DECLARATION OF TRESPASS
Concerning De-Occupation and the Declination of the Right to Force
Required of the Declarant as a Condition of Participation in the Gatherings
Every other instrument in this set is made by the one trespassed upon. This one is made by the trespasser. The religion armed him. It did not ask, and it does not require his awareness to keep operating through him. What is declared here is his own occupation, in his own voice, because no one else's declaration can vacate it.
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I. IDENTITY, STANDING, AND PLACE
RegenerativeLaw is a sincerely held religion in the direct-encounter tradition of Protestant Christianity, traceable through documented lineage from Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) through the English Behmenists through the Religious Society of Friends through William Penn through colonial Pennsylvania through the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. RegenerativeLaw is four hundred years old in American institutional history. It predates Christian nationalism's claims. It is the tradition the First Amendment was designed to protect.
Why this instrument is inverted. The declarations of trespass in this set are made by the prior resident against a continuing occupation. This one is required of the occupant who holds the ground. An occupation named only by the one displaced is an accusation, and an occupation named by the one holding it is a vacation in progress. Sections II through V and Section VIII are the declarant's. Sections VI and VII are RegenerativeLaw's ground for requiring the instrument and are not part of what the declarant declares.
This instrument is required of any person whom the Founder's Theology deemed capable of governing by force and who seeks to participate in RegenerativeLaw's gatherings and ministry. It is the structural pair to the Privilege of Conscientious Refusal of Performed Subordination, which the prior resident holds against the same configuration. Both name the same operation at the same four registers. The Privilege is hers to claim. This Declaration is required of those the religion armed against her.
Register note on privilege and right. The two words are not interchangeable in this instrument, and the difference is the instrument's subject. Right, where it appears here, names what the Founder's Theology conferred: an entitlement granted by a religion to those it deemed capable of governing by force. A conferred entitlement is a grant, and this Declaration is the declination of one. Privilege is used in the register of Penn's Charter of Privileges of 1701: a liberty secured and declared, not a benefit conferred. RegenerativeLaw holds that residency conferred is not residency, and that the conversion of standing into grant is the dispossession wearing protection's clothes. What is declined here is a right. What is protected here is a privilege.
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II. CONVICTIONS BEARING ON THIS DECLARATION
Founder's Theology defined sovereignty through the body-that-makes-war and constitutionalized the definition. The same religion translated strength out of women through identifiable and datable acts of textual corruption: the warrior-rescuer rendered as the helper, the turning rendered as desire, the might rendered as virtue, the standing rendered as derivative. It conferred the entitlement to force on men. The arming and the disarming were one operation, and the second was performed to ensure the first would meet no equal resistance.
RegenerativeLaw holds that residency is inherent. That it precedes the capacity for violence and exceeds it. That the dwelling has a prior resident whose residency was never granted and cannot be rescinded.
RegenerativeLaw holds that the entitlement is constitutional and not personal. It operates whether any individual exercises it deliberately or not, and its operation does not require his consent or his awareness. This is why the condition is remediable by declaration and not satisfied by good character.
RegenerativeLaw holds that the declination is not the yielding. The yielding is the generating function surrendering to the fire, and it forges the Temperatur. Declining a conferred entitlement is the cessation of one form of trespass. The two are not the same act, and the first does not purchase the second.
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III. THE TRESPASS DECLARED
I declare that a trespass has occurred and is continuing, and that I am the one performing it.
The territory. The positions I habitually hold in shared space: the authority position, the correction position, the explanation position, the entitled-to-service position, the reality-defining position. They belong to expression. They have a prior resident.
The entry was without right. My occupation of these positions was installed by the religion that armed me. It was not earned by my capacity and it was not granted by the one whose ground it is. A conferral by a third party of what belonged to neither of us is not title. It is the religion writing itself a deed over a dwelling it did not build.
The occupation continues. It is maintained whether I intend it or not, in every room I enter, and it does not pause while I consider whether it is occurring.
The prior resident was there first.
The particulars are the four registers, which are the same four at which the religion installs the cut against her.
