Jacob Williams
Jacob Williams is a PhD candidate in political theory at the University of Oxford.
More About this Author
Jacob Williams is a PhD candidate in political theory at the University of Oxford.
More About this Author
Jacob Williams is a PhD candidate in political theory at the University of Oxford.
More About this Author
¢Abd al-Raḥmān III receiving Ambassador John of Gorze of Otto the Great at the Medina Azahara, by Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer, 1885
Who are the enemies of religious freedom and who are its friends? Suppose a young man, thinking he might be gay, asks an imam, priest, or rabbi for advice and the religious leader counsels celibacy. In the UK, giving such advice could one day mean the religious leader has committed a crime, a view that enjoys very widespread support on the political left, revealing that, despite their ostensible sympathy for Muslims, many on the political left appear to have little respect for actual Islamic beliefs when they conflict with liberal commitments.1
As an often vulnerable religious minority in Western societies, Muslims often interpret politics through a hermeneutic of fear, making little distinction between theory and practice and assuming that the hostility of many right-wing actors reflects an underlying intellectual problem with conservative thought. In highly threatening contexts, this politics of distrust may sometimes be necessary, but it is a deeply flawed approach to political theorizing. Western Muslims must adopt a richer hermeneutic and mine the resources of their surrounding political traditions to ground a principled and stable commitment to religious freedom rather than judge their political future on the basis of the pundits’ overt (even if ignorantly invoked) prejudices.
Thinking more carefully about politics will deliver a surprising conclusion: the conservative intellectual tradition contains the West’s richest resources for the task of protecting religious liberty for believers from all faith traditions. In a religiously diverse society such as the modern West, it is not enough for a viable rationale for religious freedom to be rationally compelling: it must also appeal to citizens of all faiths and no faith, and it must be stable. In other words, it must not presuppose the truth of any one religion or the falsity of atheism. And its implementation must not produce consequences that eventually undermine religious freedom, a notable characteristic of the most prominent liberal rationales.
This essay concerns Western political philosophy. This is not because I assume that no resources exist in other traditions, including the Islamic tradition, that can contribute to our understanding. Nor is it because I assume any specific position on whether Muslims should do more than tolerate a politics that does not presuppose any religious truth. Finding a stable, respectful, and tolerable modus vivendi in the West is an important enough challenge. Rather, to be of practical relevance to Western societies, our political philosophy will have to mine the intellectual resources already present within them. We cannot ignore political practice, particularly the obvious fact that the political right often unjustly projects hostility toward Muslims. Indeed, the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton and the American legal scholar Robert P. George, whose ideas animate my reflections on conservatism and religious freedom, have variously taken political positions that Muslims might find objectionable (even as they have also spoken out against anti-Muslim attitudes), and explaining or excusing these positions would lie outside this essay’s objective. The relationship between theory and practice is always complex, so here I will address just one element of theory within broad and complex intellectual traditions.
Liberalism has made major contributions to understanding the implications of moral and religious pluralism. I do not assume that all liberals think the same or that they agree with my sketch of liberal philosophical anthropology. Many liberals may explicitly reject it. Critiquing liberalism is full of pitfalls, precisely because its hegemonic character, its dominance of the “background culture” of late modern Western society, means it exists as a social practice that often precedes theory. I hope liberals can come to recognize that the liberal “way of life” has escaped its theoretical foundations, a growing reality that I’ll turn to next.
In Western political philosophy the liberal tradition and the conservative tradition each rest on a distinctive vision of man as a moral being. For liberals, humans are autonomous choosers and basic human desires are treated as largely fixed and given; humans express their nature by creatively fulfilling those desires. In an influential formulation, we are abstract atoms beset by a “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”2 Beyond desire, it is hard to affirm any objective standard of value. While not all liberals explicitly affirm this anthropology, it implicitly dominates the culture of the societies most shaped by liberalism. This assumption tends to imply a moral voluntarism, the belief that to “do as thou wilt” defines what’s good, and your obligations to others are either freely chosen or necessary to protect their ability to do the same. By contrast, conservatism adopts a richer philosophical anthropology in which we are necessarily dependent, situated, and confronted with unchosen obligations to our fellows. The character of these obligations varies between cultural contexts, but the fact of facing unchosen commitments is universal. Rather than the consenting adult, the normative model for public life is the loving but hierarchical relationship that arises innately between parents and children.3
Philosophical liberalism is hegemonic, especially in elite circles—so hegemonic that it can sometimes become invisible, as water is to fish. Many on the political right, who call themselves conservatives, are really philosophical liberals. Scruton and George are not, but they are nonetheless liberals in another, institutional sense. Almost all Western political movements accept liberal institutional commitments including the rule of law, democratic procedures, and a basic set of individual rights. Philosophical conservatives accept these institutions, but for reasons ultimately rooted in their nonliberal, traditionalist philosophical anthropology.
