A Clash of Laws

REPRESENTING GOD: CHRISTIAN LEGAL ACTIVISM IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND. By Méadhbh McIvor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. In England, the Church of England is the state church, yet many Christians still see themselves as a persecuted minority in a “hostile world” (25). One very real reason behind this self-understanding is a recognition of the ways “in which the law’s preference for establishment Anglicanism gives way to a universal ‘right’ to religious freedom,” a historical shift many Christians find potentially catastrophic, as this model of “rights” emphasizes the individual rather than a focus on a common good (148). McIvor’s book delves into English Christian theory and practice regarding the role of religion in law and society. In part, McIvor argues that “conservative Christian activism is both a response to and constitutive of the ever-shifting relationship between Christianity and the state” (141). The “dual-sited nature” of her research—with ethnographic immersion within a congregation, Christ Church, and among legal activists at Christian Concern/Christian Legal Centre—“reveals the impact of religion’s juridification at both macro and micro levels, that is, in terms of both public policy and individual experience” (7). Likewise revealed is the savvy of grassroots religious thinkers when it comes to questions of secularism, rights discourse, and the relationship between the legal system to the ideal of law. McIvor’s book, drawing on recent work in religion and law, is interested in the “vernacular theology” and equally vernacular conceptions—and critiques—of the liberal state project and its imagining and management of “religion” (33). “for my activist interlocutors, success cannot be measured in terms of cases won or laws changed. Rather, their theology of activism rejects a focus on the results of cases and campaigns in favour of an emphasis on the immediate necessity of ‘standing,’ regardless of the worldly outcome of this stand ... urgent theology can account for both worldly success and worldly failure ...” (31) As McIvor’s interlocutors see it, “the ‘true Christian’ [is] someone who, following the example of Jesus on the cross, seeks to forgo his or her rights in the hope of bringing others to salvation. Such an ethic of sacrificial love is seen to be countercultural in a world which is imagined as increasingly individualistic, self-centered, and litigious ...” (99). The call of the gospel is no matter of mere preference, but an existential demand with cosmic consequences, what McIvor terms a “special burden.” More tellingly, she describes how her interlocutors would conceive of “a Christian who didn’t evangelise [as] like someone who found the cure for cancer, only to keep it to themselves” (143). Some Christians who took to the courts to secure “rights” were thus viewed by other Christians as having put themselves above others, and interlocutors were haunted by the possibility that, on Judgment Day, non-Christians they had met and interacted with would, in agony, ask of them, “Why didn’t you tell us?” (144). Law and the legal have, as always, multiple interpretations and instantiations in this project. On the one hand, the law of the state, enforced by the state’s legal system, considers practical cases such as whether it should be permissible to wear a promise ring—a mark of religious chastity—in public. Such legalism decides the appropriate manifestations of and boundaries for that which is identified/recognized by the state as religion. Yet religion itself is a matter of law, a source of its own law. While the Christians here are quick to distance themselves from a rules- or law-following understanding of religion, following scriptural precedents and Jesus’s conflict, therein, with the Pharisees, their Christianity is nonetheless a form of legal consciousness and commitment to that imagining of law. Indeed, the law that matters most to these religious actors is a higher law that necessarily trumps the legalism of the state. In this system of law versus law, while McIvor’s interlocutors may seek to avoid any appearance of engaging in “duties to be performed rather than services gratefully offered,” when it comes to religious practice, at the same time they understand Christianity as a commitment to “God’s original plan,” with its clear articulation of the lawful, “of right and wrong” (67, 96). Ultimately, the source of the feeling that Christians live in a “hostile world” is the fact that God’s law clashes with the law—and legal and therefore, social structure—of the state. The problem is not a matter of what roles religion is allowed to play in a supposedly secular society; the problem is one of law versus law, with the state seen as having moved farther and farther away from the original and ideal law of God, a law synonymous with morality. In response to this situation, Christian activists find themselves in multiple roles. McIvor describes both a “prophetic” role and a role as “moral campaigner,” the former being that which speaks truth and stands for true law, against the falseness of the human state; the former being that savvy activist who works within the institutions and logics of the state in the hopes that they “may forever change the face of the nation” (48). Both roles seek to balance a commitment to one vision of law—the Christian—with the immediate limits