BY MOLLIE ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY

Robert Ingersoll and his partner, Curt Freed, were longtime customers of Barronelle Stutzman, a florist in Richland, Wash. After voters in the state approved same-sex marriage in December 2012, Messrs. Ingersoll and Freed decided to tie the knot, and called their florist. "There was never a question she'd be the one to do our flowers," Mr. Ingersoll told the Tri-City Herald. But Ms. Stutzman declined, citing her Christian beliefs about marriage.

"You have to make a stand somewhere in your life on what you believe and what you don't believe," Ms. Stutzman told Christian Broadcasting Network. For acting on her religious beliefs, Ms. Stutzman has been sued twice: once by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson and once by the American Civil Liberties Union.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Voters were assured that legalizing gay marriage wouldn't undermine religious freedom—after all, the public was assured that religious institutions would be free to act as they always had. But what about religious individuals? The effects of this new legal regime on private citizens have largely been ignored.

When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June, President Obama said: "How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions. Nothing about this decision—which applies only to civil marriages—changes that."

That line was echoed by the media, with a typical comment coming from the Los Angeles Times editorial page: "Government entities in California must now recognize and extend equal rights to same-sex marriages, but that requirement does not extend to religions, their houses of worship or their ministers."

Reassuring words like those may help explain why many Americans support legal recognition for same-sex marriage even though the practice is contrary to their own religious beliefs. Some 97.6% of religious adherents in the U.S.—more than half the population—belong to religious bodies that affirm the traditional definition of marriage, according to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

For those Americans, tolerance isn't turning out to be a two-way street. A couple that owns a bakery in Gresham, Ore., closed its shop earlier this month after the state launched an investigation into their religious objections to catering same-sex union celebrations.

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that Elane Photography violated the state's Human Rights Act by declining to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony because doing so would present a religious conflict. A judge upholding a $6,637 fine against the small business owned by a Christian couple said being "compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives" was "the price of citizenship."

Members of the clergy who object to performing same-sex marriages are generally protected from such legal harassment—a fact that advocates for gay marriage emphasized to give the public confidence that religious beliefs would not be trampled by legalization. In 2008, the California Supreme Court suggested that religious freedom would be unaffected by same-sex marriage because "no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs."

But the protection of the beliefs held by church officials and congregations is guaranteed by the First Amendment and a host of legal precedents. What's at stake is personal religious liberty. "Individuals really haven't gotten much protection at all," says Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor of the University of Illinois College of Law who lobbies legislatures to protect individual religious liberty when revising marriage laws.

It's not just religious-minded business owners who need to worry. County recorders, magistrates and judges in Iowa as well as justices of the peace in Massachusetts and town clerks in New York have been told that refusing to perform services for same-sex couples will result in criminal prosecutions for misdemeanors or other sanctions. Faced with choosing between their jobs and their religious beliefs, many have resigned, including a dozen Massachusetts justices of the peace.

"Wherever government is giving you access to something, licensing the power to perform certain acts, government can abuse that position to promote a particular point of view," says Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Long before the lawsuits, fines and penalties started piling up, many legal scholars recognized that gay rights and individual religious liberty were on a collision course. In 2006, Chai Feldblum, a legal scholar and gay-rights activist later appointed by President Obama to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, acknowledged the conflict: "There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner."

It is only now becoming clear to many Americans what sort of compromise has been imposed on them.

Ms. Hemingway is a writer in Virginia.

A version of this article appeared September 19, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Gay Marriage Collides With Religious Liberty.

By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

Toward the beginning of "Down in the Chapel," Joshua Dubler describes a conversation he had with an inmate at Graterford Prison, a maximum-security facility about 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia. "I don't want to disillusion you," the inmate tells Mr. Dubler, "but a lot of these dudes just come to the chapel for something to do."

