The Long Rise of the Secular Faith

Bruce Abramson illuminates the dangerous tendency in contemporary American politics and law to supplant respect for the diversity of religious belief with a homogenizing doctrine that punishes the expression of traditional faith and compels the practice of a secular faith. If anything, the problem runs deeper than he suggests.

Rather than a consequence of “a broad rethinking of church and state,” as Abramson puts it, the delegitimization of biblically-rooted religions that has been taking place over recent decades reflects a thoughtless enactment of the progressive vision that has been steadily gaining momentum in America for at least a century and a half. The threat to religious liberty that Abramson deftly examines, moreover, is only one front—albeit an exceptionally important one—in a more general assault on liberty in the name of an intolerant alliance of secularism and statism.

That alliance derives support from the progressivism that dominates our media, entertainment industry, universities, major metropolitan areas, and the Democratic party: a sensibility that prides itself on its devotion to equality, the pursuit of which it regards as the foremost demand of social justice. Historically—and still today—the progressive impulse to enlist the state on behalf of the unfortunate, the afflicted, and the exploited has made a decisive contribution to aligning neglected corners of life in America with the national promise. But in a free society, the serious moral and political question is not whether equality is good, but which form or forms of equality are morally relevant and which should government protect.