Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
To be honest, I am somewhat embarrassed. We have been promised millions of dollars to celebrate freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but virtually no one has come forward to celebrate religious freedom. What would you propose that would be worthy?” It was August 1986, and the speaker was Chief Justice Warren Burger at a lunch in Washington, DC. He had just been appointed to lead the Bicentennial Commission celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the United States Constitution, and Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was a close friend of his, had invited me to have lunch with the two of them to discuss the plans for the celebration.
What would I propose that was worthy of celebrating religious freedom, and what it has meant to America? I am an Englishman, and I had arrived in the United States less than two years earlier. I had been a BBC reporter for a documentary on the role of religion in President Reagan’s election, and at the time I was a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. While there, I had written, purely for my own eyes, a one-page memo on the genius of the first sixteen words of the First Amendment to the Constitution. For one thing, freedom of religion and conscience for all is history’s most profound answer to the basic human challenge of how we live with our deepest differences. For another, this freedom comes as close to the secret of the greatness of the American republic as any other single feature. Through an unlikely series of circumstances, the memo had fallen into the hands of the senator, who had just been appointed to the Bicentennial Commission himself.
That incident in my early days in the United States raises the challenge of the sixth question on the checklist: How do America’s current views of freedom allow Americans to handle the challenge of modern diversity, and in President Kennedy’s words, “make the world safe for diversity”? In particular, how are Americans to handle disagreement and opposition from their fellow Americans? Technically known as pluralization, an explosion of diversity has burst on to the world in the last generation, created by the combined effects of the media, travel, and scholarship, including the mass movement of peoples (most obviously the migrants recently flooding into Europe). Pluralization is a central fact of the modern world and modern life, and it certainly characterizes modern America as the world’s lead society. As it is said, “everyone is now everywhere.”
Socially and politically, pluralization raises the question of how we are to live with our deepest differences, especially when those differences are religious and ideological. The issue, needless to say, has been at the heart of America’s culture wars for more than fifty years, but not just because of religious and ideological differences. There is an important additional reason why it remains highly combustible now. A key feature of Left/liberal strategy and its political correctness has been the way it silences disagreement and opposition—another resemblance to 1789. How we live with our deepest differences and how we handle disagreements and opposition are also an immense problem for the world at large.
I thought rapidly when I heard the Chief Justice’s question, and suggested that Americans should celebrate the genius of the religious liberty provisions of the First Amendment in a charter that honored and reaffirmed the significance of freedom of conscience and religion for America and the world. Shortly afterward, I found myself addressing the full Bicentennial Commission in the Annapolis State House, outlining the same ideas in greater depth. Nearly two years later, the proposal had grown into the Williamsburg Charter, a celebration and reaffirmation of the genius of the first sixteen words of the First Amendment, the religious liberty provisions. The charter was published in Williamsburg at the Hall of the House of Burgesses on June 25, 1988. It was signed by a distinguished group of American leaders, led by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and the signers included both chief justices Warren Burger and William Rehnquist and leaders from a wide spectrum of American society and life.
It would be fair to say that the Williamsburg Charter was a substantive success, but fell well short of its political and educational goals. (Among other things, we had in mind no less than a restoration of civic education on freedom of religion and conscience for the public schools.) It has been described as the best statement on religious freedom in the last century, and its key notion, the “civil public square” still offers the best solution to the fruitlessness of the culture wars. But the Williamsburg Charter encountered two obstacles that proved fatal. For a start, it was attacked by key players on the religious right, who went out of their way to block President Reagan’s support. (“The culture wars are in the interests of Republicans,” one cabinet secretary said to me, “so you will only get to the president over my dead body.”) Later, it became clear that for many of the signers it was a bicentennial statement in “red, white, and blue” rather than a serious and costly dedication to standing for a constructive political vision of freedom today.
Be that as it may, what matters is that at the time of the two hundredth anniversary of the US Constitution there was still a broad if somewhat shallow consensus on the place of religious freedom for all in American life. In spite of nearly thirty years of culture warring, ever since the early Madalyn Murray O’Hair lawsuits opposing school prayer, the consensus on the importance of freedom of religion and conscience still struck most people as highly important and deeply American. With hindsight, it is clear that the last gasp of this broad consensus was the passing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993, which was passed by both houses of Congress with near unanimity and had the full support of President Clinton and even of the ACLU.
By the end of the Obama administration, less than twenty years later, that consensus had collapsed, and the landscape of the discussion of freedom of religion and conscience was unrecognizable—not only for those who remember the late twentieth century but for those who have read Alexis de Tocqueville on America in the 1830s and those who appreciate the struggles and victories of such earlier heroes as Roger Williams, William Penn, Isaac Backus, James Madison, John Leland, and Thomas Jefferson. This recent sea change on religious freedom in America is stunning, and it has titanic significance for the broader issues of freedom, for religious freedom has always been a primary and critical part of America’s overall freedom, and for America’s significance for the wider world. This tragic degeneration deserves far more serious attention than it has received.
The results of this sea change are often surreal. As I write, for example, the Student Activities Commission at Georgetown University is examining charges that Love Saxa, a student group promoting Roman Catholic views of marriage and sexuality, is guilty of sanctioning “hatred and intolerance.” In other words, in true Mad Hatter style, a Catholic group is attacked at a Catholic university for positions that lie at the heart of Catholicism.
What is behind this sea change? There were certainly weaknesses in the defense of freedom of religion and conscience before the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was bizarre, for example, that so many conservatives thought and acted as if religious freedom could be defended by law and litigation alone, without any attention to civic education and what Tocqueville called the “habits of the heart.” That distorted emphasis on law at the expense of civic education had long been a fallacy of 1960s liberalism. But as the culture wars deepened, it became a hallmark of conservatives too, and led to the deepening bitterness of the culture wars as batteries of lawyers, each with huge defense funds, lined up on either side of every passing issue. Yet such weaknesses are nothing compared with what has happened since 1993, for America is now experiencing an open assault on freedom of religion and conscience. What was the founders’ “first liberty” and the freedom that (Lord Acton wrote) “secures the rest” is in danger of being dislodged from its central and time-honored place in American life.1 The significance of this blunder reverberates far beyond the importance of freedom of religion and conscience by itself. Five major factors have contributed to the recent sea change.
