religious at all.
And the matter becomes even more fraught when questions of the military draft—questions of risk of death—are involved. That’s why, during the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was required to address directly the sort of belief that properly counts as “religious” for purposes of conscientious-objector status.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Orthodox Protestants in America can now have clarity on the way forward and the choices that lie before them. The elites are accommodating, as I predicted they would be. And new leadership is now needed, one that understands the exile nature of the church, the inevitable opposition of the world, and the importance of opposing the abolition of man at every turn.

In two recent articles on the Respect for Marriage Act, David French both argues that the legislation contains provisions sufficient to protect religious dissenters and apparently accepts the legitimacy of same-sex unions as civil marriages. These essays have caused much consternation in the Protestant evangelical world. I, by way of contrast, welcome them. At last, the future for Protestant Christians, and the choices we will have to make, are becoming clearer.
Now, I have never met French and only written about him once that I can recall. Ironically, that was when I defended his strategy of politeness in civil engagement over against Sohrab Ahmari’s criticism of “David Frenchism.” In the tradition of good deeds never going unpunished, French’s one engagement with my work (of which I am aware) was a blunt response to my 2021 article “The Failure of Evangelical Elites.” In his reply, French defended himself, criticized me, and deftly avoided my central contention: that evangelical elites will prove unreliable and compromised as the cultural revolution rolls on. In fact, I had not even mentioned French in my essay, but apparently he saw himself indicted. That he responded just days before speaking as a guest at my own college put the dear colleagues who invited him in an embarrassing position. I chose to remain politely silent for their sake, but the incident left me wondering about exactly where the politeness I had earlier defended was now to be found.
Well, life once again mimics art, and it is now clear that French was right to see himself indicted in my essay. Elite evangelicalism is clearly making its peace with the sexual revolution and those of us who will not follow suit are destined for the margins.
The story is bigger than David French, though, and the question “whither French?” is of comparatively little interest compared to that of “whither orthodox Protestantism?” Any answer at this point is purely speculative, of course, but here are my thoughts.
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Written by Samuel D. James |
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Feelings are what are leading a lot of people away from the presuppositions and certainties of progressivism. The notion that secular philosophies will always appeal better to people’s emotions than historic Christianity is just dead wrong. I am convinced that the coming years are going to be marked by people finding a meaningful peace and catharsis through Christianity and through traditional value systems: the ideas of human purpose, divine image-bearing, the importance of place, and the givennesss of truth. The mental health crisis in the West is ideologically coded precisely because it is ideological. And in the coming years, the most effective form of Christian or conservative argumentation will simply be the display of stability and compassion.

I would like to pioneer a new genre of personal essay. I call it: “My Parents Did Their Best Raising Me and Of Course They Got Some Things Wrong But I Don’t Blame My Problems on Them Because I Don’t Want My Kids to Blame All Their Problems on the Mistakes I Will Inevitably Make.” Basically this kind of essay would follow all the familiar patterns of a typical piece wherein the author awakens from the cruel hypnosis inflicted upon them by their strict/overbearing/religious/nosy parents. But instead of ending with the author being enlightened and the family being exposed, it would end with a terrifying realization: that even my parents’ mistakes were valuable, that my grown-up problems were not reducible to them, and that the most mentally and spiritually healthy attitude I could have toward my childhood is gratitude for the many good things, and forgiveness for the bad.
Even writing a sentence like that one is enough to elicit a near unbearable wave of anger and critique. If a thousand people read that opening paragraph, I promise that at least 100 will believe I have somehow suggested that abusive, traumatic experiences are irrelevant and trivial. There is no suggestion of the sort within a country mile of what I wrote, but the context of contemporary #discourse is so loaded that even talking about forgiveness can and will appear to some listeners as a kind of experience-negation.
Negating someone’s experience is a social sin that has become so totemic of the times that you have to go out of your way—and often say the opposite of what you mean—in order to avoid even giving the appearance of having committed it. But I’ve noticed that in many situations this dynamic only works one way. Negating someone’s experience may not be a sin if their experience is deemed to be the wrong kind. The opening paragraph of this post hints at one category of personal experience that often goes negated with impunity: the experience of realizing you don’t know as much as you thought and that the people around you actually don’t have as much ultimate power over your well-being as you might have been tempted to believe. In digital culture especially, this kind of memoir just feels backward, like a screenplay in which the Bad Guy actually wins. You’re not supposed to feel more outward-facing gratitude and less inward-facing certainty as you age. You’re supposed to see your enemies all the more clearly. This strikes me as a recipe for pathological mental anguish.
The tragic irony for many people my age is that the kind of mental health that we desperately need is almost always predicated on decentering the self, which is precisely the very thing we have been educated not to do in the interest of mental health. Our windows to the world are mirrors. Many of the most popular “self-care” techniques are really just analog-era recreations, which suggests what we really need is just one hour where we’re not staring at our own psychological state. Decentering the self is not just implausible in the Age of the Mirror, it’s actually condemned as immoral through the way we articulate which personal narratives matter and which ones don’t. The narratives that don’t matter include:

I realized how much I’d been given and how evil only living for myself would be.
I was miserable trying to curate my own identity and this was cured when I gave myself completely to this spouse and these children.
I thought me and my desires were the same thing, but then I realized that denying those desires gave me more joy.
I was convinced people who disagreed with my core convictions were wicked, but I was wrong.

These are personal narratives that happen every day! They’re true stories of genuine transformation. Yet they are far less likely to be published, promoted, or celebrated than stories of learning how to “care for myself” or of “throwing off” the stuff I was taught. The narratives that carry the most cultural weight all go in the same direction, outward → inward: “I thought X because other people told me X, but when I looked inside myself I realized Y, and now I’m free, both from X and from the people who told me X.”

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