CHAPTER 12

Coming Home? The Imminent Immanent City

In the previous two chapters, we have observed how the so-called culture wars—specifically the conflicts over public symbols, over the legally recognized norms of sexuality, over the Constitution, and over religious freedom—can be understood as a sustained effort to reengage the fourth-century struggle and to reverse the religious revolution by which Christianity supplied the dominant regulative ideal in the Western world. The culture wars amount to a counterrevolution, or a campaign to retake the city, so to speak, for immanent religiosity—for “modern paganism,” as T. S. Eliot put it.

Whether and in what form that campaign will succeed remain uncertain. Occasionally a critic or combatant will pronounce the conflict over, with the immanent or “progressive” side triumphant. In this spirit, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet recently declared victory for the progressive party. “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won.”¹

Tushnet’s declaration of victory seemed ungracious but not implausible; at the time, the momentum seemed all on the side of immanent progressivism. Probably it still does. The reelection of Barack Obama (and perhaps even more so his “evolution” on issues like marriage), the judicial crushing of opposition to same-sex marriage, the filling of the judiciary with Democratic appointees—all portended further victories for the devotees of immanence, further defeats for the party of tradition and transcendence. Still, it is worth remembering that just over a decade ago, after the reelection of George W. Bush, observers were sometimes rendering the opposite verdict (usually in despairing tones).2 And just what the unexpected electoral victory of the mercurial Donald Trump may presage in these matters is at this point anyone’s guess. Lacking a Tiresias or an Isaiah to call upon, we would be wise to forgo confident predictions.

Still, let us suppose that Tushnet is right, that the recent trajectory holds, and that modern paganism manages to grow in strength and to consolidate its hold on the city. Would this development be one to celebrate or to lament?

In chapter 8 we surveyed two closely related themes that have characterized the Western historical and political imagination—first, a persistent, gnawing regret for the loss of (and a yearning to recover) the freedom and the “shining beauty and grace”³ of the classical pagan city, and, second, a smoldering resentment of the Christianity that subjugated that city. Restoration of the pagan city might seem to achieve the fulfillment of that entrenched yearning, the assuagement of that long-standing resentment. Like long-tried royal Odysseus, enlightened governance would after many hardships and ordeals have at long last returned home and triumphed over its foes.

Indeed, it may seem that the fully realized modern pagan city would in fact be a vast improvement over the ancient one. The Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon was able to imagine second-century Rome as a “golden age,” as we saw in chapter 3, and as the most enviable period in the history of humanity—but only by studiously neglecting to notice or dwell on the vast slave populations, the ubiquitous brothels staffed by desperate and downtrodden women, the lethal savagery of the gladiatorial games, the widespread practice of infanticide, and the dismal tenement housing afflicted by fire and filth and disease. In our own times, by contrast, the pagan city would be one that has renounced slavery, has declared an equality of men and women, and has condemned (though not actually eliminated, alas) not only physical violence but also harassment, bullying, and microaggressions. Moreover, spectacular advances in economic productivity, technology, and medicine afford modern citizens a level of flourishing unimaginable to their distant predecessors.

And yet we also saw, in the first chapter, that T. S. Eliot (whose thesis has guided us through this book) took just the opposite view. Eliot favored a city based on a renewed Christian vision, but he recognized that most of his audience would find that vision prima facie unenticing, or worse. People would come around to the Christian view, Eliot thought, only after contemplating—seriously contemplating—what the alternative of “modern paganism” would actually entail.4 The suggestion may seem improbable; on the contrary, as we have just been reflecting, modern paganism may seem distinctly alluring. Still, we have stuck with Eliot this far, and we may as well finish by considering his suggestion—by reflecting on what a city framed by modern paganism would entail, and by pondering whether that is in reality the sort of city we would want to adopt as home.

Longing for Home

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the novelist and physician Walker Percy remarked on “Western man’s sense of homelessness and loss of community.” Percy discerned in contemporary man a “sense of homelessness in the midst of the very world which he, more than the men of any other time, has made over for his own happiness.”⁵ Surely not everyone feels this sense of homelessness, or feels it with equal intensity. Or perhaps the condition has become so familiar that many hardly notice it anymore, or hardly manage to conceive of any different condition; people who have never known a home may not feel its lack. And yet, some such implicit or submerged sense of homelessness or alienation arguably underlies the recurrent communitarian aspirations of modern progressivism—on which more in a moment.

This condition of homelessness, or this yearning for community, might plausibly be diagnosed as the product of two of the three main existential orientations we have considered in this book: the Christian or transcendent orientation, and the orientation of positivistic secularism. Conversely, the third orientation we have considered—the orientation of immanent religiosity or “modern paganism”—might seem to supply the remedy for this sense of homelessness.

Thus, as we saw in chapter 5, by making “eternal life” the transcendent goal and God the transcendent authority, Christianity left human beings as “resident aliens,” no longer fully at home in the world.6 The “disenchantment” of the world described by Max Weber⁷ and associated with modern secularism may seem to have completed this process of alienation, leaving human beings isolated strangers stranded in a purposeless world. As we saw in chapter 9, this bereft condition has been evocatively described and lamented (or reveled in?) by thinkers like Bertrand Russell, who urged that in a meaningless world we must proceed “on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”⁸

But as we also saw in chapter 9, the revival of immanent religiosity bids to offer a remedy for this condition, reassuring us that sacredness, sublimity, and meaning are real after all—all the more real and accessible because they are no longer sloughed off onto an unattainable transcendent source or deferred to some future state. Rather, these qualities are intrinsic to this world, and to this city. We need not look to some other sphere for meaning and comfort; we can realize these values here and now. The immanent religiosity of modern paganism promises to consecrate this world, this life, and this city in a way that has not been possible since the Christian revolution.

In short, the revival of immanent religion and the restoration of the pagan city amount to an invitation to come home—to come back to the home that was lost with the Christian revolution. It is a compelling, almost irresistible invitation. But is the invitation genuine? Or is it bidding us to indulge in a kind of fantasy?

Yearning for Community. The pagan city of antiquity enjoyed a fraternal solidarity that the city has not exhibited since the emergence of Christianity. Or at least so modern admirers of antiquity have supposed. To describe the ancient city as unified and fraternal may seem a hopelessly naive idealization, to be sure. Do we have any reason to suppose that the vast hosts of slaves—Spartacus and his brethren—or lower-class plebeians, or subordinated women, felt any civic solidarity with the rich and aristocratic males whose lives of opulence they supported? Still, the ancient city was unified at least in the sense that its citizens and subjects could be counted on to give whatever civic allegiance they felt to the city, unqualified by loyalties to some other, foreign or transcendent sovereign. Moreover, among themselves the various pagan or polytheistic cults enjoyed a kind of unity of mutual acceptance and respect.

As we saw in earlier chapters, this solidarity was lost with the ascendancy of Christianity. Or at least Christianity aspired to subvert the monolithic solidarity of the pagan city. Now the citizens’ allegiance was, or was supposed to be, divided. They were loyal to the city, yes, but their higher and stronger commitment was to the heavenly city, or the city of God. Moreover, far from respecting and cordially embracing the diversity of religious beliefs and practices, Christians condemned pagan cults (and also unorthodox Christian sects) as damnable error and heresy.

Both political philosophy and constitutional jurisprudence over the last few decades have exhibited a desire to overcome the divisions introduced by Christianity and to recover, in modern form, the civic solidarity of antiquity. Rather than attempt any general survey, let us notice this aspiration in two important progressive thinkers. The first is the most influential political philosopher of recent times; the second is a well-known and respected legal scholar.

By reputation, the political philosopher John Rawls was a secular and individualistic thinker who attempted to screen religious beliefs out of political deliberations and who was criticized for giving insufficient weight to humans’ communal character.9 But both labels—secular and individualistic—underestimate the complexity of Rawls’s thought. Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel report that “those who have studied Rawls’ work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings.”¹⁰ At one point, Rawls had seriously considered entering a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood.¹¹ His religious and communal inclinations were exhibited in his senior thesis, written as a precocious Princeton undergraduate, entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community.”12 The thesis adopted as a “fundamental presupposition” the idea that “there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ.”¹³ “Man is dependent on God,” the young Rawls affirmed, “and . . . everything is a gift of God.”¹⁴ This theistic presupposition had communal implications: “the universe is a community of Creator and created.” And this communal dimension needed emphasis, Rawls thought: “the flavor of the times seems to point to a revival of ‘communal’ thinking after centuries of individualism.”¹⁵ Robert Adams remarks that “clearly there is nothing that Rawls commends more highly in the thesis than community.”¹⁶

As it happened, Rawls entered the military, not the priesthood, and (as he explained in a later personal statement)¹⁷ his Christian faith dissipated in the carnage and terror of World War II. But his commitment to community persisted, and the religious dimension of his thought persisted as well, albeit in a transformed and more subtle form. The fundamental goal of Rawls’s theorizing, as is true of liberal political philosophy generally, was to figure out how, in a pluralistic world, citizens of different views and values could live together peacefully and in accordance with their various conceptions of the good life.¹⁸ Rawls, however, was conspicuously unwilling to rest content with arrangements or compromises that might work pragmatically but would amount to a mere “modus vivendi.”¹⁹ His ambition, rather, was to articulate the basis for a more genuinely united community—a community bound together not merely by negotiated mutual self-interest but by commonly shared principles of justice, and by a public discourse in which all could participate on equal and respectful terms.²⁰

But how to achieve this unity in the face of de facto differences in the citizens’ fundamental moral and religious views and commitments? The ancient city was able to maintain the kind of unity Rawls sought because the various pagan or polytheistic cults were already inclined to take a relaxed attitude toward truth, as historians have emphasized,21 and to cheerfully suppose that their superficially diverse deities were probably just the same set of gods going under different names, or at least were members of a common pantheon. So, bracketing the vexing cases of Judaism and Christianity, religious fraternity came naturally, so to speak; the “overlapping consensus”²² that Rawls sought was a cultural fact, not a philosophical artifice or a legal prescription.

