The GOBA Blog - Page 6

There are few contemporary legal scholars who offer more profound and incisive analysis of the relationship between law and religion in the USA and elsewhere than Professor Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.  My own familiarity with Sullivan’s work came via the anthropological scholar Talal Asad, whose work on the vexed relationship between the sovereign nation-state, the secular, law and religion, elaborated in monographs such as Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (2003) provides an important lens through which to approach Sullivan’s seminal work.

Rather than engaging the political debate about the importance of religious freedom or attempting a re-telling of the narrative of how we arrived at a point of such rhetorical consensus – although these are both worthy endeavors – I will take a close look at two U.S. religious freedom cases, with a view to trying to persuade you that “religion” is a tremendously unstable concept, too unstable, perhaps, to bear the weight of constitutional or human rights status. As historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith insists, “religion” is a second-order category invented by scholars in the early modern period to explain the European encounter with other peoples. And, as Talal Asad adds in his call for an anthropology of the secular, the goal of the modern state in promoting tolerance and the privatization of religion as well, as in negotiating the line between the secular and the religious and the moral, is not freedom, but control.

Den 23. april 2013 kunne internetavisen iTromsø berette, at tøjbutikken WOW, ejet af BikBok og målrettet unge piger, solgte 'satanistiske smykker'. En opvakt kunde havde besøgt butikken på Jekta og skrev efterfølgende i et læserbrev, at et smykke forestillede ”den okkulte guden Baphomet, komplett med pentagram i panna”, mens et andet havde en ”skarabé på, også det et velkjent okkult symbol som brukes i demoniske og satanistiske ritualer” (Moe og Bjellmo 2013). Butikkens administrerende direktør gjorde kort proces og fjernede alle disse smykker, da de som hun skrev ”tar sterk avstand fra slike produkter”. Ordenen var genoprettet.