Mr. Dubler, at the time a graduate student at Princeton University, was far from disillusioned. He had come to Graterford to study the practice of religion in prison and quickly discovered that men do indeed head to chapel or make other gestures toward religious observance in part because there's nothing else to do. Or because they hope to impress the parole board or because they want to use the chaplain's phone to call home. But Mr. Dubler chronicles something remarkable at Graterford as well: committed worshipers who, at times, debate what religious belief is or should be.

As an Episcopal minister who comes to teach at the chapel tells Mr. Dubler (in the author's paraphrase): "People on the outside refuse to believe the sort of spiritual maturity guys in here have." One inmate, a murderer serving a life sentence, began studying Greek and Hebrew in prison and has by now, Mr. Dubler says, carved "a sizable path through the canon of late biblical and early rabbinic literature." Born a Protestant, the man has converted to Catholicism in prison because, he tells the author, it allows him to access "both the numinous and the mystical facets of religious experience."

Most of the winding conversations that Mr. Dubler records are more down-to-earth about religious matters. In one, an inmate says: "I see a lot of brothers who profess Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and I can't look into their heart but they don't live it out in their actions, even when they're down here in the chapel. They don't live with the gifts." To which another inmate responds: "How can you say they're not using it if you don't know what God gave them? . . . You can't tell them what the proper expression of their gifts is! That's like Protestants who say you've got to speak in tongues. But I gave my life to God on December 11, 1991, and I ain't never spoke in tongues." Another inmate, listening in, adds: "You don't have to set yourself apart or anything like that. Because when it comes down to it, it's not what we do, it'swhhhhhh, whhhhhh"—at which point, Mr. Dubler tell us, he blows through his fist. "It's what we are." As the author summarizes the point: "Spirit is what we are."

Mr. Dubler's ability to capture these conversations—the differences among inmates, their changing moods and shifting positions—is nothing short of amazing. He spends most of his time in the chapel and its surrounding offices, with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Native Americans. (The chaplains don't like to go see the men in their cells because it seems too "embarrassing" for the inmates.) During the course of a single week—the book's chapters chronicle one day at a time—he attends various services and Bible studies and acts as a stenographer for impromptu conversations. His note-taking is dutiful and sprinkled with observations of his own. Of the Jehovah's Witnesses, he notices "the bureaucratic flavor of their biblical urgency." Of one of the chaplains, he notes: "On his more pessimistic days, [he] suspects the administration sees his staff as little more than affable opiate peddlers—feeding inmates false hopes that make them, if nothing else, better prisoners."

Along the way, Mr. Dubler looks at the history of Graterford, particularly at a period in the 1970s when "humanitarian innovations" were implemented and, coincidentally, the Nation of Islam expanded within the prison, and at a later period, when a raid found that the Nation was running, for all intents and purposes, a crime syndicate on Graterford's grounds. The number of Muslim attendees at services has been low ever since. Salafism, a strict version of Sunni Islam, is the dominant form of Islamic affiliation now. The influence of the Nation of Islam—the black-centered, American-born offshoot of Islam—has evidently faded. While Mr. Dubler, a secular Jew, hears plenty of talk about the vast Jewish conspiracy that has left all of the inner-city blacks in poverty, he doesn't here any talk about radical jihad.

At one point, Mr. Dubler describes himself accompanying the Catholic chaplain into the Restricted Housing Units, the home of lifers and, temporarily, of those confined to solitary confinement. He writes that one of the inmates there, a man who is in "the hole" for yelling at a guard, "teases me about my dissertation's lack of a thesis." Presumably, the author is often asked about his formal graduate-school writing project and has given a diffuse account of it. To judge by "Down in the Chapel," the inmate may be on to something. It is hard to tell whether Mr. Dubler, in his book, is arguing anything in particular about religion in America or religion in prison or the prison system generally. But there is value simply in the details on offer.

