IT is one of the prices of being a thought criminal that when you take a stand that is clear in both the language and content of it, people read into it more than was in your words or, really, in the logical conclusions of what it said.
When I said that I had become convinced that secularism was deadly to democracy because secularism is damaging to the moral basis that democracy absolutely depends on and cannot live without, I was not talking about the administrative necessity that the government be non-sectarian and secular in that sense that it doesn't favor any religion or religious orientation, including the religious orientations that you expressed worry for, atheists, agnostics, "pagans" in all of the myriad things that can mean.
However, that doesn't mean that the government, especially the courts can have any legitimacy if they are morally neutral. There are things which a pretense of moral neutrality, of a very sloppy, very dishonest claim of "secularism" can allow to happen on the pretense that that isn't what the politician or the judge or the "justice" wanted to happen to start with or which they are willing to allow happen if it means that something else they want will be included with it.
I think with Amy Coney Barrett being pushed onto the court illegitimately, with her pretenses of morality and propriety we are going to see a flood of such insincere, rather openly hypocritical instances of such "secularism" which will have the unsurprising outcome of producing exactly what we could expect someone with Barrett's background - and yes, I do mean the right-wing cultic Catholicism that she has sworn herself to - among other poses of "Christian" morality but more so her political and legal ideological orientation. Her pose of "textualism" and her admiration for the self-serving "originalism" of Scalia.
More so, though, when I condemn secularism I specifically mean that anti-religious, anti-Christian program of the rather dumb secular left to delegtimate the role of religion in society so as to encourage irreligion and the abandonment of morality which, I've noticed, loosens the moral convictions of those in the first generation of such secularism and eventually eventuates in children and grandchildren who not only abandon and mock and ridicule Christianity but also Judaism and other religions (based on who it's fashionable to mock, which can change rather rapidly, see the atheist "left" on Islam over the past twenty years). Eventually they either tacitly or explicitly join onto the Republican-fascist, corporatist right in great numbers, the neo-cons of the 1940s and after are the model of taking that tiny step from the anti-religious, often Marxist "left" to the hard right. I measure the distance based on the ease with which that step has so often been taken and the fact that the moral basis of their Marxism or other starting ism was never that far from the Republican-fascist right. I'd love to go into the case of the brother of Crystal Eastman, one of the founders of the ACLU, Max Eastman whose letter announcing his quitting the "left" written to Corliss Lamont lamented that the good ol' days of them trashing religious belief were over due to Lamont's Stalinism. Reading it was one of those things that led me to see this phenomenon for what it was.
While I am deeply skeptical of "Christian" parties and, with what I'm reading about People of Praise and other "charismatic" groups, of those kinds of organized often political entities and their inclusion under the badly written First Amendment and tax laws for non-profit groups which allow con men in collars to bilk everyone, I don't think American democracy can live without the foundation in morality based on the radical egalitarian-economic, social and, yes, uncomfotable as it may make some, personal committment to doing to others as we would want them to do to us, of what Habermas called the "universal ethic of love." I don't think that any kind of decent, equal, democratic anti-gangster government is possible without a consistent majority of voters, citizens and residents subscribing to that in real life instead of Sunday recitation.
Any number of relgions subscribe to that in a negative form, of not doing to people what you wouldn't want them to do, though I think it's a rather unfortunate and weak way to put it. Some religious traditions, many Christians are worse at it despite subscribing to the stronger, positive statement of it. Some are better at it, I don't think anyone much does it every time, some do it more often than others and religious profession doesn't much seem to be a good predictor of that. Many non-Christians and non-Jews have been very good at it, even a few "seculars" have been, though when they do I believe it is a vestige of cultural and personal habit having no secure basis in metaphysical belief. Some of the religious traditions that would be called "pagan" have a very strong form of it articulated in their religious practice and social practice. Clearly a large percentage of that critical mass of the population who will have to hold it in their hearts and in their actions will not be Christians or Jews or Muslims. I don't think anyone who does not at least aspire to it is a reliable person to exercise influence or have power though keeping them out of power should never be a matter of law or of legal rulings, I don't trust the courts and especially Supreme Courts to exercise that power, it should be a common understanding of things among The People that you don't vote for people who don't practice universal egalitarian justice and mercy and charity because such people cannot be trusted to do anything but try to instill gangster government such as the one we are on the verge of having now, likely through the actions of the anti-democratically constituted Senate, acting on the choice of the loser of the 2016 election, made law by the Roberts Court following in a long history of appalling rulings by that non-democratically appointed and conducted Court.
I think that with the de-Christianization of not only American society but, let's be honest, the de-Christianization of Christianity the great desideratum of the anti-Christain, anti-religious "left" of the past and up till today will come gangster government by what was claimed to be their ideological opposites. That, as so much that was claimed by those "leftists" was a lie. They, especially the Marxists, are not their ideological opponents, they are merely their rivals for power.
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