Thanks to Eugene and coconspirators for having me here this week writing about my recent work on church autonomy law. I have a new paper (forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review) about the limits of the church autonomy doctrine—responding, in part, to areas of confusion that have arisen in lower courts applying church autonomy doctrine. I'll use some future blog posts this week to get into those issues. Before getting into that, I want to step back to reflect on what's going on in the field of "church autonomy doctrine" and how this issue has risen in significance in the last decade.
The "church autonomy doctrine" is a legal principle of protection for the internal self-governance of religious organizations. (You can find a longer version of this explanation, with more citations, in the law review article.) Church autonomy doctrine protects religious institutions from state control, ensuring that religious organizations can control their own beliefs and internal affairs, or ensuring that the state does not establish a religion. The basics are fairly intuitive: Americans don't want the state telling religious bodies whom it can or can't retain as a minister, rabbi, or imam, or endorsing the theological distinctives of one side of a church split when the competing factions disagree about what counts as the "true" form of a given faith.
The church autonomy doctrine applies to all religious institutions, not just churches. While it could be termed "religious autonomy" (or more precisely, autonomy for religious institutions), "church autonomy" remains the most used term in the courts for the body of law that has developed about the internal affairs of religious organizations.
