“faith, However Defined”: Reassessing Jfs and the Judicial Conception of “religion” Aaron

In 1908, the eminent British legal scholar F.W. Maitland declared that, “Religious liberty and religious equality are complete.”1 More recent scholarship has suggested that Maitland’s declaration may have been somewhat premature.2 But the last hundred years have witnessed the “demise” of Christianity as the “dominant ideology of our academic discourses.”3 And—at least on the surface—the situation in law is much the same. But how does law conceive of “religion” itself? And does that conception reflect any religious bias or tacit suppositions that affect how legal issues involving religion are framed, analyzed, or decided? The questions are hardly idle. Legal conceptions of religion “are not mere abstract intellectual exercises. They are embedded in