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God Is As God Does: Law, Anthropology, And The Definition Of "Religion", James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

This Article first discusses the judicial deliberations upon the definition of religion. That discussion adopts a chronological sequence because, in legal matters, that is the one that counts.

It can be a tedious, but not particularly difficult task to summarize the legal struggle to define religion. The strategy applied to evaluate the product of that struggle is intellectual triangulation, whereby bearings from two fixed positions are used to specify that of that third. By analogy, the correct definition of "religion" can be identified by finding where the legal efforts intersect with an independent sighting of the same target. Where this …