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.

Read the article “The Long Rise of the Secular Faith” on mosaicmagazine.com.