Despite his own secularism, Mr. Dubler tries to be fair, and he certainly doesn't portray religion in prison as some sort of opiate. The men who are really passive and tuned out, as more than one inmate observes, are the ones watching television all day, not the ones in Bible study. But ultimately Mr. Dubler is still a liberal academic, and his reason for avoiding the Marxist understanding of faith appears to be more strategic than principled. "Religion as mass delusion doesn't strike me as a particularly interesting story to tell," he writes. Luckily, "Down in the Chapel" is.

Ms. Riley is the author of " 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage Is Transforming America."

A version of this article appeared September 16, 2013, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Spirit in A Cage.

TORONTO--


By Alistair MacDonald


The French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec on Tuesday announced plans for wide-ranging legislation aimed at keeping religion and religious clothing out of the workplace, a move that has ignited a fierce debate about religious freedom and discrimination.

The measures, if passed, would ban public employees from wearing visible religious symbols, from turbans to skullcaps, and would allow small businesses the right to push back on religious demands, such as prayer time. While aping laws in France, the policies in the so-called Charter of Values are being seen by critics as part of the long-term campaign by the separatist minority government of Quebec to secede from Canada. Critics argue the laws are an attack on freedom of worship and multiculturalism, with religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews, saying they are being singled out for their style of worship.

The minority Parti Quebecois government says the laws treat everybody equally by ending special treatment for the religious at work. They are also aimed at enforcing secularism in government and discouraging clothing such as the burqa, which the Parti Quebecois says discriminates against women.

"We want rights and values that will be the source of harmony and cohesion," said Bernard Drainville, the Quebec provincial government's minister for democratic institutions and active citizenship. "That will apply to all Quebecers, regardless of our faith and religion."

France passed a ban on wearing religious symbols in schools in 2004 and effectively banned burqas in public via a 2010 law.

Legal experts and political rivals say the law may struggle to get off the ground in Canada. The PQ will need the support of another party to get the bill through provincial parliament. Jason Kenney, a federal government minister, said he was "very concerned" by the proposed legislation and said the federal government will challenge any law in courts if they deem it unconstitutional. Lawyers say the law may infringe constitutional rights on freedom of religion and expression.

Political analysts say they believe the Parti Quebecois will relish these challenges, allowing them to argue that Quebec's identity and future can only be safeguarded outside of Canada.

According to an opinion poll taken by researchers Leger, 57% of Quebecers think the charter is a good idea, while 28% believe it a bad one. The province has a postwar history of fighting against religious interference in state activities. In the 1960s, the so-called Quiet Revolution saw Quebecers loosen the grip of a Catholic Church that had dominated education and health care in the province. The process has left Quebec with some of the lowest church attendance rates in Canada.

The proposed charter has come under fire from public-sector unions.

"If you want to wear a cross on your neck, that's your business," said Yves Parenteau, an official at teachers union, Alliance des Professeures et Professeurs de Montreal. "Just as long as you don't talk about the crucifixion in class."

In an increasingly diverse province, many religious groups have also come out against the measures.

"This is painful, it's an encroachment on freedoms that are guaranteed constitutionally," said Salam Elmenyawi, the president of the Muslim Council of Montreal.

Mr. Elmenyawi and others say the charter is an attack on multiculturalism, in which different cultures are encouraged. Pauline Marois, Quebec's premier, stoked this view when she told one local paper that multiculturalism in the U.K. had fed homegrown terrorism and social unrest. The bill's critics say it lets off many Christian traditions, allowing, for instance, Christmas trees in public spaces.

Mr. Drainville said the measures were, in part, aimed at promoting Quebec's cultural heritage. "We are all Quebecers, regardless of our origins," he said.

Write to Alistair MacDonald at [email protected]

Syrian war makes sudden appearance at convent in historic Christian town

By Liz Sly, Published: September 9

BEIRUT — High in the mountains above Damascus lies a town so remote that Syria’s war had passed it by, so untouched by time that its inhabitants still speak the language of Jesus.

The violence ravaging the rest of Syria has finally caught up with Maaloula, renowned as the oldest Christian community in the world — and the last in which the same version of Aramaic that prevailed 2,000 years ago is the native tongue.

