Tensions between authoritarianism, pluralism, sectarianism, inclusion, diversity, and religious and national identity pervade and construct the possibilities of global discourse. In many ways, these tensions signal a retreat from reforms that require discomfort, reflexive engagements, courage. This retreat manifests in policies, both real and those we imagine to be real, that seek to neutralize public educational pedagogies and curriculum. We reside now in a perfect storm, the nexus between ideologies of politics, class, race, gender, and religion, wherein authoritarian populist movements (including those of religious factions) are reshaping society. In this article, I argue the falseness of pedagogical neutrality and explore the need for pedagogical spaces that recognize manifold layers of pluralism. I suggest that a structural blindness to values that are incommensurate with those each of us hold, particularly those that pertain to being religion-blind, furthered by democratic and secular religious "neutrality," has had a reproductive effect enabling and furthering an agenda that serves to sanction and "demarcate the intolerable" (Brown 2012, 6).