Day 4 — A Constitutional Line: Religion Isn’t Science, and the State Shouldn’t Pretend It Is

Keeping faith free by keeping government neutral

A line worth drawing (even when everyone hates lines)

There’s a move people make in arguments about God that always sounds humble, but usually isn’t: “Science can’t be 100% certain about anything—so why not leave room for religion inside science, or inside public policy?”

That sounds reasonable until you notice what it quietly smuggles in. Science “isn’t 100% certain” because it is a method designed to live with uncertainty without lying about it. Religion isn’t “uncertain” in that same way. Religion is a set of metaphysical truth claims backed by authority, tradition, revelation, and identity. Different category. Different rules. Different standards. And when the state pretends those categories are interchangeable, you don’t get “faith plus reason.” You get politics plus myth—enforced by whichever faction happens to have the votes.

America’s constitutional design isn’t built for theological arbitration. It’s built for pluralism—meaning the public square has to run on rules that don’t require citizens to accept someone else’s sacred story as “public knowledge.” That doesn’t mean religion is evil. It means religion is personal. Protected, yes. Privileged, no.

And that’s where the constitutional line matters: the government should not elevate religious truth claims to the status of public knowledge—not Christianity, not Islam, not any of it.

The legal backdrop: Lemon is out, “history and tradition” is in

If you’ve been watching Establishment Clause doctrine, you already know the Supreme Court has been reworking the framework. For decades, lawyers argued about the Lemon test (purpose, effect, entanglement) and its “endorsement” offshoot—whether government looked like it was endorsing religion.

Then came Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022). The majority didn’t nibble around the edges. It said the Court had “long ago abandoned” Lemon and the endorsement test.  And it instructed that the Establishment Clause should be interpreted by reference to “historical practices and understandings.”

That shift is not a minor technicality. It’s a change in what counts as an argument.

With Lemon, you could at least fight over stated purposes and observable effects. With “history and tradition,” you’re fighting over whose history and which tradition. That’s where the culture-war pressure spikes—because every faction starts arguing that its preferred tradition is the “real America,” and that anything else is a hostile takeover.

Even the dissent in Kennedy flags the novelty and the practical problem: you’re replacing a (flawed but legible) framework with something that can be weaponized by selective storytelling.  A Congressional Research Service summary makes the same practical point: administrators are left with less clear guidance and more litigation risk.

So yes—doctrine is moving. But the principle worth defending doesn’t depend on what test is fashionable:

Government neutrality means government does not certify religious truth claims as if they’re evidence-based public facts.

Neutrality is not hostility (it’s category control)

People hear “keep religion out of government” and translate it into: “keep religious people out of public life.”

No. That’s not what this is.

Religious citizens have the same rights as everyone else to speak, vote, advocate, assemble, donate, persuade. Free exercise is real. It matters. And in a pluralistic country, you’re going to see religion in public—churches on corners, hijabs on buses, crosses on necks, prayers at dinner, synagogues and mosques and temples, religious charities doing real good.

The constitutional line is about the state’s posture, not the citizen’s identity.

• The state can protect your right to worship.
• The state can’t declare your worship “knowledge” that binds other people.
• The state can allow expression.
• The state can’t adjudicate whose metaphysical story gets official status.

That’s not anti-religion. That’s anti-theocracy. And it’s also the only way pluralism survives.

Because once government starts treating a particular religion’s claims as “public truth,” everyone else becomes a second-class citizen in their own country—forced to live under rules justified by premises they don’t share and can’t challenge without being told they’re “attacking God.”

Science isn’t a belief system; it’s a discipline for avoiding self-deception

Yes, science is provisional. That’s the point.

Science is not a set of sacred conclusions you recite. It’s a method that says: show me the mechanism, show me the evidence, show me the error bars, show me the replication, show me what would change your mind.

Religion doesn’t run on that fuel. Religion runs on revelation, authority, and loyalty to a narrative. When religion uses evidence, it tends to do it selectively—treating ambiguity as confirmatory when convenient and demanding impossible standards when inconvenient. That’s not a slam on believers; it’s a description of how apologetics works in every tradition when identity is on the line.

So when someone says, “Science isn’t 100% certain, therefore my religion should be taught as an alternative explanation,” they’re not asking for fairness. They’re asking to swap the rules of the game mid-play.

Uncertainty in science is disciplined.
Uncertainty in religion is often insulated.

Those are different epistemic ecosystems. Mixing them doesn’t “enrich” science education. It breaks it.

Government isn’t a theology department

Here’s the practical issue: public institutions don’t have a legitimate way to adjudicate metaphysical claims.

If the government starts treating Christianity’s truth claims as special, it immediately inherits a problem it can’t solve: which Christianity?

• Catholic or Protestant?
• Which Protestant?
• Whose canon? Whose creed?
• Literal Genesis or symbolic?
• Trinity or Oneness?
• “Saved by faith” or “faith and works”?
• Young-earth or old-earth?

And that’s before you even leave Christianity and enter the broader reality: Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, agnostics, deists, and the “spiritual but not religious.” Pluralism isn’t an abstract concept. It’s your neighbors.

So a neutral state does what a neutral referee does: it doesn’t pick a team.

The Josephus/James “called Christ” problem is a perfect case study

Let’s get concrete, because abstraction is where people hide.

Josephus (a first-century Jewish historian) has a passage in Antiquities 20.200 describing the unlawful actions of Ananus (the high priest) and mentioning James, described as “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ.”

Christians often treat this as a tidy “non-Christian confirmation” of Jesus—and then quietly upgrade that into: “See? It’s basically established history.”