imposed and possibilities allowed within the other, lesser, system of law—that of the state. As such, McIvor’s book shows us how studies of “religion and law” are always also studies of law and law ... and how those operating within a worldview of religion-as-law must negotiate the realities of the state, often offering nuanced critiques and articulating subtle analyses thereof. The essays collected in this symposium share an admiration for McIvor’s ethnographic immersion, the clarity of her framing of ideas, and, in particular, her ability to parse—with attention and respect—her interlocutor’s thoughts. As Winnifred Sullivan notes, McIvor doesn’t take meanings as obvious: tears over the Queen’s Christmas address to the nation turn out not to be tears of joy at the continuing relevance of the Church in English public life. Rather, the Queen’s speech is read by one Christian as an index of how far Christianity has been pushed from national identity and discourse. Sitting with a scene (and an interlocutor), patiently waiting for explanations, characterizes McIvor’s ethnographic and intellectual commitments here. As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd points out, McIvor is also particularly adept at capturing a “neither/nor; both/and sensibility” among those Christians with whom she spent time. Hurd rightly flags this as one of the key contributions of McIvor’s work: an attentiveness to the unsettled and unsettling, seemingly paradoxical, human reality of her subjects, an ability to represent that roiling humanity via a robust “and at some moments comical account of the views, thoughts, experiences, and disagreements encountered during her fieldwork.” We live in a world where multiple things can be true at the same time. McIvor’s subjects come across as particularly clever readers of the broader situation of so-called secularism, of the state’s policing of and thus permitting a model of “freedom” for “religion.” The reviews collected here link McIvor’s work to their own interests. Soumhya Venkatesan focuses on the tensions McIvor explores between freedom and grace, between how ought I to live, and how ought I to exercise my freedom to bring the world to a realization of freedom under grace. The pressures of the call to live a Christian life while working within the constraints of society are an exemplification of the difficulty religious actors have within a society predicated on a model of “freedom” that positions their religion as “as one religion among others and its paramount values as one set of values amongst others.” S. Beena Butool observes that McIvor’s work exposes “the friction between secular laws and religious aspirations,” yet showing, as well, how “the two are inextricably linked.” In its focus, in particular, on the “hostile world” in which Christian activists find themselves and within and against which they must negotiate their paths, Butool sees McIvor’s book as offering “a remarkable prism for scholars of comparative religious ethics.” For Finbarr Curtis, McIvor’s work is useful in comparison to the United States, where “Christian activists have welcomed private liberties that allow them to opt out of public oversight or engagement,” with an increasing focus on “getting rid of the public altogether.” Contrary to this, McIvor’s English interlocutors “worry that the individualistic focus of rights-based discourse undermines the relational quality of a Christian community tied together by a sense of the common good based on the teachings of the Bible.” This imagined Christian “counterpublic”—in opposition to a model of social “freedom”—offers a useful counterexample for Americanists to consider. Joseph Blankholm also writes with the United States in mind, particularly “the resurgence of the discourse of ‘unalienable’ and ‘natural’ rights, in opposition to ‘human’ rights.” Blankholm turns to a US example, the 2020 Report of the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights, produced by a government commission established during the first Trump administration and pursuing what, at first glance, might seem like paradoxical goals. The Report insists on human rights as a universal while also remaining committed to “National sovereignty” as a necessary means of securing such rights. The Report, further, insists that a common moral foundation underwrites “pluralism”—thus preventing a slide into what the document describes as “cultural relativism.” Blackholm’s appreciative reading of McIvor’s nuanced examination of how rights as enshrined and imagined insists on Representing God as being “deeply useful,” McIvor’s work is “for understanding U.S. religion and secularism.” Winnifred Sullivan also considers the comparative value of McIvor’s work, noting the similarities between the US and the UK, in terms of conceptions of church and state, as opposed to in continental Europe, where “the relationship of church and state is understood to be far more necessarily entangled,” and, indeed, “One sees a mimesis between church and state, as Michel Foucault observed, that is largely foreign to the common law countries.” Sullivan frames her consideration of McIvor’s book with a reflection on “the current American popular fascination with the papacy,” which she sees as both about the American origins of the new pope but also about how the pope is “a supra national figure” in a time of desperate longing for “an alternative to nationalist