In the modern Christian or post-Christian world, by contrast, that kind of natural unity is no longer available. So how is the genuine community to be achieved? And how is the disruptive force of Truth (about which humans can never seem to agree) to be tamed?

Rawls’s answer (and that of other like-minded liberal theorists) was, basically, to distance the political community from divisive Truth by constructing a civic sphere from which transcendent religion and other potentially disruptive “comprehensive doctrines” would be excluded. Citizens might retain their religious or philosophical convictions for private purposes, but upon entering the civic sphere they would put aside these rival “comprehensive doctrines” and would deliberate with mutual respect under the canopy of a shared “public reason.”²³ In this way, the unity and community that came naturally to the ancient pagan city would be reconstructed artificially, so to speak—by constructing walls around a core civic sphere and keeping Christianity and other strong faiths and philosophies outside those walls. Although screening out the doctrines associated with a transcendent faith like Christianity, however, “public reason” would not preclude appeal to immanent values of the kind favored by Ronald Dworkin and supported by his “religion without God.”24

In a similar spirit, legal scholar Robin West has exhibited a yearning for community from her earliest scholarship in the 1980s. In an article called “Jurisprudence and Gender,” West advocated a feminist jurisprudence centered on the claim that in contrast to men and the masculine, which are characterized by separateness, individualism, and competitiveness, women and the feminine are constituted by “connectedness”—a relational orientation grounded in the experiences of sexual penetration, pregnancy, menstruation, and breast feeding.²⁵ This orientation to connectedness meant that the feminist project put special value and emphasis on community—an emphasis, West said, that is desperately needed in the world today.²⁶ Later, in a Harvard Law Review article, West looked to the Czech author and political leader Václav Havel for a vision of a “liberal, tolerant, diverse community” that might guide American constitutional law.²⁷

Recently, West has again promoted the communitarian ideal in opposition to Supreme Court decisions upholding particular rights—to church autonomy, to religious exemptions, to gun ownership, to parental rights to direct the upbringing of children—that, as West views the matter, permit citizens to “exit” from “our civil society” and its norms.²⁸ These rights, West contends, “splinter our communities. They divide us up every which way. . . . They move us, inexorably, . . . from an aspirational ideal of e pluribus unum, to that of e pluribus pluribus.”²⁹

The ideal, and the yearning for community, are the more powerfully and poignantly apparent because West presents her position in terms of an ostensible description of American community that, measured against the actual conditions of contemporary life, partakes more of fantasy than of reality. Thus, at a time of increasing (and increasingly acrimonious) polarization,30 West talks over and over of a community united by “shared” values and commitments.³¹ (If these commitments are indeed “shared,” one wonders, why are so many thousands or millions of citizens seeking to “exit” from them? And why does West need to implore that their “exit” be blocked?) West describes a community grounded in an ostensible “social contract,” but, unlike some social contract theorists, she makes no effort to explain how citizens have or could be deemed to have (constructively?) consented to that contract; nor does she attempt to expound the terms of the contract. Communities are, to be sure, “imagined,” as we saw in chapter 10, but in this instance the imagining seems to reside entirely in the wishful thinking of West and a few like-minded theorists.³²

But however distant it may be from contemporary realities, West’s community presents an alluring vision—one consonant with the image of the ancient community (with its “mild spirit of antiquity”)³³ that inspired thinkers like Gibbon. “Our civic society,” West says, is “less insulting, less hurtful, more inclusive, more fully participatory, more generous, and fairer” than alternatives.³⁴ It promises “a world of equal opportunity and full participation that is free of racism and sexism and their related effects.”³⁵ It is “a national community of broad based participation and civic equality.”³⁶ Who would not want to live in such a community—if it existed?

Can Modern Paganism Support Community? But does modern paganism contain the resources needed to support the kind of rich community envisioned by thinkers like Rawls and West?

Here the differences between ancient and modern paganism become pertinent. Ancient paganism, as we saw in chapter 3, was predominantly public and communal in nature. It was manifest in spectacular temples and noisy processions, in public sacrifices and auguries. And all citizens were expected to participate in rendering sacrifices and libations to the gods, including the divinized Caesars; indeed, the pervasiveness of these ceremonies—in the forum, in the games, in the marketplace—made it nearly impossible to avoid participation.

Modern paganism, by contrast, lacks these communal elements. As we saw in chapter 9, modern paganism, as reflected in Ronald Dworkin’s “religion without God,”37 is more a sort of philosophical sanctification of experiences, judgments, and commitments that individuals are free to have or not to have. It is mostly of the type that Marcus Varro classified as philosophical religiosity, as opposed to the mythical and civic forms, and it is thus predominantly personal in character.³⁸

Vestiges of the old “civil religion” remain, to be sure—presidential inaugurations, Fourth of July gatherings (with fireworks and parades), Constitution Day programs. But the American civil religion was Christian or biblical in character, as we saw in chapter 10. Modern paganism (and the “progressivism” under which it travels) is accordingly more suspicious than supportive of civil religion.³⁹ Consequently, both in its occurrence and in its aftermath, a presidential inauguration today is more likely to be divisive than unifying. In short, present paganism, unlike its venerable predecessor, seems more conducive to a “bowling alone” type of religiosity than to a communal one.

What about the language or discourse of political community? As we have noticed, philosophizing like that of John Rawls is animated by the aspiration to sustain a “public reason” that all citizens can join in on equal and respectful terms—a discourse cleansed of the strife and offensiveness associated with more “sectarian” voices. It aims to achieve this laudable goal by screening out potentially divisive “comprehensive doctrines” (like Christianity) from public decision-making.

So, how has this project fared? It is frequently observed that public discourse today seems both more shallow and more bitterly contentious than in times past.⁴⁰ And, upon reflection, these disappointing results should not be surprising; if notions of “public reason” cannot be held solely responsible for this condition, they have likely contributed to it.41 After all, people whose deepest convictions (embodied in their “comprehensive doctrines”) have been declared inadmissible in public discourse will understandably feel excluded from public deliberations, and alienated from the city governed by such deliberations. In addition, as basic beliefs and commitments are screened out of public decision making, there is less and less discursive and rhetorical material to work with as people attempt to reason together and to persuade each other.⁴² Sometimes purely utilitarian or pragmatic desiderata will govern, and people will be able to argue about those—about whether free trade or protectionism will better stimulate the economy, for instance. But with regard to the most basic human concerns (concerning life and death, for example, or sexuality, or marriage), what are people supposed to say when their fundamental principles have been ruled out of bounds in the debate?

It can happen—indeed, it increasingly does happen—that the main or only rhetorical resources that remain will appeal to the one thing that everyone can still agree on—namely, that it is bad or wrong to act from hatred, bigotry, or a mere desire to harm. Consequently, public debate on all manner of fundamental issues increasingly degenerates into clashing accusations of hatred or bigotry, delivered with a cultivated righteous indignation. In this respect, both the United States Supreme Court and the United States Civil Rights Commission have recently set a depressing example.⁴³ And thus the aspiration to construct a community grounded in and guided by an elevated and respectful public discourse from which divergent and divisive “comprehensive doctrines” have been excluded leads instead to a shrill and shallow cacophony in which opposing parties can do little other than accuse each other of being racists, sexists, homophobes, and bigots.⁴⁴

Community and Tradition. More generally, one need not be a disciple of Edmund Burke to understand that genuine human communities are not decreed into existence either by philosophical prescription or by governmental fiat; they are a product of people living together, over time, under traditions and customs that are shared or at least acquiesced in. The paganism that animated and consecrated the ancient city was communal and traditional in just this sense: it reflected patterns of living and thinking that had evolved over centuries. Conversely, Christianity was at that time the new, defiant, critical upstart. So perhaps the most central and powerful pagan indictment of Christianity (eloquently expressed, for example, in Symmachus’s poignant plea for retention of the Altar of Victory)45 was that the new religion was subverting the customs on which the Roman city was founded. (“Allow us, we beseech you, as old men to leave to posterity what we received as boys. The love of custom is great.”)⁴⁶

Today these relations are flipped. Now it is Christianity that has provided the dominant ideal for centuries, and has served to orient and inform ways of life that by now possess the character of tradition. Conversely, modern paganism has had to assert itself in opposition to received customs and traditions, now associated with Christianity, and hence has of necessity been critical and adversarial in character, not traditional. Thus, a central characteristic of the “modern paganism” that Peter Gay discerned and celebrated in the Enlightenment was its antitraditionalism and its relentlessly, aggressively critical quality.⁴⁷

Modern paganism can hardly be blamed, exactly, for opposing and undermining tradition; under the circumstances, what else could it do? Still, this critical, antitraditional, acidic posture subverts rather than sustains the social material with which actual communities are built and maintained.