On Sunday, Syrian rebels, including some affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through Maaloula for the second time in four days, after an assault a few days earlier in which the last of its few thousand residents fled and the specter of unchecked violence threatened to convulse the iconic town.

Only a couple of dozen nuns remained, cowering in fear as warplanes screeched overhead, shells exploded and al-Qaeda-linked fighters overran their convent, turning them into witnesses to what may be one of the more extraordinary encounters of the Syrian war.

The monks had fled from their nearby monastery months ago, and even the last two priests who oversaw the affairs of Maaloula’s ancient Mar Takla nunnery took buses out of town last week, leaving the nuns of Maaloula to fend for themselves as the fighters closed in.

With Congress poised to debate President Obama’s proposed military intervention in Syria, the arrival of war in Maaloula illuminates the complexity of a conflict that has defied all attempts at resolution for 21 / 2 years. The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is just one of the smaller issues at stake in the discussions expected to unfold.

The fight for Maaloula began Wednesday, when rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government because of its declared affiliation with al-Qaeda.

The bomber, said by other fighters to be a Jordanian, blew himself up at the Syrian army checkpoint commanding entrance to the town, killing seven government loyalists. Other rebel units, most of them less extremist, swarmed into the town, which in past years lured Christian pilgrims from around the world to explore its ancient sites and listen to the Christian liturgy preached in Aramaic in its churches.

Firing volleys of gunfire into the air, according to videos posted on YouTube, the rebels roamed through the town in pickup trucks and said they had “cleansed” Maaloula of supporters of the regime.

They also vowed not to attack Christians and proclaimed, “We must not harm any church . . . we target only those who shoot at us,” a commander told the camera. “These people are our families . . . these icons of the church and those people here and there, they should stay in peace.”

And then they departed Friday, almost as abruptly as they had arrived. They attacked the town, several rebel spokesmen said, only as part of an offensive to secure control of a major road between the strategically vital city of Homs and the capital, Damascus, both at the forefront of the broader battle for control of Syria — a battle that has been waged by the family of President Bashar al-Assad for 40 years.

But when the rebels moved in, the elders of the town “were afraid of airstrikes and shelling,” said Abu Shamso, an activist with the rebels, speaking by Skype from a nearby opposition-controlled village in the mountains northwest of Damascus.

“They wanted us to go, so we left,” he said.

Overnight Saturday, the rebels surged back into the town, including members of Jabhat al-Nusra. They surrounded the Mar Takla convent, which was built into mountains where persecuted early Christians found sanctuary many centuries ago.

The 27 nuns and the two dozen or so orphans they are caring for remained inside, huddled in an ancient cavern known as the Christmas Cave because it resembles the caves in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, said the convent’s mother superior, Pelagia Sayaf, who was interviewed by telephone and has been in charge of the nunnery since 1990.

The cave also offered protection from the MIG fighter jets that began dropping bombs on the town to dislodge the rebels and the shelling that routinely targets towns across the country that are seized by rebels.

Late Sunday, the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters entered the convent and asked the nuns to appear in a video to declare that they had not been harmed. Such videos serve as the chief medium of communication for all parties to the Syrian opposition.

There were 25 fighters in all, Sayaf said. The one who negotiated with her spoke with a Saudi accent, while others appeared to be from Afghanistan or Chechnya, she said. Several spoke no Arabic, and all of her comments were interpreted from Arabic into English by one of the fighters to the others, she said, leading her to suspect that some were Americans.

In the video, she told the fighters that she had not been harmed, which, she said, is true.

And then, she said, the fighters withdrew from the convent. The nuns remain, praying and expressing no opinions about their hopes for the outcome of a war that could soon engulf the town.

“If you had heard so many explosions in any other place on Earth, many people would be dead,” Sayaf said. “It is because of our faith that we are alive.”

And, she added, “Maaloula is a very special place.”



