Abstract

In this essay I set current reappraisals of the secular, of secularism, and of secularization, in the context of the ways in which law regulates religion in the U.S. today. Religion under the rule of law—as it is practiced in the United States. Virtually all Americans today, however orthodox their asserted religious identities, Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, claim the right to associate themselves with religious communities—and religious ideas and practices—as they see fit, to define the terms of any such an association, to change their religious identities and associations at will, and to "mix and match" religious traditions. That right is understood to be authorized by political, legal, and theological narratives and texts and is changing the legal phenomenology of religion in the U.S.