secularism 
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SOURCE: The Hill
6/8/2023
Is Oklahoma's Religious Charter School Good News for Secularists?
by Jacques Berlinerblau
Oklahoma recently approved the first publicly-funded religious charter school in the United States. Is it possible that this ambitious move will backfire when schools representing all denominations and faiths demand equal treatment?
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SOURCE: MSNBC
3/3/2023
Why Are Dems Surprised at Eric Adams's Rant Against Church-State Separation?
by Jacques Berlinerblau
Democrats and secularists shocked by the New York mayor's declaration of religion as the heart of society need to confront facts: the church-state separation they revere has been all but entirely demolished. Secularists must now demand equal footing for their lack of belief.
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SOURCE: MSNBC
10/18/2022
Will Court's Abortion Overreach Galvanize Religious Americans Who Prefer Secular Society?
by Jacques Berlinerblau
Not all religious Americans loathe a secular society; many see it as the best protection of their own personal freedom of worship and conscience. Challenges to Florida's new abortion restrictions show they could be a powerful political force.
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SOURCE: Dame
9/12/2022
What's in Store for American Religion When Faith in God is Waning?
by J.L. Tomlin and Thomas Lecaque
Two historians address the recurrent American preoccupation with gauging the nation's religiosity and issuing dire warnings about the disastrous results of a decline in piety.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
8/28/2022
Alito's Battle Against Secular Society is Just Getting Started
"Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category."
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
7/15/2022
Review: David Sehat on the Struggle to Make a Secular America
by Johann N. Neem
In "This Earthly Frame," Sehat examines the way that activists in the 20th Century pushed the nation from an implicit privileging of Protestant Christianity toward a posture of "negative secularism" that separated the functions of government from doctrinal belief, and the transience of that victory.
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SOURCE: Juan Cole
7/29/2022
Alito Laments "Disrespect" for Faith – But His Dobbs Ruling Will Push More Americans Away
by Juan Cole
"Ironically, even as Alito has managed to impose 20th century Roman Catholic dogma on all Americans, striking down any right to privacy or for women to control their own bodies, he is puzzled as to why anyone would be hostile to his agenda."
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SOURCE: Boston Globe
8/1/2022
The Demise of the Church-State Wall
by Steven V. Mazie
A political scientist and court correspondent says that SCOTUS has adopted a radical version of the "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment that makes a mockery of the historic separation of religious and political authority.
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SOURCE: Freethinker
6/14/2022
Is the Right Now Post-Religious? If Only!
by Jacques Berlinerblau
A high-profile op-ed by Nate Hochman obfuscates the continued significance of strains of Christian nationalism to the rising far right and falsely claims this movement is a secular one.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
5/23/2022
The Imminent Demise of Roe Signals More Christian Nationalist Attacks on Secular America
by David Sehat
Christian conservatives are targeting not just abortion or contraception, but the broader idea of a secular American republic.
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SOURCE: Salon
5/14/2022
We're Facing the Results of the Dems' Retreat from Secularism
by Jacques Berlinerblau
By trying to match the Republicans on bringing Christian faith into policy, Democrats abandoned the difficult but necessary struggles to define how a diverse society protects religious freedom for majority and minority faiths – and those of no faith.
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SOURCE: Current
3/11/2022
John Fea Interviews David Sehat on American Secularism
"American secularism was the result of a layered religious conflict in the 20th century that played out in the courts and that left the U.S. Supreme Court with no option but the adoption of a secular order as a condition of social peace and political equality."
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SOURCE: Salon
1/7/2022
Secularism: The Essential, Fatally Weak Guardrail of Democracy
by Jacques Berlinerblau
The framers of the US Constitiution failed to build in the protections against religious belief overpowering the rights of others or the security of the state that Locke and other political theorists thought were urgently necessary. This oversight might imperil democracy.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
11/3/2021
After Paine, Why Did American Secularism Fail?
by Chris Lehmann
Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt chronicles the decline of American secularism; the fate of Thomas Paine's looted corpse stands as a tidy metaphor for the mismatch of secular rationality with the desire for communal ritual.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/29/2021
Church Membership in the U.S. has Fallen Below the Majority for the First Time in Nearly a Century
Political Scientist Ryan Burge predicts that there will no longer be a single dominant religion in the United States in 30 years, due principally to the rise of non-affiliation.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
12/4/2020
French Academics Fear Becoming Scapegoats in War on Terrorism
The killing of a social studies teacher has opened French academics to accusations of supporting radical Islamists and undermining France's policy of national secularism; those who turn a critical lens to French colonialism and racism in contemporary France have received sharp criticism from nationalist and center-right politicians.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/26/2020
A Teacher, His Killer and the Failure of French Integration
The murder of a French social studies teacher who showed his multiethnic class images offensive to Islam illustrates the dilemma of the French policy of secularism, which is beset on one side by complaints that immigrants do not assimilate and on the other by rising xenophobia and racism.
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Secularization of America: Is the Latest Pew Poll Really a Big Deal?
by Brent Nongbri
Bible and rosary image via Shutterstock.