I cannot think of anything more self-defeating than a “religious exemption” enshrined in law.
Anyone who professes any religion – anyone who cares about any religion – should really, really, really not want the government chiming in on what qualifies as legitimate orthodoxy or orthopraxy. That is a task for your priest or your prophet or your guiding angel, not for an agent of the secular state; and if you let the state’s agent make the call, at some point you’re going to find yourself very unhappy with what he has to say.
Anything that a believer should be allowed to do, in the name of his faith, is something that anyone should be allowed to do for any reason.
Think the real matter is more practical, the law enforcement apparatus has gotta navigate between Ruby Ridge and Aum Shinrikyo.
Religious exemptions are more often about religious people demanding potentially-costly accomodations (that people *not* of that religion don’t demand because they don’t care), rather than demanding the right to do something that is otherwise illegal because of their religion. For instance, it’s perfectly legal to wear a hijab, regardless of whether or not you are a sincere Muslim, the law doesn’t care. But if you want to wear a hijab and also *not get fired from your job* for wearing unusual headgear, you have to invoke the body of law that restricts the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of religion - and that’s when the secular state has to determine whether wearing a hijab is legitimate-enough orthopraxy for the anti-discrimination law to apply.
One exception I can think of is peyote laws, which really did entail specific native american religious groups asking for an otherwise-illegal drug to be made legal in specific religious contexts (or how wine for communion was one of the several types of alcoholic drink that was legal during prohibition). But of course prohibition of alcohol was a failure and there are good civil libertarian arguments for making recreational peyote legal too.
The case of the Amish is interesting - they successfully lobbied the government to not have to pay the social security tax, on the grounds that their religion treats social security as a type of haram lottery, and that they would take care of their own community’s aged. Assuming you think that social security is a good idea on its own merits, you probably *don’t* want anyone to be able to get out of paying the tax for it by saying they have a religious objection to it. It’s an actuarial system that works only because most of the population pays the tax! But does that mean that the exception the Amish carved out is unfair? Unfair to people who have legitimate anti-social-security beliefs but are less good at lobbying than the Amish were? Unfair to people who have no beliefs against social-security and do pay the tax themselves? Unfair to trolls whose made up ad-hoc anti-social-security belief should be considered as valid as the Amish’s in the eyes of the secular state?Religious exemptions used to be popular among both the left and the right. More recently, much of the left has become suspicious of them, largely because of how the right has mobilized them in order to avoid following what they see as a leftist social agenda, and also partly due to concerns that religious exemptions are a form of religious supremacism that privileges religious conviction over secular worldviews.
In the last several years, the legal/political philosophy literature on religious exemptions has exploded in size. Now there are a ton of articles about many topics, e.g.: the “sincerity test” (”Is there something messed up about the courts/laws deciding whether someone’s religious claim is sincere? Does the practice of religious exemptions require the sincerity test, or can the sincerity test be avoided while still doing religious exemptions? If we discard the sincerity test, is there still a way to exclude troll religions e.g. Flying Spaghetti Monster religious exemption claimants? If not, is that okay?”), concerns about fairness/unfairness and burdens (to the religious claimants and/or to non-claimants who are affected), and many more topics.
The question “Does defending religious exemptions imply that there should be analogous secular/moral exemptions?” has become especially big.
Also there are questions on what, if anything, justifies religious exemptions. Some philosophers think the basis is mainly the “futility” argument: “Religious exemptions are sometimes necessary not due to intrinsic concerns of justice or religious freedom, but simply because so many religious people won’t obey this particular law, so it’s futile to try to enforce it.“ But other philosophers think religious exemptions, and perhaps also analogous secular/moral exemptions, have intrinsic weight.
I don’t know for sure if there are articles about whether there’s something objectionable about having the courts decide that some religious claims are “properly orthodox” or “official” (or suchlike) enough to qualify for an exemption while other religious claims aren’t. If there aren’t any such articles yet, I expect there soon will be– that’s a natural concern to raise, and it deserves to be taken seriously!
Many phil articles (not sure how many are readable w/o a university web connection):
The Impossibility of Religious Freedom is all about
whether there’s something objectionable about having the courts decide that some religious claims are “properly orthodox” or “official” (or suchlike) enough to qualify for an exemption while other religious claims aren’t.
It’s not very good, but it certainly represents a literature trying to grapple with the topic.