Any Number Can Play

America has been remarkably favored—blessed, if you prefer—by a wise constitutional policy of non-preferential protection for the free and responsible exercise of religion.  For the good of the entire community of Americans, religious and secular alike, we should protect that policy against encroachments from whatever quarter. Further, religious individuals and groups ought also to respect and honor the valuable principle of pluralism, the essence of which is not that all values are up for grabs and that no value position is to be preferred over another, but that our society is one in which "any number can play," and that a multiplicity of views contributes not to chaos, but to a rich and diverse republic. (It has also contributed mightily to a free-market environment in religion that helps account for the amazing vitality of American religious bodies, vitality unmatched by any other comparably modern society.) As James Madison observed more than 200 years ago, “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights; it consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

Americans cannot, of course, require other nations to adopt the principle of church-state separation. I see no problem, however, in our being willing to acknowledge the remarkable success and demonstrable advantages of this model and to invite others to inspect it, leaving it to them to assess its merits and act as they see fit.  It is indeed a commendable arrangement. You may want to thank God for it—but you don’t have to.