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August 6 - August 19, 2025
To a large extent, the ceremony of September 11, 2011, exemplified the possibilities of a new vision for secular America, wherein both freedom of and freedom from religion are granted as much space as possible. Under the Bloomberg protocols, no state-sanctioned clergy or prayer was included during the memorial. Yet those citizens who wished to express their faith were completely at liberty to do so.
Secularism is a political philosophy, which, at its core, is preoccupied with, and often deeply suspicious of, any and all relations between government and religion. It translates that preoccupation into various strategies of governance, all of which seek to balance two necessities: (1) the individual citizen’s need for freedom of, or freedom from, religion, and (2) a state’s need to maintain order.
In country after country the pattern is the same: religious traditionalists bring forth their basketfuls and quivers of progeny. Meanwhile, birth rates among more secular populations are stagnating or declining.
Secularists who have taken note of this evangelical activism feel a sense of dread. They fear that this return of the sacred will transmogrify into the reign of the sacred. They fret that such lawful groups are only tactically and temporarily lawful. That is to say, once they achieve power they will dissolve the secular structures and safeguards that stand as the crowning glory of the American political experiment.
Such debates, and the cacophonous buzz they generate, draw focus away from a crucial truism: the decisive cultural conflict in this country is not between nonbelievers and believers; the real hot ideological action is occurring among members of the same faith. Revivalists abhor not only secularism, but also what they perceive to be its handmaiden: liberal theology and its moderate religious views.
If American secularism was to have a Mount Rushmore enshrining its grandees, where might we situate that peculiar hypothetical monument—Washington Square Park in Manhattan? Whose grizzled countenances would appear on it? We nominate Martin Luther, Roger Williams, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison for this honor. These five men are the major builders and heroes of the American secular vision that has left its imprint on our politics and culture.
These rudimentary ideas include a warning about the dangers of bringing religion and governmental power into proximity, the celebration of religious freedom, the emphasis on the need for social order to ensure proper communion with the divine, and the idea that all religious groups must be equal in the eyes of the state.
Rather, secularism is more or less what most people in liberal democracies—religious and nonreligious—already believe to be true and just. Many groups, be they made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, or nonbelievers, are already speaking the poetry of secularism. The trick lies in getting the believers to see themselves, in some small but significant way, as secular or secularish. Only when that occurs will it be possible to unite them in action.
Freedom of and from religion are precious values. Peace among the faithful and the faithless is the hallmark of the just society. The secularish virtues of moderation and toleration are civilized graces worthy of being rehabilitated and defended. And the alternatives to secularism now bandied about by American Revivalists need to be strenuously resisted lest the nation fall away from those principles that have rendered it prosperous, tranquil, and strong.
Secularism is a political philosophy concerned with the best way to govern complex, religiously pluralistic societies. It aims to strike an extraordinarily delicate balance. On the one hand, it wishes to ensure the existence of a stable social order free of religiously themed strife. On the other, it aspires to guarantee citizens as much religious freedom and freedom to be nonreligious as possible.
Luther craved order, but Locke adds an intriguing new twist: nothing threatens order like religion.
They knew of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), during which Protestants and Catholics devastated each other and Germany to boot. Though the body count is difficult to ascertain, the figure is plausibly set at eight million.
And all drew a similar lesson: societies tend to rip themselves apart when the power of a religious institution is aligned with that of the government.
Secularism is not in any way opposed to religion.42 Rather, it does not approve of certain types of relations between religion and government.
Pope Benedict XVI reflects on the genesis of the secular state. It arose, he argues, by “declaring that God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or to the democratic formation of the public will.”
If toleration is a Christ-like attribute (and orthodoxy a subjective position), then a just polity must set itself the goal of respecting the conscience of every citizen. Subjects cannot be forced to practice religion or worship God in ways that violate their convictions.
Put simply, a religious person in a secular state cannot act on her beliefs, no matter how heartfelt they may be, if the resulting actions contravene the laws of the land.
What Locke is saying is truly remarkable. Governments cannot force religion on subjects even if the democratic will of the majority has authorized the powers that be to do precisely that. On certain issues the will of the people is to be ignored. It doesn’t matter, for example, if the majority wants mandatory prayer in public school. As for that Revivalist mentioned earlier, with all of his damning statistics about what the people want, the secularist cordially invites him to place himself either at the back of, or under, the bus.
But it is undeniable that American secularism forces Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and especially evangelicals (whose theological affinities now lie more with Calvin) to make significant concessions.
Last of all, secularism provides ordinary citizens with essential civil rights. It ensures that, as bearers of a faith or no faith, they are all equal before the law. It guarantees that the state will never interfere in their lawful religious worship. It has the added benefit of creating order—the very order that all the Founders believed was conducive to the contemplation of God.
Cognizant of the fact that schoolbook decisions made in the Texas market will influence many other states in the Union, the board member Cynthia Dunbar declaimed, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Thus when in 1985 Justice William Rehnquist, in Wallace v. Jaffree, denied that Madison viewed the government as needing to remain neutral on the merits of “religion and irreligion,” he was correct.54 The nonreligious have always had to fight for the right to be considered equal in America. This has much to do with the Constitution’s inability to take them into consideration. A legal theorist put it aptly: “France is suspicious of the true believer. The United States is suspicious of the non-believer.”55
In any case, Holyoake refined and defended his thought about secularism across more than a half-century of published work. His initial comment from 1851, referenced earlier, maintained that “secular” connoted “principles of conduct, apart from spiritual considerations.”