Thus, institutional liberalism is not to be confused with the individualist stance popularly known as “classical liberalism.” If classical liberalism endorses an absolute negative liberty to do whatever does not directly harm others, then Scruton and George reject this, for such freedom arises from liberalism’s atomist and voluntarist anthropology. The basic rights that conservatives defend do not necessarily include a right to engage in immoral conduct, even if no one else is directly harmed. Philosophical conservatism rejects the harm principle, but this does not mean it rejects freedom. Rather, civil liberties, including religious liberty, are construed as compatible with a degree of moral paternalism.
Philosophical liberalism has critics to its left as well as its right, but almost all of these left-wing critics (socialists, critical theorists, neo-Marxists) accuse liberalism of being insufficiently true to itself—of not delivering enough liberty, enough equality, enough emancipation. Conservatives are external critics of liberalism: they think that it is far too true to itself. By contrast, left-wing critics are liberalism’s internal critics. Their complaints about liberalism’s failure to emancipate marginalized groups still appeal to broader liberal ideals.
Traditionalists from each of the Abrahamic faiths have noticed the seeming paradox of a growing coercion directed against their views of personal morality and virtue, a coercion justified with the thoroughly liberal rhetoric of rights, freedom, equality, and emancipation. The assumptions of a philosophy that prides itself on pluralism and tolerance are deployed in a manner too often intolerant of dissent from reigning orthodoxies on gender, sexuality, and identity.4 Yet while conservative Christians, long aligned with the political right, have a readily available narrative that pins liberalism as the culprit, the Muslim response is complicated by the very real racism and bigotry that sadly often finds expression on the right. Many Muslims thus assume that the philosophical assumptions of liberalism are more congenial to Muslim dignity, or at least to the tolerance of Muslims, than those of conservatism; they also assume the energy behind anti-Muslim coercion comes only from right-wing narratives of race and nation. These assumptions are mistaken. To see why, we must consider liberalism’s fraught relationship with tolerance.
Abdal Hakim Murad, in his book on the travails of Europe’s Muslim Other, asks, “Can liberalism tolerate anything other than itself?”5 Liberals are apt to be perplexed by the question, for they typically imbibe their ideology’s dramatic origin story, in which tolerance takes center stage. It is held that a dawning recognition that a confessional state could not work arose from the ashes of Europe’s seventeenth-century wars of religion. Recognizing the intractability of religious and philosophical disagreement, the state came to redefine its role as one of protecting pluralism, diversity, and individual rights claims rather than upholding the fullness of truth. And over time, goes the story, this recognition of the “fact of reasonable pluralism” was extended into new domains of human life, granting rights to women and sexual minorities without compromising those of traditional religious believers.6
The truth of this story is in some doubt. What is not in doubt, however, is that this mythos of liberalism obscures from liberal theorists the ways their ideology, as actually practiced, has become increasingly intolerant of any way of life that recognizes sources of value other than autonomous and arbitrary choice. Sometimes, such intolerance is first developed and spread throughout society by the left and then belatedly adopted by the right.
For example, what Murad calls progressive “body beliefs”7 are central to contemporary anti-Muslim bigotry, or “Lahabism.” The right-wing populist movements sweeping the Western world are indifferent to what Muslims believe about God’s essence or attributes, but they care a great deal about Muslim views on His will regarding marriage, sexuality, and gender. Right-wing actors who once opposed rights for sexual minorities come to embrace an ideology scholars call “homonationalism.” This Lahabite movement, then, is a “Godless crusade,” not a revival of political Christianity or social conservatism.8
If coercive liberalism and anti-Muslim sentiment are driven in large part by liberal ideals of autonomy and voluntarism, we should, in fairness, note that liberal thinkers may not approve of these practical outcomes either, often failing to recognize that their own commitments lead to them. Andrew Koppelman, for instance, asserts that those who seek to enforce progressive body beliefs simply “aren’t liberals” but rather intolerant leftist progressives who betray liberalism’s deepest commitments.9
To grasp what Koppelman is getting at, we need to understand the rather distant and abstract character of modern liberal theory. In the 1980s and ’90s, John Rawls declared that a social consensus around liberal individualism or voluntarism could only be achieved through thoroughly illiberal coercion. His “political liberalism” would seek instead a neutral set of values that persons of all faiths or none could equally accept. Traditional lifestyles and values were to be fully respected as long as nobody was forced to adhere to them.10 Even liberals who rejected the “political” turn of Rawls’s theory came to see full-throated defenses of liberal anthropology as problematic, and they adopted thinner views of the good, in which (in one prominent version) any worldview, including highly traditional ones that limit autonomy, could be affirmed as good for its adherents as long as it was adopted on the basis of honest reflection on life’s moral challenges.11
Tolerant liberals like Koppelman live in the shadow of Rawls. They assume that theory determines practice. If we can develop an internally coherent and compelling liberal theory that is fair to both religious traditionalists and sexual minorities, runs the implicit thought, both religious and personal liberty will have found a secure rationale.
