{"id":167,"date":"2011-02-11T16:53:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T16:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom.html"},"modified":"2011-02-11T16:53:48","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T16:53:48","slug":"apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom.html","title":{"rendered":"Apostle Oaks and Religious Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dallin Oaks, one of the LDS Church’s dozen Apostles, spoke last week on
\n“Preserving Religious Freedom” at the Chapman University School of Law,
\nand an interesting speech<\/a>
\nit was. Not least interesting was the way Oaks surrounded what he had
\nto say with statements from non-Mormon religious authorities like
\nCardinal Francis George and Rabbi Harold Kushner. Mormons happily
\ncollaborate with those of other faiths on good works, but they won’t
\npray with them. Oaks’ readiness to use the word “ecumenical” creeps
\ntowards making spiritual common cause in a way that, to this eye, looks
\nlike something of a departure for LDS general authorities.<\/p>\n

As for
\nthe substance of his remarks, Oaks fell rather interestingly between
\nhis religious bureaucrat’s stool, his sometime law professor’s chair,
\nand his former seat on the Utah Supreme Court bench. Which is to say,
\ninto a somewhat awkward posture.<\/p>\n

He begins with the debatable
\nproposition that religious liberty is in trouble in America. The
\nevidence he adduces mostly has to do with ways that religious
\ninstitutions and individuals may be pressured to accommodate to social
\nnorms they oppose. If society recognizes same-sex relationships as
\nlegitimate, up to and including marriage, then it indubitably creates
\nchallenges for those who find such relationships morally unacceptable.
\nBut this is hardly a new thing in the history of American religious
\npluralism. An ordinance forbidding discrimination against same-sex
\ncouples in housing is hardly more burdensome than the Supreme Court’s
\n1890 Reynolds decision barring Mormon polygamy. Oaks does not so much as
\nmention Reynolds, which shot down a central LDS religious practice.<\/p>\n

He does recognize that the Court substantially weakened religious liberty in the 1990s, thanks to the Smith decision<\/a>
\ndeclaring that any neutral law of general applicability can trump a
\nfree exercise claim. But he doesn’t fix the blame for the decision where
\nit belongs: on Antonin Scalia, who authored the opinion and led the
\njudicial charge. That would call into question Oaks’ claim that it’s not
\nrecent jurisprudence but “moral relativism” (MR) that is responsible
\nfor undermining religious freedom today. No one would accuse Justice
\nScalia of MR.<\/p>\n

In attacking MR, Oaks doesn’t claim that we all
\nneed to adhere to the same moral norms, but rather that it’s important
\nfor religious freedom that we believe that such norms are timeless and
\nGod-given. Why so? Moral absolutists throughout history have been happy
\nto restrict the religious freedom of those who disagree with them. I’d
\nrather have religious freedom depend on those committed to the sanctity
\nof the individual conscience–like those moral relativists over at the
\nACLU.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I’d be interested in knowing how Apostle Oaks feels about that new piece of legislation<\/a>
\nintroduced by state representative LaVar Christensen that would protect
\nUtahns from prosecution for their religious beliefs–up to a possibly
\nincluding the practice of polygamy.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dallin Oaks, one of the LDS Church’s dozen Apostles, spoke last week on “Preserving Religious Freedom” at the Chapman University School of Law, and an interesting speech it was. Not least interesting was the way Oaks surrounded what he had to say with statements from non-Mormon religious authorities like Cardinal Francis George and Rabbi Harold…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nApostle Oaks and Religious Freedom - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Apostle Oaks and Religious Freedom - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dallin Oaks, one of the LDS Church’s dozen Apostles, spoke last week on “Preserving Religious Freedom” at the Chapman University School of Law, and an interesting speech it was. Not least interesting was the way Oaks surrounded what he had to say with statements from non-Mormon religious authorities like Cardinal Francis George and Rabbi Harold…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-02-11T16:53:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Apostle Oaks and Religious Freedom - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/apostle-oaks-and-religious-freedom.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Apostle Oaks and Religious Freedom - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Dallin Oaks, one of the LDS Church’s dozen Apostles, spoke last week on “Preserving Religious Freedom” at the Chapman University School of Law, and an interesting speech it was. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}