Religious Politics: Rejecting the Religion of Secularism

'To applaud the separation of church and state is not necessarily to accept the separation of religion and politics, or the privatization of Christianity to otherworldly concerns.

Blackford is right that, in his original piece, he did not explicitly claim that the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were resolved at the time by introducing secularism, which was a much later development. But he must have had some reason for beginning his piece with the tale of the religious wars. The heroes of the piece are Hobbes and Locke, who were "deeply troubled by the experience of religious strife." The solution Locke and Blackford offer to the problem of religious strife is secularism, the privatization of otherworldly religion so that public policy may deal with purely mundane matters.'

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