Politics & Power Quote by John Paul Stevens

“Complete neutrality” is a deceptively loaded phrase: it sounds mild, even polite, while staking out one of the most aggressive positions a judge can take in America’s culture wars. John Paul Stevens isn’t pleading for a secular society; he’s drawing a constitutional boundary line. The intent is jurisprudential, not spiritual: the state’s job is to govern citizens, not validate beliefs, even when beliefs are popular, even when “tradition” tries to pass as a legal argument.

The subtext is a rebuke to a recurring American impulse: to treat religious majorities as synonymous with the public. By demanding neutrality, Stevens is also resisting the rhetorical trick that casts government accommodation as harmless “recognition.” Neutrality implies symmetrical distance: no promotion, no penalty, no winks. That’s why the word “must” matters. It frames neutrality as a duty, not a preference, and it anticipates the predictable backlash that neutral government is “hostile” to faith. Stevens’ formulation flips that complaint: what’s often called hostility is simply the state refusing to take sides.

Contextually, this lives in the long shadow of Establishment Clause battles where the fight is rarely about banning religion and almost always about who gets the microphone: prayer in schools, Ten Commandments displays, public funding routed to religious institutions, civic rituals that smuggle theology into “heritage.” Stevens’ neutrality is both an ethic and a strategy: preserve pluralism by keeping government from becoming a referee that secretly plays for one team.