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?