Pluralism is fundamentally different from secularism. Pluralism accommodates agnostic/atheistic beliefs as one of many protected belief systems. Secularism turns over the public sphere to agnostic/atheistic beliefs and relegates religion to a private role. In the U.S., a Muslim is a Muslim all the time--in school, when they vote, when they hold office, etc. In France, Muslims must be agnostic/atheistic in public, and can be religious in private. Thus in the U.S., banning a Muslim girl from wearing hijab would be a civil rights violation, while it's the law in France.

"Separation of church and state" thus operates fundamentally differently in the two systems. In the U.S., it means a narrow procedural framework to allow Christians and Muslims and atheists to get along. The government can't establish an official mosque. And the government can't discriminate between Muslims and Christians or play favorites. In France, by contrast, it means the creation of a parallel agnostic/atheistic belief system to govern public affairs, to which everyone must subscribe and into which children must be socialized. That's not the American system.

> It isn't French-style, but in a country where, for example, interracial and same-sex marriage is legal ... there are times where the state must step in to protect its citizens from having their rights stripped by organizations acting as a formal or informal arm of religion, so it can sometimes look like a state-sponsored secular faith.

It's important not to mistake American tolerance for shared American morality. In a pluralistic system, people can often believe that other people should be able to act according to their own conscience. That's wholly distinct from a shared secular morality or agreement about what's acceptable and not acceptable that can be taught in public schools. For example, 60% of Americans think it's immoral for teenagers to have sex, and 90% think married people having an affair is immoral, but nobody is trying to ban either. At the same time, people would probably object to teachers commenting on those issues. Muslim Americans are a stark example of the difference between tolerance and shared morality: a large majority support same-sex marriage, but virtually no mosque in America will perform one: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....

> The ICCPR was adopted by the United States with a declaration and proviso that fundamentally give it no force of authority here (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/text_blocks/28885). In other words, the ICCPR is, at best, a declaration of morality and has no force of law, so if the US shares no morality or culture, you can't use it in this context to make an argument about how the US should act.

While the ICCPR is not legally binding in the U.S., religious pluralism is a fundamental right in our Constitution. The ICCPR is an important and widely adopted articulation of what religious freedom means and how it should operate. In that understanding, freedom to socialize your children in your own moral and religious beliefs is a core principle.

> The culture decided upon through the interaction of the school board and the election of the board by the people. With an overlap of the federal Department of Education. It's a complicated process, but it's there.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the organic statutes of these entities giving these bodies the power to declare and evangelize a "shared culture" or "consensus morality." This attitude also confirms why the Florida law has such strong public support. Educators really do believe that they're champions of what you call this shared public morality and that it is within their ambit to socialize kids into that moral framework. That's exactly what people are afraid of.

I have to say, in all sincerity, that I respect your logical explanation of your position. You've clearly articulated where the disagreement lies.

If the so-called "religious zealots" were duly elected through free and fair democratic process, then yes absolutely. The "separation of Church and State" does not mean "secularism", it means religious pluralism, with no favorites for a particular religion. The absence of religious belief is not "neutral" but instead just another belief system, and all belief systems are treated equally. This is why we don't administer religious tests to enter office, which allows atheists to enter office, but (importantly) also allows religious people to enter office regardless of their faith. All that said, the Constitution disallows religious zealots from explicitly codifying religious scripture into the legal process or from establishing a state religion.

> What if Afghanistan were a state?

Afghanistan's problems stem from 1) the fact their religious zealots have taken over the country by force rather than via free and fair elections and 2) the fact that they have an officially established state religion that explicitly operates on Sharia law.

> Would our nation allow them to stone harlots, and behead adulterers?

It would not, but that's not because of some abstract commitment to secularism, but because that would likely violate the 8th Amendment which proscribes cruel and unusual punishments. In fact, the Constitution likely permits States from outlawing adultery if their citizens so desire. One might choose to support such laws because they think "cheating is bad", but it doesn't matter which book made them think that "cheating is bad". The Constitution places guard rails on which human rights may not be violated — and unfortunately abortion isn't one of those human rights enshrined in the Constitution.

> Let's face it: The right of women to privacy, life, and happiness runs directly afoul of a religious belief (not shared by all religions, not even by Christianity, Judaism, or the bible, only Christianists) in the theoretical life of unborn children. Who but the mother is best suited to choose the right balance of rights?

Again, one's opinion on how society should choose the right balance of rights is a function of the core belief system they operate off of. One may derive their belief system from secular sources, like reading Harry Potter as a child or being raised a particular way, or from religious sources like the Bible or the Quran. "Separation of church and state" does not mean that the government cannot regulate behavior based on religious beliefs, it just means that the State cannot establish a state religion.

In Islam, gambling is a sin, and one may choose to personally vote to outlaw gambling because they are Muslim, but that doesn't mean that outlawing gambling is a violate of "separation of Church and State". It doesn't matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible.

As it relates to abortion, yes you're correct that the majority of pro-lifers are religious, and likely derive their views on abortion from non-secular belief systems, but there are also many secular pro-lifers (https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0018333/), even Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim pro-lifers (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...). Even though they're in the minority among their respective groups, they apply some belief system to derive their moral views, and then use those moral views while participating in democracy. Again, it does not matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible. Conversely, if one's religious beliefs were that "free speech is bad", and they attempted to vote to regulate speech based off of their personal beliefs, the Constitution would invalidate any laws that came about that way because the end result is not permissible by the Bill of Rights.

