The main reason is as basic as it is important. It is not religion, but fundamentalism, that is incompatible with human rights, democratic societies, and tolerance of others. This point was driven home to me when I was the guest of Iranian reformers at a 2002 meeting organized by the Center for the Dialogue of Civilizations. The reformers stressed that they were fighting not for a secular civic society but for a religious one, in which people would be free and encouraged to pray but not forced to do so, where modesty for men and women would be fostered by moral arguments but not imposed by moral squads.

For example, the debate over whether Catholicism could be compatible with a free society was often similarly misframed. A better question would have been, what kind of Catholicism? After all, the kind that leaves political choices to the voters and seeks to persuade rather than force its adherents is very much compatible, but the kind of Catholicism that led the Church to support the Inquisition, appease the Nazis, and assist the Argentinian generals is not. The same fault line that separates the persuasive versions of religion from the coercive ones is found in Judaism between Reform Jews and some ultra-Orthodox groups. It is also found between fundamentalist forms of Islam and more moderate varieties, as practiced by most Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Mali, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere.

Here the principled and practical lines of reasoning converge. It is inconceivable that the overwhelming majority of Shi’a in Iraq, and most Afghans, Saudis, and Pakistanis, among others, would send their children to public schools that teach only normatively neutral subjects or provide only secularized civic and moral education. In short, there is neither a principled reason nor a practical reason to impose on other nations the model mainly followed by the United States and France: the opposition to any and all religious teaching in public schools. Moderate religious teachings not only are compatible with free societies but also provide a major source of the informal moral codes for countries that do not yet have them. Thus the United States should promote moderate religious teaching in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.