Scopes of religious exemption: A normative map

Religious exemptions take a variety of forms, with distinct shapes and normative underpinnings. This chapter identifies eight ideal types of religious exemptions, grouped into three larger rubrics, representing different analytic and justificatory structures, to help make sense of what might otherwise seem to be mysterious discontinuities and inconsistencies. The essay suggests how the various types can illuminate each other and how surveying the sequence as a whole might say something about the relationship between religion and the state and the power of the legal imagination. The payoff is that the first, most straightforward, category of religion-based exemptions is also the most radical. Some of the other categories are tamer precisely to the extent that they introduce a wider and more complex range of values, but that the excursion in the end will necessarily come full circle to where it began, with an existential encounter between religion and the state.