Barack Obama's real opinions about secularism are either confused or simply unknown — he has expressed both sentiments which can be construed as pro-secularist and sentiments which can be construed as anti-secularist. These contradictions might charitably be interpreted as typical political posturing: telling everyone what they want to hear in order to avoid offending anyone. On the other hand, maybe he himself is sincerely confused due to conflicting impulses.

In his "Call to Renewal" Keynote Address of June 28, 2006, Barack Obama first expressed this anti-secularist sentiment:

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

No one has ever said that believers should "leave their religion at the door before entering the public square." Believers are free to express their religious beliefs and practice their religion in public all they want — and in fact they do.

Neither has anyone said that "personal morality" shouldn't be brought into personal policy debates. As Obama notes, law and morality go hand-in-hand, though he's wrong to suggest that "Judeo-Christian tradition" is primarily responsible for our current system.

It is only Christian Nationalists who propagate the lie that telling believers that their religious doctrines shouldn't be part of public policy is somehow the same as saying that their religion shouldn't be expressed in public or that morality shouldn't be part of policy debates. Why is Barack Obama echoing the lies of the Christian Right? Why is he giving these lies even more legitimacy and credibility than they already have?

Then, just a little bit later in the same speech, he offered this very pro-secularist sentiment:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

In contrast to the lies and straw men mentioned by Barack Obama above, here he expresses exactly the sentiments which secularists and church/state separationists keep recommending. Whatever personal reasons a believer may have for some policy and which are grounded in religious doctrine, those reasons are necessarily invalid as a basis for public policy. In order to argue for their ideas being adopted as public policy, they most translated those reasons into something more "universal" and not dependent on the particulars of any alleged divine revelation.

This doesn't mean that they can never argue for their idea on the basis of their religion in public, especially when speaking to fellow believers, but such arguments are necessarily limited in nature. At the very least, it would be a good idea to mix those arguments with more universal arguments, or make more universal arguments at other times. This is because the state must be secular rather than religious, and this requires that the laws and policies of the state be based on secular reasons rather than narrow religious reasons.

So we are faced with a very curious problem. Barack Obama starts out by repeating some common misrepresentations and lies often used by the Christian Right for attacking secularism and church/state separation, but then he later comes around to repeating the true position of secularists and separationists. Taken together these represent contradictory positions — how can a person who truly supports secular government and church/state separation so easily repeat obvious falsehoods about that same position?

Either Barack Obama doesn't really understand what he's talking about, or he can't quite be trusted to tell us what he really thinks.