Religion and Public Life Begins Three-Part Series on Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft

Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life (RPL) program opened its three-part lecture series, "Scripture, Secularism, and Statecraft," with a talk by Professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University, titled “From Separation of Church and State to Christian Preferentialism: How the United States Supreme Court Thinks (or Doesn’t) About Christian Preferentialism.” In introducing the event, RPL director Terrence Johnson described the program’s goal as understanding religion “in context, with special attention to questions of power, peace, and conflict.”

Berlinerblau began by addressing what he called “the dreaded s-word—secularism,” describing it as “the most misunderstood '-ism' in the entire global political lexicon.” He traced the term to 1851, when British freethinker George Jacob Holyoake defined secularism as “a system of this worldly ethics geared to improving human well-being by recourse to science and reason.” 

Berlinerblau distinguished his approach from other major definitions—Cécile Laborde’s framing of secularism as a project ensuring civic equality, and Talal Asad’s critique of it as a historical technique of power that disciplines religion. His own account focused on governance, presenting secularism as a “triune God” of “disestablishment, equality, and neutrality”—a framework for structuring state-religion relations rather than a stance on belief. He emphasized that “none of the said scholars associate secularism with atheism,” warning that conflating the two is “hazardous to the health of secularism.” 

A major focus of the talk was the United States Supreme Court’s shifting approach to church-state relations. Berlinerblau described the Warren and Burger Courts (1947–1985) as the “golden age of separationist secularism,” contrasting them with the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, which he argued have steadily eroded that tradition. 

In concluding the conversation, Berlinerblau noted that today’s Roberts Court has “replaced separationist secularism with neo-preferentialism,” a judicial philosophy that favors majoritarian faiths, disfavors minority religions and non-believers, and subordinates the Establishment Clause to the Free Exercise Clause.