VideoTranscript
People generally who think in terms of separation of church and state, they tend to think in terms of privatisation of religion. The more private it is – it’s for your home, it’s for your heart, it’s for the small community of believers – but the public space should be free of religion, should be neutral with regard to religion, emptied of religious concerns.
I think that’s a very big mistake. It presumes, then, simply, that there is such a thing as a neutral worldview and why is it then not [a] certain form of attenuated secularism that’s being established as a “political religion” versus other religion that has been pushed out? So my sense is that we need to create spaces in which people with different over-arching interpretations of life can participate on equal terms.
That means not a privatisation of religion – and privatisation of religion, in any case, I think is problematic. Because life is a kind of unity, life cannot be lived … even I, as a private person, cannot live simply as an individual demoored from what the political system as a whole, or what the larger society as a whole, how it is being structured. So that I don’t think there is anything like a private faith in that sense. And I think faith has, by its nature – Christian faith has, by its nature – a goal to be concerned for the good broader than just of my own or my own little community.