Religious and Legal Others: Identity, Law, and Representation in American Christian Right and Neopagan Cultural Conflicts

Conservative Evangelicals and Neopagans in the United States have long engaged each other in public struggles over religious authority and power. This paper argues that these struggles are defined by their competing, and often fluid, interpretations of legal and constitutional norms concerning religious freedom. The result of these processes is a ‘polymorphous discourse’ whereby each religious community seeks to establish command over this range of ideas and issues in order to curtail or delegitimise the activities of the other. This ‘strategy of alterity’ shapes the way these communities understand each other, how they narrate American religious history, and how they experience political order. By balancing theoretical inquiry with case studies of local instances of Neopagan/Evangelical conflict, this paper seeks to contribute to enlarged understandings of contemporary religio-political conflict in the United States.