Important Clarificatory Addendum

Since I’m new to this Substack thing, I shouldn’t be surprised that it took me just two posts to stick my foot in my mouth. Although no one has emailed me in alarm yet, I realized shortly after sending my last post that a key sentence in it could be read in the opposite sense intended:

“Now, it should go without saying—but alas, it does not—that among the unpopular things we should say out loud, I do NOT include, “We should rescind religious liberty for Hindus, Muslims, or Jews” or “We should have a nationally established church” or even “we should bring back state established churches.””

I’m pretty sure that the intended meaning is clear enough from the context, but it’s important enough to be worth taking the time to be unambiguous. I do NOT mean that we should think such unpopular things, and just not “say them out loud.” I mean that we should not say them out loud because we shouldn’t even think them. While I will always be the first to defend the cogency and coherence of post-Reformation establishmentarian Protestantism against its snide and condescending modern critics, I think the American religio-political order (at least as designed) represents a real improvement on it. Some of the premises of earlier establishmentarianism were simply flawed; others made sense in their context but not in a more mature, literate, and mobile civilization.

Anyway, hopefully the nuances of my thoughts on this will be clear from the essays I linked to in the last Substack, but I thought it worth a quick clarificatory note just to make sure no one was triggered or started quoting me out of context.