Lydia McGrew, writing at The Christendom Review:
There is a peculiar separation of religion and public policy that many, including some Christians, believe we are required to maintain. And such a separation can be made to sound speciously plausible. The reasoning runs something like this: “You wouldn’t want to be ruled by someone else’s religious beliefs, so you shouldn’t try to rule other people by your own religious beliefs. You should try instead to make all your public policy recommendations in such a way that even non-religious people or people from other religious backgrounds can see that they are reasonable.” Such intuitions can be made into fairly strong restrictions on virtuous public action. Consider, for example, the following principle, which we may call a Generic Naked Public Square (GNPS) principle:
GNPS: The promotion (by vote or other means) of a given public policy is civically virtuous only if the policy in question is sufficiently supported by non-religious reasons.
Before we say more about what is wrong with this principle, we should find the most plausible version of it. And in order to do that, we shall have to define its most important term—‘religious’. For it is obvious that a great deal turns on that. There could easily be invidious or overly-broad definitions of ‘religious’ that would make the principle ludicrously false, and we should set these aside before we go any further.