“Secularism is the study of promoting human welfare by material means; measuring human welfare by the utilitarian rule, and making the service of others a duty of life. Secularism relates to the present existence of man . . . [it is] a series of principles intended for the guidance of those who find Theology indefinite, or inadequate, or deem it unreliable.”
Secularism is a philosophy about governance that posits a church and a state; it works with these two basic units of analysis. It cannot tolerate the lack of toleration witnessed among militant atheists any more than it can tolerate the similar characteristics among Revivalists. It is very clear that extreme atheists would rather that the church not exist, and this makes their inclusion in the secular camp problematic.
Movement secularists and atheists wildly overstate their numbers.9 Yet they must surely recognize that their political clout is limited, if not nonexistent.
Perhaps this accounts for the hyperbolic claims made by self-identified secular leaders and intellectuals. They reason that although they lack political power, they retain a massive base of sympathizers—27 million, 29.5 million—who can be mobilized. But the truth is less reassuring: secularism as currently advocated lacks both political power and a massive base of sympathizers.
The Supreme Court has moved away from the old separationist orthodoxy. The shift was symbolically marked by Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in the Wallace v. Jaffree case of 1985. There, the soon-to-be chief justice would pronounce the words that would trigger the steady demise of the old order: “The ‘wall of separation between church and state,’” he avowed, “is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”
The Protestant architects of secularism conceived of the world in terms of individuals. It was the solitary human being, not the community, who composed the fundamental unit of political analysis and moral redemption. The architects were deeply suspicious and mistrustful of religious majorities. All sought to protect the individual conscience from the tyrannical impulses of such a majority. The Enlightenment architects went a step further. They endeavored to safeguard not only the individual, but also the state from these threats.
Locke and Luther erected a shelter for freedom of conscience. Accordingly, both defended the rights of dissenters and heretics against the power of the governing authorities. In so doing, they endowed the individual—even individuals espousing unorthodox beliefs—with protections against external coercion.
A high priority on secularism’s to-do list should be gathering its intellectuals together for the purposes of grand strategy. Their assignment: to figure out how to combat the problem of lawful Revivalists who use democratic means to render our society less secular and eventually, by extension, less democratic. The answer they come up with can’t involve using the courts to impose their agenda. The judicial strategy is no longer viable.
The Bush-Obama faith-based offices are legitimated by another variant, a reading of the Constitution known as accommodationism. To give a law textbook definition, accommodationists “argue that the government may aid religion as long as it does not do so to the advantage of one religion over another . . . aid must be given in a nonpreferential manner; what is available to one religion must be available to all.”27
It is, in fact, likely that many had no opposition whatsoever to state establishments. Some scholars suggest that the main purpose of prohibiting federal establishments was to ensure the right of states to make their own decisions about the proper place of religion in public life. The feasibility of that interpretation might be gleaned from the curious fact that seven of fourteen states had establishments after the Constitution was ratified in 1791.39
As for the White House’s receptivity to separationism, think of President Obama’s performance at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2011. When a Democrat delivers a twenty-two-minute address about his personal faith, drops half a dozen scriptural references along the way, and declaims, “I came to know Jesus Christ for myself and embrace Him as my lord and savior”—all we can say is that the sixties are over, man!
As a first step toward alleviating secularism’s chronic shortage of supporters, let’s advance a big-tent definition of what it means to be a secularist: A secularist may be a believer or a nonbeliever, secular and/or secularish, but always someone who rejects religious establishment. She or he maintains that a good society is one whose government permits its citizens the maximal possible degree of freedom of religion and freedom from religion while maintaining order. A secularist is flexible as to how the government may accomplish this goal and is thereby willing to consider options ranging
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There can be meaningful understanding between religious minorities and nonbelievers under the umbrella of secularism, as was pointed out by the Dalai Lama in a speech in Tokyo in 2006: “Secularism does not mean rejection of all religions. It means respect for all religions and human beings including non-believers.”52
The case of libertarians—a group that sits squarely on the secular spectrum—is instructive, reminding secularists how a political movement can keep its feet in two rivers. The Libertarian Party’s website reasons, “We favor the freedom to engage in or abstain from any religious activities that do not violate the rights of others.”
Indeed, one libertarian scholar advances the argument that “social harmony is enhanced by removing religion from the sphere of politics.”55 Another points out that “libertarians are not for or against religion; they oppose government policies that favor religion, in part because this means government must define what constitutes a religion. This will inevitably favor the status quo at the expense of smaller, newer religions, and at the expense of individual liberty.”
here is the definition that can move secularism forward: Secularism is a political philosophy that, at its core, is preoccupied with, and often deeply suspicious of, any and all relations between government and religion. It translates that preoccupation into various strategies of governance, all of which seek to balance two necessities: the individual citizen’s need for freedom of, or freedom from, religion and the state’s need to maintain order.
At this teachable moment let us make a constructive response: the ideal secular state is not an establishment, but a referee. Its job is not to cater to a particular religion’s worldview, but to make sure that no single religious worldview gains unfair advantage over any other through exploiting the apparatus of the state (for purposes of fairness, atheism or secular humanism could be categorized, in this context, as a “religion” as well).
But as infuriating and irresponsible as such activities are, they are not illegal. Public servants have a right to express religious sentiments in public. The truth is, not a whole lot can be done about that. There is no constitutional sanction against Obama or Perry, as private citizens, doing God talk. Interestingly, the Freedom from Religion Foundation tried to prevent Obama from authorizing a national day of prayer. The Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Wisconsin snippily dismissed the foundation’s case, arguing that “hurt feelings differ from legal injury.”
