Where Two or More Are Gathered, the First Amendment Should Protect Them

Why voluntary organizations deserve the same rights to speech, religion, and assembly as individuals.

The Christian tradition has a lot to say about community. People weren’t made to be solitary individualists. Aristotle may have been the first to describe man as a “social animal,” but he was not the first to recognize our inherent sociability.

The Scriptures describe God creating human beings to have fellowship with him. As God himself has eternal fellowship within the triune Godhead, human beings are also designed to have fellowship with each other. As God proclaimed in the Garden of Eden, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Over the course of biblical history, God ordains a series of social institutions: marriage, family, state, church. Of course there is an important place for the individual in Christian anthropology. But the point is that the individual exists—is created to exist—within a rich set of social interactions, institutions, and associations.

Mainstream contemporary political and legal theory, by contrast, tends to operate within a more constrained social landscape. The focus is on the relationship between the individual and the state. By comparison, non-state social groups get short shrift.

Several scholars have been working to change that, including Luke C. Sheahan, a political theorist at Duquesne University. Sheahan’s new book, Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism, makes the case for the importance of voluntary associations in our political landscape. Rather than the dichotomy of individual and state, Sheahan offers an account of society with three components: individual, state, and association. He argues that the American judiciary in particular has failed to recognize the importance of associations. Finally, he ...