On Tuesday, January 20th, Ruth Okediji, a professor from Harvard Law School, gave a forum address at BYU entitled “The (costly) Arc of Religious Freedom.” Her main claim was that “counterintuitively, the more a government is committed to religious freedom, the less presence Christians have and are encouraged to have in a secular society.”
She built this argument by introducing herself as someone who is both an academic and a person of faith, telling a story of her praying for her students in class, even at Harvard, to which she received applause from the crowd.
Her story not only serves as an example of someone who, as President Reese would say, is “bilingual in both secular and spiritual learning” but also as a way to challenge the “deeply engrained cultural idea that we are part intellect and so we can have nothing to do with God in our academic and intellectual sphere” (Okediji). She emphasized telling Christians that “somehow that our spiritual experiences are limited only to discrete aspects or at certain times of life is a fallacy… Indeed, it is the worst of fallacies because it belies explicit instructions in the Bible” (Okediji).
Okediji then highlighted Acts 17: “Throughout Paul’s ministry, he seamlessly moved between the cerebral and the devotional… between teaching and debating.” This, Okediji argued, is the example of integrated living set for Christians in the Bible.
She then goes on to explain how this “integrated way of living is what makes religious freedom terribly contradictory for Christians.” In her view, this is because current conceptions of religious freedom don’t “care whether your faith is objectively real, whether it bears fruit… or whether the religion makes you a better or worse person so long you call it a religion you are free to practice it without accountability to the state because it is the ‘private sphere.’” This separation of the public and private sphere allows for the “most sacred moments of worship” but also “endangers the rights of a fully integrated person to participate in society.”
One example came from her question: “How can we serve in and for institutions, including governments, neutrally?” She then argues that by precluding the state’s interference in religion and Christians embracing this preclusion, Christians are contributing to a state that separates the public and private in such a way that some “areas of life are just so private that religion and religious expression cannot touch them.” When these boundaries are drawn, Okediji argues, some things are “outside our moral judgment: think about abortion, think about prayer in public schools, it is supposed to be done in private.”
As such, when Christians are not allowed to bring their whole “integrated selves” to society, Okediji argues that “what we’re left with is a caricature of faith” and that “living out your faith consigns you to being either an outcast or being an agitator but not a citizen that is contributing to the well-being of our society.”
Okediji concluded her address by urging Christians to be “more discerning in their embrace of religious freedom and what it stands for today” and by challenging BYU to bring our studies of “religious truths” and “biblical truths” to the “public sphere, not the private sphere.”
Written by: Thomas Olsen
Senior Contributor at The Cougar Chronicle
The Cougar Chronicle is an independent student-run newspaper and is not affiliated with Brigham Young University or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
