A few years ago I visited Nicaragua as part of a program sponsored by my university. We traveled by bus to the coffee country outside of Matagalpa and met with members of the Union of Organized Women of Yasica Sur, in a community center the women had built in a hollow beside the road. The president of the group described how thirty years ago, she and a small group of women organized to improve the supply of drinking water for their children. Over time, the women moved from providing water to providing schools and bridges, and then affordable medical care and medicines. The organization now has about one thousand members and is one of the most effective in the region. Yet the needs are still great.

Many of the women had walked for over an hour in their best clothes to visit with us. As we listened to them, I heard also my aunts and grandmothers, who did not look so very different from these women, who were just as smart, determined and hard-working, and whose lives were not so very different, except their crop was not coffee: it was sugarcane and pineapple. The sense of connection was shortlived, however. There was a question-and-answer period, and the president asked us what we did at home. One of my colleagues shared she was an environmental engineer, who specialized in lakes. The president smiled and said, “We could use you here.” Then I told her I taught international law. The president listened for the translation, regarded me and said, “I am not educated. Your work is too high for me.” So much for my solidarity with the Union of Organized Women of Yasica Sur.

In democratic countries where the law might be influenced by religious communities, family law cases can present one of the most sensitive and complex challenges. Religious laws governing personal status and the supervision of family relations are vital components of many religions and, in some cases, crucial to the cultural survival of the religious community. However, the family laws of some religions are discriminatory towards women, same-sex couples, people of other religions, and other groups. Currently, there is heated political and scholarly debate about the tension between the norms of multiculturalism, which dictate that religious communities be allowed to preserve their values and culture, including through autonomy over family law, and liberal norms prohibiting the discrimination that religious family law can perpetrate.

One of the best known liberal advocates for restricting discriminatory cultural practices of minority groups was Susan Moller Okin. Okin maintained that many cultural minorities are more patriarchal than the surrounding culture and that the female members of the patriarchal culture might be much better off were the culture into which they were born to become extinct, if, that is, it could not be altered so as to uphold women's equality. She pointed to religious personal law as one example of a sphere in which patriarchal cultures strive to maintain autonomy at the cost of women's and girls' freedom and basic rights. Consistent with her view, nation states should not give legal autonomy over family matters to patriarchal minorities unless these minorities reform their religious laws so as not to discriminate against or impair the rights of women and girls.

In October 1846, the men and women of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis (African Church) met to consider whether they would remain with the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) or align with the recently-formed Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS). Two years earlier, in 1844, amid growing conflict over the question of slavery within the national Methodist Church, its General Conference had adopted a Plan of Separation that provided for the withdrawal of the southern Methodists and the creation of their own ecclesiastical government. The Plan provided that each Border State congregation would have the right to determine for itself by a vote of the majority with which of the two churches it would affiliate.

After the southern conferences had organized the new MECS in May 1845, the trustees of the all-white Fourth Street Methodist Church (Fourth Street Church), whose quarterly conference exercised nominal authority over the African Church, informed the black congregants that they could retain their house of worship only if they voted to join the southern Methodists. Throwing caution to the wind, and putting at risk a decade-and-a-half of patient efforts to achieve formal congregational independence within the Methodist Church, the black congregants voted decisively, by a 110 to 7 margin, to remain affiliated with the Northern Conference.

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Samuel Brown Wylie, an Irish-Presbyterian minister of a group of Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians known as the Covenanters, and William Findley, a United States Congressman and also a descendant of the Covenanters, debated the Constitution's compatibility with Christianity and the proper bounds of religious uniformity in the newly founded Republic. Their respective views were diametrically opposed, yet each managed to borrow from different aspects of earlier political traditions held in common while also laying the groundwork for contrasting political positions which would more fully develop in the decades to come. And more than a few times their views seem to criss-cross, supporting contrary trajectories from what one might expect.

Their narrative, in many ways strange, challenges certain “Christian” understandings of early America and the Constitution, yet it also poses a few problems for attempts at a coherent theory of secularity, natural law, and the common good in our own day.

Samuel Brown Wylie is an obscure figure in American history. As a Covenanter, Wylie was forced to immigrate to America due to his involvement in the revolutionary United-Irishmen in Ulster. After finding it impossible to unite with other Presbyterians in Pennsylvania, Wylie became the first minister in the “Reformed Presbyterian Church of the United States,” which would also be called “the Synod of the Reformed Presbyterian Church.” According to his great-grandson, Wylie also went on to become the vice-Provost of the University of Pennsylvania.