In a landscape strewn with cant, slogans, and cheap certainties, a lucid new essay reminds us that religion and law are not combatants but co-architects of our public conscience.
At ReligiousLiberty.TV, our mission has always been to foster thoughtful dialogue where rights of conscience, belief, and expression intersect with public life. We believe that law and faith traditions are not only compatible but mutually illuminating. In an era where legal disputes over religion often become battlegrounds for deeper cultural anxieties, we seek to bridge gaps not by flattening differences, but by encouraging principled understanding across them. Perry Dane’s essay on the 40th Anniversary of the Journal of Law and Religion resonates with this ethos: it affirms that respectful engagement between secular law and religious conviction is not only possible but essential for a society that values pluralism, justice, and peace. Through careful reflection and open exchange, we aim to carry forward this work—of learning from one another and building a framework of mutual respect. It inspires Founders’ First Freedom’s work with the Nootbaar Institute at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law and our writings and legal advocacy.
Perry Dane, Professor of Law at Rutgers and a scholar long engaged with the moral dimensions of legal systems, has written an essay that deserves your time. His reflection, published in 2025 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Law and Religion, is not a tribute to nostalgia or institutional memory. It is an urgent act of intellectual preservation. It insists that religion and law, when approached with care, can still help us think about what binds communities together and what pulls them apart.
If you are the sort who is genuinely curious about how societies cohere, or fail to, you will want to read Dane’s essay. If you are not that sort, then by all means retreat into your algorithm-fed prejudices, your ideological purity, and your suspicion of any complexity that cannot be reduced to a hashtag. For the rest of us, this is a brisk and bracing plunge into the deep waters where law, religion, and public life swirl, clash, and occasionally clarify one another.
Dane reminds us, firmly and with evidence, that religion has always had something to say to law, and vice versa.
Dane is no pamphleteer. He does not plead for the inclusion of religion in legal thought as a concession to tradition or cultural sentiment. Instead, he reminds us, firmly and with evidence, that religion has always had something to say to law, and vice versa. Both are systems of interpretation. Both claim authority. Both ask us not simply what we can do, but what we ought to do. And both, when honest, are in dialogue with the same crises: a loss of moral confidence, the flattening of complex values into slogans, and a creeping despair that often manifests as political extremism.
The essay opens not in abstraction but in memory: Yale Law School in the 1980s, where Dane and his colleague Burke Marshall taught a course on religion and law. There were no textbooks. They made their own. In an environment where religion was largely treated with what Dane calls indifference, this small act was radical. The Journal of Law and Religion, launched around the same time, was radical too – not because it proselytized, but because it refused to ignore.
From its first volume, the journal welcomed Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Protestant perspectives on law. It published pieces on biblical atonement and modern criminal law, the role of lawyers in Jewish ethics, the authority of the Buddha over monastic order, and the political views of Reinhold Niebuhr. This was not ecumenism as decoration. It was an assertion that law without moral inquiry is arid, and religion without legal consciousness is self-indulgent.
Dane’s diagnosis of the present moment is exact and unflinching. We now live in a time, he says, when half the country seems to want to accuse their fellow citizens of trying to impose a theocracy and the other half seems to have little interest in responding to the accusation. What a ghastly reduction. In place of genuine moral engagement, we get rehearsed panic. In place of legal reasoning, we get loyalty tests. The Journal of Law and Religion does not enter this circus. It watches, records, thinks, and speaks in full sentences.
In place of genuine moral engagement, we get rehearsed panic. In place of legal reasoning, we get loyalty tests.
Here is Dane at his clearest: secular law and religion are engaged in an encounter with each other, trying to make sense of each other, each trying to overcome the solipsism to which every normative system is otherwise susceptible. This is the sort of sentence that should be printed on a slip of paper and handed out in classrooms, courtrooms, and pulpits alike. Not because it is pious, but because it is true.
And it is in this spirit, not of faith as blind obedience but as intellectual ambition, that Dane urges us to view the law-religion dialogue not as a battle but as a kind of co-authorship. Religion need not vanish from the public square, nor must it dominate it. What it must do, and what law must do, is reckon with each other honestly, seriously, and above all humbly.
So if you are tired of reading policy papers that mistake cynicism for realism, or manifestos that mistake certainty for wisdom, I commend this essay to you. It is called In a Time of Crisis, and it is published by Cambridge University Press under the auspices of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
You may download it here: https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2025.5. I suggest you do.