Suzie Haidamous and Ahmed Ramadan contributed to this report.

The commentary below was taken with permission, from the Newsroom website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/relevance-religion).


COMMENTARY —  25 JULY 2013The Relevance of Religion

SALT LAKE CITY — “Over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.” R. R. Reno[1]

Resilience amid Change

How relevant is religion? It’s a question each new generation asks itself. As times change, new circumstances present new challenges and possibilities. And yet, through it all, this immemorial longing we call religion continues on.

In the 1960s, sociologists came to a consensus that religion was fading. As knowledge and freedom increased, they theorized, so modern society would outgrow religion. Thirty years later, however, that hypothesis was reversed. One of these sociologists, Peter Berger, explained the miscalculation this way: “Religion has not been declining. On the contrary, in much of the world there has been a veritable explosion of religious faith.”[2] He concluded that just because the world is becoming more modern doesn’t necessarily mean it is becoming less religious. Religion, it can be said, is just as relevant now as it has ever been.

The value of religion speaks less through sermons and more through the soup kitchens, hospitals, schools and countless other humanitarian works it nurtures. Simply put, religion builds social capital. Research shows that more than 90 percent of those who attend weekly worship services donate to charity, and nearly 70 percent volunteer for charitable causes.[3] Such giving also benefits the giver. According to the landmark study American Grace, “the correlation between religiosity and life satisfaction is powerful and robust.”[4]

Religiosity, however, does not remain static. It might surge in one part of the world and decline in another. In America, for example, religion is in a state of flux. The number of those who claim no religious affiliation nearly doubled from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008.[5] Now that number has crept to nearly 20 percent. And among those under 30 years old, disaffiliation jumps to 32 percent.[6]

In many ways religion finds itself on the margins of society, where one’s beliefs and values may be expressed privately but are often dismissed publicly. Conflicts sometimes arise when religious organizations or individuals share their views of right and wrong in the public sphere. Tension can be seen, for example, in rules banning religious clubs from college campuses or in regulations curbing the conscience of health care practitioners. Public figures and regular citizens often hesitate to articulate their religious values to avoid controversy.

This separation of religion from public life is a feature of what is often called secularism. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes the current environment as a shift “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”[7] Meanwhile, the broader questions of religion get lost in narrow cultural divisions. What does religion mean in the actual lives of people? What role does religion play in forming communities? And how do religious beliefs address life’s most difficult problems? Such matters cannot be reduced to mere politics; they are perennial concerns, deeply interwoven in humanity’s rich fabric.

The Good of Religion

Human beings are religious by nature. They seek a higher purpose outside themselves. Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or other, religion offers a framework by which people find meaning, belonging and identity. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written, religion gives us “a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.”[8] And this feeling tends to flow into civic interactions. American Grace found that religious observance is linked to higher civic involvement, connected to trust and correlated with the neighborly virtues of charitable giving, volunteerism and altruism.[9] Churches of all kinds bring communities together and provide a space and setting for individuals to serve people they otherwise would not. According to Rabbi Sacks, religion “remains the most powerful community builder the world has known.”[10]

Religion and the search for transcendence are integral to the human experience. Though they take many forms, religious beliefs help us make sense of life’s mysteries and provide answers to deep philosophical challenges. Professor Brian Leiter, who normally disagrees with privileging religion in public life, concedes that faiths “render intelligible and tolerable the basic existential facts about human life, such as suffering and death.”[11]

Religion and secularism, though, do not always have to be at odds. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Each can benefit from the other. The encounter between the two can be a productive tension that provides opportunities to learn, not contradictions to avoid. Mormons, for example, believe that "the glory of God is intelligence."[12] People of faith reject the notion that religious faith and practice are devoid of rational thought. Science can explain much of the human experience, but without faith we lack ultimate meaning.