Sometimes proponents of the modern de-Christianized city at least implicitly understand the importance of tradition, and attempt to connect their more immanent and progressive vision to the transcendently oriented traditions that have undergirded the nation, at least until recently. But such efforts can end up underscoring the gaping disjunction between the contemporary immanent vision and the received tradition. In this spirit, John Rawls attempted to explain how his prescription of a public discourse purged of transcendent religion could nonetheless make allowance for Lincoln’s majestic Second Inaugural Address (“With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .”), perhaps the most profound and revered statement ever made by an American official or politician. This was no easy task because, as noted, Rawls’s “public reason” attempts to screen out theological appeals, while Lincoln’s speech was pervasively theological in character. Indeed, the speech was, as one historian observed, a “theological classic, containing within its twenty-five sentences fourteen references to God, many scriptural allusions, and four direct quotations from the Bible.”48

Rawls aptly described the speech as offering a “prophetic (Old Testament) interpretation of the Civil War as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.” He nonetheless suggested two reasons why the speech might escape censorship under his theology-averse “public reason.” But Rawls’s first suggestion—that the speech had “no implications bearing on constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice”—seems almost comically implausible. Slavery wasn’t a matter of basic justice? The reconstitution of the republic after secession and civil war wasn’t concerned with “constitutional essentials”? Rawls’s second suggestion—that Lincoln’s basic message “could surely be supported firmly by the values of public reason”⁴⁹—seems almost astonishingly tone-deaf. To be sure, a president more attuned to Rawls’s prescription could give a talk saying something like the following: “My fellow citizens, slavery was a bad business and a violation of equal respect, but there’s no use pointing fingers now: we need to let bygones be bygones and get on with life.” But this bland, theologically sanitized speech would not even come close to approximating the power and insight of Lincoln’s actual address.

In the end, Rawls’s effort to explain why his own civic vision would not exclude the most powerful interpretation of the American experience ever given by a political leader merely reveals the chasm between the contemporary progressive conception of the political community and the political traditions that in fact have constituted that community.

In sum, modern paganism may yearn for community, but it has been forced to take an adversarial stance toward the actual substance of the community against which it has had to assert itself. Aspiring to reestablish the solidarity of the ancient city, modern paganism has in fact been subversive of the community or communities that actually exist. Hence the oft-observed growing polarization in American society.

Modern Paganism and the Problem of Tolerance

Central to the possibility of community under conditions of pluralism is the practice of tolerance. The ancient Roman city was able to maintain solidarity in diversity because of, as Gibbon affectionately (and wishfully) put it, its “universal spirit of toleration.”50 To be sure, as we saw in chapter 6, Roman authorities did not explicitly endorse the idea of “tolerance.” Theirs was “not tolerance born of principle,”⁵¹ as J. A. North has observed; it consisted rather of indifference to most of the religious diversity that flourished in the empire together with an ability to absorb or annex most religious cults and practices into the pagan framework.⁵² When a religion resisted absorption, as Christianity and Judaism did, Roman authorities could be brutally and unapologetically repressive. Nonetheless, whether we describe its attitude as “tolerance” or as indifference/assimilation, ancient paganism did manage to embrace a vast variety of different cults and deities.

Advancing beyond their ancient predecessors, modern progressive proponents of community tend to talk explicitly and favorably about toleration; indeed, tolerance is central to their self-understanding. Thus, we have already noticed Robin West’s advocacy of a “liberal, tolerant, diverse community.” Conversely, to the progressive mind, intolerance or bigotry seems to be the cardinal sin (as it was not to the Romans).

Their more open and explicit endorsement of the principle might suggest that modern progressives would be even more tolerant than their pagan forebears were. Paradoxically, and sadly, this turns out to be a situation in which open endorsement of a virtue in fact works to undermine that virtue.

Intolerance of the Intolerant. How so? Well, if tolerance is a virtue, then intolerance is a vice. And so the more emphatically I insist on tolerance, the more censorious I am likely to be toward the vice of intolerance wherever I perceive it (or think I perceive it). The observation leads to a familiar question, or conundrum: How should a tolerant person, or a tolerant society, treat people who are intolerant?

Probably there is no logically compelled answer to this question. One possibility is that even the intolerant should be tolerated. In this vein, Justice Holmes countered the argument that Marxists were undeserving of the freedom of speech their philosophy rejected with the observation that “if, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”53 But Holmes’s sobering interpretation was not the only possible meaning of free speech. Others have argued that those who oppose free speech forfeit their right to it.⁵⁴ More generally, the very notion of toleration implies that although much that is disagreeable should be put up with, there may be practices or ideas that are intolerable, or beyond the scope of what should be tolerated. And on either logical or prudential grounds, one might conclude that one thing even a tolerant society surely must not tolerate is . . . intolerance.⁵⁵

In this way, the enthusiastic endorsement of tolerance can provide a powerful rationale for excluding, marginalizing, or sanctioning people or institutions whose views are deemed intolerant. The notion of “intolerance” is in turn so elastic that it can be used to cover virtually anyone whose views or commitments imply rejection of beliefs or ways of life to which others adhere. You believe my way of life is immoral? You’re being intolerant.

Another paradox lurks here, to be sure. Isn’t the condemnation of beliefs or practices deemed intolerant itself a rejection of beliefs or practices to which others adhere? Pressed, this interpretation risks dissolving “toleration” into the proposition that “we should put up with all manner of diverse beliefs and practices—except for those that fundamentally disagree with our own.”⁵⁶ But in practice, it seems, this paradox can easily be overlooked by those who proudly self-identify as proponents of tolerance. And hence, ironically, a commitment to tolerance can supply a justification for the massive marginalization or sanctioning of people whose beliefs or practices disagree with those of “tolerant” elites.

As I write, this logic of intolerant tolerance is at work in epidemic proportions. As noted already, the logic informs large swaths of public discourse, as advocates accuse and seek to marginalize their adversaries for ostensible bigotry or intolerance. The logic enters into law as well. Tolerance is invoked by high-minded judges, without any apparent sense of irony, as a justification for imposing heavy sanctions on the photographer or florist or baker who is religiously opposed to servicing and celebrating a same-sex wedding.57 An otherwise exemplary fire chief is dismissed from his job for self-publishing a Sunday school manual containing a section teaching traditional biblical sexual morality, which is deemed intolerant.⁵⁸ Legislators advocate cutting off state funding for religious universities that do not accept the prevailing “tolerant” orthodoxy supporting same-sex marriage.⁵⁹ Instances proliferate.

In an important sense, this policy of intolerant tolerance parallels the approach of ancient Rome to religious diversity. As we saw in chapter 6, Roman authorities could accept all manner of religious cults and deities, so long as the adherents were willing to sacrifice to the deified Caesars and to have their deities enrolled in the pantheon along with the other gods. To the Romans, this appeared to be a reasonable, reciprocal, “live and let live” approach: we’ll accept your god if you’ll accept ours. To monotheistic Christians and Jews, by contrast, the proposition came across very differently: we’ll accept your religion if you’ll in effect renounce it in favor of the kind of polytheistic religion we favor. In a similar way, contemporary progressive tolerance is happy to respect any number of different religious views—so long, that is, as they do not actually proclaim their own truth and hence, expressly or by implication, the error of contrary views.

But if modern progressive paganism runs parallel to the Roman approach to religious diversity, the potential repressiveness today is significantly greater in at least two respects than it was in antiquity. First, ancient paganism mostly prescribed outward behaviors—sacrifices to the gods, for example—but cared little for what a person thought or felt.60 Christianity, by contrast, was deeply interested in what was in a person’s mind and heart; lustful desires were condemned along with actual adultery, and hateful feelings and words were deplored in the same way that actual violence was.⁶¹ This is a feature of Christianity that modern paganism seems to have incorporated wholeheartedly; it is severely censorious not just of antisocial actions but also of what it perceives as racist or sexist or homophobic attitudes or expressions. Remember Memories Pizza.⁶²

Second, the class of people and institutions deemed “intolerant,” and hence intolerable, is likely much larger today than it was in the Roman era. For the most part, the Romans managed to reach a modus vivendi accommodating the Jews (although, as noted, there were occasional horrific exceptions).⁶³ The primary conflict was with Christians, who represented a novel religion with relatively few adherents, even into the fourth century. Today, by contrast, it is public paganism that is the newly emerging force, in opposition to adherents of Christianity or traditional religion who have in one degree or another constituted a sizable portion of the population. Hence the scope of conflict and potential repression is much larger than it was in antiquity.

