It is a reigning deceit in our national consciousness, a lie on which innumerable social and institutional practices and expectations are founded, that religion can and should be merely an optional component of individual private life.  This thesis further maintains that barricades can and must be erected to keep religion from influencing public policy in order that a fair and impartial government may be operated.  This narrative offers that the former, unfortunate day when religious allegiances governed the polity is behind us; we now operate from neutral principles of value shared across the ideological spectrum, uninfected by provincial religious tenets.  And we are told that a realm cleansed of religion is freed to be objective, scientific, and democratic, instead of subjective, dogmatic, and theocratic.  This is a definitional coup.  It is flatly wrong on all counts.

One of the principle errors in this project of defining lies in its analytical placement of religious beliefs as if they were ancillary to the basic views that we all uniformly share.  Or to employ a metaphor, the assertion is that religion is an optional side-dish available to supplement the universal main course:  some select that side-dish, some don’t.  This proposal is fundamentally mistaken, and serves to hide the fact that the theistic view of life which it marginalizes is precisely like any other competing view of life, in this respect:  such worldviews organize and set in place all other ideas, facts, and values.  There is no approach to life that eludes authoritative presuppositions about the nature of reality.  It is, for example, inevitable that the government is going to organize itself and take official positions based on some conception of moral precept, of its own authority and legitimacy, and so on.  And this process is made sensible only in terms of a certain network of premises about reality—i.e., a religion (theistic or not). 

The question, then, is simply:  which reality-defining standard will govern?  It is not whether a conception of life will be established in a privileged position in a polity.  Only which will enjoy the dominant and defining position.  Modern liberal societies obscure the partisan nature of this ordering process by deceptive naming conventions:   the excluded are called “religious,” and the ruling outlook is called “secular.”  The former is biased, the latter neutral.  Sure. 

Thus when the government through compulsory education laws takes children for 12 formative years and subjects them in government schools to a functionally atheistic, naturalistic education, imposing on them what the Supreme Court calls the “inculcat[ion of] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system,” our enlightened class calls this neutral and eminently constitutional.  Secular catechizing is praiseworthy.  But when a rebellious legislature dares pass a law that throws a crumb allowing for one minute of silence at the beginning of the school day before the beginning of the “inculcation of fundamental values” (from which God is banished) in order to give students a fleeting opportunity to pray to the Deity-in-exile, this is condemned as unconstitutional state support of religion.  The requisite “neutrality” requires entire elimination of divine acknowledgment while young minds are being regimented. 

So the State may spend years—at taxpayer expense—giving children a comprehensive view of the world, explaining its (and their) meaning, intricacies, and operations, and foisting on them all the values ostensibly necessary for America to flourish (which usually requires a great deal of instruction on contraceptive methods), just so long as it does not suggest that God is necessary or relevant to anything that can be taught or learned. 

This principle is applied across the board.  Thus while we observe the government pursue social engineering through the omnipresent threat and application of force, and the redistribution of multiple billions of dollars, we are to take comfort in knowing that these efforts derive from a neutral outlook shared by all reasonable people, and are accomplished without any official reliance on the precepts of Christianity.  Thereby is liberty and scientific fairness maintained.  Indeed.

Please, love, let us do away with this fiction that the exclusion of Christian precept from government voice and mind constitutes “neutrality.”  Government policy is nothing other than instantiated value judgments.  The state necessarily must choose between competing visions of justice, of what is the appropriate design of community, and so forth, as it legislates and regulates through incentives and coercion.  There will always be a prevailing view of the good, which is itself derivative of a factional, comprehensive worldview of some sort.  James Madison in Federalist 51 mused, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” 

No realm of cultural endeavor or significance is immune from similar assessment. 

We either submit to God or replace Him with a rival.  The Position is never unfilled.  Authority is inescapable.  Neutrality is a myth.