Politics & Power Quote by Bill Bradley

“Absolute governmental neutrality” is doing a lot of rhetorical work here: it’s Bradley’s way of framing church-state separation not as a constraint on public life, but as a patriotic fidelity test. By calling neutrality “the only way” to honor “our American tradition,” he flips a familiar conservative move on its head. Instead of treating religion as the moral glue of the nation, he argues that the nation’s glue is the refusal to let any one faith claim the machinery of the state.

The intent is both legalistic and cultural. “Neutrality” signals a constitutional posture: government can protect free exercise and prohibit establishment, but it can’t play favorites. The word “absolute” goes further than the Supreme Court usually does in practice, and that’s the point. Bradley isn’t litigating doctrine; he’s drawing a bright line in an era when “values voters” and public religious displays were increasingly used as partisan shorthand. Neutrality becomes the antidote to the slow creep of symbolic establishment: prayer in schools, religious tests by vibe, policy arguments that smuggle theology in as “common sense.”

The subtext is a warning about power. Once government starts “recognizing” religion, it inevitably chooses which religion counts, which beliefs look respectable, and which practices get treated as suspect. Bradley’s sentence makes pluralism sound less like a feel-good slogan and more like a hard-won operating system: neutrality isn’t hostility to faith, it’s the only arrangement that keeps faith from being drafted into coercion - and keeps citizens from being sorted into insiders and outsiders by creed.