The two sides are pitching this case in different ways, but the issues themselves are far more complex. This gets into the “Citizens United” case that established that corporations are people.
- Christianity Today
- Slate
- When Corporations get saved
- Mother Jones: Are you there God? It’s me, Hobby Lobby
The most well-publicized and controversial element of the case is Hobby Lobby’s assertion that a for-profit corporation can have the constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion. It’s a strange notion, but the court opened the door to this argument when it ruled in Citizens United that a corporation has First Amendment rights. So now the justices will have to consider whether corporations can pray, believe in an afterlife, and thus, be absolved of ACA’s contraception mandate. But that’s hardly the only thorny issue the court has to grapple with.
To summarize a complex argument, Polanyi (and more recently, Brad Gregory in his masterful work, The Unintended Reformation) described how economic arrangements were “disembedded” from particular cultural and religious contexts in which economic arrangements were understood to serve those moral ends—and hence, that limited not only actions, but even the understanding that economic actions could be considered to be undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities. As Polanyi describes, economic exchange so ordered placed a priority on the main ends of social and religious life—the sustenance of community order and flourishing of families within that order. The understanding of an economy based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing individuals was largely non-existent, and a “market” was understood to be a part of the whole, an actual physical place within that social order, not an autonomous, even theoretical space for the exchange of abstracted utility maximers.
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