It’s strictly forbidden to have a religious test for office in the United States, but it is reasonable to ask a person if their moral, social, political, religious or economic convictions will interfere with their ability to do their job. After all, it’s not just religion that can cause a problem. People have non-religious convictions that can interfere with their ability to judge impartially.
How far can you go down the road of questioning the influence of a person’s religious beliefs without breaking the prohibition on a religious test for office?
There are some things that would clearly be illegal religious tests, such as rule that a person has to be a Trinitarian, or swear allegiance to the pope, or be baptized in order to hold office.
But it gets tricky the further you get from such obvious examples. What about requiring that a person hold to a religious point of view — say, that all men are created equal? Can we require that from a candidate? It’s an extraordinarily useful dogma that lies at the heart of our system and laws, but … it really is a religious idea. What if someone didn’t hold to it? Would that disqualify him?
Nowadays it seems good enough that you believe that all men are equal. The part about them being “created” can be taken as a literary embellishment the 18th century. I myself don’t have a problem with saying that people are created, but as long as the nominee has the conviction that we are all equal before the law that’s good enough for me.
As you indicate, there are several senses in which we can understand “all men are created equal.”
Focus on “created” — all men get their dignity from and are answerable to God. That’s clearly a religious view.
Focus on “equal” — “equality before the law” as a secular value. But you could have all people “equal before the law” and be considered mostly worthless. When joined with “created” the concept adds the sense that all men have a special value.
Regardless of these metaphysical speculations, “equal before the law” will do the trick in legal matters.
My hobbyhorse (which I remember bringing up on an earlier version of Crowhill) is that once you separate the idea of being religious from theism or more broadly from a belief in the supernatural at all, you notice that all sort of things people who consider themselves very secular look awfully religious. Environmentalism is a good example.
This can mean that it’s hard to come up with some abstract principle that can be consistently applied and will forbid what we want to forbid and permit what we want to permit (to bind and to loose..), but as a conservative I doubt that’s possible in general and so I don’t get hung up on it.