The Need for a Law of Church and Market

The study of law and religion has tended to focus on debates over “church and state.” The central question has been how the law ought to structure the relationship between religion and the government. Many of the legal conflicts over religion, however, take place in a commercial context. They are thus not simply puzzles of how God and Caesar should interact. They also present the question of how the law should structure the relationship between God and Mammon. The exploration of co-religionist commerce by Professors Michael Helfand and Barak Richman is important because it places the law of church and market at center stage. Rather than viewing the intersection of commerce and religion as simply one more stage for church-state conflicts, they focus on the legal regulation of religious commerce. Their work reveals the dangers of uncritically applying law developed in other contexts to religious commerce. In so doing, they demonstrate the need for explicit reflection on the proper relationship between religion and the market and how the law should structure that relationship.