Yes, but we were talking about western Europe, like Poland and Hungary.
> The U.S. isn't a "secular nation" either. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits Congress from establishing a national church, just like Article 137 of the Weimar Constitution in Germany
Yes, but we were talking about Poland and Hungary, not Germany. Poland and Hungary's constitutions establish national religious law. I would consider Germany to be secular, like the US, as opposed to Poland or Hungary, which are not.
> Justice Story made clear in 1830 that the constitution was not understood to prohibit non-preferential government support of religion
However, throughout the later 1800s, a majority of states (and nearly the nation as a whole) passed Blaine amendments, banning the use of public funds for private religious schools. Now this might have been driven in part by anti-catholic sentiment, but no, I don't think you can claim that the court adopting an interpretation that most states already had adopted was a "dramatic departure". Perhaps legally, but not in terms of popular support/understanding.
> particularly due to the Supreme Court taking various decisions on social issues away from the electorate, the laws in the U.S. with respect to churches, abortion, etc.
Right, and this is unambiguously a good thing. Laws shouldn't be based on religious ethics.
> And does that give us any insight into the current situation in the US?
Honestly, I don't see how it does. Trump's brand of populism isn't particularly religious. His appeal to the religious right wasn't much beyond "I'll appoint conservative judges". It's much more nationalist than religious (and I'll grant you that those two things are often intertwined, but that seems to be more because conservatives are often the ones stoking nationalist sentiment, and also they're usually more religious, I don't think religion necessitates nationalism).
Weekly church attendance in the U.S. is far higher than in Western Europe: https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment.... The U.S. is at 36%. (That ranges from 21% in Vermont to 53% in Utah.) According to Pew, Germany is at 10%. France is at 12%. The U.S. is much closer to Turkey or Iran in religiosity by that measure than to Western Europe.
> They aren't secular nations, and the things you describe aren't common in secular nations in Europe.
The U.S. isn't a "secular nation" either. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits Congress from establishing a national church, just like Article 137 of the Weimar Constitution in Germany (which is still in effect). At the time the Establishment Clause was written, and for decades after, a number of states, like Massachusetts, had established state churches! Public schools in the U.S. were invented to teach religion, and did so for 150 years until FDR-appointed Justices enshrined a "wall of separation" notion into the constitution.
To use the school example, the enforced secularism in the US is comparable to France, and to the left of the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy. But the US is vastly more religious than any of those countries. There is a major impedance mismatch between our society and our laws, that was created by the Supreme Court. (57% of Americans still oppose that Supreme Court decision banning school prayer, all of these decades later.)
> And there was understanding that the establishment clause banned state support of public schools in the 19th century. McCollumn wasn't a particular leftward shift, it was an enshrinement of longstanding practice.
McCollum was a dramatic departure. Justice Story made clear in 1830 that the constitution was not understood to prohibit non-preferential government support of religion: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_re.... What happens in say Germany, where Muslim children can get Islamic instruction in schools, and Catholic children can get Catholic instruction in schools, is squarely within what is allowable under an original understanding of the Establishment Clause.
> Abortion is another example. What changes would you expect to Abortion policy? I'd expect to see things continue roughly in line with Roe.
Roe is already a significant departure from American and European public opinion (under 30% of people in the U.S. support generally legal abortion in the second trimester and beyond, which is mandatory under Roe, most people support various restrictions and waiting periods which are impermissible under Roe). I would anticipate further efforts to strike down popular restrictions such as parental consent rules, which are not atypical in Europe.
> I've seen very limited (and only very particularly targeted) support of public unions from the left. Consider that police unions are not particularly loved at the moment.
Biden, thanks to Jill Biden, is hugely supportive of teachers unions. Democrats have advocated for shutting down charter schools, which are broadly popular.
> The crux of this line of argumentation (and your general lines of argumentation when we have similar discussions) seem to be that we should take Poland and Hungary, and other ex-soviet nations as examples of how the US should legislate. I don't get that.
No, you miss the point entirely. I'm not talking about how the U.S. should or should not legislate. I'm talking about how Democrats have and want to legislate in the U.S., by comparison to European countries that have similarly high levels of religiosity to the U.S. This isn't a discussion of policy, but of the polarized political dynamics in the U.S. My point is that, particularly due to the Supreme Court taking various decisions on social issues away from the electorate, the laws in the U.S. with respect to churches, abortion, etc., are much further to the left compared to other highly religious countries.
The point is to try and understand how that is driving political polarization in the U.S. Hence the hypothetical about what if we applied French-style secularism to a country as religious as Poland. How would we expect Poles to react? And does that give us any insight into the current situation in the US?