The Heretics Club, a lunch discussion series hosted by the Office of Chaplains’ Interfaith Community, hosted its first event of the semester on Thursday, Feb. 5. Colgate University students, faculty and community members gathered in the Memorial Chapel basement for a talk by Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Nathaniel Mull, followed by an open discussion among attendees. The talk, titled “Is It Possible to be ‘Neutral’ With Religion?” addressed secularism and religious liberty from a political perspective.
The Heretics Club was revived after some years of inactivity in 2025 by Associate Professor of Religion Jenna Reinbold and George C. Carleton Professor of Philosophy David Dudrick as an informal discussion series. Dudrick and Reinbold, who now serve as the program’s directors, were able to restart the Heretics Club using a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation for the support of civil discourse. According to Dudrick, Heretics Club’s unique purpose is the fostering of open discussion among Colgate community members, which he said he hopes will offer a rare space for thoughtful disagreement.
“Our hope is to foster productive disagreement — the issues are too variegated and interesting for everyone to think the same, but we can come to understand why others think the way they do, even when we think they’re wrong,” Dudrick said. “That doesn’t happen in our society, but we’re seeking to be heretics, after all.”
Mull’s talk — designed to constitute only a brief portion of the planned event time — began with a presentation of a problem liberal government faces in exercising sovereignty over its multireligious citizenry. Namely, that some policies, according to Mull, are bound to affect certain religious communities more than others.
“If you think about fighting foreign wars and conscripting an army to fight foreign wars, there are certain religious faiths that would be affected by that requirement in ways that other religious faiths are not,” Mull said.
Though the waging of war might be unbiased in religious intention — waged for nonreligious reasons, for example — the fact of its uneven effect poses a question of fairness, Mull said. It asks whether it is unfair that laws or government action may have uneven effects on different faiths, and whether policy should be neutral in effect as well as intention with respect to religious belief.
“The idea of neutrality is that it’s no longer enough to be neutral with respect to theological purpose, but we now need to think about all the different religions out there and … make sure that we carve out exemptions for these religions,” Mull said.
Mull observed that the pursuit of religious neutrality often takes shape as exemption, or the allowance of persons whose religious faiths conflict with the law to be exempt from it. Mull raised the example of the Quakers, a religious group that was granted a “conscientious objection” to military conscription because they prohibit violence.
In the last hundred or so years, Mull said, conscientious objection has also expanded to include not only religious objections, but any moral objections whatsoever, including those made by atheists or otherwise nonreligious people. According to Mull, this is the point at which Western secular thought about religious liberty has settled.
“This is sort of where secularism has stuck, to say, ‘Well, that’s all we can do,’” Mull said. “‘All we can do is ensure equal liberty of conscience. If you have a sincere moral, conscientious belief, we will accommodate that.’”
Mull then challenged the notion that such laws are completely “neutral,” even as accommodated to an increasingly wide range of objections. One suggestion he made was that these laws do not account for persons whose objections are not moral or conscientious, let alone religious.
“If you’re thinking along the lines of neutrality and fairness, you could take it further and say, ‘What about me? I don’t have any moral convictions, I just don’t want to fight, or I think this war is stupid, though I have no objection to violence, per se,’” Mull said.
The unconscientious objector, Mull argued, is affected just as unfairly as those with moral objections, but does not receive the same exemption, suggesting that government may privilege — and therefore not be exactly “neutral” to — moral and religious qualms over other kinds of objections.
“Okay, you’re neutral with respect to competing moral claims, but you’re not neutral with respect to different ways of life,” Mull said. “You are privileging certain conscientious ways of life while not privileging those who don’t pursue conscientious ways of life.”
He also presented an alternative perspective advanced by the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. Locke would say, according to Mull, that granting special protection to all moral and religious objections is not actually “neutral” with respect to religion. By privileging personal conviction over one’s allegiance to the state, Mull said, religious neutrality deprioritizes one’s secular, civic duties.
“In the attempt to carve out religious liberty and neutrality, we’ve discarded a certain kind of secularism, where laws are not religiously neutral, they’re religiously even-handed,” Mull said.
Following Mull’s initial presentation, the floor was opened to questions, critiques and comments from the entire group. This open discussion portion made up most of the event and covered topics as disparate as imperialism, Native American religion, contraception and “daddy issues.” The final comment came from Campus Imam Ahmet Celik, who suggested that the discussion was limited by Western conceptions of the divide between religion and secularity.
“What are the alternative perspectives on secularism, religion and politics? It is very difficult to find it in just the Western context,” Celik said.
First-year Theresa Montana, a regular attendee of the Heretics Club events, said that the conversation was highly engaging, if somewhat divergent from the talk’s headline.
“I kind of wish they stuck more to the topic, but I really liked where the discussion went,” Montana said.