Laycock’s Question Revisited. Which brings us back to one of our initial questions—the one to which we gave only half an answer in the preceding chapter. Why do the proponents of a familiar antidiscrimination agenda insist on suing marriage counselors who object on religious grounds to counseling same-sex couples and wedding photographers and florists who object to serving same-sex weddings—even when these professionals’ goods and services are available elsewhere, and even when no same-sex couple would actually want to receive counseling or service from such persons? Douglas Laycock and others say that the activists are attempting not so much to gain a needed remedy as to drive these traditionally religious people out of business.64 Perhaps, but why?

While advocates describe the possibility of material harm in some circumstances, in other contexts they are sometimes explicit in explaining that the suits are not about the denials of services per se.⁶⁵ There are, after all, plenty of other photographers, florists, and bakers. And in any case, the damages for this type of marketplace injury would usually be de minimus—perhaps for the time and expense of calling up another photographer, florist, or baker.⁶⁶ The injury, rather, comes from the message implicit or perhaps explicit in the denial of services; the injury is the affront to the “dignity” of the same-sex would-be customers or clients.⁶⁷ As Douglas NeJaime and Reva Siegel argue, refusals of service “address third parties as sinners in ways that can stigmatize and demean.” For example, a pharmacist who objects to filling a prescription for contraceptives conveys a message that “he deems [the use of contraceptives] ‘wrong’ or ‘a sin.’ ”⁶⁸

This logic is understandable, and plausible; it is also ominous. Once the distinction is made between the denial of services per se and the message sent, it would seem to follow that the actual denial of services is merely incidental: the message would inflict similar injury even if conveyed in some other (perhaps more explicit) way. And indeed, this corollary is entirely plausible. To be sure, a refusal to serve someone may be an especially vivid or painful form of delivering the message. Or maybe not: in some instances, providers have attempted to be delicate and respectful in expressing their religious reservations,69 whereas some nonprovider expressions can be extremely caustic and confrontational. Think of the Westboro Baptists,⁷⁰ for example.

In any case, the same logic that says the offended customer suffers an injury to his or her “dignity” when a professional declines services on religious grounds—because of the implicit message that the customer’s conduct is “wrong” or “a sin”—would suggest that the speaker who advocates a “comprehensive doctrine” condemning (as “wrong” or “a sin”) homosexual conduct or same-sex marriage inflicts the same type of injury to personal dignity. Ultimately, in fact, it is not merely the overt expression of the offending view that inflicts injury, but rather the fact that someone holds the offending view and is known to hold it.⁷¹ In the Proposition 8 case, federal judge Vaughn Walker said as much: he issued a “finding of fact” asserting that “religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.”⁷²

The judge did not actually rule that lawsuits or prosecutions should be permitted against churches or individuals merely for holding these harmful beliefs. Nor does it seem likely that such suits or prosecutions will be authorized in the foreseeable future. Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” nonetheless reflects a fundamental tension in the modern pagan city and a fundamental obstacle to the realization of its vision of community. As we saw in chapter 6, one understandable reason that pagans might resent Christians was that Christianity imposed, morally if not legally, severe restrictions on people’s freedom—their sexual freedom, their freedom to live according to whatever values or goals they might prefer. Even insofar as Christianity did not legally restrict conduct, its moral condemnation could be perceived as a kind of assault on the dignity and moral worth of people who chose to reject Christian standards. The same is true today.

Is true a fortiori, in fact. At least through the end of the third century, after all, Christianity was a marginal and politically impotent faith, condemned by the authorities and rejected or ignored by the vast majority of Roman subjects. So the injury inflicted on pagans by Christian moral censure was arguably de minimis. Today the situation is utterly different. Christianity has provided the regulative ideal for centuries (even if that ideal has never actually been realized, even approximately). Christianity has been in a sense the dominant regime against which non-Christian dissenters like Gibbon and Hume and Voltaire and Mill have had to assert their independence. Its sexual norms were embodied in law, as we saw in chapter 10, into the 1950s, even into the 1970s.73 Its strictures are thus more real and forceful, less easy to ignore, and arguably more injurious to dignity than they were in late antiquity. And this makes the active or open presence of Christian ideals in the public space more troublesome and threatening than those ideals might have been in the first, second, and third centuries.

So it is understandable why activists and litigants would want to drive overtly Christian employers and professionals out of the public square and the public marketplace. Their goods and services may or may not be needed, but their message is a standing affront to dignity, and their presence is an irritant and an insult to the kind of community to which modern progressive pagans aspire.

More generally, as in the ancient city, citizens with commitments to strong versions of Christianity or other truth-oriented faiths are today a foreign and divisive element in the city of “modern paganism.” Now, as then, devout Christians do not accept the city’s terms of cooperation—terms that require citizens to check their religious beliefs at the door before entering the civic sphere. Their commitment to particularistic or “sectarian” versions of the Truth, and their attempts to bring such Truth into the public square, threaten and disrupt the “overlapping consensus” and the mutually respectful deliberation and communion that Rawls and like-minded citizens seek to achieve.

Little wonder that the proponents of the Rawlsian liberal community would ostracize these views, and the citizens who insist on maintaining them, from the civic sphere and consider them “unreasonable.”⁷⁴ Unreasonable in the same sense that Christians were viewed as uncivil and unreasonable in the Roman Empire.⁷⁵ And little wonder that Robin West and other progressives would force such citizens to accept the “shared” public norms as a condition of participating in the public sphere, including the economic marketplace.

Toleration or War? It is not that the de-Christianized city could not put up with such views and such citizens. During the decades and centuries in which Christianity still dominated the civic understanding, at least as a sort of residual regulative ideal, dissenters like John Stuart Mill expounded attractive visions of a more “open” society76 committed to a more principled and expansive tolerance than what prevailed in ancient Rome. In the tolerant modern city, people of fundamentally different convictions could gather together, forcefully advocate and debate their competing and incompatible “comprehensive doctrines,” and then decide democratically what course the community would take. This more classically “liberal” vision contemplates a robust community of confident, tough-minded citizens who do not bracket their commitments to truth, who understand that other citizens have different and sometimes incompatible views, and who are prepared to encounter and respond to strong condemnations of their own views and ways of life (sometimes, if that is where the argument leads, by modifying those views and ways of life). Public discourse in such a community would be, as the Supreme Court once explained, “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”⁷⁷ Self-confident, thick-skinned citizens would accept, perhaps even appreciate, what Andrew Koppelman only partly sardonically describes as “the joys of mutual contempt.”⁷⁸ Surely there are still citizens and theorists who cling to that more “liberal” vision of “a confident pluralism,” as John Inazu describes it in a recent book.⁷⁹

Moreover, at least some of the reasons that animated the ancient pagan city’s episodic but forceful suppression of Christianity do not seem to apply today. The devotees of “modern paganism,” for example, typically would not assert that there are deities who will be angered, and who will accordingly smite the city or fail to answer its auguries, because of the community’s toleration of the blasphemies or sacrileges committed by Christians.

So it is imaginable that Christianity, along with other strong and transcendent religiosities, could be tolerated and accommodated even in a pagan community—in a classically liberal (as opposed to immanently progressive) pagan community.

Still, a triumphalist paganism may see no reason to extend such accommodation to citizens whose views and values reject and disrupt the immanent religiosity on which the pagan city is built. Recall Harvard professor Mark Tushnet’s declaration, noted earlier in the chapter: “They lost, we won.” Tushnet goes on to advocate a “hard-line” approach to the defeated religionists. “You lost, live with it.”80

Tushnet’s recommendation raises a prudential question: Could a “hard-line” approach succeed in realizing the genuine community to which the pagan city aspires? At present our politics are polarized and our public discourse is shrill, shallow, and nasty, as observers on all sides of the cultural divisions often complain. But perhaps that is because the cultural conflict is still active. Civility never flourishes during wartime. But if the party of immanence were to prevail, decisively, and then were to consolidate its control through “hard-line” measures as contemplated by Tushnet and others, perhaps a genuine, peaceful, respectful community could be achieved after all.

Maybe. That is no doubt the progressive aspiration. But here an observation of the historian Edward Gibbon may be pertinent. As noted in chapter 7, some historians have surmised that if the fourth-century pagan emperor Julian had reigned for a longer period, paganism might have been reestablished and Christianity gradually eliminated.⁸¹ Gibbon disagreed. By the mid-fourth century, Christians still may not have represented a majority of Roman citizens; even so, “if we seriously reflect on the strength and spirit of the church, we shall be convinced, that before the emperor could have extinguished the religion of Christ, he must have involved his country in the horrors of a civil war.”⁸² As we saw in the previous chapter, proposals today are not for “extinguish[ing] the religion of Christ,” exactly, but rather for excluding it from an ever-expanding public sphere—one now construed to include the economic marketplace—and relegating its committed practitioners to a shrinking domain outside the city walls. But a similar prudential question is presented. And a similar if somewhat scaled-down prediction seems plausible.

