ABSTRACT
Sullivan is a legally trained, religious studies scholar, and the Impossibility Thesis she develops continues to be very influential, as is evident from references to it in the essays and editorial comments contained in the Politics of Religious Freedom, and from the commendation The Impossibility of Religious Freedom has received from distinguished scholars like Philip Hamburger and Talal Assad. Since conscience, religion, or belief involve, at bottom, basic convictions about truth and rightness, they are subject, in traditional language, to the 'law of the spirit' persuasive appeals to reason, emotion, and evidence-and to the 'law of the sword'. The complaint is, at bottom, that such biasing mistakenly privileges a Protestantized understanding of religion and conscience that gives priority to highly rationalized forms of belief and ignores ritual, ceremony, and 'lived religion' in adjudicating which actions ought to be protected and accommodated.