First, there are the reducers, those who shrink freedom of religion and conscience to a size that would be unrecognizable to America’s earlier champions such as Roger Williams and James Madison. For example, leading contemporary voices, including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a time, referred to freedom of religion and conscience as “freedom of worship” in a way that, wittingly or unwittingly, undermined the robustness and comprehensiveness of the right and its protection. Many other voices followed suit. As a result, many people no longer understand freedom of religion and conscience to be about “free exercise,” and certainly not to do with any “free exercise that touches public life.” It is now said to be a purely private affair, with no impact on speech or conduct in public life.
Whether deliberate or not, that shrinking of a foundational human right is wrong, retrograde, un-American, and disastrous. Freedom of religion and conscience, which the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment protect as “free exercise,” is far more than freedom of worship. There is hardly a dictator worthy of the name who has not allowed his people freedom of worship—in other words, the freedom for people to believe whatever they like between their two ears so long as they stay in their homes and keep their mouths tightly shut. But that is not what is meant by freedom of religion and conscience in America. In May 1776, George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights had proposed the word toleration, which was routinely used at the time. But the shy, young “Gemmy” Madison advanced the cause of freedom light years when he struck it out and replaced it with the words “free exercise,” which were later enshrined in the Bill of Rights in 1791.
Far more than “freedom of worship,” freedom of religion and conscience is the comprehensive right to seek, hold, exercise, share, and change one’s ultimate beliefs, based solely on the dictates of conscience. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is even clearer and more specific than the First Amendment, and there is no question that the free exercise of the religious liberty provisions in the First Amendment and Article 18 go far beyond freedom of worship. Only the comprehensive right of freedom of religion and conscience would have allowed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak out in American public life rather than in his Ebenezer Baptist Church alone, and only the same strong right can protect those who run the risk of death for “apostasy” when they choose to convert from one religion to another.
Second, there are the removers, those who have aggressively attempted to change freedom of religion and conscience from freedom for religion to freedom from religion. Some people have argued for this removal on the grounds that religious freedom was merely freedom for the religious and therefore biased and not inclusive. That is entirely wrong. Freedom of religion and conscience is freedom for everyone, and it has always included all ultimate beliefs, whether religious or naturalistic, transcendent or secularist—it includes atheists and agnostics no less than Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, and all other religions. The real problem is not that secularists have been excluded from freedom of religion and conscience, but that many secularists (though not all) have refused to acknowledge that their secularism is also an ultimate belief, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities that that means.
The more practical reason for the drive for freedom from religion was the terrorist attack of September 11. In the Lowell Lecture at Harvard in 1992, Gore Vidal had argued that radical monotheism of Judaism, the Christian faith, and Islam was “the great unmentionable evil” at the heart of Western civilization. In the same tenor, Christopher Hitchens flamboyantly countered President George W. Bush’s claim that terrorist countries were the “axis of evil” by saying that “the real axis of evil” was the same three Abrahamic faiths that more than half the world believed. The attacks on 9/11 reinforced and accelerated this reaction against religion, which is now equated automatically with violence and extremism—though, ironically, the Obama administration consistently refused to refer to “radical Islamic terrorism.”
There is no question that in most liberal circles now, religion has gained a negative reputation. Even at the more popular level, the current vogue is firmly for “spirituality, not religion.” In the longer term this fashionable notion will be seen as a distinction without a difference, and it will not endure for long, but in the short term it makes it all too easy for people to move on to the notion that the solution to religious extremism is to remove religion from public life altogether—which in its strong form is a brand of secular extremism and highly illiberal as well.
Third, there are the rebranders, those who turn the notion of freedom of religion and conscience upside down and inside out, and then attack it as a form of power play that is dangerous and should be abolished. There are two types of rebranders speaking out at the moment. The more prominent ones are the activists on behalf of the sexual revolution who hijacked the notion of discrimination from the 1960s civil rights movement. They brandish it to attack all who disagree with them as discriminating, prejudiced, bigoted, and hateful. For example, Martin Castro, Obama’s chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, wrote that “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance. . . . Present day ‘religious liberty’ efforts are aimed against the LGBTQ community.”2 In a move that is either ignorant or illiberal, or both, major newspapers have even begun to put scare quotes around “religious freedom,” as if it were a so-called right that is only a code word for bigotry.
This attack is born of the fear that religious freedom is being weaponized, used as a weapon against the sexual revolution and alternative relationships. To be sure, some people may see it this way and try to use it this way, but three considerations should offset an overreaction to this fear. First, freedom of religion and conscience is primarily a shield and not a sword. It stands to protect the believer’s believing rather than to promote the believer’s beliefs. Second, freedom of religion and conscience is not a right for some but for everybody, and its test is always the status of how it protects the smallest minority and the most unfashionable group. And third, there is as much danger in misusing nondiscrimination as a weapon as in using freedom of religion and conscience as a weapon.
Fortunately, there are distinguished supporters of LGBTQ rights who also recognize the importance of freedom of religion and conscience, and who therefore repudiate the charge that all disagreement is discrimination. The blanket charge is a blunder of historic proportions, with grave implications for freedom that are highly illiberal. It is a subversion of liberty to characterize (demonize) all disagreement and dissent as discrimination without investigation into real cases. The current targets of such attacks are mostly Christians, whether Evangelicals or Roman Catholics, but soon the victims will be Jews, for all three Abrahamic faiths in their orthodox forms stand for a different way and disagree with the policies of the sexual revolution. The blanket antidiscrimination tactic, which makes no distinction between principle and prejudice, covers many other religions too. And eventually it will boomerang back on the heads of liberals and progressives themselves.
The truth is that antidiscrimination can be made into far too sweeping a category to be just, for all thoughtful people discriminate in the original positive sense of making discerning distinctions. Making distinctions, for instance, is inescapable and at the heart of human speech, because our words are specific and refer to certain things and not others. Making distinctions is also at the heart of human logic. According to the principle of noncontradiction, A cannot simultaneously be A and non-A. The truth is that discernment comes through making distinctions between two realities. It is therefore vital to be able to distinguish between making proper distinctions and improper discrimination, and not to lump together all disagreements as discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry.
Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mormons, and many religious believers immediately fall foul of the rebranders’ charge for a deeper reason. They make essential distinctions that are rooted in God’s creation—the distinction between holy and unholy, sacred and secular, true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish (and male and female, heaven and earth, and God and humans). Such distinctions are basic to their views of the world and therefore of their freedom to be faithful. They do not see such distinctions as accidental, or a matter of prejudice, because the distinctions go back to their understanding of the origins of the universe and to God himself. Creation in the biblical worldview is essentially “a process of separation” (Leo Strauss) or a “process of demarcation, distinction, separation” (Leon Kass). Distinction is the means by which chaos and disorder are brought into order.
The point is not that all distinctions are necessarily right and true. In a free society, that remains to be discussed. But there is no question that they may be sincerely held, intellectually serious, culturally consequential views of the universe. As such, they represent an alternative worldview, and they cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice without a hearing. Disagreement may or may not be prejudice. According to the biblical view, God himself is the great “separator and distinguisher.”3 Daniel Elazar states simply, “The universe rests upon making and maintaining proper distinctions whose roots go back to creation,” and sin is seen as the transgression of such boundaries, whether deliberately or unintentionally.4 Rabbi Heschel underscores the same point: “The power to make distinctions is a primary operation of intelligence. We distinguish between white and black, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, gain and loss, good and evil, right and wrong. The fate of mankind depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions.”5
In Rabbi Sacks’s words, it is a feature of the Jewish priestly mind to see the universe in terms of “distinctions, boundaries, domains, in which each object or act has its proper place and must not be mixed with another.” In short, “goodness equals order,” “disorder in the moral universe is like entropy in the physical universe,” and such disordering is sin as transgression of a moral boundary and the disruption of the social harmony. Thus “Jews are charged to respect and honor boundaries and differences by obeying the will of God, Creator of the world and Architect of its order.”6
From the biblical and the classical Greek and Roman perspective, this conviction means that when the extremes of any revolution reject such distinctions altogether, they are courting either chaos or insanity. For the rebranders, however, it means that Judaism and the Christian faith, and their defense through freedom of religion and conscience, are guilty of “discrimination”—by definition. The charge is sticking for the moment because of its novelty and the hijacked prestige of the civil rights movement, though its illiberalism and confusion are bound to show through. It represents an insidious attack on freedom of religion and conscience in the form of an uncompromising scorched-earth, take-no-captives, zero-sum style of “antidiscrimination.”
True liberals should think again before advancing such illiberal arguments. Such accusations entangle them in inconsistencies. Deeply held convictions over two entirely different ways of life may be a matter of honest dissent and not discrimination in the sense of prejudice. If, then, any one is accused of discrimination, why is the accuser not guilty too? Or is the only difference the degree of power and popularity of the one who makes the charge? It is vital today to see how “antidiscrimination” arguments are being erected into a damning prohibition of three foundational rights: political dissent, conscientious objection, and civil disobedience. These are essential to moral politics and the triumph of right over might, and they have long been a bulwark of freedom and justice and of genuine liberalism.
Worst of all, there is a distinct whiff of totalitarianism in the air in the manner by which “antidiscrimination” activists stifle dissent and override conscientious objection. Like Marxism and communism, some proponents of the Left/liberalism demonstrate a form of “antidiscrimination” that is hardening into a comprehensive political ideology that brooks no dissent and seeks to sweep all before it, including what is seen as “superstition” (religion) and all the forces of “reaction” (again, religion). One professor from the Harvard Law School touted the hard line without shame when he advised his fellow liberals:
For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, not after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard line approach.7
Quite apart from the professor’s invidious equation of Western tradition with Nazism, the implications for freedom of religion and conscience, and for dissent, conscientious objection, and civil disobedience, are profoundly troubling.
Jewish thinkers have long been alert to the dangers in these illiberal arguments, and the danger goes directly back to 1789 and the French Revolution’s treatment of the Jews. Prior to the revolution, Judaism was either tolerated or persecuted as a whole community, and there was little difference between personal and public expressions of faith within Jewish communities. But in the name of Enlightenment tolerance, the revolution set down a new principle that was an enforced schizophrenia, which struck at the heart of the Jewish (or any other believer’s) freedom to be faithful. (“To the Jews as citizens, everything; to Judaism as corporate community, nothing.”) This principle, in its turn, produced a damaging outcome: a coercive privatization of faith. (The choice as the Jews put it, “Be a Jew at home, a human being when you go out.”)8
The effect of this tolerant intolerance, in Jacob Neusner’s words, was to “de-Judaize the Jews, to define the terms of their existence in ways that denied the Jews the right to be themselves.”9 His conclusion on whether Jews should celebrate the French Revolution was blunt. “No, we Jews gained nothing on Bastille Day, but we lost a great deal. So I don’t think we have anything to celebrate in the French revolution. It was very bad for the Jews.”10
Years later, in a 1962 lecture, “Why We Remain Jews,” Leo Strauss added a further warning to his fellow Jews that goes to the heart of today’s menace. If liberals tried to try to stamp out discrimination altogether, they would spell the end of liberalism because the law would have to reach right into the private world and destroy not only private faith but private life itself. “The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between state and society, in a word, the destruction of liberal society.”11
More than fifty years later, America has witnessed the success of Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” such as universities, the press, and the media. Strauss’s prediction came closer through President Obama and his regulators. The intended targets of the Left are religious believers and conservatives, and all who differ from the sexual revolution, but true liberalism and genuine diversity are the unintended casualties. The vile medieval notion that “error has no rights” is alive and all too well in circles that once took pride in being liberal but are fast cementing their status as the radiating centers of illiberalism. When talk of liberation becomes a fig leaf for absolutism, and expanding rights becomes a stalking horse for totalitarian-style coercion and a denial of rights, it is time for true liberals to stand up and challenge the proto-totalitarian left-wing wolves now marauding in liberal sheep’s clothing.
