Representative Tom Tancredo has introduced something he calls the “Jihad Prevention Act.” The bill would exclude from  admission into the United States of “[a]ny alien who fails to attest . . . that the alien will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States . . . .” The bill raises a number of questions but the one that calls out to me is the question of the government’s interest in the religious beliefs of its citizens. Constitutional doctrine says that the state must make no religious decisions and treat all equally but, as I argue in a forthcoming paper (and I was hardly the first to notice), the government engages in all sorts of conduct that is calculated to shape the religious beliefs of its citizens, and there is probably no way to avoid that. Certain religious systems may well be incompatible with liberal democracy. Christian Dominionism may be one of them. Perhaps a form of Islam insisting upon Sharia law is another.

Does the government have an interest in discouraging the formation and spread of such beliefs? If so, what can it do to further that interest?

This Friday, in my seminar on Law & Theology, we turn to a topic that is near and dear to my heart – the role of religion in public discourse. Although not all proponents of minimizing God talk in the public square seek to mold a secular society, some do. They argue that religion – particularly religion outside of the highly privatized and skeptically contingent world of liberal Protestantism – is irrational and, for that reason, potentially dangerous. Richard Rorty told conservative Christians that the goal of a liberal teacher is “to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.” Children from such homes, he wrote, “are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . .”

Within the legal academy, Steven Gey argues that the public square should be a “religion free zone” and popular writers, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, write bestsellers calling for the end – or at least the marginalizing – of faith. In a forthcoming film, comedian (?) Bill Maher announces that “[t]he plain fact is religion must die for man to live.”

But is this assumption of a post-religious world governed by rationality consonant with reality?