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Boundary Work: Transcendence and Authoriality in Religious and Secular Law

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International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The semiotic investigation of the divine or transcendent authoriality of religious law involves, in the context of discussions concerning the propriety or impropriety of the influence of religion in “secular” political and legal systems, preliminary boundary work to discern the meanings of “religion”, “secular”, and “belief.” Jeremy Waldron’s account of the propriety of religion in “secular” politics, mirroring but reversing John Rawls’ account of religion’s impropriety in that context, can be contrasted with neo-Calvinist (and other) conceptions of pluralism and the inevitability of fundamental “beliefs” in all political and legal thought. In the latter perspectives, religious believers are neither unique in their appeal to transcendent values, nor relegated to advancing theocracy (because pluralism is conceived as a religious value rather than religion’s opposite). A workable alternative to the conventional discourse of religious influence in politics and law is therefore evident.

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Notes

  1. “Rival claims of revelation are mutually unintelligible, like the mysteries of competing theologies; they mean nothing except to their adherents” [25; 15].

  2. While the Oklahoma law specifically targeted Shari‘a law, other states “will have a better chance of withstanding judicial scrutiny if they remain focused on excluding the use of international law in state courts and not on Shariah itself” [10].

  3. Tongue in cheek, a critical reviewer of the aforementioned four books on the Religious Right, who found the books to be alternatively exaggerated, over-simplified, paranoiac, and apocalyptic, noted that “Christian Reconstructionists … are genuine theocrats, of a sort, … who … rank somewhere between the Free Mumia movement and the Spartacist Youth League on the totem pole of political influence in America” [14; 24].

  4. Waldron distinguishes his argument from those, like George Rupp, who contrast market individualism with communal altruism, because those in material comfort do have communities: “It is the limited altruism of community that is hardest to overcome for the sake of the outcast and the marginalized” [25; 10].

  5. For Kuyper, the “goal of Christian social and cultural action is not to confessionalize society” by establishing a state church or an official religion; he wanted “a strong confessional church [but not] a confessional state … [The] secularization of state and society is one of the most basic ideas of Calvinism” [17; 165, 197].

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  1. Villanova University School of Law, 299 North Spring Mill Road, Villanova, PA, 19085, USA

    David S. Caudill

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Caudill, D.S. Boundary Work: Transcendence and Authoriality in Religious and Secular Law. Int J Semiot Law 26, 149–161 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9263-z

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