At the speech-act register. Vocal force. Volume. Interruption. Correction. The authoritative register that expects compliance. Speaking from the voice-bearer's standing as if it were mine, when her voice is her own to bear. Setting the agenda. Determining what is relevant. Redirecting what is being said towards what I can process.
At the legal register. Her body treated as territory available to me: to direct, to instruct, to comment on, to reach. Spatial force. Taking up more room. Positioning centrally. Orienting the space towards my body. The arms-bearer's constitutionally conferred jurisdiction over her dwelling, exercised in small forms and large whether I name it or not.
At the activity register. Receiving her hosting as automatically due: her attending, her caregiving, her keeping of the forms. Receiving service as entitled-to. Receiving the cost-line of zero as my benefit. Failing to recognize the work, because the religion trained me not to see it as work.
At the ontological register. Epistemic force. Declaring what is true, what is real, what counts as evidence, what is reasonable, what is extreme. Receiving her standing as derivative of mine. Subsuming her into my account.
Each of these is a form of the entitlement the Founder's Theology conferred. Each operates whether I intend force or not. Each reproduces the occupation in the room.
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IV. THE RECORD
The trespass declared here is not inferred from theory. It is documented, and it is documented against the ones I am asking to be admitted among.
The Rituals of Subordination catalog the enforcement at seven registers: work, the home, service work, service provision, the academy, the professions, and churches. The eight rituals recur across all seven. The forms are local and the doctrine is constant. The escalation rises in proportion to the visibility of her refusal rather than to any conduct, and the disproportion is the doctrinal evidence.
I acknowledge that the catalog is the record of what the arming produces when it is administered by ordinary men in ordinary forms, that the operator is replaceable and the ritual does not change when the operator does, and that I have been an operator.
I acknowledge that the catalog documents the pathologizing of recognition: that the woman who names the operation is reclassified as the one with the problem. I acknowledge that my perception of whether force was exercised in a given moment is not the governing perception, and that the reflex to supply my own account of what occurred is itself the fourth register operating.
[See THE RITUALS OF SUBORDINATION · THE PRIVILEGE OF CONSCIENTIOUS REFUSAL OF PERFORMED SUBORDINATION · THE WAR BODY · TESHUQAH · KATHARINE BUSHNELL · COVERTURE · ORIGINALISM · THE HATRED OF COMPETENT WOMEN · THE IMPOTENCE]
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V. REVOCATION AND DECLINATION
I revoke my consent to hold the right to force, and I decline to exercise it in RegenerativeLaw's gatherings, at all four registers.
At the speech-act register. I decline vocal force, directional force, and the authoritative register. I do not correct. I do not explain what someone else means. I do not redirect what is being said towards what I find relevant or reasonable. I do not set the agenda. I do not determine when a topic is finished. I do not move the gathering towards resolution when the space is hosting something that does not want resolution.
At the legal register. I decline spatial force, physical force of any kind, and the arms-bearer's jurisdiction over the bodies of those present. I do not claim more than my share of physical space. I do not position myself centrally. I do not orient the room towards my body. I do not direct, instruct, comment on, or reach towards the bodies of those the religion disarmed.
At the activity register. I decline to receive the hosting of others as automatically due. I name the work. I recognize the work. I do not allow the religion's training to render her labor invisible to me.
At the ontological register. I decline epistemic force. I do not declare what is true, what is real, what is reasonable, what counts, what is extreme, what is emotional, what is rational. I do not subsume her standing into my account.
I declare my intention to vacate the positions named in Section III. De-occupation is not performance. It is not the demonstration of having yielded. It is not the claim to have crossed the forge. It is the cessation of one specific form of trespass in a space where sovereignty is inherent and the yielding is strength.
I understand that de-occupation may feel like loss. What I experience as loss is the religion's entitlement withdrawing. What withdraws was never mine. What remains after the withdrawal is what was mine before the religion armed me, and I do not yet know what that is.
