Two nuggets from the Religious-Secular Divide conference, which in the end made me dejected for secularism. We learned that all religion gets Protestantized (subjectivized, privatized, reduced to sincerity of belief rather than action) in America - by law and sociology - and that nonbelief has become just another form of religion in this respect. (When someone asked a panel about Mainline Protestantism today, people froze as if asked about the UFOs.) What we're stuck with, if would seem from the conference, is the politically important but pretty shallow problems of pluralism and sincerity in a fundamentally disenchanted world.
"The American way to be secular is to be religious." - Winnifred Sullivan
"In the United States, freedom of religion is the freedom to act Protestant even when you're not." - Janet Jakobsen, quoted by Ann Pellegrini
