It would mean, however, that the state should not be explicitly backing the 'religion' in e.g. public universities, even though that's not the immediate issue at hand in the article.
So this can easily be taken as an argument that governments should be divorced from academia. No grants, no student loans, no degree requirements in public sector jobs. Which would be fine, I think. The arguments for why governments should fund academia look very weak these days. It was supposed to be about long range research that the private sector wouldn't fund, but what we see in practice is the private sector funding ultra-long-range research like self driving cars, AI, etc whilst public funding gets guzzled by oceans of non-replicable P-hacked ideology driven pseudo-science. And as for education, well, researchers often don't make the best teachers anyway.