“Several variants of secularism kill two
birds with one stone: as they try to seal public life from religious doctrines
they also cast out a set of nontheistic orientations to reverence, ethics, and
public life that deserve to be heard. These two effects follow from the secular
conceit to provide a single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public
ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or
“private” faith. To invoke that principle against religious enthusiasts, secularists
are also pressed to be pugnacious against asecular, nontheistic perspectives
that call these very assumptions and prerogatives into question.
[…]
For to adhere to a separation of church and
state is not automatically to concur in those conceptions of public life most
widely bound up with secularism. To put the point briefly, the secular wish to contain religious and irreligious
passions within private life helps to engender the immodest conceptions of
public life peddled by so many secularists. The need today is to cultivate a
public ethos of engagement in which a wider variety of perspectives than
heretofore acknowledged inform and restrain one another.”
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