The less prominent rebranders are the postmodern thinkers who expand on the notion of power in the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, and therefore charge that advocacy of freedom of religion and conscience is a form of power play to oppress other peoples and nations. Again, like the “antidiscrimination” tactic, this charge will backfire on its postmodernist advocates, because once they have removed truth from the equation, all arguments become a form of power play—including their own. The accusation of powermongering is particularly galling and false when leveled against freedom of religion and conscience. The truth is quite the reverse of what the critics say. The demand for freedom of religion and conscience has always been the cry of the weak, the powerless, the marginalized, and the oppressed—those who know that it takes truth to make a stand against power.
The first two mentions of religious liberty in history are by Tertullian and Lactantius, Christian writers in the early Christian centuries who represent the young and much-persecuted church, and who long predated the hierarchical power structures that the Roman Catholic Church unfortunately borrowed from the Roman Empire.12 Tertullian in his Apology was the first to use the term religious freedom (libertatem religionis) and to link it with the idea of a human and natural right. Lactantius spelled out religious freedom clearly in his own writing, but more importantly, he was tutor to Constantine’s son. He was therefore behind the twin emperors Constantine and Licinius and their famous Protocols of Milan in AD 313. This was the first official document to set out the notion of religious freedom and to distinguish it clearly from mere tolerance.13
Later heroes of modern religious freedom, such as Roger Williams, John Leland, and William Penn, would have been astonished to find themselves accused of being voices on the side of power, let alone the establishment. For example, Williams’s 1644 classic The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience is a passionate cry for justice against the oppressions of government. The fact is that today’s real “paternalists” and “colonialists” are the advocates of the sexual revolution who are attempting to impose their agenda on many societies around the world, using law and economic aid to bulldoze their will on global cultures regardless of local conscience. Freedom of religion and conscience, in contrast, assumes and requires persuasion rather than coercion. It may seek to persuade anyone of anything, but it coerces and imposes on no one. This distinctive principle has long been one of the surest and most solid bedrock protections of the powerless and the oppressed. It is therefore time to say to our brave new rebranders: “Deconstructionists, deconstruct thyselves!”
Fourth, there are the reimaginers, those global utopians who join John Lennon in dreaming of a borderless world with no heaven, no hell, no countries, and no religion, when humankind will be at peace and “the world will live as one.”14 The dream of peace is not new. A messianic passion was first heard in the stirring voices of the Hebrew prophets, and it has been a recurring theme down the centuries. But in its aggressively antireligious form, it has been given fresh twist through globalization, connectivity, and the sexual revolution. John B. Watson, the pioneer of behaviorism, worked to create “a new individual who needed no country, no party, no God, no law, and could still be happy.”15 The jet age and the global era have done it for him. Those who now travel the world as their hometown regard themselves as “citizens of the world” and live closer to their fellow elites than to their fellow citizens. It is they who tend to view religion with disdain and have no idea of what it means to ordinary people.
From their superior viewpoint on life from penthouse suites and corporate jets at thirty thousand feet, religion is small, local, petty, and parochial, a source of conflict and war. Such global elites do not so much attack religion as rise above it altogether in their superiority and impatience. Their desired world-state is a world beyond all differences, all countries, all wars, all religions, and all moral restraints.
Such utopians and globalists are as dangerous as they are naive. They celebrate diversity in theory but hammer it flat in practice. The fact is that there is no true human life without bodies, without families, without neighborhoods, without countries, without languages, and without religions— in short, without the stubbornness of particularity and the messiness of real diversity. The world may be global, but we will never all speak Esperanto, daily life will always be local, and for better or worse there will always be religions. So long as humans believe in truth and goodness, they will always believe that some things are true and good, and some things are false and bad. And the differences will lead to divisions, and divisions to conflict. Even the cosmopolitanism of the imagined Grand World Union would create conflict, for there would be, and there are, those who disagree with it strongly.
G. K. Chesterton remarked wryly on the cosmopolitanism of George Bernard Shaw in the 1920s,
He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. . . . The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between civilizations because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between utopias.16
Enough, then, of the current liberal Left hypocrisy of celebrating diversity but flattening real differences and insisting on uniformity! The human challenge is not to remove all differences but to recognize and respect genuine diversity, to give it space, and to know how we are to live with our deepest differences with the maximum freedom and justice for all. In Rabbi Sacks’s happy term, there is a “dignity of difference,” and that dignity should be respected.
Not surprisingly, the fifth and final factor in the sea change is exhaustion. After fifty years of the American culture wars, during which religion has festered as a constant source of controversy, many Americans simply wish that the whole messy business would simply go away. “A plague on both your houses,” they say. “We are understandably tired of the issue.”
In his “Memorial and Remonstrance” in 1785, James Madison declared that “it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens.”17 Because of this profound sea change, America today is well past the first experiments on liberties that have been central for three hundred years. All who have a “prudent jealousy” for America’s “first liberty” should make it their “first duty” to examine the activists’ proposals with great care, and where they are wrong to resist them with courage.
The totalitarian overtones of the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, no-exemptions approach of some of the activists on the Left should be troubling to freedom-loving people. In their view, all dissent is to be crushed as discrimination, all conscientious objection is to be ripped away as a fig leaf to cover bigotry, and all civil disobedience in the mode of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King is to be rejected as hateful. Will the legal bulldozer of the progressive Left soon be turned against religious advocacy in public life, against religious and home schooling, against religious nonprofit activity and status, against religious speech that is deemed incorrect, and even against churches, synagogues, and mosques? Any compulsion may be unfortunate, they say, but in the chilling words of a New Mexico Supreme Court ruling against religious freedom and a small business owner, compulsion is “the price of citizenship.”18
For anyone who surveys this massive sea change and its huge implications, it is clear that America’s first liberty has been turned upside down. A false and cancerous “freedom” has started attacking healthy freedom. The United States is not only in danger of losing a critical component of its basic freedoms but of squandering part of its unique heritage that is vital to its survival. Even as a foreigner I watch with amazement, mixed with sorrow and outrage, because of the implications for the world. For what is at stake is not so much the loss of a single freedom, vital though freedom of religion and conscience is, but a vital way of protecting and negotiating all other freedoms. The reason lies in the double benefit of religious freedom. On the one hand, freedom of religion and conscience protects the foundational human search for meaning and belonging. On the other, the condition of freedom of religion determines society’s capacity to promote religious freedom for everyone, and to negotiate peaceably the differences that will obviously arise through such freedom.
