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The thing to watch here in this excellent piece is the semantic slippage. Over and over, the interviewees talk about Christianity and religious freedom, but the things signified are often aspects of idealized small-town life: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html?smid=tw-share
"Christianity" here sometimes stands for cultural values--some religious, like opposition to abortion, some not, like gun ownership. Other times it is things like knowing your neighbors, not locking your doors, staying local, rootedness in place. Occasionally, it slips into race.
The category of "religion" has come to be the carrier of all of these values, because it has express recognition as a protected category in a liberal order, whereas "custom" or "tradition" are not. So it becomes the primary language in which a whole way of life is vindicated.
Throughout the article, the idea of religious freedom seldom means liberty of conscience in an individual sense, but rather the right to live among churchgoers and everything that is supposed to signify. It serves as a corporate right to a way of life.
And the giveaway is the section on Jesús Alvarado, whose manifest religiosity does not necessarily give him entrée into a broader way of life that is obviously about more than Christian belief or mere churchgoing.
So he clearly does not partake of the freedom to express one's values (without being thought a "hick" or a "bigot") that the other interviewees keep celebrating. He keeps talking about what he can't say.
What is amazing from a historical point of view is the way 'religious liberty,' which was designed to manage pluralism is here deployed to conserve homogeneity.
And that something really predicated on the atomized interiority of belief (Locke called religion an inward persuasion of the mind and said every man is orthodox to himself) is now the way in which people must vindicate the exteriority of culture.
This is an inversion. They talk about "religious freedom" but what they actually mean is almost its opposite: civil religion, the sacredness and non-negotiability of our group life, our civic and political existence together.
We tend to think of "civil religion" as pertaining essentially to national life and its rituals and obsequies, but perhaps we must deploy it in more localized, regional ways.
Ok. Basta.
Ok. Basta.
