Between No Establishment and Free Exercise: The Dialectic of American Religious Pluralism

Abstract

“Religious freedom” is one of the cornerstones of the American political-social order. The very first words of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” At the same time, however, these words in fact address in one breath two different aspects of the privilege. One is that there will be no law respecting the establishment of religion; thus the state may not establish any religion as a state religion. The second clause, however, is much less straightforward in its potential consequences and is where practically all “religious freedom” questions in the United States and beyond have been argued—namely that there shall be no prohibition of “the free exercise” of that religious freedom.

This chapter takes up this problematic in terms of its consequences for both the United States, particularly with respect to the Second Amendment to the Constitution (the right “to keep and bear arms”), which is similarly double-barreled, in light of globalization and the multiplicity of religious stakeholders in, with and under the international system of states at the start of the twenty-first century.