Why should freedom of religion and conscience be given a central place today? It can and should be argued that freedom of religion and conscience is the first liberty, though integrally related to the other core political rights; that it is a vital key to a healthy civil society; and that it is essential for harmony in societies that value both diversity and freedom. Beneath those crucial points, freedom of religion and conscience is important because it is the direct expression and the deepest protection of our freedom and responsibility to be human. Freedom of religion and conscience affirms the dignity, worth, and agency of every human person by freeing us to align “who we understand ourselves to be” with “what we believe ultimately is,” and then to think, live, speak, and act in line with those convictions. Nothing comes closer to the heart of our humanity than the self-understanding and the self- constitution made possible through freedom of religion and conscience. As a right, it is primary, foundational, and indispensable. Freedom of speech, for instance, is simply freedom of conscience expressed in words.
There are important qualifications to this right—above all the equal rights of all others, as well as consideration for the public peace and the common good.19 Or put differently, this freedom is absolute at the point of belief, but qualified at the point of behavior, because behavior touches other people and other things. Someone is free to believe in paganism, for example, but not to sacrifice an animal or another human being. But that said, the primary and foundational character of the right must never be lost.
What is at stake with freedom of religion and conscience is nothing less than human dignity, human self-determination, and human responsibility. In the words of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, written in the scorching afterglow of the Holocaust,
Man is born as an object, dies like an object, but possesses the ability to live like a subject, like a creator, an innovator, who can impress his own individual seal upon his life and can extricate himself from a mechanical type of existence and enter into a creative, active mode of being. Man’s task in the world . . . is to transform fate into destiny, a passive existence into an active existence; an existence of compulsion, perplexity, and muteness into an existence replete with powerful will, with resourcefulness, daring, and imagination.20
Soul liberty was Roger Williams’s stirring seventeenth-century term for the freedom of religion and conscience.21 Williams and his fellow pioneers regarded this right as inherent not only in common law but in the nature of humanity and the human family. It was rooted in the inviolable dignity of each human person and in particular in the character of reason and conscience, the twin organs of thinking and moral intuitions. For Williams and others, such as John Milton and John Locke, these ideas in their turn were rooted in the conviction that humans possessed this dignity because they were made in the image of God. Each human has a measureless worth that goes beyond any possible descriptions of status, function, and utility. All other descriptions are vulnerable to our being reduced to our functions and utilitarian qualities—we are merely voters or viewers or buyers or consumers or passengers or statistics and so on. But made in the image of God, we each possess an equal and inalienable worth that is prior to every other category and consideration. This dignity and worth is therefore inalienable and inviolable.
What true liberal or what freedom-loving conservative can argue with each person’s right to think and order their lives in accordance with what they believe to be true, based on the dictates of conscience? To be sure, it will have to be decided how the freedom this right gives to each person is to relate to the equal freedom of all others, to the public peace, and to the common good. But it anchors the principle that what needs to be negotiated is an absolute right and not merely a matter of tolerance, let alone a benefit conferred by the state. As Lord Acton declared simply, “By birth all men are free.”22 Or in the powerful words of Timothy Shah: “Anything less than full religious freedom fails to respect the dignity of persons as free truth-seekers, duty bound to respond to the truth (and only the truth) about the transcendent in accordance with their own judgments of conscience. . . . When people lose their religious freedom, they lose more than their freedom to be religious. They lose their freedom to be human.”23
Let the truth ring out throughout the world. Freedom of religion and conscience is not a code word for bigotry or prejudice. It stands as a sure and essential protection of human dignity and freedom.
That point raises the question that lies at the heart of this chapter: Which model of religion and public life serves freedom best? No one who follows the American culture wars can fail to see the two competing visions now battling for supremacy. The myriad changing issues at stake may appear to be confusingly different—prayers in public spaces and on official occasions, head scarves or turbans in places of work, crosses or crescents worn as symbols of faith, the Ten Commandments as historical memorials or a religious expression, exemptions for conscience over practices such as adoption, abortion, contraception. For fifty years, controversies such as these have made the American public square into a cultural war zone rather than a forum for public deliberation and decision, and in the election of 2016 it was tragically clear that the divisions had grown highly dangerous.
Yet closer inspection shows that all the kaleidoscopically changing controversies are an expression of the battle between two starkly different visions of public life—on one side there are the proponents of what Richard John Neuhaus called a naked public square, those who would exclude religions and religious expression from public life, and on the other, the proponents of a sacred public square, those who would give some religion or ideology a preferred, established, or monopoly position in public life at the expense of everyone else.
To be sure, there are mild and strong versions of each model of the public square elsewhere in the world, and there are many societies that range somewhere in between. Take the different varieties of the naked public square, where all religion is excluded. The exclusion of religion sought by many American secularists and separationists is a relatively mild case, though it leads decisively in the direction of French-style laïcité rather than the settlement constructed by their own founders. At the other extreme, the People’s Republic of China practices a brutally harsh version of the naked public square that is the scourge of its people today and will be the shame of Chinese generations to come. The Beijing government is unashamed to flout human rights, persecute religious believers of many kinds, and without any qualms ruthlessly repress all signs of opposition to its totalitarian rule. Kemal Atatürk’s settlement for Turkey once stood between these two extremes, owing much to the French separationist precedent, though President Erdogan now seeks to take Turkey in the direction of a more oppressive Islam that endangers the freedom and the lives of all who disagree with it.
A similar range can be seen among the varieties of the sacred public square. The Church of England stands at the mild end of the spectrum. It can truly say that it has no blood on its hands since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and has therefore provoked no militant, French-style anticlerical hostility against itself. But today, its own government bans the wearing of the church’s central symbol at places of work, and many of its friends fear that in its present institutional form it will not last another generation. Little wonder that many of its adherents are described as “belonging rather than believing,” and cynics say that the established church’s amiable but feeble condition is fit only for the “hatching, matching, and dispatching” (baptizing, marrying, and burying) of citizens and should soon be disestablished as the Lutheran state church was in Sweden in 2000.
