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What are the rights of religious institutions? Should those rights extend to for-profit corporations? Houses of worship have claimed they should be free from anti-discrimination laws in hiring and firing ministers and other employees. Faith-based institutions, including hospitals and universities, have sought exemptions from requirements to provide contraception. Now, in a surprising development, large for-profit corporations have succeeded in asserting rights to religious free exercise. The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty explores this "corporate" turn in law and religion. Drawing on a broad range perspectives, this book examines the idea of "freedom of the church," the rights of for-profit corporations, and the implications of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby for debates on anti-discrimination law, same-sex marriage, health care, and religious freedom.
In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society. Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business. Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.
How early American Catholics justified secularism and overcame suspicions of disloyalty, transforming ideas of religious liberty in the process. In colonial America, Catholics were presumed dangerous until proven loyal. Yet Catholics went on to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped to finalize the First Amendment to the Constitution. What explains this remarkable transformation? Michael Breidenbach shows how Catholic leaders emphasized their churchÕs own traditionsÑrather than Enlightenment liberalismÑto secure the religious liberty that enabled their incorporation in American life. Catholics responded to charges of disloyalty by denying papal infallibility and the popeÕs authority to intervene in civil affairs. Rome staunchly rejected such dissent, but reform-minded Catholics justified their stance by looking to conciliarism, an intellectual tradition rooted in medieval Catholic thought yet compatible with a republican view of temporal independence and church-state separation. Drawing on new archival material, Breidenbach finds that early American Catholic leaders, including Maryland founder Cecil Calvert and members of the prominent Carroll family, relied on the conciliarist tradition to help institute religious toleration, including the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649. The critical role of Catholics in establishing American churchÐstate separation enjoins us to revise not only our sense of who the American founders were, but also our understanding of the sources of secularism. ChurchÐstate separation in America, generally understood as the product of a Protestant-driven Enlightenment, was in key respects derived from Catholic thinking. Our Dear-Bought Liberty therefore offers a dramatic departure from received wisdom, suggesting that religious liberty in America was not bestowed by liberal consensus but partly defined through the ingenuity of a persecuted minority.