If the government is entirely secular, then every person is free to worship the god or gods they believe in, and no person has the right to impose their faith onto others.
I don’t think that one can say a government is entirely secular, nor can it reasonably be an ideal endlessly striven for. A political apparatus would have to determine what is and isn’t permissible, and any line drawn would be arbitrary.
Suppose a law is passed by a coalition of theist and environmentalist politicians banning eating whales, where the theists think it is wrong for people (in that country) to eat whales as a matter of religious law. A court deciding whether or not the law was impermissibly religiously motivated not only has to try and divine the motives of those involved in passing the law, it would have to decide what probability of passing it would have had, what to counterfactually replace the theists’ values with, etc. and then compare that to some standard.
I don’t think that one can say a government is entirely secular, nor can it reasonably be an ideal endlessly striven for. A political apparatus would have to determine what is and isn’t permissible, and any line drawn would be arbitrary.
Suppose a law is passed by a coalition of theist and environmentalist politicians banning eating whales, where the theists think it is wrong for people (in that country) to eat whales as a matter of religious law. A court deciding whether or not the law was impermissibly religiously motivated not only has to try and divine the motives of those involved in passing the law, it would have to decide what probability of passing it would have had, what to counterfactually replace the theists’ values with, etc. and then compare that to some standard.