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Separation of church and state?
Winnifred Sullivan studies the relationship of religions to the state
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
As a scholar of comparative religion, as well as a former corporate lawyer and advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan holds a rare position in her field: She's an expert on both the U.S. legal system and the nation's many religious traditions.
After spending
the past academic year in the prestigious fellowship program at the
National Humanities Center in North Carolina, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
began her first semester on campus earlier this month as an associate
professor and director of the new Law and Religion Program in the Law
School.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI
An associate professor in the UB Law School, Sullivan joined the UB faculty in 2006, but began her first semester on campus this month after spending the past academic year in the prestigious National Humanities Center fellowship program in North Carolina.
"Questions of the public role of religion and the relationship of religions to the state are all such important issues right now," says Sullivan, who directs the university's newly established Law and Religion Program. "Religious studies for a long time were pretty obscure. It's now partly because of the religious revival of the past 25-30 years—and growing awareness of the importance of religion—that people who study religion find the books and articles they write have a certain immediate political currency. This is particularly true, of course, for people who study Islam and fundamentalist Christianity."
Sullivan's interests are not limited to only one religious tradition, however, but concern all religions represented in the United States, particularly conflicts between religion and law in modern life. "Religion's changing and government's changing," she says, pointing to the rising role of government in people's lives and immigration's impact on religious plurality in the U.S. "The result," she says, "is a messier sort of interaction."
Part of the problem is confusion about the government's original stance on government and religion, she says, noting that the commonly cited phrase "separation of church and state" is not actually in the Constitution, but rather originated in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson.
"This highlights the fact that there's a difference between popular understandings of the Constitution and formal legal understandings," Sullivan says. "Many [legal historians] believe that the sort of separation that many people see as foundational is something created in the 19th century."
Sullivan maintains that confusion also arises because most judges and lawyers possess no advanced religious training. "They rely on their particular Sunday-school training," she notes, "or popular understandings of religion." Rulings on religion are frequently inconsistent as a result, she says, or employ legal language that's influenced by a judge's particular religious upbringing.
"Finding a language in which to talk about religion that is not the language of a particular religious tradition is a very challenging project," she adds.
Sullivan says one of her main goals as an educator is to share her expertise on law and religion in order to overcome these problems—a challenge she has met head-on, not only in conferences and classrooms, but also in the courtroom as an expert witness in trials from Florida to Wisconsin. The most recent of these experiences came last year in a district court case in Iowa that challenged the constitutionality of a faith-based, prison rehabilitation program operating in a state penitentiary.
"I think of myself as working ethnographically," says Sullivan, whose writings regularly come out of these court experiences. "The three books I've written so far have been very close readings of trials and the ways in which religion is constructed in those contexts."
Her latest book, "The Impossibility of Religious Freedom" (Princeton University Press, 2005), for example, extrapolates larger points about religious freedom in the United States from a court case in Southern Florida in which local residents fought a challenge to their placing religious tributes on public grave sites. A book she is writing that was inspired by the Iowa prison case is due out in 2008.
The first step on Sullivan's career path in academia came after she left her job as a lawyer in Chicago in the mid-1980s. "My law firm wouldn't let me work part time after I had my kids, so I quit," she says, noting that attitudes about mothers in the workplace have changed a lot in the past 20 years. Her sons, George and Lloyd, today are a legislative aide and a college student, respectively. Her husband, Barry Sullivan, is a partner in a law firm in Chicago.
Sullivan says a personal interest in religious issues prompted her to pursue a doctorate in religion from the University of Chicago, from which she previously had earned a law degree. Starting in 1994, Sullivan spent six years as an assistant professor at Washington and Lee University, and then five years as senior lecturer and dean of students at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Now at UB, Sullivan is teaching a course this semester titled "Religion and the Constitution," as well as completing the manuscript for the book project. "As with many people who write and teach," she says, "I think the two are intimately related. Teaching helps one think through what one learns from one's students." She also notes she's eager to forge closer connections with other scholars interested in law and religion, of which, she says, there is a concentration at UB.
"There's a group of people here who are interested in these topics," Sullivan says, noting that she hopes to organize this loose affiliation of experts and courses into the formalized program in law and religion. "There are people here trained in anthropology and sociology and history who have an interest in religion," she adds, "and that's something distinctive to UB. Not all law schools would be as hospitable to this kind of conversation—it's one of the reasons people want to come here."
In her case, Sullivan says coming to Western New York is a return of sorts. In the early 1970s, she spent several years in Ithaca working as a full-time costume designer after graduating from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in theater arts. Today, she resides in the Elmwood Avenue neighborhood of Buffalo.
"I'm from Chicago," Sullivan adds. "I like Midwestern cities, and cities generally. Buffalo seems in a way very familiar to me."