I personally agree with you that the mother is best suited to choose the balance of rights, but that's because I (probably) derive my morals off of a similar set of core beliefs as you do, and therefore we are able to agree on the issue of abortion. The fact that this is not true for everybody is not a violation of "separation of Church and State", and is to be expected in a religiously pluralistic country.

But religious people can exercise their right to give input in the formulation of law---the same right all citizens share regardless of the philosophy that guides them to favor one position over another. After all, arbitrarily excluding religious viewpoints from public discourse would be discriminatory, would it not?

Let's consider that a state (nation-state or US state) might recognize 0, 1, or N religions.

There are many nation-states with 1 or N state-recognized religions, as you point out, but a US state that recognizes any number of religions other than 0 is effectively, in many senses, establishing that set of religions, and excluding any others.

Officiating at weddings is a very light-weight form of recognition compared to tax exemptions, or to religious requirements to hold public office.

My preference for the US would be to keep government out of religion, and religion out of government, keeping that number at 0.

At the federal level, it's been both since the beginning; freedom of religion under the free exercise clause, and freedom from religion under the establishment clause, both of the First Amendment. Just like the rest of the First Amendment, and much (but not all) of the rest of the Bill of Rights, that's been held to be incorporated against the states under the 14th Amendment.

> New Hampshire had a state church until 1877.

Very shortly after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 and before the Court had heard and ruled on the cases in which it found the First Amendment rights to be fundamental rights inherent in the concept of ordered liberty incorporated against the states by the 14th Amendment. The states are not free to impose a state church any more than they are to ban all religious expression, for the same Constitutional reason, and they are no more free to do either under the 14th Amendment than the federal government is to given the First.

Restrictions on prostitution are pretty far downstream of core church-state separation territory. The original constitutional prohibition is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" ("establishment clause") "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" ("free exercise clause").

The core territory of the establishment clause is that there can't be an official state church or an officially designated state religion. Later court cases extended that by analogy to require fairly broad religious neutrality, as well as to avoid various forms of "entanglement" between church and state.

But so far, there's no official interpretation of it that implies that laws that were originally motivated by religious sentiment or religious morality are invalid. (If I remember correctly, Scalia's dissent in Obergefell expressed concern that the majority was gesturing in that direction, although the majority definitely didn't phrase it that way.) Particularly, there's no clear constitutional law that all legislation always has to be justifiable in terms of addressing a harm (usually that only comes into play when another constitutional right is implicated).

I agree with the idea of legalizing prostitution and I agree with the idea of separation of church and state, but I don't think you can directly get one from the other.

It's obviously negotiable since Christmas is the only religious holiday for the Federal Government.

Should they have ceremonial atheism too? "In God we don't believe"?

Err, no, that's a common misunderstanding.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government from encouraging or promoting ("establishing") religion in any way.

It's there to forbid the creation of an official state religion (eg: the Church of England being created to replace the Catholic church back in the day).

See:

https://www.aclu.org/other/your-right-religious-freedom

Just pointing out that this seems to be your own interpretation and isn't held in any legal doctrine I've been able to find.

In-fact it doesn't have a lot of historical or academic backing either: Historically, the separation of church and state was about removing the special benefits of state-sanctioned religions so that other churches could exist.

That was explicitly about the legally registered organisation, and you can see this now in how legally registered churches are constantly trying to find ways to legally divorce themselves from linked entities so those entities can receive state funding. That is 100% about the legally registered organisations.

Historically the church informed everyday practices and morals and was the basis of many laws.

The worry was that a singular church would rise up in a region, and aim to use governmental power to put down its rivals.

The idea of a total atheistic separation where no one talks about morals and laws in a religious context was truly alien.

The United States government, which is what we’re discussing is absolutely a secular body. The various religions or non-religions of the citizenry are irrelevant, constitutionally.

In that case worship centers should be treated equally. Certainly not given extra leeway or scrutiny.

> Freedom of religion is a bedrock principle of the Constitution...

Indeed, yet it stops when ones freedom of religion would cause harm to others.

So yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about: this is disenfranchising people based on their religion.

> If you can't make secular decisions in your job representing all people in your constituency, if you can't separate your religious belief and personal morals from what is legislatively appropriate, then just maybe, you shouldn't be a politician. (...) If you are a Senator or Representative in the US, you also represent the atheists in your constituency, as well of those of all other religious beliefs than your own. You don't just represent the ones who align with your religious belief.

This is just an isolated demand of rigor, it's a standard that you would not apply in other circumstance. Try making the same argument, but replacing religion with political party. "Sure, you are personally deeply aligned with Democratic policy, but you also represent Republicans in your constituency, so you should separate your personal beliefs and morals from your politics, and don't push for policy that your Republican constituents would not agree with". This is of course ridiculous.

You need to understand that what you proposing here is plainly disadvantaging (some) religious beliefs compared to other philosophies, and holding them to a different, higher standards. Why do majority of voters have to give "sufficient secular reason" for a given law? Constitution doesn't demand this sort of "parallel construction".