But look at what you’re actually holding:

1. A text transmitted through centuries of copying.
2. A short identifying phrase that is doing enormous work.
3. A scholarly dispute about what exactly is original, what is later gloss, and what Josephus meant (or didn’t mean) by it.
4. A debate that is inseparable from incentives—because “called Christ” isn’t a neutral phrase inside Christian polemics; it’s a prized trophy.

Even Origen—writing in the third century—explicitly notes that Josephus “did not believe in Jesus as the Christ,” while still mentioning Josephus discussing James and using the phrase “called Christ.”  That alone tells you something important: early Christian intellectuals were already navigating the fact that Josephus is not a Christian witness, and the evidentiary value of Josephus is not as clean as modern apologetic soundbites pretend.

Now fast-forward to modern scholarship and the argument becomes a live wire. Richard Carrier’s January 6, 2026 critique of T.C. Schmidt’s work on this very issue is an example of how intense and technical this debate gets.  Schmidt, for his part, argues the Josephus material should be taken more seriously than many skeptics allow (including detailed discussion in Oxford Academic publications).

You don’t have to “pick a winner” here to see the constitutional point:

If a claim depends on contested textual transmission, interpretive scaffolding, and scholarly trench warfare, the state has no business treating that claim as privileged public knowledge.

That isn’t “Christianity is false.” It’s: Christianity is a religion—like other religions—and the government is not competent (or authorized) to certify it as epistemically special.

Why “history and tradition” can become gasoline on the culture-war fire

This is where the Kennedy shift matters in practice.

When the Court says we interpret the Establishment Clause by “reference to historical practices and understandings,” it creates an opening for people to argue: “Well, historically America was Christian—so Christian practices in public institutions are just normal.”

But “history and tradition” is not a single thing. It’s a battlefield of selective emphasis.

• Yes, there was religion in early America.
• Yes, there was also explicit fear of state-established religion.
• Yes, there were Christian majorities.
• Yes, there was also an emerging constitutional structure designed to keep government from becoming a church enforcement mechanism.

And if the test becomes “whatever tradition you can narrate convincingly,” then you will get dueling myths presented as law.

That’s why I call it a warning label. Not because history is irrelevant—but because history is easy to weaponize. It’s the most respectable costume propaganda can wear.

So even if courts are shifting tests, the civic principle we should insist on is stable:

Public institutions should run on public reasons.
Reasons that don’t require metaphysical buy-in.
Reasons that can be debated using shared standards.

That’s the only way disagreement stays nonviolent.

So what should public life do? Three lanes, no collisions

Here’s the clean version:

1) Science education stays methodological.
Hypotheses, testing, replication, error bars, peer review, humility, revision. If it can’t be tested, it can be discussed in philosophy or comparative religion—not smuggled into science class wearing a lab coat.

2) Religion stays protected as belief and practice.
Worship, community, private meaning, moral formation, ritual, tradition. People can believe whatever they want and live it out—within the limits of general law that applies to everyone.

3) Government stays neutral.
It doesn’t adjudicate which metaphysical story is “true.” It doesn’t privilege one sacred narrative. It doesn’t convert a faith claim into a civic premise.

When you blur these lanes, you don’t create harmony. You create a competition for state power—because now the prize is official validation of your worldview.

The predictable rebuttal: “But our values come from religion”

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, the law still needs a public justification.

A religious person can absolutely oppose theft because God forbids it. But the law against theft doesn’t need “God said so” to be legitimate. It can be justified in public terms: property rights, social stability, human flourishing, preventing coercion and violence.

This is the difference between motivation and justification.

Motivation can be religious.
Justification in a pluralistic state must be shareable.

Once “because my scripture says so” becomes sufficient justification for public coercion, pluralism is over. Now you’re living under the religious majority’s theology whether you consent or not.

The deeper problem: privileging religious claims turns democracy into sectarian combat

People underestimate how fast this spirals.

Today it’s “let’s have more Christian messaging in schools.”
Tomorrow it’s “which Christian messaging?”
Then it’s “why not prayers led by staff?”
Then it’s “why not religious doctrine as moral curriculum?”
Then it’s “why do dissenters get to opt out?”
Then it’s “if they opt out, they’re undermining the community.”

That’s not paranoia; it’s political gravity. When you make metaphysical truth claims a tool of governance, you incentivize everyone to fight over whose metaphysics wins. And the people who lose don’t just lose an argument—they lose equal standing.

Why This Matters

A country can survive deep disagreement if it shares rules for public reasoning. Once government starts privileging religious claims as “knowledge,” pluralism collapses into a fight over which sacred narrative gets the microphone—and eventually which one gets enforcement power.

If you want Americans with radically different worldviews to live together without tearing the place apart, you need a public square built on shared standards: evidence where evidence is appropriate, equal rights regardless of creed, and a government that refuses to become a theological referee.

That’s not hostility to religion. It’s the only arrangement that protects religious freedom for everyone—including believers—when the political winds shift.

References

• Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. ___ (2022) (U.S. Supreme Court opinion).
• Cornell Law School, U.S. Constitution Annotated: “Establishment Clause and Historical Practices and Tradition.”
• Congressional Research Service. (2022). Kennedy v. Bremerton School District: School Prayer and the Establishment Clause (LSB10780).
• Carrier, R. (2026, January 6). “T.C. Schmidt on James in Josephus: Apologetics vs. History.”
• Origen. Contra Celsum, Book I, Chapter 47 (Roberts-Donaldson translation).
• Josephus, F. Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20 (Ant. 20.200), English translation (Whiston).
• Schmidt, T. C. (Oxford Academic). “James the Brother of Jesus: Antiquities 20.200.”
• Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History, Book II (public domain translation available via New Advent).

Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are opinions of the author for educational and commentary purposes only. They are not statements of fact about any individual or organization, and should not be construed as legal, medical, or financial advice. References to public figures and institutions are based on publicly available sources cited in the article. Any resemblance beyond these references is coincidental.