Originally a comment by The Whimster Gap on Christian Nationalist wish list.
“Though not a religion, secularism, like theocracy, is incompatible with our First Amendment freedoms because it excludes religious voices from the process of self-government.”
Well, that’s got things arse-about-face, hasn’t it? Secularism – properly understood – does not exclude religious voices. Secularism actually guarantees a space for their participation in public life, precisely because it’s public life and so takes all comers. Secularism says, “Oh, that’s what you believe, is it? Fine. Feel free to make the case. Feel free to argue what you like. No strongarming, mind; but that’s about the limit of the limits.” (This is why I’d classify the repressively atheist regimes of people like Enver Hoxa as not secular; they didn’t have the commitment to the state stepping back and letting people figure stuff out.)
There’s a tendency among reactionary religionists to complain that secularism is a threat to them. That’s why in the UK you sometimes see strange confluences of the more evangelical bits of the Church singing the same song as conservative Muslims. It’s dressed up as a common concern for the rights of the religious, and – more dubiously – of religion.
But the real motivation is that secularism threatens their ability not to make the case for their position, but their ability to enforce it. And so they’ll join together to moan about how awful secularism is. Of course, they despise each other really, and in the non-secular world they claim to want their pretence of a unified protection of religion would crumble; they’d be at each other’s throats for heresy faster than you could say “Arminian Heresy”.
They should love secularism, because it protects them against the beastliness of others. But it also stops them being beastly in return if they happen to have the whip hand; and that’s a big price to pay. Too big, it seems.