True Secularist

You've written that the U.S. is a religious country, but you also think that it is a secular country.
I think the fact that [the U.S.] has a secular history--we were the first country to separate church and state, and we established our religious framework on secular grounds in the 18th century--makes it possible for our culture and so much of our political life to have a religious coloration. We separate church and state but we don't separate church and culture. We have a very religious culture, even though we have a very formally nonreligious state. And politics is about culture, especially these days when we have a so-called culture war. So religion infuses a great deal of our politics and our political campaigns. But no president could then get elected and say, "I'm going to make my religion be the religion of the country." George W. Bush never tried doing anything like that. Nobody can do that.

But having a religion puts a presidential candidate in the cultural mainstream.
That's right. No aetheist could ever be elected president of the United States, for the foreseeable future. Now, that's not true elsewhere. Chile has an aetheist president--a woman. An unmarried mother. It's inconceivable [in the United States]! But if you're a nonbeliever and you think that enlightenment or progress is measured by the extent to which a country can elect a nonbeliever as president, then Chile is a more progressive or modern country than the United States.

Why do people insist on having candidates from this mainstream and then insist equally on secularism in the government?
I think those two things are related. Since you can't create the political system based upon the principles of one particular church, you look for signs in your candidates that they take religion seriously. But my point is that we would actually be very upset if a candidate said that I want you to take the specific theology of my religion seriously. The way I put it is, we're a very religious country but we're not at all a theological country. We don't want our candidates to talk about theology. We just want them to make general, really contentless remarks about their faith.

So we are free to talk about religion in any sphere, but there is an institutional separation between church and state.
That's right. In 1776 Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations" and said that we should have a free market in business because that would promote efficiency and so on. The same idea applies to religion. We have a free market in religion. We have no state church. Government doesn't pay people to be ministers. Churches have to raise all their own money. Everything's voluntary. That's what I mean about secular--it's borrowed from a very secular idea: the free market. And the result is--exactly like Adam Smith predicted about economics--that we have innovation and experimentation in religion, and religion grows. In Europe, where you have a state church, that's like what Adam Smith called a cartel, or a monopoly, and that promotes inefficiency. So where you have an official, established religion, religion tends to stagnate.

Has that been helpful to the United States in ways that set it apart from Europe?
We're having much less difficulty absorbing Muslim immigrants than Europe is. I certainly think that our tradition of religious pluralism and combination of secularism and religion has made it possible to do that. When you have an established church, then a religious minority--like Muslims--comes to the country and they see an established church as oppressive of them. If the state is paying for Catholic schools and isn't paying for Islamic schools, that's discrimination. But if you come to a country in which the state pays for no religious schools--all federal money for religious schools in America is prohibited--then Christians and Muslims are on exactly equal terms. So that's a big advantage in incorporating new groups.

Is Sarkozy modeling himself after the Americans?
The whole appeal of Sarkozy has been that he's going to modernize France, and modernize means make it more like the United States.