Liberalism and the Secular Vision

For better and for worse, the modern democratic experiment has always harbored within it a principled religious dimension: that something greater than our individual self-interest—a common, shared faith—must bind us together as citizens and equals on earth. Some of the greatest accomplishments of our civic and social contract rest on the faith that political majorities can be trusted to make decisions and laws that benefit even the most vulnerable, stigmatized, and outcast minorities who live next to them. Secularism can be viewed as one way of resolving this intractable—and historically violent—relationship between faith, inequality, and freedom.

As that humanist vision fumbles today, the most brazen attacks on human freedom and civil rights—the right to read, the right to vote, the right to choose, the right to seek asylum, the right of safe harbor from bombardment, the definitions of personhood—are carried out in the name of religious liberty by evangelicals and religious…