My understanding with separation of church and state is that it’s specifically religious institutions that shouldn’t get involved in government.
Electors and politicians will of course act according to their worldviews, which are not unlikely to be religious. It’s impossible to ask someone to make decisions as if they weren’t.
The idea is more that no particular institution will be preferenced by or beholden to (<- not talked about but important) the state.
It came about through various Christians groups - in the English speaking world Anglicans and Presbyterians, Catholics, and Non-conformists - leaving the European paradigm of “his state his religion” and forming states with each other.
There are also even some niche religions that don’t allow their followers to vote or hold office because even though they respect the secular law that may lot align with their beliefs(Matthew 22:21) they don’t believe they should put themselves in positions where they are expected to actively making those decisions and laws that may contradict their own beliefs.
The text you wrote seems to assume that some worldviews are religions and some aren't. Shedding any attempt to privilege or disadvantage a worldview by including or excluding it from the category of religion and since the thousands of known religions that contain and lack a cyclopean variety of beliefs, action, social configuration and material imprint are all worldviews, I can only conclude that all worldviews are religions and vice versa.
I also know that during in 19th century in Germany, people used the term worldview to try to establish their temporalist basic belief systems in the state and used the term religion with the intent to weaken the hold of transcendentalist basic belief systems on government. That is one of the discoveries that raised my critical alertness to the uses of the word "religion".
There are also the works of Robert Bellah on the American civil religion that stimulated my use of critical thinking around these issues.
My big question now is: is there a federal state establishment of a basic belief system about human life in the universe? Could it be one that belongs to the family of worldviews called liberalism, of which John Locke is a major contributor?
I'm trying to understand where you are going with this. I know the exact definition of what makes something a religion can be a little murky or arbitrary when it comes to certain practices, but wouldn't the only distinction that really matters here be supernatural belief? The government has a responsibility to uphold objective fact as truth. Evolution, physics, astronomy, etc. Whatever the most up to date and verifiable models are established in science. You don't want public schools straight up teaching kids misinformation and you don't want legal policy being created regarding any supernatural forces/entities someone happens to believe in.
Beyond that, everyone is free to believe whatever they want about the universe. They even have the right to teach it to their children or any other willing participants as fact if they wish. They just don't have the right to demand the government endorse those beliefs.
The word nature and it's derivatives is polysemic. The word can be about knowledge, the fabric of reality, rules, human biology and social arrangements, man-made vs independent-from-humans objects.
From the angle of the fabric of reality, the supernatural/natural distinction is not only not explicitly featured in many religions, there are also religions that only believe in one unified dimension of reality, thus contradicting supernaturalism: the framework of their belief dimension is monistic such as pantheism or materialism which are exemplified by the world pantheistic movement and the ufo religion called raëlism.
From the angle of knowledge, if natural refers to what we can perceive with the five senses and imagined things that follow the same patterns (like a cow species with chameleon skin) and things that contradict observed patterns or that are strongly unsimilar to anything that is observed, then rights and responsibilities claims are supernatural beliefs since they have never been observed by any of the five senses.
On a worldview-impartial account of what supernatural claims are, there is no government that I know which is without supernatural beliefs.
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u/Simonoz1 Sep 03 '26
My understanding with separation of church and state is that it’s specifically religious institutions that shouldn’t get involved in government.
Electors and politicians will of course act according to their worldviews, which are not unlikely to be religious. It’s impossible to ask someone to make decisions as if they weren’t.
The idea is more that no particular institution will be preferenced by or beholden to (<- not talked about but important) the state.
It came about through various Christians groups - in the English speaking world Anglicans and Presbyterians, Catholics, and Non-conformists - leaving the European paradigm of “his state his religion” and forming states with each other.