At the other end of the spectrum, harsh examples of countries with a sacred public square would include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and Burma under the generals. Their treatment of religions other than the established religion—Islam in the first four cases and Buddhism in the latter—is draconian, barbarous, a complete affront to human dignity, and a monumental disgrace to the faiths they claim to espouse. Their blatant denials of freedom can no more be countenanced by the world than the brutally similar repressions of the Chinese and North Koreans.
Clearly, for all the variations on either side, neither of the two models fulfills the requirements of freedom and justice for all under the conditions of the exploding diversity of the global era. In truth, both models are now exposed as finally unjust and unworkable, and those concerned for humanity would challenge both of them on behalf of the primacy of soul freedom for each of the diverse faiths within their jurisdictions. The conclusion is incontrovertible: Extreme versions of either model, China and North Korea on one side and Iran and Saudi Arabia on the other, are the world’s major source of brutal governmental repression and the leading roadblock to advancing freedom and justice in the global era. Let there be no mincing of words when it comes to such roughshod flouting of human dignity. No secularist, however ardent, should defend the former, and no religious believer, however devoted, should justify the latter. The blood and tears of humanity cry out that there must be a better way.
A closer look reveals a further, though more controversial, fact. There is more extremism in the American culture warring than many acknowledge, and this extremism is on both sides. Extremism rarely grows by itself. It grows in reaction to something. Extremism over religious issues is no exception, though because of people’s philosophical prejudices and social locations, each side tends to see only the extremism of the other side. Few admit the problem on their own side. The splinter in the other’s eye looms large and dangerous, while the beam in one’s own goes undetected.
In most educated circles in the West, the extremism on the religious side sits in the stocks in the full glare of the media, for all to deride and pelt. Indeed for some people, religion and extremism are synonyms. Unquestionably, few tyrants in history have matched the oppressive alliances between religion and government that end in coercing conscience and compelling belief. But little real thought seems to be needed to cook up some strong prejudices that run far beyond such facts.
Start with the single ingredient of a monopoly religion. Throw in a mention of how established religions have dealt with dissenting opinion, such as the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Albigensians, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Then season with a sprinkling of the contemporary cruelties of the Taliban or one of the idiotic acts of some purported religious leader, such as the burning of the Qur’an. Stir according to taste, and the argument can be left to marinate to perfection. Plainly, religion is evil, divisive, and violent—in fact, doubly evil for being evil in itself and evil too for the evils it rationalizes. Religion poisons everything.
Prepared according to such a recipe, the American religious Right can clearly be served up as Al Qaeda with smoother chins and slicker PR. How else could otherwise fair-minded liberals pretend with a straight face that the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family are “American Ayatollahs,” “American theocrats,” and “American fascists”? Was it the American groups themselves they did not really investigate, or was it the bogeymen they were comparing them to? Does it matter? According to the new atheists, religious moderates are no better than religious extremists. All are equally dangerous, and none are to be tolerated. Religious extremists are not to be tolerated, say Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but neither, they say openly, are religious moderates who tolerate extremists. By definition, religion itself is extremism.
This prejudice is not new. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham used to refer to organized religion as “Jug,” which was short for juggernaut, as he charged that all religion was oppressive and rode over people like the infamous Hindu vehicle that crushed the devotees under its wheels. But in truth, he was blind to all that people of faith were doing even in his own lifetime. William Wilberforce, for example, was the greatest social reformer of all time and Bentham’s contemporary, and never before had so many inspiring faith-based reforms been underway at the same time.
Christian “reconstructionists” in America are sometimes paraded as examples of dangerous Christian extremism, but they are a tiny group with no chance of wider political success, and only a paranoid should inflate their significance. Far more significant are the Islamist groups in the West that find themselves in Muslim-minority situations but still hew to the traditional Muslim-majority maxim that “Islam rules. It is never ruled.” The result is a response summed up by Omar Ahmed, the cofounder of the influential Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR): “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. . . . The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”24
But who dares speak of the extremism on the secularist side? The call for a partnership between responsible religious believers and responsible secularists is not a stalking horse for an assault on secularism, but the unashamed intolerance of the new atheists shows how there are secularist Tweedledees as well as religious Tweedledums. China’s Cultural Revolution was an atheist inquisition for millions rather than thousands. The Hall of Infamy in the modern world includes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao alongside Torquemada from an earlier time. If there is little religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, there is no more in China.
“Religion poisons everything,” Hitchens cried, yet “Religion is poison” was the slogan Mao used to launch his vicious assault on the people of Tibet. If Al Qaeda places bombs in the public square to kill, the ACLU puts up barriers in the public square to keep out, and the square is empty either way. For every Christian fundamentalist such as Jerry Falwell, there is a secularist fundamentalist such as Richard Dawkins. If there is the dire menace from theocrats, there is an equally dire menace from seculocrats, those illiberal liberals who directly oppose all religion and seek to exclude all religious voices from public life.
Centuries ago, the philosopher Leibnitz had predicted, “The last sect in Christendom and in general in the world will be atheism.” Its way of propagating itself would show that “the world is already in its old age.”25 And a century after Wittgenstein, Terry Eagleton comments similarly on Richard Dawkins, “His anti-religious zeal makes the Grand Inquisitor look like a soggy liberal.”26 Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC and chancellor of Oxford University, noted dryly: “It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith.”27
Again, I am not claiming moral equivalence between the two extremes. Sometimes one side is the clear leader in infamy, sometimes the other. What matters is that neither extreme holds the answer. On one side, we face the problems of a sacred public square, with its advocates seeking to favor one religion at the expense of everyone else. On the other, we face the equally real problems of a naked public square, with its advocates seeking to force all religions out of public life and thus, at least unwittingly, to favor some form of secularism, whether atheism in the West or communism in China. Dare anyone stand between the two sides when they fight in the same society? Who will step forward and declare, “A pox on both your houses”? The time has come for an honest recognition that each side can be as bad as the other, and that neither is the best model for the future. The need is for the courage to challenge both, not just the one that one side or the other happens to dislike more.
