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In a recent essay on the relevance of Jacques Lacan's work for theological discourse, William James Earle (1989) raises the question of “reason and religion since Freud”:
How can we, this far into the discussion, find anything that does not have the form of ever more insistent repetition, like the interminable rehashing of frozen positions in a family quarrel? Put the problem … another way: What would make the disagreement between religious and nonreligious people tractable if it isn't tractable already? (p. 148)
In the fields of law and politics, the disagreement is not tractable, now as ever. Religious activists claim to be marginalized by an increasingly secular culture, whereas the nonreligious point to the enormous potential — and historical reality — of religion as an exemplar of marginalization.
As Earle explains, religion was suspect in psychoanalysis from the very beginning — Freud was “Enlightened” regarding the historical tension between faith and reason (p. 136). From that perspective, from “the outside, faith may seem like a reaction formation to … established knowledge [such that] the nondisappearance of religion … occasions surprise” (p. 139). Yet religion remains, and social scientists, observing the phenomena of the religious Right as well as religiously inspired ideals of economic justice that each nowadays affect politics (perhaps differently), have apparently renewed