Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur J. Goldberg

Neutrality, Goldberg suggests, isn’t a thermostat you set at “room temperature” and forget; it’s a posture that can quietly curdle into an ideology of its own. His target is a particular drift in Establishment Clause reasoning: when the state tries so hard not to “endorse” religion that it ends up treating religion as uniquely suspect, an intrusive presence that must be scrubbed from public life. The phrase “brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular” is a surgical jab: secularism becomes not a baseline civic condition but a quasi-faith, complete with its own pieties and taboos. That’s the subtextual inversion that gives the line its bite.

Goldberg is also doing something strategically constitutional. He’s not arguing for a confessional state; he’s arguing that the Constitution’s promise of religious freedom contains an anti-hostility principle. “Neutrality” can’t mean government neutrality between religion and irreligion only in the sense of equal coldness. It has to mean equal liberty: the state may not favor religious doctrine, but it also may not penalize religious expression simply because it is religious.

Context matters: mid-20th-century Supreme Court battles over school prayer, Bible reading, and public religious symbols pushed “separation of church and state” from metaphor toward administrative program. Goldberg, a Jewish Justice appointed by Kennedy, often worried that a rigid separationism would flatten pluralism into a sanitizing secular uniformity. His intent is corrective: to warn that constitutional “neutrality” is being misread as mandated secularization, and to insist that the First Amendment restrains governmental hostility as much as governmental sponsorship.