we recently received a copy of thINK, the newsletter of the Work Research Foundation, and in it, Gideon Strauss has an article about the need for renewed participation in public life. discussing the "naked public square" (public life stripped of religion, leaving only the government and the individual), he quotes John Neuhaus:
The alternative to the naked public square is not the sacred public square, but the civil public square. We should not want a confessional state. The state should not confess a faith. It does that, however, when, in hostility to the faith confessed by its people, it confesses the ersatz religion of militant secularism. The great antidemocratic danger, contrary to much popular punditry, comes not from the free exercise of religion but from the secularist creeds imposed by governments that recognize no higher sovereignty. That was the reality of Nazism and communism. That danger is also present in our democracies when "the separation of church and state" is taken to mean the separation of religion from public life. The public square, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If it is not filled with the lively expression of the most deeply held convictions of the people, including their convictions grounded in religion, it will be filled by the quasi-religious beliefs of secularism.
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