The secular establishment wants to reduce the autonomy of religious institutions and limit the influence of faith in the public square. The reason is not hard to grasp. In America, religion largely means Christianity, and today our secular culture views orthodox Christian churches as troublesome, retrograde, and reactionary forces. They're seen as anti-science, anti-gay, and anti-women -- which is to say anti-progress as the Left defines progress. Not surprisingly, then, the Left believes society will be best served if Christians are limited in their influence on public life. We're in the midst of climate change -- one that's getting colder and colder toward religion. For a long time, political theorists have argued that our laws must be based on so-called public reason, which is in fact an ambiguous, ill-defined concept that gives privileged status to liberalism. This shift in legal thinking on the Left reflects underlying religious trends. As the religious character of our society changes, so do our assumptions about religious freedom. The main change has been the rise of the Nones. In the 1950s, around three percent of Americans checked the “none" box when asked about their religious affiliation. That number has grown, especially in the last decade, to 20 percent of the population. And Nones are heavily represented in elite culture. A great deal of higher education is dominated by Nones, as are important cultural institutions, the media, and Hollywood. They are conscious of their power, and they feel the momentum of their growth. As the Nones have emerged as a significant cohort, the committed core of religious people has not declined and in fact has become unified and increasingly battle tested. There is no principled reason for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection. Religious belief can be described as a uniquely bad combination of moral fervor and mental blindness, serving no public good that justifies special protection. More significantly, it is patently unfair to afford religion such protection. Why should a Catholic or a Baptist have a special right while Peter Singer, a committed utilitarian, does not? Evoking the principle of fairness, everybody's conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. The Arabic word dhimmi means non-Muslim. Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims were allowed to survive only insofar as they accepted Muslim dominance. Our times are not those times, and the secularism of the Nones is not Islam. Nevertheless, many powerful forces in America would like to impose a soft but real dhimmitude. The liberal and libertarian Nones will quarrel, as do the Shi'a and Sunni, but they will, largely unify against the public influence of religion. So why are we losing our religion? The global economic collapse certainly seems to have triggered a collective loss of faith in figures of authority in every sector of society, and the process of globalization also sped up the process of atheisisation. If atheists were a homgeneous group, the collapse of religion would accelerate. The proliferation of the world wide web has exacerbated the process eroding religious faith in the west. Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever, and this is all breaking down.

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