A secular state cannot be neutral while religious institutions hold public power

The argument

A second argument for prohibition concerns the position of the non-believer. Proponents note that religious bodies in many countries hold powers that are not available to other private associations: they run schools, they are consulted on legislation, they receive tax treatment and public funding, they are granted exemptions from laws on employment and discrimination that bind everyone else, and in some states their doctrine is written directly into family or criminal law. On this account a citizen who holds no religion is not simply living alongside believers but is governed in part by institutions whose authority they do not recognise and in whose decisions they have no voice. Proponents argue that the usual remedy, separation of religion from the state, has not worked where it has been tried. The institutions in question are wealthy, organised and long-lived, and they are able to convert those advantages into political influence faster than constitutional provisions can exclude it. Exemptions once granted are defended as matters of conscience, which makes them unusually difficult to withdraw, and so the asymmetry tends to persist or to widen rather than to erode. From this proponents conclude that only prohibition produces genuine equality before the law. So long as religious organisations exist as organisations, they argue, they will seek and obtain privileges that no secular body could claim, and the non-believer will continue to be governed by rules made on grounds they are given no means to contest. Banning religion, on this reasoning, is not an attack on private conviction but the removal of a standing exception to equal citizenship.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that the argument identifies a case for removing particular privileges rather than for abolishing the institutions that hold them, and that exemptions, establishment and state funding can each be ended without prohibiting belief or worship. They add that a prohibition would create a far larger inequality than the one it addresses, since the state would be deciding what citizens may believe, and that the premises treat the difficulty of disestablishment as evidence that it is impossible when it has in fact been achieved in a number of states.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The privileges listed are real and are creatures of particular legal arrangements rather than of religion's existence. Establishment, public funding and statutory exemptions are each separately repealable, and the premise does not explain why the remedy must extend to belief itself. [Rejecting P3] That separation has not worked is a generalisation made without reference to the states in which disestablishment has substantially occurred. The premise treats the difficulty of a reform as proof that it is impossible. [Rejecting C] The conclusion claims equality before the law as its aim while proposing a law that would divide citizens by what they believe. The asymmetry the premises identify would be replaced by a larger one, and the argument does not address that exchange.