Plausible—not certain. As we saw in chapter 9, surveys showing that a large majority of Americans are still Christian are for these purposes largely unreliable. Many people who mark the box for “Christian” (or “Methodist,” or “Catholic”) may be profoundly uncommitted to or altogether ignorant of their ostensible faith. The ranks of self-professing Christians are likely pervaded by people who are realistically more pagan than Christian.83 And there is no way to take an accurate head count.

Even so, it seems likely that there are still enough genuine and committed Christians to make the “hard-line” imposition of a pagan society difficult. Moreover, unlike the Christians of late antiquity, who could hardly have supposed that they had built the empire (which, after all, had largely assumed its shape and boundaries before their religion even came onto the scene), modern Christians can assert with some plausibility that they and their Christian forebears were responsible for the construction of the civilization that is now being wrested from them. Christians, to be sure, are taught to be submissive and to “turn the other cheek.” But that injunction is subject to interpretation, and in any case, with this as with other precepts, Christians have often fallen short of their announced ideals. It would be understandable if they did not passively acquiesce as modern paganism seizes the city that they and their ancestors have constructed and attempts to relocate them to the shrinking space outside the city walls.

Predictions are precarious, and it is possible that a “hard-line” refusal to accommodate traditional Christianity—with respect to marriage, sexuality, employment, education, commercial activity, and other matters—could succeed in more or less peacefully repressing the nonconforming constituencies. “You lost, live with it,” as Professor Tushnet says.⁸⁴ But it seems at least as likely that the uncompromising approach will merely raise to a new level of intensity the culture wars that over the last several decades have flourished mostly in unedifying but nonviolent forms.

And so in the end, alas, it may be that the shimmering pagan city, like the Christian one, is simply not to be realized in this world—or at least not by the application of law and force.

Modern Paganism and Human Fulfillment

As we have seen, in its aspiration to create community, the modern progressive project has sought to separate the city, or at least the civic sphere, from claims about Truth—claims that came with the Christian revolution and are likely to be divisive. We have thus far been considering whether that strategy is likely to succeed in constructing genuine community, and we have seen that the prospects are doubtful. But now let us set doubts aside and ask a different question. Suppose the modern pagan city could be established and maintained. Would that city allow us to come home again at last, after centuries of wandering in the wake of the fourth-century Christian revolution? Would it dispel the sense of “homelessness” that Walker Percy discerned in the modern world? More generally, how efficacious would a triumphant modern paganism be in providing people with spiritual fulfillment—in providing the kinds of goods that (as we discussed in chapter 2) many people seek and that religion has typically sought to supply?

In considering these questions, we will not attempt to arrive at any final judgments about Truth—about the truth of paganism (in its diverse forms), or Christianity (in its diverse forms), or any other religion. Rather, as in chapter 7, we will attempt to survey the strengths and weaknesses of modern paganism relative to these truth- and spirituality-oriented desiderata.

Minimalism and Believability. One relevant feature of modern paganism of the philosophical sort—a feature that may be either a strength or a weakness—is that, unlike many other religions, it does not seem to demand much of its adherents, either creedally or behaviorally. Think of Ronald Dworkin’s “religion without God,” which we discussed in chapter 9. An adherent of Dworkin’s religion will affirm that life has “objective” meaning and that there is in the world “objective” beauty or sublimity. Nothing more is required, really. The religion does not instruct adherents on what and where meaning and beauty are, on how these “objective” qualities have come to exist, on what if anything they demand of anyone. Susan Wolf, as we saw in chapter 2, argues that philosophers have no very good account of what it even means for value to be “objective”; Dworkin’s religion does not remedy that deficiency.

In short, by contrast both to ancient mythical paganism (which at least implicitly asked its devotees to believe, in some sense, in a host of divine beings) and to Christianity (which affirms a series of refined creeds and doctrines), Dworkin’s “religion without God” asks for very little. To be counted as a congregant, it is seemingly enough to affirm, “I think that my life is really (and not merely subjectively) valuable, and that the world and the sunset and the Grand Canyon are really (and not merely subjectively) sublime.”

With respect to believability, this minimalist stance is in one sense a strength. Most people today—certainly people with higher educations—would find it impossible to believe in anthropomorphized deities like Zeus, Apollo, and Athena (just as many educated people in late antiquity found it impossible to believe in these deities in any literal way). Many of the same people, whether or not they have devoted any study to the issue, are likewise convinced that science or historical criticism or something else has rendered the claims of the Bible or the Christian creeds unbelievable as well. We noted the philosopher Luc Ferry’s observation that “neither the ancient model nor the Christian model remain credible for anyone of a critical and informed disposition.”85

Correct or not, Ferry surely describes the mind-set of many educated people in our times. At the same time, not many people are willing to relinquish the idea that there are things that are “sacred” or “sacrosanct” or “inviolable”—the human person, perhaps, or maybe the natural environment, or a species of animal or plant. Modern paganism allows people to affirm this sort of minimal, immanent sacredness without signing on to the more ambitious, complex, and (for many) incredible claims of either full-bodied paganism or the transcendent religions. Recall, from chapter 9, Barbara Ehrenreich’s explanation that by contrast to the transcendent God of Christianity and Judaism, whom she rejected, “amoral gods, polytheistic gods, animal gods—these were all fine with me, if only because they seemed to make no promises and demand no belief.”⁸⁶

If modern paganism’s creedal minimalism is a strength, however, that quality may also be a weakness: modern paganism may be vulnerable in much the same way that ancient philosophical paganism was vulnerable. Ancient philosophical paganism attempted to shore up a polytheism that was becoming increasingly implausible (at least for the more educated) by interpreting the gods as symbolic representations of a more unitary and encompassing divine reality. But as we saw in chapter 7, the position rendered itself vulnerable to Christian critics like Augustine, who contended that if the divine Reality was actually unitary, it would be more sensible to acknowledge and worship that single Reality than to persist in pretending to honor a vast and unruly host of merely metaphorical deities. Thus, as R. T. Wallis observes, “In seeking to establish traditional worship on a philosophical basis the [later pagan philosophers] ironically ensured the triumph of Christianity.”87

Put differently, whether or not they were ultimately true, both full-bodied polytheism and articulated Christianity at least had a sort of integrity. Philosophical paganism, by contrast, was neither one thing nor the other; it attempted to occupy a sort of no-man’s-land in between these positions. But that middle position turned out, arguably, to be less defensible and attractive than either of the leading alternatives. Hence, philosophers today still study and debate Plato and Aristotle on their merits; they take an interest in Plotinus and Porphyry mostly as a matter of antiquarian interest. As a historical proposition, the philosophical paganism of Plotinus and Porphyry turned out to be important mostly because it could be a sort of stepping-stone to Christianity (as it was for Augustine).

In an analogous way, the modern philosophical paganism reflected in Dworkin’s “religion without God” attempts to occupy a sort of middle position between the “disenchanted” world of scientific naturalism and the full-blooded transcendent religions of Christianity and Judaism. Unlike naturalism, Dworkin’s religion wants to affirm that “objective” value, “objective” beauty, sublimity, and the sacred exist; unlike biblical faith, this religion wants to disavow any reference to or reliance on a transcendent source, like God, for such qualities. But without such a reference, it is wholly unclear what these affirmations mean or why we should accept them.

True, as Dworkin observes, most of us have the experience of encountering things that seem valuable or beautiful. And we experience these things and their qualities of value or beauty as real. Naturalistic science offers reductionist accounts of such experiences as subjective projections. By contrast, transcendent religion attempts to account for such experiences by reference to a transcendent source. Each kind of account has its logic, its own sort of integrity. The naturalist will think that the reductionist accounts are sufficient and securely grounded in empirical observation, and that the transcendent accounts reflect a kind of “wish fulfillment” or intellectual immaturity.⁸⁸ Conversely, a traditional religious perspective may perceive that reductionist and naturalistic accounts are insufficient (because they fail to credit or adequately account for the fullness of such experiences) and that an expanded ontology that includes at least one transcendent reality—God—offers a more adequate account of our experience. The debate has been flourishing for centuries; it will likely not abate any time soon.

The “religion without God” of modern paganism, by contrast, agrees that the reductionist and naturalist accounts are inadequate—hence Dworkin’s sharp criticisms of Richard Dawkins—but it is unwilling to expand its ontological inventory89 to include anything supernatural or transcendent. Rather, while rejecting the naturalist’s reductionist normative judgments, it attempts to stay within the naturalist’s more immanent ontology. But within the naturalist ontology, it is wholly unclear why we need to posit “objective” values, “objective” beauty, or immanent sacredness. Reductionist and subjective accounts will seem to give us all we need, to explain all that we observe. Indeed, it is unclear what it even means to posit such “objective” entities or qualities, or what “objectivity” consists of; it seems to be a foreign or alien element within the naturalistic framework.

