Neither does tolerance or pluralism. The Court's free exercise jurisprudence has been subjected to a great deal of critical commentary, because the Court has shifted the level of scrutiny often, making the doctrine appear chaotic. The view, however, that the Court's free exercise doctrine is in disarray is shortsighted. If one takes the long view, a central decisionmaking framework, or paradigm appears, which runs through all of the Court's free exercise cases. The Court's threshold inquiry in the free exercise cases is whether the religious interest at issue is belief or conduct.
Belief is to be accorded absolute protection but conduct is subordinate to the state's law.
This Article argues that the Court defines belief and conduct and relates the two terms in distinctly Pauline ways. The use of these Pauline categories to protect solitary belief but not religious conduct compromises the Court's capacity to foster and protect the wide variety of religious experience in this country. Indeed, at a theoretical level, the Court's secularized version of the Pauline relationship between faith and works under the law should protect no religious interest from regulation by the state. The larger Pauline vision, on the other hand, envisions the religious life following conversion as a dialectical relationship between faith and works of love and provides an example of a way of envisioning the heart of religion that could vitalize the Court's free exercise jurisprudence. It proceeds from the assumption that we cannot fully understand or successfully critique the Court's jurisprudence in ignorance of its implicit world view.