populism.” Perhaps here, too, is an imagined counterpublic, or alternative public, which offers a frame from which to reconsider the nation-bound struggles of McIvor’s interlocutors (and, despite the universality of their understanding of the gospel, what might well be the nation-boundedness of their vision of the practice of Christianity, too). Sullivan suggests that McIvor’s interlocutors, like many Americans today, long for a supranational frame, or, as she puts it, “the promise of a moral horizon beyond the failed separations of modernity, the accommodations and compromises of nationalism, and the cramped worldview of scientism.” Hurd’s essay shares an awareness of the closed—perhaps even claustrophobic—nature of working within the state as a religious activist. As Hurd phrases it, “McIvor demonstrates how the practice of legal governing Christianity in England today has the paradoxical effect of ensuring that ‘religion—even established religion—no longer takes priority.” The nation-state has its own law, privileging rights, and the establishment of a state religion brings with it no privilege for the alternative law of that religion. Indeed, McIvor’s interlocutors are trapped in a frustrating situation, within the state, wherein their “activism contributes to the very processes of secularization it is intended to confront and challenge,” as Hurd puts it. Yet while Sullivan suggests a supranational vision (one that transcends the state), Hurd focuses on a secondary nationalism popular among US Christians, “a moral crusade” in support of the state of Israel. For such “Christian Zionists for whom support for the return of Jews to Israel aligns with biblical prophecy and is required for the second coming of the messiah,” the genocide of Palestinians becomes an inconvenience or is read as anti-Israeli propaganda, and God’s plan—the ultimate Christian law—includes the notion of nation-state sovereignty for Israel, which must be voraciously supported by Christians as part of living a gospel-based life. Hurd wonders if this facet of theology—“a political theological defense of the maximalist—and maximally violent—ambitions of the current Israeli government and its steadfast American ally”—has similar popularity in the UK, though she doubts that it does, in part because McIvor’s interlocutors identify themselves as at the margins of the state, whereas “their louder American evangelical counterparts” are, at present, “dizzy with power.” McIvor’s response engages with these comparisons to the scene in the USA, drawing distinctions between her interlocutors’ Christian worldviews and those of American Christians who see in the gospel mission a call for political violence. She considers the implications of an anti-Islamic bias built into this worldview, all the same, and writes that Christian Zionism lacks the traction it has with her interlocutors that it has so prominently on the other side of the Atlantic. She links this fact to a coalitional nature of the communities with which she was embedded, noting a variety of theological and eschatological positions. Her response fleshes out one notable stance from the book, the claim that her interlocutors were more than merely reactionary in their vision for society. Rather than longing to return to an imagined, idealized English past, “they are looking to surpass that heritage, to usher in a world in which the nation both was and will be Christian.” Theirs is an activism “deeply invested in the future; a future they hope will be more righteous than what has come before.” Finally, McIvor contextualizes her work—which began in the field in 2012—in light of recent changes and the contemporary political and religious scene. She notes that her activist interlocutors, in recent years, have won some cases—on issues of gender, involving disputes over perceived anti-LGBTQ+ speech, particularly anti-trans speech—reflective of a general social shift on these issues. Such victories in state legal terms index broader backlashes and may be manifestations of an even broader pendulum swing of public understandings of identity and norms. In the moment, McIvor writes, her Christian interlocutors “may be slightly less countercultural than they once were,” but only in relation to particular claims. The state, to these activists, feels more secular than ever. McIvor notes, toward her closing, the irony that this further secularization is fueled in part by Christian activists “framing Christianity as an isolable set of beliefs and practices (a highly secular reading of religious life).” Select judgments, wherein the state allows citizens to use certain language in relation to trans or queer folks, are, after all, bricks in the vast apparatus of state legality. Some decisions might favor the stances of Christian activists, but, as decisions, they reinforce the rule of state law. McIvor notes, finally, her agreement with the promise of Sullivan’s gesture beyond the state. Such a vision, it seems to me, is the only way to escape the clash of laws in which religious activists find themselves as they live within and speak to and against state law while allegiant to another and always superior law, a law that, as McIvor puts it, represents an “alternative vision of human flourishing” (147)

Christianity · Ethnography · Grassroots · Vernacular · Evolving Legal Systems and Governance · Law in Society and Culture · Religious Freedom and Discrimination