Five or ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have a serious lecture on whether secularism is in danger in the United States. At least in a legal context, the question would have elicited stares, maybe some laughs, but not a serious response. It was sort of a religious truth, amongst lawyers, that there was a separation of church and state, and that prayers were not admissible in the public schools. These were regarded as eternal – Nobody would have thought that the school prayer decision was in any danger. 

Nobody would have thought 5 or 10 or 15 years ago that aid to parochial schools would be constitutionally acceptable…Justice Scalia has written two opinions since, as it happens, in which he urged that the school prayer decisions were wrong.  That’s no longer off the horizons, with conceivably 4 votes now on the Supreme Court.  Aid to parochial schools, if it’s done right, is clearly constitutional at the moment…

Is America going to become a theocracy?  I don’t think so.  I think that that is entirely off the horizon. I think if anybody had any doubts, I think events in the Muslim world have now persuaded most Americans of the danger of handing over the government to religious believers and inevitably the most extreme of religious believers…

Clearly, I think overwhelmingly Americans believe that the government should not be run by any church or collection of churches… [But] there’s a lot less clarity about what we mean by a secular state.  For example, is a secular state one in which religion plays no role at all in the setting of public policy?  That’s a possible meaning of a secular state.  That is essentially the French understanding of the secular state--that religion is purely a private matter between a person and his Creator and it has no intrusion into the sphere of government or community decision-making.  To the point where the Chief Rabbi of France, an Orthodox rabbi, has to go bare-headed when he meets the president of the republic.  In México, for example, they needed to pass a special law to allow the Pope to remain in his vestment when he came because of the old Napoleonic French tradition of secular state.

There are a series of [relevant] decisions about [Muslim] head scarves. There are two (if I remember correctly) decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, generally a very what you would call “liberal court,” upholding the right of Turkey to ban religious headgear from its universities.  Denmark has allowed a supermarket to fire a woman who wore a hijab on the theory that this promoted diversity and secularism in the public sphere and everybody should be able to come in on equal terms; religion is checked at the door.  I don’t think that’s a terribly prevalent understanding of secularism in the United States. Although as in the tradition of theocracy one can at the margins find people who adhere to that stringent view of secularism.  So the battleground, really, is somewhere in between.  And in between it is very unclear exactly what we mean...

What you mean [regarding] “a future for secular America?” depends in large part on what you mean by secular.  I don’t think France is going to happen here anytime soon.  Of course, I didn’t think we’d be where we are today either…  I don’t think we’re going to France; I don’t think we’re going to Saudi Arabia either.  In the middle there’s still a lot of room for discussion...