Title：On the Boundary Between Secular Government and Sacred Authority

Subtitle： Do Not Shackle Public Reason with the Sacred

By：Qubo.Pu

A Review of Meir Soloveichik’s “How the Bible Helped Smash the Crown”(The Free Press, December 23, 2025)

In his article “How the Bible Helped Smash the Crown,” published in The Free Press on December 23, 2025, Meir Soloveichik argues that the cornerstone of American equality lies not in secular political reasoning, but in submission to “sacred authority.” According to this account, the American Revolution did not merely reject earthly monarchs; it replaced them with a higher sovereignty—God as King—from which liberty and equality are said to derive.

Soloveichik presents this arrangement as a distinctive and even radical achievement of the United States. He celebrates what might be called sacred pluralism: a public order in which multiple faiths coexist at the moral center of political life, bound together by shared reverence for transcendence. The argument is rhetorically elegant. Institutionally, however, it is deeply misguided.

The problem is not theological, but constitutional.

I. Only What Can Be Offended Belongs in the Public Square

Democracy, liberty, and republican government did not become the foundations of the public realm because they were sacred, but precisely because they were not. Their authority rests on their openness to challenge. They can be questioned, criticized, revised, and—when necessary—replaced. This vulnerability is not a weakness; it is the very condition of public legitimacy.

These principles are products of reason. They survive only insofar as they withstand logical scrutiny and public debate. Religious doctrines, by contrast—whether Catholic, Jewish, or Islamic—are grounded in revelation. Their core claims are not meant to be falsified or renegotiated. This does not make them false, but it does make them categorically unsuited as foundations for public governance.

Any claim that refuses full examination, regardless of how many adhere to it, belongs to the private domain. Introducing the unquestionable into public authority is equivalent to planting an exclusionary charge beneath the foundations of public reason.

II. Beware of Government as the Agent of Sacralization

The most troubling development in contemporary politics is not the persistence of religion, but the willingness of governments—particularly those that identify as progressive—to act as agents of sacralization.

A secular state is not one that suppresses faith. It is one that imposes limits. Its task is to ensure that when belief enters public life, it does so stripped of claims to inviolability and subject to the same legal and rational standards as any other proposition.

When public power shields certain beliefs or identities from criticism, or elevates them beyond dispute, it does not promote equality. It creates the conditions for fanaticism and tribal absolutism. Any idea granted immunity from debate by virtue of being “sacred”—whether religious or ideological—acquires a political privilege incompatible with republican government.

III. The Cost of Sacred Pluralism: When “Unoffendable” Becomes Law

Soloveichik’s vision obscures a harsher reality. At the institutional level, sacred pluralism produces not harmony, but systematic suffocation of reason. This is not a scene of theologians embracing on the steps of Congress; it is the slow colonization of the public sphere by unfalsifiable claims.

In parts of Canada and in U.S. states such as California, certain classifications grounded in subjective self-identification have acquired near-immunity from question. To challenge foundational assumptions is no longer treated as scientific or philosophical inquiry, but as sacrilege against a protected identity. The result is not debate, but professional exile, deplatforming, and accusations of hate speech.

In science education, pluralism has likewise been misused to erode factual consensus. In 2023, a Kansas school district, under pressure from religious groups, downgraded evolution from established scientific theory to merely “one possible explanation,” while instructing teachers to treat Indigenous creation narratives as equivalent knowledge systems. This was not cultural respect, but the transformation of science classrooms into museums of myth—where students learn reverence for narratives rather than how to test hypotheses.

These are not marginal cases. They are the predictable outcomes of sacralization once governments abandon their role as guardians of public reason and instead crown certain beliefs as unoffendable. The public square ceases to be an arena of argument and becomes a collection of shrines.

IV. The Covenant Between Public and Private

It bears repeating: the legitimacy of modern democratic government did not arise from submission to sacred order. It emerged from the rejection of divine kingship, clerical authority, and providential destiny. America’s founders did not seek a republic ruled by God’s representatives, but a secular polity governed by people, for people, and accountable to people.

The implicit covenant is clear.

The state governs the public realm. It provides law, protects speech, and enforces procedural justice—without adjudicating souls or certifying sanctity.

Individuals govern the private realm. One may pray, preach, or affirm any ultimate meaning—without demanding that public authority endorse the sacred status of those beliefs.

This is not cold separation. It is the minimum condition for peaceful coexistence. Once the boundary collapses—whether the right demands Genesis in classrooms or the left demands that law enshrine identity narratives as unquestionable orthodoxy—the public realm becomes a battlefield of sacred wars.

Conclusion

Peaceful pluralism does not require a shared reverence for the sacred. It requires a shared commitment to public reason. The “sacred bonds” Soloveichik invokes would, in practice, fragment society rather than unite it.

The true radicalism of the modern republic lies not in how many gods it accommodates, but in its ability to build trust, justice, and cooperation where no god rules.

What we need is a public square governed by reason—not a powder keg of sanctified idols, its fuse increasingly lit by the state itself. Only by reaffirming the secular covenant—the state governs the public realm; individuals command the private—can democracy remain free from theological capture and liberty from spiritual colonization.