Upon reflection, the “religion without God” of modern paganism (at least as manifest in its Dworkinian version) may thus come to resemble a kind of self-referential pulpit pounding, or an exclamation mark added to first-person judgments. “This Rembrandt painting isn’t just beautiful to me; it really is beautiful, dammit, and if you don’t think so you’re just wrong!” Such claims have neither the tough ontological frugality of the naturalistic position nor the expansive sublimity of the theistic vision. They seem understandable mostly as a sort of unstable halfway house or way station for people in transition, either from scientific naturalism to transcendent religion or vice versa.

Minimalism and Spiritual Efficacy. If its minimalism is a strength but also a weakness of modern paganism with respect to believability, the same is true with respect to spiritual efficacy. Humans are both social and embodied beings; both the immanent religions of ancient paganism and the transcendent religions of Christianity and Judaism have accordingly sought to address people’s religious nature through performances, spectacles, sacrifices, or liturgies that bring people together and engage them through their bodily senses—sight, hearing, smell, even touch and taste. Humans are also intellectual beings, so religions ancient and modern have provided material for the mind—whether in narrative form (as in the elaborate pagan myths and also in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures) or in more dialectical (as in the Jewish Talmud) or propositional form (as in the Christian creeds, theologies, summas). Such narratives, discussions, and propositions speak to questions like the origin and purpose of life, the meaning of evil, the significance of death.

Humans are also active and embodied beings, living in the world; so religions both ancient and modern have provided their adherents with precepts and commandments—with things to do, ways to live. These have included the rituals and libations and sacrifices of ancient paganism and Judaism and the moral instructions and liturgies of Judaism and Christianity.

By contrast, modern philosophical paganism (at least of the Dworkinian variety) offers none of these things. It sponsors no ceremonies, prescribes no rituals. It does not attempt to explain why the world exists, why we suffer, or whether there is anything for us after death. In this respect, once again, modern paganism is minimalist in comparison either to its ancient predecessor or to its more modern transcendent competitors. One wonders whether modern paganism is simply too intellectually, morally, and ceremonially or liturgically thin to provide what religions are supposed to provide.

But then, perhaps this critical judgment is unfair, overlooking the obvious. True, the “religion without God” may not offer ceremonies, rituals, even moral codes separable from the rest of life and identifiable as pagan religious ceremonies or codes. But then, that is arguably the whole point of immanent religion—namely, to discern and declare the existence of the sacred within the world, and within life. In this sense, it might be said that modern paganism does engage the senses and prescribe ways to act and live. It engages the senses in . . . musical concerts, or plays, or athletic contests—or walks on the beach or in the woods. It allows us to ponder the big questions of existence and life and death in whatever ways we are already inclined to ponder them. And it authorizes us to receive instruction in how to act and how to live through whatever media and means we already receive such instruction—school, home, movies, podcasts, philosophy books.

The whole point, once again, is to close the gap between the sacred and the world as we actually dwell in it. To consecrate life as we already know and live it. To allow us to feel once again at home in the world—not left distracted and dissatisfied by an illusion of an outside and unreachable transcendence. To the lost soul who yearns for home, modern immanent religiosity says, “But you already are at home; you only need to look around yourself, more attentively, and to give up your distracting and futile search for some other home somewhere else.”

Transcendent religion, in short, seeks to lift our gaze toward an ideal that lies beyond our present mundane existence—to show us that there is a higher reality, if we will only be humble and attentive enough to see it. Immanent religion, by contrast, seeks to consecrate our present existence, or to show us that our present existence is already consecrated—if we only have eyes to see it (and if we can resist the allure of transcendent religion, which teaches us that the sacred is somewhere else, not here).

So, which of these perspectives is more alluring? More illuminating? More intellectually and spiritually satisfying?

Is the World Sufficient unto Itself?

The questions take us back to alternatives that we considered in earlier chapters. One way of posing the question is in terms of goods. From the Christian perspective, as we saw in chapter 5, thinkers like Augustine have contended that the world provides an array of goods—friendship, pleasure, sexual gratification, professional recognition, aesthetic experience—and these are genuine goods. But they are also transitory, in two senses. In time, they grow stale and unsatisfying. And they end with death—our own death, or the deaths of friends and loved ones. These goods are thus not stable ends-in-themselves, but rather glimpses of and pointers to a higher good—eternal life, or the life of and with God. Take away that transcendent reference, and this world—and this earthly city—lose their purpose and become, as Augustine said, a kind of “death-in-life, or life-in-death.”90

Was Augustine right? Or are the goods of this world sufficient, or at least as good as it gets, and thus the only goods we should concern ourselves with?

Another way to put the question is in terms of meaning. In chapter 2 we considered the view of Viktor Frankl, Susan Wolf, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Leo Tolstoy, and others, that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. We are not content with “flourishing”—in the sense of satisfying our “interests”—or even with living by a code of morality; rather, we want and need to see our lives as having some sort of “meaning.” And in seeking to ascertain the sense of that elusive notion, we considered the proposal of the philosopher John Wisdom that we might understand the idea of “meaning” by analogy to a play. We can see part of a play, perhaps, and wonder how it fits within the whole play. Or we can see the whole play and wonder what it “means.” What is the character or point of the narrative? Is it a tragedy, a comedy, an exhibition of the absurd, or something else? In the former case, we are wondering about the larger play that would complete and thus give sense to the fragment we saw. In the latter case, we are wondering about “the order in the drama of Time.”91

Following Wisdom’s suggestion, we might present our current question in this way: each of us directly observes only an infinitesimally small slice of the human affairs of our own time—namely, the ones we are personally involved in—but we can indirectly learn about some of the affairs of other human beings (still only a tiny fraction, probably) both in our own times and at earlier stages in human history. And with respect to these various human doings, we can ask: Does all this human activity, our own and that of others—all this living and striving and dying—have some sort of meaning? As Viktor Frankl asked as he clung to life as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps: “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning?”⁹² Does human existence fit into some sort of overarching plot or narrative? And if so, is that narrative one that plays out and makes sense within this world? Or do the human doings of this world seem more like an act or fragment of a larger narrative that will be fulfilled and redeemed in some other dimension of existence, and without which our mundane doings are ultimately lacking in narrative sense—“sound and fury signifying nothing”?

These questions generate a variety of answers, obviously. But, rounding off, the answers might be sorted into four logical categories. It might be that neither individual lives nor human activity and history as a whole have meaning in the narrative sense. Or, second, it might be that human history as a whole has no meaning, but individual lives do. Conversely, and third, history as a whole might possess some kind of narrative sense, but individual lives might not. Finally, it might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.

Perhaps the safest and most familiar answer today, at least in elite circles, is the first one: there is neither any overall meaning in human history nor any “objective” meaning in individual lives. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” physicist Steven Weinberg declares, “the more it also seems pointless.”⁹³ Individuals, likewise, are born; they live; they experience pleasure and pain, happiness and disappointment. And then they die. They may if they like try to think of their lives under the form of some sort of story—a story of which they themselves are the putative authors. But from a detached perspective, there is no overall “meaning” or story in their existence. It is what it is, as the saying goes—no less, but emphatically no more. To Tolstoy’s question—“is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death that awaits me?”94—the most plausible answer is “No. There isn’t.” As Bertrand Russell declared, “No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. . . . The whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”⁹⁵

As we saw in chapter 9, this is the view most congruent with scientific naturalism, taken not as a framework for research but rather as a worldview. Modern paganism, by contrast, appears to favor the second answer. An individual’s life has meaning, Ronald Dworkin insists—indeed, “objective” and not merely “subjective” meaning—but it does not seem to follow that there is any overall meaning in human history. None that Dworkin managed to articulate, at least. The “religion without God” seems calculated not to supply any such overall meaning, but rather to offer the consolation that although there may be no overall point to it all, our individual lives can still have “objective” meaning (whatever that is).

Measured against Wisdom’s suggested narrative or theatrical analogy, though, the contention that individual lives have meaning within the frame of this world seems wildly implausible, at least as any sort of general proposition. To be sure, some people’s lives may add up to a satisfying narrative pattern. They live through and savor the stages of life—youth, adulthood, old age.⁹⁶ They posit and achieve worthwhile goals, perhaps, enjoy many of the pleasures and achievements they set out to enjoy, or raise healthy and productive children who will remember them and carry on their legacy. Good for them—for the “favourites of fortune,” as Gibbon put it.⁹⁷

But then, many other people’s lives are deformed by deprivation or truncated by tragedy. They meander aimlessly through life, never even figuring out what they want from it. Or they have aspirations but fail miserably to achieve them. Maybe they inflict immense and gratuitous harm on themselves and others, and perhaps die prematurely (sometimes at their own hand) while their aspirations and potential remain unrealized. If a novelist or playwright abused, tortured, or killed off her characters in these arbitrary and senseless ways, we would rebel: that is not how a coherent story is supposed to go. But, all too often, that is how actual human lives do unfold.