Modernity in Fragments

With its teeming plurality of choices and possibilities, our modern world presents unique challenges to religion. Endless philosophies, ideologies and truth claims clamor for attention, magnified by instantaneous media. Globalization pushes peoples and cultures together. Different religions and worldviews interact and collide. Personal preferences alone become a guide in dealing with moral dilemmas. In this flux individuals can feel isolated and become disconnected from their communities.

Modernity, therefore, is not just one thing; it is a commotion of many things. But it can tend toward fragmentation. In this competition of choices, according to Charles Taylor, living a religious life can be “an embattled option,” making it “hard to sustain one’s faith.”[13] In such an atmosphere, he continues, many will “feel bound to give [their faith] up, even though they mourn its loss.”[14] In much the same spirit, novelist Marilynne Robinson laments how the religious self is often reduced to “a sort of cultural residue needing to be swept away.”[15]

Even so, during the millennia of human existence nothing has been able to replace religion. Skeptics have misread and underestimated the religious impulse in the human spirit. It is part of who we are, and it won’t go away. Secular thinker Terry Eagleton describes the situation over the past century this way: “Culture made a bid for power, a bid as it were to oust God, to oust theology and religion. … But it didn’t work.”[16]

Religion’s Place in the Whole

People of faith have cause to believe not only in the good of their own religion but also in the good of religion in general. The conclusion of William James is fitting: “The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.”[17] Religion can also be a powerful source of ethical reflection and orientation toward the moral.

The roots of religion are so deeply planted in the values of society that to pull them up would unsettle the whole. Virtually all of us, believers or not, practice values laden with religious meaning. Our modern aspirations toward human rights and humanitarian aid, for example, have long religious pedigrees. Religion’s reservoir of moral ideas spills over for everyone to drink. Reflecting on what they called “the lessons of history,” scholars Will and Ariel Durant asserted, “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”[18]

All societies have some moral basis, whether derived from religion, philosophy, custom or any number of sources. Religious values should not be dismissed from the public square any more than the vast array of other positive values. Prominent thinker on religion and society Jurgen Habermas wrote that among the modern societies of today, “only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”[19]

Religion is worth upholding and honoring in our society. It has both tremendous capacity andresponsibility to lift individuals, support communities and uphold the dignity of all God’s children. Faith and society, therefore, are intertwined in important ways. As Christian Pastor Rick Warren has affirmed, “A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.”[20] With mutual respect and civility we can all live, even flourish, with our deepest differences. As long as we continue to seek meaning, purpose and community, religion will remain not only relevant but an essential part of what it means to be human.


[1] R. R. Reno, “Religion and Public Life in America,” Imprimis, Apr. 2013.


[2] Peter Berger, “Secularization Falsified,” First Things, Feb. 2008.


[3] Arthur C. Brooks, “Religious Faith and Charitable Giving,” Policy Review, Oct. 2003. Similar statistics are found in the “Faith Matters Survey 2006,” as cited in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.


[4] Robert A. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 491.


[5] Barry A. Kosmin, Ariela Keysar, “American Religious Identification Survey,” 2008, 3.


[6] Cary Funk, Greg Smith, Pew Research Center, “’Nones’ on the Rise: One in Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation,” Oct. 9, 2012. It is worth noting here that though religious unaffiliation is not the same as irreligion — two-thirds of the people in this group say they still believe in God — it does indicate a diminished confidence in churches and religious institutions.


[7] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.


[8] Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 101.


[9] Robert A. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).


[10] Jonathan Sacks, “The Moral Animal,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2012.


[11] Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), 52.


[12] Doctrine & Covenants 93:36


[13] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.


[14] Ibid.


[15] Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011).


[16] Terry Eagleton, Intelligence Squared, “Terry Eagleton in Conversation with Roger Scruton,” Sept. 13, 2012.


[17] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), 254.


[18] Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 51.


[19] Jurgen Habermas, et al, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2010), 5.


[20] Rick Warren, “A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.” (#NationalDayofPrayer), May 2, 2013, 8:05 p.m. Tweet.