Talking About Religion and Culture
Traveling the Middle Ground
Religion's place in education, politics, and law is a contentious subject, but, luckily, First Amendment scholar Jay Wexler has little fear of engaging with controversial issues.
An associate professor at the School of Law, Wexler writes about such volatile issues as the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design in schools and of displaying religious symbols on government property. But his conclusions may be surprising to those who see these issues in black-and-white. For Wexler argues that the Supreme Court has both wrongly stripped religions of the protections promised by the Constitution and wrongly chipped away at the necessary barrier between church and state. In staking out a position in the middle ground, Wexler has raised the hackles of the most vocal parties in the debate over church-state issues, the extremists—on both sides.
In the book he is working on now, Free Exercise, Expensive Gas: A Church-State Road Trip, Wexler discusses the nuances of American church-state law through the stories of the people and places the laws affect. He plans to travel to the sites that sparked landmark court decisions, like the notorious Ten Commandments monument at the Texas State Capitol, to collect interviews and anecdotes to help engage his readers in the complex legal, political, and cultural questions the book will explore.
These are combustible topics, to be sure. But Wexler's goal is not to stoke the fires of us-against-them. Instead, he strives through his research to encourage people on both the secular left and the religious right “to listen more openly to what members of the other 'side' think and say about the issues that concern them.”
Though the book will chronicle a distinctly American journey, Wexler's interest in promoting dialogue about law and religion doesn't end at the U.S. border. He spoke last winter at the Conference on Law and Religion in Transitional Societies in Oslo, Norway—a conference sponsored, in part, by the Chinese government—and is currently preparing a paper and presentation for the Religion and Rule of Law in Southeast Asia conference, to be held this fall in Hanoi, Vietnam. “The U.S. church-state stuff is really interesting,” he says, “but it's a little bit small and subtle compared to the big religious issues happening in the world, like in places where people actually don't get to practice their religion.”
That's not to say that he's leaving behind the subtle, stormy—and often strange—realities of church-state law in our own incredibly religiously diverse nation. As he explains in his proposal, “I want to write a book that will entertain readers and make them laugh, not only because it makes for a more user-friendly book, but also because I think that learning to laugh at oneself makes it easier to tolerate and respect others, something that is quite crucial to achieving civil peace on issues of religion and government.” That goal, at least, is one that we can all agree on.
For more information, see www.bu.edu/law/faculty/profiles/fullcvs/full-time/wexler_j.html.