The French philosopher Luc Ferry attempts valiantly and reflectively to develop some notion of meaning and value within this life98—“transcendence within immanence,” as he calls it⁹⁹—but he admits that the fact of death poses a serious obstacle to this enterprise. Of the various possible responses to the inevitability of death, Ferry says, “I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting—except for the fact that I do not believe it.”¹⁰⁰

The skeptical or resigned response to these morose observations, of course, would be that human lives simply do not have, and do not need to have, meaning of the kind Wisdom describes and Ferry seeks. That again was the answer of Bertrand Russell and countless others. But if human lives do have meaning in the sense of a satisfying or fulfilling narrative, it is surely not realized here. Even the “favorites of fortune,” as Gibbon put it, die after a relatively brief span; even if their legacy somehow lives on, they are not around to appreciate the fact. For individual people, it seems, this world is not sufficient unto itself. Hence Gibbon’s own melancholy in his more advanced years.¹⁰¹

Another possibility is that individual lives lack meaning in the narrative sense but human history as a whole is meaningful. Marx offered one version of this answer.¹⁰² Hegel offered a different version.¹⁰³ History in its vast sweep is like a grand master’s chess game that will culminate in some splendid victory—the classless society, perhaps, or the final triumph of reason; individual human beings are merely the pawns who are pushed about, sometimes advanced, and often sacrificed in the pursuit of that grand culmination. Or, as Hegel put it, history is “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised”—but all as part of an overarching agenda in which reason will ultimately be realized in the world.104

So, should we individuals—we pawns on the chessboard, or sacrificial victims at the slaughter-bench of history—find consolation in the reflection that our own lives, while meaningless in themselves and perhaps miserable, are the ingredients for a larger and triumphalist historical story? Some people have evidently found that thought comforting—all those who willingly sacrificed themselves for the Marxist dream, for example. But should they?

Unlike the preceding answers, Christianity teaches that there is an overall meaning, and also that individual lives have their own meanings or meaningful narratives—meanings that fit into and fulfill the overall narrative or meaning. This is a teaching, though, that may require a leap of faith. And the teaching seems utterly implausible if we limit our framework to this world and this life. This world is not sufficient unto itself: taken merely on its own terms, it does not add up to any discernible or satisfying narrative. And so Christianity expands the scope, and looks to a transcendent frame and goal. As G. K. Chesterton’s fictional priest-detective Father Brown put it, “We are here on the wrong side of the tapestry. . . . The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.”¹⁰⁵

In this respect, the theologian E. L. Mascall argued that “the modern absurdists [like Sartre and Camus] are fully right in maintaining that the world does not make sense of itself.”¹⁰⁶ Mascall quoted Wittgenstein: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. . . . All that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”¹⁰⁷ And Mascall summarized the alternatives: “So we are presented with this choice. We may, if we so decide, make the best of a world which is in the last resort a senseless and hostile desert, in which we must either bury our heads in the sands or make, each for himself, our little private oases. Or we may look for the world’s meaning in some order of reality outside and beyond it, which can do for the world what the world cannot do for itself.”108

The Pagan City and The Christian City

Our discussion in this book would suggest a slight revision of Mascall’s description of the alternatives. Mascall supposed, as so many have, that the live alternative to Christianity or transcendent religion today is something like the “disenchanted” scientific naturalist worldview that resonated with the resigned or heroic (or mock-heroic) declarations of people like Bertrand Russell and Walter Stace, and that we considered in chapter 9. But as we have seen, that sort of “disenchanted” worldview, though it may in some sense be the official orthodoxy of domains like contemporary academia, probably has a comparatively small constituency. Nearly everyone believes and asserts that something is sacred and inviolable. And so in the political domain, the leading potentially viable alternatives, once again, seem to be the city centered on the immanent religiosity of “modern paganism” or the city that continues to accept Christianity, or transcendent religion, or at least the possibility of transcendence, as a regulative ideal.

Although we cannot know exactly what the pagan city would look like, we have tried in this chapter to assess the strengths and weaknesses of such a prospect. The pagan city would be one that accepts and respects immanent sanctities but is self-consciously closed off against transcendence. The city might not actually prohibit belief in transcendence. But such belief is a foreign and offensive element within the ethos of pagan civility; the city would accordingly try to marginalize transcendence and its devotees—to relocate them outside the (ever-expanding) walls that define the civic or public sphere. Forceful measures might be needed to achieve such closure and marginalization.

In this chapter we have questioned whether this sort of civic paganism is a viable basis for community under current circumstances and, even if it is, whether the community that it contemplates is the sort of city we really want to live in. Would the pagan city allow us to be free and at home again in the world, after so many centuries of alienation? Or would it entail a new and more repressive authoritarianism? And would it impoverish and degrade our communal and individual existence, reducing that existence to the mundane pursuit of fugitive and ultimately futile goods and pleasures in a world understood to have no ultimate point or purpose, and relegating those with a different and more transcendent vision to a life of civic pariahs subsisting outside the city walls? Eliot suggested that something like the latter scenario was more likely.

Many will take a different view. And they might ask: What, after all, is the alternative—the “Christian” alternative that Eliot preferred? This book is almost at its conclusion, and we have said little about that alternative. But that is because, as with the pagan city, we cannot know exactly what the Christian city would look like; but in another sense the Christian city, unlike the pagan one, is one we have known and inhabited already, for centuries.

So we know that Christianity has proven to be compatible with—and at the same time in tension with—a whole variety of political and cultural regimes. Christianity has persisted under monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies; in poverty or prosperity; in societies that were technologically backward or technologically advanced. The common feature has been that Christian societies have embraced as an aspiration and critical standard a transcendent ideal (“Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”) that they have known in advance would not be realized in this world. That transcendent ideal has been—and would surely continue to be—the source sometimes of intolerance (toward those who do reject the ideal), of criticism (of the society for its ubiquitous and inevitable failures to realize the ideal), and of progress (as society attempts to respond to criticism and to move closer to the ideal). Hence inquisitions and persecutions—and also campaigns for the abolition of slavery, discrimination, and poverty, and in favor of religious freedom. And hence also a sort of perpetual restlessness, because in the Christian earthly city the citizens are never, and are not supposed to be, fully at home. The human heart, as Augustine said, will be restless until it rests in its eternal abode.109

Unlike in some past instantiations, a central feature of any contemporary Christian society under conditions of modern pluralism is that it is unlikely to sponsor any official account of what transcendence is and requires—any official orthodoxy. The modern Christian society would be open to transcendence, and it would attempt to accommodate its citizens in their efforts to live in accordance with their understandings of transcendence. It would not declare or prescribe what the transcendent Truth is.

In this openness, and in this ongoing struggle to grasp and approach a transcendent ideal that cannot be officially articulated and that is not realizable in this world, the city would of necessity call upon the political skills and virtues, the creative efforts, the moral aspirations and imagination, the empathy, and the willingness to sacrifice of its citizens. Which seems to be what Eliot contemplated—and this seems a fitting conclusion to our investigation of his thesis—when he observed that “the only hopeful course for a society which would thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilisation, is to become Christian. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.”110

Purgatory, of course, is a transitional place or condition. As is human life—for pagans and Christians alike. This world is a fugitive state. Unlike the gods, and for better or worse, we mortals have here no abiding city.

1. Mark Tushnet, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism,” Balkinization (blog), May 6, 2016, http://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/05/abandoning-defensive-crouch-liberal.html.

2. Writers of an apocalyptic bent foretold an imminent “theocracy.” See, e.g., Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2006). Ronald Dworkin reported that “many Americans are horrified”—it is not wholly clear whether Dworkin counted himself among the company of the horror-stricken—“by the prospect of a new dark age imposed by militant superstition; they fear a black, know-nothing night of ignorance in which America becomes an intellectually backward and stagnant theocracy.” Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 79.

3. Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 50.

4. See above, 9.

5. Walker Percy, “The Coming Crisis in Psychology,” in Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays, ed. Patrick Samway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 251, 252.

6. See above, 115–16.

7. See, e.g., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155 (“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ ”).

8. Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 104, 107.

9. The criticism of Rawls from a communitarian direction is manifest in Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

10. Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, “Introduction to John Rawls,” in John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1, 5.

11. Cohen and Nagel, “Introduction to John Rawls,” 1.

12. John Rawls, “A Brief Inquiry,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry, 105 (written in 1942).

13. Rawls, “A Brief Inquiry,” 111; Cohen and Nagel, “Introduction to John Rawls,” 6.

14. Rawls, “A Brief Inquiry,” 242.

15. Rawls, “A Brief Inquiry,” 108 (emphasis added).

16. Robert Merrihew Adams, “The Theological Ethics of the Young Rawls and Its Background,” in Nagel, A Brief Inquiry, 24, 68.

17. John Rawls, “On My Religion,” in Rawls, A Brief Inquiry, 259.

18. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

19. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxxix–xl.

20. On the influence of an ideal of respect in Rawls’s theorizing, see Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

21. See above, 83–85, 108.

22. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 133–72.

