Resumen:
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Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility: Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of our national discourse. Critical reasoning, supported through academic research is needed. As a result, De Gruyter, along with its partner presses, is making freely available books and journal articles across nine topical areas for all students and faculty. Broadening access to this scholarship enables more people to address these issues in an informed manner: it helps us combat false news sources, to consider the nature of truth and ethics, and to understand the struggles of all members of society
This article considers the effects of secularization on the American constitutional law of religion. It argues that, in a secular age, religious belief becomes a matter of subjective opinion to be treated in much the same way as other opinions. Claims that religious beliefs occupy a privileged legal position become problematic, once those opinions are understood to be merely subjective. Free exercise jurisprudence tends to collapse into the jurisprudence of free speech: We protect religious speech because it is speech, not because it is religious. In establishment clause jurisprudence, endorsement becomes the focus of attention. If religious belief can never be more than a subjective opinion, then it is measured like other opinions: we want to know who supports it, not whether it is true. Thus, the endorsement test asks whether the state is asserting a religious belief as its own. Once religious belief is understood as subjective opinion, its natural place will appear to be within, not outside of, politics, for interest groups are defined by the opinions they pursue. Perhaps ironically, the increasingly visible role of religious groups in American politics is an expression not of how seriously we take religion, but of how much less serious it has become. No longer about the truth of the human condition, it is merely another opinion
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