Is there an alternative to these two extremes? The alternative is the vision and model of what is called a “civil public square.” A civil public square is a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths and none are free to enter and engage public life on the basis of their faith, as a matter of freedom of religion and conscience, but within an agreed framework of what is understood and respected to be just and free for people of all other faiths too, and thus for the common good.
This framework is political and not religious. In John Courtney Murray’s apt description, it is a matter of “articles of peace” rather than “articles of faith.” As such, it has to be agreed, affirmed, and then handed down from generation to generation until it truly becomes a “habit of the heart” for the citizenry. At its core are the three Rs of freedom of thought and conscience: rights, responsibilities, and respect. A right for one person is a right for another and a responsibility for both and for everyone. Freedom of religion and conscience therefore means that there are no special rights, no favored faiths, and no especially protected beliefs. It is the conscience of believers, not the content of beliefs, that is protected.
A civil public square is the direct expression of covenantalism. It ensures a foundational respect for the reality of diversity and disagreements, but is a form of covenantal pluralism in that reciprocity, mutuality, and universality are the key principles of its vision. As Roger Scruton notes in his blistering critique of how both Left and Right annihilate dissent, “The question of opposition is, however, the single most important issue in politics.”28 In this sense a civil public square is the political embodiment of the Golden Rule. “Treat others with the respect you would like to be treated with yourself, and protect for others the rights you would like protected for yourself.” Thus a right for a Christian is automatically a right for a Jew, an atheist, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Mormon, a Hindu, a Scientologist, and for every believer in every faith under the sun as the earth turns. All human rights are the rights of all human beings. They are for the good of all. I write as a Christian as well as a visitor, but let no one say that I am striving for anything other than freedom of religion and conscience for everyone and for the good of all.
Many Americans today, and especially the younger generation, have become cynical about the political process. Recent elections have been too rancorous to be able to afford another passing spasm of civility talk. And there are in fact solid reasons why civility is scorned today. First, civility is confused with niceness and dismissed as a wimp word. At best it is viewed only as a matter of manners and etiquette, having a mild tone of voice, or feeling a refined distaste for the nastiness of differences. Far from it. Civility is a tough-minded classical virtue and duty that enables citizens to take their public differences seriously, debate them robustly, and negotiate and decide them peacefully rather than violently. Extremes on both sides, whether communism or fascism, the sacred public square or the naked public square, will always be inimical to those who disagree with them. But as philosopher Scruton argues, “In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms,’ and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals.”29
Second, civility is too often discussed by itself and taken as a stand-alone virtue, as if it could somehow magically transform public life into sweetness and light all by itself. Again, far from it. Civility is a classical virtue and duty essential for both republics and democracies and especially for societies that need to negotiate a strong degree of diversity among the citizens. But civility is not an end in itself. It stands in the service of the higher good—soul freedom for all. Indeed, the greatest benefit of civility is that it provides the best conditions within which freedom of thought and conscience can grow strong and active.
As such, civility is only one part of the complete resources of the well-formed citizens, who together can take pride and responsibility in building and maintaining a healthy civil society and a vigorous but civil public square. An uneducated citizenry will quickly be overrun by powermongers, manipulators, cynics, and moneyed seducers. Such people are not destroying civility alone, but soul freedom itself, as well as the bonding of the republic and the duties of their own citizenship. Hand in hand with the complete responsibilities of citizenship, civility makes for a thriving republic and a truly open democracy. It speaks, after all, to our human nature as men and women who can speak, listen, weigh, decide, and live up to our human responsibility.
Needless to say, such a vision of a civil public square has numerous implications. A civil public square is absolutely essential to a free and open America, for without it there can be no open ground for discussing the common good in terms illuminated by public reason. As Cicero argued passionately before the Roman senate, if public reasoning is undermined, so also is the foundation of what constitutes a republic. All who care for free societies must therefore review their assumptions and follow the logic of these assumptions in rebuilding and maintaining the public square with care—whatever the costs of facing down the obdurate religious extremists on one side and the obdurate secularist extremists on the other. Make no mistake about the alternative: If words and persuasion fail, violence and coercion will be at the door.
Civility in public life carries many positive consequences, but there are also some notable traps it is easy to fall into. The right to free exercise in public life requires civility, and civility in public life assumes in turn that public discourse must shift from coercion to persuasion—from the sword to the word, as Roger Williams put it. Those who would prevail in public affairs have to persuade others in the public square. To make a persuasive public case under the conditions of contemporary pluralism means that advocates of any policy have to translate their case into terms that make sense to others. They have to know how to address the interests and ideals of others, and persuade believers of different faiths and worldviews.
One particular concern is common at this point. Many people fear that granting someone the right to enter and engage public life is tantamount to giving them a license to impose their views on everyone else. Needless to say, nothing in a postmodern world is held to be worse than imposing morals on anyone else (as if all law were not a moral imposition of some sort). So the obvious safeguard is to restrain free exercise in public life by coming down on the side of no establishment. But there are many reasons why this response is undemocratic and un-American. First, it curbs the democratic freedom of the First Amendment right to the free exercise of faith. Second, it makes the mistake of opposing the two halves of the religious liberty provisions, when both free exercise and no establishment were designed to serve the same end: freedom of religion and conscience. Third, it forgets that everyone has assumptions, so every single democratic decision, with no exceptions, will express (and therefore “impose”) someone’s assumptions. Fourth, it overlooks the fact that in a democracy no one can impose their views on others without persuading others that their views are right and good, and even then they have to win a sufficient majority to enact a law in their favor. Whether the prevailing majority is liberal and hopes to promote the sexual revolution or conservative and seeks to deny it, it can only prevail (impose) through democratic persuasion, and even then there should always be respect for the rights that protect the dissenting minority.
Contrary to recent demands and much misunderstanding, persuasion and its need for publicly accessible arguments does not mean that public discourse has to have a secular haircut and be shorn of all religious content when entering the public square. What it does mean is this: We need to recognize that arguing with people who do not understand us is ineffective, and citing authorities to those who do not share them is a waste of time. So the reason why we must all translate in order to persuade is not because of any phony threat that we are violating the separation of church and state but because of our desire to persuade people of different positions, different perspectives, and different policies. Persuasion, in short, is not imposition. It is a highly liberal exercise, and it follows naturally from freedom of thought and conscience and free exercise.
