The Iron Cage of "Obsessive Liberalism": Rethinking US Religious Freedom Law

This paper argues that, under what I call "obsessive liberalism," religious practices will be protected in proportion to their perceived similarity to those of the mainstream.  Obsessive liberalism, I argue, imagines a universal liberal subject, from whom all rights of the individual and group derive and who ought to hold rights exactly equal to all other liberal subjects.  Under obsessive liberalism, moreover, the solution to liberalism's problems is, always, more liberalism.  Identifying examples of obsessive liberalism in the extant literature, this paper seeks after a framework based in dual values of equity and, in some cases, of rights springing from peoples, not from the individual liberal subjects that make them up.  In either case, such a framework holds the potential to make possible the cognizability of non-protestantized religious practices and beliefs under the law, leaning in particular upon the example of Native peoples living under US settler law.