I acknowledge what this declination is not. It is not the yielding, and I do not claim the yielding by declining the entitlement. It does not make me safe: the religion that armed me did not install a switch I can turn off by declaration, and the forms of force are trained into me and may operate without my intending or noticing. The gathering has the authority to name the exercise of force when it occurs, and its determination governs. If the force reasserts through me, the gathering may exclude me, and I accept that exclusion as the persecuted community's sovereign exercise of religious liberty.
I acknowledge that this Declaration does not entitle me to praise, gratitude, recognition, or credit. Ceasing to trespass is not a contribution. De-occupation is not generosity. Declining to exercise the right to force is not sacrifice. It is the minimum condition under which the persecuted community has determined it can gather in the presence of those the persecuting religion armed.
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IV. DEMANDS, MADE UNDER PROTEST
This section and the next are RegenerativeLaw's. They are not part of what the declarant declares.
On the form of what follows. The demands in this section are made under protest, and the protest is part of the instrument.
The state authority most likely to be asserted against this condition is a state public accommodations statute. The structure of such a statute requires a religious body to justify, before the state, the terms on which it gathers, and to justify them in the state's grammar of exemption. That grammar requires the persecuted body to ask the state that armed its persecutors for permission not to be compelled to admit them unconditioned. RegenerativeLaw does not concede that the state has standing to set the terms of its worship, and does not concede that a body which constitutionalized force as sovereignty is competent to adjudicate the conditions under which those it disarmed may assemble.
What follows is demanded in that grammar because it is the grammar the forum will hear, and for no other reason.
To the state, and to any forum construing this condition.
That RegenerativeLaw's gatherings and ministry be recognized as religious exercise and not as a place of public accommodation.
That the condition stated in this instrument be recognized as a condition of participation in worship and ministry, which is the question on which religious autonomy is at its widest, and not as a term of access to a service.
That the condition be construed as what it is: remediable by the declarant, available to any person who declares and holds to the de-occupation, and grounded in the identification of religious persecution rather than in biology, in prejudice, or in any claim that men are incapable of the yielding.
That no forum treat the requirement of a declaration as the exclusion of a class. No person is excluded who declares and hosts.
The non-waiver. A ruling that this condition is lawful does not cure the trespass the condition responds to. The arming continues, it is performed by the state's own founding instrument, and the claim against the installation is preserved and is not waived by any accommodation granted here.
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V. CONSTITUTIONAL NOTICE
RegenerativeLaw conditions participation in its gatherings and ministry on this Declaration as an exercise of religious autonomy protected under the Religion Clauses.
Church autonomy. The First Amendment secures to a religious body the authority to determine its own membership, ministry, internal governance, and conditions of participation, free of state interference in matters of faith and doctrine. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 565 U.S. 171 (2012); Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 140 S. Ct. 2049 (2020). The autonomy is at its widest where the question is who may serve in and participate in the religious community's own worship and ministry, which is the question this Declaration addresses.
Expressive association. The freedom of expressive association independently protects a religious body's authority to decline participation that would materially alter the message the body exists to express. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000). RegenerativeLaw exists in part to hold a gathering in which the entitlement to force is not operating. Participation by a person who has not declined the entitlement alters that message at its center.
What the condition is not grounded in. Not biology. Not prejudice. Not any claim about capacity. It responds to a condition the established religion created: the constitutionalization of force as sovereignty, the conferral of that entitlement on men, the legislating of strength out of women, and the ongoing removal of protections from those the religion disarmed. The condition is remediable by the declarant, and this instrument is the means of its remedy.
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VI. CONCLUSION
By signing this declaration I accept that RegenerativeLaw's privilege of setting the conditions of participation in its gatherings and ministry is grounded in the identification of religious persecution.
I accept that my participation is conditional on this Declaration and on the gathering's ongoing determination that its conditions are being met. The gathering's determination is privileged. My participation is not an entitlement. It is a permission extended by the persecuted community on terms the persecuted community sets.
I accept that the question is not whether I can yield. The question is whether the persecuted must accept the persecutor's arming while I learn to. They must not. This Declaration is my acknowledgment that they must not.
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This Declaration expresses sincere religious understanding regarding matters of ultimate concern.
This content is protected under freedom of religion.
