A Post-Secular Supreme Court?: How the Roberts Court Strategically Deploys the Religion-Secular Binary to Advance Christian Supremacy

Scholars invested in the so-called “post-secular turn” often argue that critically deconstructing the religion-secular binary and interrogating the modernist assertion that the political and legal spheres should remain epistemologically “secular” will promote religious pluralism and respect for religious difference. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, however, the very same theoretical claims underlying notions of the “post-secular” are also, ironically, being exploited with increasing frequency by the American conservative legal movement (CLM) to advance Christian supremacy. Through a critical examination of the language, structure, and organizing logics of recent Supreme Court decisions, I elucidate a significant and problematic inconsistency pervading majority opinions that aids in this work: whereas recent non-establishment holdings deconstruct the religion-secular binary into a nullity so that state actions may countenance distinctly Christian practices, symbols, and truth claims, concurrent free exercise rulings reify the binary in order to posit “secular” state animus toward conservative Christian beliefs.