Like civility itself, the vision of a civil public square is surrounded by a thicket of misunderstandings and misgivings. One common misunderstanding is that a civil public square must be reached by a search for a lowest common denominator unity, whether a “no label” political movement or a form of interfaith dialogue and interfaith cooperation. “No label” movements are well-intentioned and understandable reactions to the gridlock of extreme partisanship. But they are utterly misguided because politics is essentially partisan, and civility stands for a protection and negotiation of differences, not their elimination.
Interfaith efforts are always welcome and often beneficial, as are the many new initiatives in citizen diplomacy. As Winston Churchill said, it is always better to “jaw jaw” than to “war war.” But it also has to be said frankly that these initiatives are limited, and they will never reach the desired goal we are seeking. At the end of the day, whatever reconciliation is effected by interfaith dialogue is limited to some religions, rather than all, and the reconciliation usually does not include citizens who are secularists. Besides, the blunt fact is that the differences between core beliefs, including secularism, are irreducible, ultimate, and here to stay. As such, they will never be bridged by any lowest common denominator, however long we talk and however nice we are.
Besides, contrary to the foggy multiculturalism of the postmodern era, it is important to go beyond a celebration of diversity in the abstract. This often turns out to be one group’s way of promoting its difference over others. What we really need is to examine what those differences mean in reality. Differences make a difference, both to individuals and to whole societies and even civilizations. Those differences are important, and they have to be engaged honestly and debated fearlessly.
So once again, let there be no misunderstanding: a civil public square does not require or depend on interfaith dialogue. Nor does it require any ultimate ecumenical unity. That hope, which is attractive to some and faithless to others, is utopian. Rather, a civil public square is forged through an agreed political framework of rights, responsibilities, and respect, within which each faith is free to be faithful to its own beliefs and yet responsible to know how to deal respectfully and civilly with the vital differences of other beliefs.
Here lies one of the greatest advantages of the civil public square: it protects the freedom to be faithful. A civil public square promotes the highest freedom of religion and conscience, the strongest civility between faiths, and the greatest freedom for each faith to be true to its own truth claims—and all within a framework that respects disagreement and opposition. Under no other model—neither the naked public square nor the sacred public square—are all citizens encouraged to be true to the faiths they live by and yet taught to be civil to others and care for the common good of the society they live in.
The last widespread misgiving about civility and a civil public square is that, at best, the two ideas are inherently and dangerously unstable and therefore exceedingly foolish in today’s world. The fear is that, in protecting the equal rights of all beliefs, the door will be open to dangerous beliefs that will undermine the system itself. A common current fear, for example, is that Muslim extremists may use the freedom of the civil public square to press for their own advantage in order to gain the victory and put the “enemies of God” out of the game—“one man, one vote, one time,” as the Middle Eastern maxim goes—or more simply, to exploit the freedom of the host countries in order to plot their destruction.
That scenario is certainly a possibility and a serious danger. All free and open societies are inherently unstable, and in fact there are two major ways, not just one, in which an open society can always be undermined. The obvious danger is that, in their freedom, free societies may open the door to the enemies of freedom. The other is that freedom may breed such tolerance that it degenerates into anything-goes indifference, to the point where the whole system slumps into apathy. It was in fact a combination of these two follies, reinforced by an ill-considered multiculturalism, that led the British, the Dutch, the French, and Swedish to welcome radical Islamists and allow them to build their enclaves with such destructive consequences.
But neither of these potential dangers is unique to the vision of a civil public square. They are inherent in the notion of democracy itself. They can be countered only by a vigilant attention to the obvious requirements of a healthy, open society—including the vital importance of civic education and commitment to free, unfettered debate that engages with any and all ideas that are inimical to its health. Does any freedom-loving society deserve to survive if its citizens pay so little attention to freedom that they allow hostility or indifference to prevail through their own carelessness?
The Egypt of the pharaohs certainly lasted for thousands of years, whereas the democracy of Pericles and Demosthenes lasted only a few decades, but that is not an argument for giving up on democracy. It means, rather, that if we value democracy, we attend to the essentials that are necessary if free and open societies are to flourish and endure.
Some may fear that this rich, full notion of “soul freedom” for all is a mirage, or that this vision of civility and a civil public square is an impossible pipe dream. Such misgivings must be thoroughly answered if we are to progress. Only time can show how realistic freedom is for humanity, but our convictions and decisions today are what will shape the outcome of those questions tomorrow.
President Woodrow Wilson, it is often said, undermined himself through the naivety of his own progressive idealism. He entered World War I to ensure a “world safe for democracy,” but the Great War, which was launched as “the war to end all wars,” led to the Treaty of Versailles, which turned out to be “the peace that ended all peace.” Was President John F. Kennedy’s vision of “a world safe for diversity” similarly flawed by its idealism, or did his play on the words of his predecessor mask the urgency of a supremely practical problem for humanity in the global era: “How do we live with our deepest differences?” Much earlier, the German philosopher Schopenhauer had captured the problem with a graphic simplicity. The problem of freedom and diversity is the problem of porcupines in winter. If they huddle too closely, they injure each other with their quills, but if they stay too far apart, they freeze and die. All that was missing in his illustration is the fact that modern-day porcupines have automatic guns and may soon have nuclear-tipped quills. Or in Reinhold Niebuhr’s words, we humans have not yet learned to live together without “covering each other ‘with mud and with blood.’”30
Again, will it be said that freedom was a challenge too hard for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the sixth question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: How does your view of freedom allow you to handle the challenge of modern diversity?
What do you think of the reducers, the rebranders, and the reimaginers? Which model of public life—the sacred, the naked, or the civil—best answers the requirements of freedom and justice? What would it take to resolve the conflicts of the culture wars? How do Americans live with their deepest differences, especially when those differences are grounded in different religions and ideologies? There can be no ducking this question. Today’s desire for freedom has to be answered with a clear understanding of how today’s level of diversity complicates the issues, and how the issues may be resolved.