Creating the 'Cruel Secular'

This paper explores the emergence and gradual ascendence of a particular formulation of secularity within the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning with the Court’s first overt reference to secularity as a legal principle, this paper then traces the near-simultaneous emergence of a discourse of “cruel” secularity – a characterization of the secular legal aspirations of the 1960s as both a symptom of growing American hostility to particular religious worldviews and a subtle endeavor to establish a system of values that reflects the sensibilities of political liberals. This “cruel” counterpart to the legal secularity of the 1960s hearkens back to longstanding conservative anxieties about modernity, but this paper will focus upon the way in which, beginning in the 1980s, it became framed as a legal problem to be addressed by U.S. courts.