23. This at least was the ideal, although the practical realities of modern pluralism forced Rawls to compromise by introducing various qualifications, such as the “wide view” of public reason, as he called it, and the “proviso.” Originally, Rawls debated whether political liberalism supported the “exclusive view” of public reason, which would categorically exclude invocation of comprehensive doctrines, or the “inclusive view,” which would “[allow] citizens, in certain situations, to present what they regard as the basis of political values rooted in their comprehensive doctrine, provided they do this in ways that strengthen the ideal of public reason itself” (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 247 [emphasis added]). He concluded that the proper view could vary with historical and social circumstances (247–54), while acknowledging (in what critics may take as a wry understatement) that “much more would have to be said to make this suggestion at all convincing” (251). Later, Rawls explicitly revised this position to adopt what he called the “wide view” elaborated by “the proviso,” which held that “[comprehensive] doctrines may be introduced in public reason at any time, provided that in due course public reasons, given by a reasonable political conception, are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support” (li–lii).

24. See above, 335.

25. Robin L. West, “Jurisprudence and Gender,” University of Chicago Law Review 55 (1988): 1.

26. West, “Jurisprudence and Gender,” 64–66.

27. Robin L. West, “Taking Freedom Seriously,” Harvard Law Review 104 (1990): 43, 60.

28. Robin West, “Freedom of the Church and Our Endangered Civil Rights: Exiting the Social Contract,” in The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty, ed. Micah Schwartzman et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 399; Robin West, “A Tale of Two Rights,” Boston University Law Review 94 (2014): 893.

29. West, “Freedom,” 412. See also West, “Tale of Two Rights,” 911 (“The new generation of exit rights . . . have the potential to unravel civil society, depending on the extent to which they are embraced”).

30. See, e.g., “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public.

31. E.g., West, “Freedom,” 407, 409, 410, 412, 416.

32. In a similar vein, see Jean L. Cohen, “Freedom of Religion, Inc.: Whose Sovereignty?” Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy 44 (2015).

33. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:57.

34. West, “Freedom,” 400.

35. West, “Freedom,” 401.

36. West, “Freedom,” 404.

37. Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

38. See above, 88.

39. See, e.g., Frederick Mark Gedicks and Roger Hendrix, “Uncivil Religion,” West Virginia Law Review 110 (2007): 275.

40. See, e.g., Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Random House, 2008); Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, 4.

41. For further argument on this point, see Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

42. See Steven D. Smith, “Recovering (from) Enlightenment?” San Diego Law Review 41 (2004): 1263, 1297–1306.

43. See United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013). For a manifestation by the US Commission on Civil Rights, see the commission’s ironically titled “Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties,” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, September 2016, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/Peaceful-Coexistence-09–07-16.PDF.

44. For discussion, see Steven D. Smith, “Against Civil Rights Simplism” (San Diego Legal Studies Paper No. 17–294); Steven D. Smith, “The Jurisprudence of Denigration,” U.C. Davis Law Review 48 (2014): 675–701.

45. See above, 175–76.

46. Symmachus, Relation 3, para. 5, reproduced at https://people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/texts/sym-amb/symrel3f.html (introduction by J. Vanderspoel).

47. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1966), 127–203.

48. Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), 135–36.

49. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 254.

50. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:56.

51. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 63.

52. See above, 155–56.

53. Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 673 (1925).

54. See Robert Bork, “Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems,” Indiana Law Journal 47 (1971): 1, 31; Carl A. Auerbach, “The Communist Control Act of 1954: A Proposed Legal-Political Theory of Free Speech,” University of Chicago Law Review 23 (1956): 173, 188–89.

55. For more detailed consideration of these questions, see Steven D. Smith, “Toleration and Liberal Commitments,” in Toleration and Its Limits, ed. Melissa S. Williams and Jeremy Waldron (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

56. This irony is zestfully developed and exposed in Stanley Fish, “Mission Impossible: Setting the Just Bounds between Church and State,” Columbia Law Review 97 (1997): 2255.

57. Elane Photography, LLC v. Willock, 2013-NMSC-040, 309 P.3d 53 (ruling that the application of accommodations laws to wedding photographer Elane Huguenin did not violate the first amendment). Judge Bosson concurred: “the Huguenins have to channel their conduct, not their beliefs, so as to leave space for other Americans who believe something different. That compromise is part of the glue that holds us together as a nation, the tolerance that lubricates the varied moving parts of us as a people” (at ¶ 92 [Bosson, J., concurring]).

58. In 2014, Kelvin Cochran, Atlanta City’s fire chief, was fired for publishing an “anti-gay” book on biblical and sexual morality for his Bible study group. Abby Ohlheiser, “Atlanta Fire Chief Suspended after Distributing His Religious Book to Employees,” Washington Post, November 26, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/11/26/atlanta-fire-chief-suspended-after-distributing-his-religious-book-to-employees.

59. The California legislature, for example, proposed to limit religious exemptions from the discrimination provisions in California’s Equity in Higher Education Act. Alan Noble, “Keeping Faith without Hurting LGBT Students,” Atlantic, August 15, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/christian-colleges-lgbt/495815.

60. See above, 108.

61. Matt. 5:27–28.

62. See above, 317–18.

63. See Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 366–487.

64. See, e.g., Douglas Laycock and Thomas C. Berg, “Protecting Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty,” Virginia Law Review in Brief 99 (2013): 1, 9.

65. See Douglas NeJaime and Reva B. Siegel, “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” Yale Law Journal 124 (2015): 2516, 2566–78.

66. In the much-publicized Arlene’s Flowers case, for example, the gay couple forced to find an alternate florist claimed $7.91 in monetary damages for this expense. See Warren Richey, “A Florist Caught between Faith and Financial Ruin,” Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 2016, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0712/A-florist-caught-between-faith-and-financial-ruin.

67. See, e.g., Louise Melling, “Religious Refusals to Public Accommodation: Four Reasons to Say No,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 38 (2015): 177, 189–91; Marvin Lim and Louise Melling, “Inconvenience or Indignity? Religious Exemptions to Public Accommodations Laws,” Journal of Law and Policy 22 (2014): 705. Cf. Helen M. Alvare, “Religious Freedom versus Sexual Expression: A Guide,” Journal of Law and Religion 30 (2015): 475, 476 (“On the part of a person who identifies as LGBT, another’s refusal to recognize a state-recognized marriage is often interpreted as a rejection of his or her entire person, and an affront to dignity, equality, and social responsibility”).

68. NeJaime and Siegel, “Conscience Wars,” 2576.

69. See Richey, “A Florist Caught between Faith and Financial Ruin.”

70. See Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011).

71. Larry Alexander develops a similar argument with care regarding the dignitary harm inflicted by “hate speech.” See Larry Alexander, “Banning Hate Speech and the Sticks and Stones Defense,” Constitutional Commentary 13 (1996): 71, 76–78.

72. Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 704 F. Supp. 2d 921, 985 (N.D. Cal. 2010) (factual finding #77) (emphasis added).

73. See above, 284–86.

74. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 61.

75. See above, 152.

76. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., Inc. [1859] 1947); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1945] 1994).

77. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964).

78. Andrew Koppelman, “The Joys of Mutual Contempt,” in William N. Eskridge Jr. and Robin Fretwell Wilson, eds., Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights, and the Prospects for Common Ground (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

79. John D. Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

80. “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.” Tushnet, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.”

81. See above, 171.

82. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:908.

83. A recent series of surveys by the American Culture and Faith Institute concluded that only about 10 percent of Americans maintain a biblical worldview for purposes of making practical decisions. Among younger Americans—the so-called millennials—the percentage was much lower. See “Groundbreaking ACFI Survey Reveals How Many Adults Have a Biblical Worldview,” American Culture and Faith Institute, accessed August 29, 2017, https://www.culturefaith.com/groundbreaking-survey-by-acfi-reveals-how-many-american-adults-have-a-biblical-worldview.

84. Tushnet, “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.”

85. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 97.

86. Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (New York: Twelve, 2014), 213.

87. R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 130–37, here 137.

88. See above, 30.

89. On the concept of an “ontological inventory,” see Steven D. Smith, Law’s Quandary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8–21.

90. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 1.7, p. 4.

91. John Wisdom, “The Meanings of the Questions of Life,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 257, 258–59.

92. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000), 183.

93. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 154.

94. Leo Tolstoy, “A Confession,” in A Confession and Other Religious Writings, trans. Jane Kentish (London: Penguin, 1987), 34–35.

95. Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 104, 107.

96. See Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 88–89.

97. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:80.

98. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 232–64.

99. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 236.

100. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 263.

101. See above, 187.

102. See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 33–51.

103. See Löwith, Meaning in History, 52–59.

104. Quoted in Löwith, Meaning in History, 53.

105. G. K. Chesterton, “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” in The Complete Father Brown Mysteries (Los Angeles: Enhanced Media Publishing, 2016), 97.

106. E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 42.

107. Mascall, The Christian Universe, 39 (quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, 6.41).

108. Mascall, The Christian Universe, 45.

109. Augustine, Confessions 1.1, p. 3.

110. T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 1948), 18–19.