The problem is that—as conservatives have long understood—outside the liberal academy, theory rarely works this neatly. Some theories are self-undermining: when applied, they produce social conditions that make it highly unlikely that their prescriptions succeed. I believe tolerant liberalism is such a theory, and some important liberal theorists are beginning to realize this too.
One of these is Alexandre Lefebvre, whose Liberalism as a Way of Life describes Rawls’s liberalism as a “ghost story” because the social conditions that motivated it have vanished—a (predictable) consequence of applying the theory itself.12 Forty years ago, religious affiliation characterized a large majority of citizens of the major Western democracies, and the rest often consciously embraced a particular humanistic or antireligious philosophy. Religious and philosophical pluralism was the era’s hard question, and Rawlsian neutrality became the dominant liberal answer. Today, religious affiliation is plummeting, but Dawkins-style atheism is not replacing faith. The West is slouching toward something far stranger: when asked about the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, says Lefebvre, “We liberals merely shrug, indifferent and unconcerned.”13
How did neutrality produce the slide toward indifference? Lefebvre shows us that the neutral institutions and practices that Rawlsian liberals support, while not explicitly based on a cosmic shrug, systematically favor a permissive, secular worldview that struggles to see any rival as reasonable. If a society’s primary social imaginary centers on a vision of itself as a “fair system of cooperation” between individuals but remains silent about what makes those individuals’ lives good, it teaches that the good must be expressive individualism and self-authoring autonomy—it teaches not through reasoned argument but through the power of suggestion.14 When this expressivist social imaginary spreads beyond political institutions and increasingly “marshal[s] all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry,”15 the result is its entirely predictable rise across the generations.
Thus, tolerant liberalism tends to produce a society built on the assumption that the good life equals the unhampered expression of one’s authentic desires and intimations, which, in turn, grounds the coercive turn in liberal practice.
The great conservative cultural critic Allan Bloom showed us how. In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom described the paradoxically closed minds of his progressive Gen-X students, the first generation raised entirely on a liberalism-saturated pop culture. Consumed by a lazy relativism in which all conceptions of the human good reduce to arbitrarily posited “values,” Bloom’s students—souls without longing, he called them—almost always saw any claim that one conception of the good might be objectively true as a suspect act of potential oppression.16 There cannot be any determination as to whose values are best, so how can anyone presume to instruct a fellow citizen in virtue?17 Relativism about the good, the corollary of expressive individualism, produces an aggressive absolutism about the right, which, expanding and unfolding its inner logic, delivers our contemporary coercive liberalism. This relativism obviates the Rawlsian idea that we should all acknowledge one another’s views of the good as reasonable, for it implies that any nonrelativist conception is unacceptably authoritarian and thus inherently unreasonable. You can believe that gender is binary as an expression of your personal values—but woe betide you if you try to teach those arbitrary values as truth, even to your own children.
Thus, as expressivism strengthens its hold over society’s cultural mainstream, it should not surprise us that support for coercive liberalism is rising dramatically in the younger generation. Although some young men are vocally aligned with the right, overall, the young are between three and ten times more likely than the old to support hounding people from their jobs for saying there are two genders, or other expressivist heresies.18 Tolerant liberalism is undermining its own foundations by producing not a society of reasonable pluralism but one dominated by a profoundly unreasonable monoculture of relativism. Its rationale for religious freedom, whatever its logical soundness, is sociologically self-defeating. The theories of Koppelman and other liberal scholars, however well-intentioned—however well they might work if men could be made angels—are part of the problem.
An obvious problem with arguments from conservatism is the impression, pervasive in some quarters, that conservatism has no distinctive principles of its own, that it is a mere personal disposition to prefer “the familiar to the unknown… the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded… present laughter to utopian bliss.”19 In this view, every political position would be consistent with conservatism, but none would be demanded by it, making it impossible to say that conservatism furnishes any particular rationale for anything of practical interest.
Fortunately, conservatism is much more than this. The preference for familiarity does not exhaust it or even capture its core, for a politics of familiarity might as well characterize a Stalinist in 1950s Russia or a Reaganite in 1980s America. In fact, studies in social psychology have shown that conservatives consistently embrace three substantive values to which liberals ascribe little weight: deference to traditional authorities like parents and faith leaders, a sense that the human self’s sanctity can be violated by even self-regarding action, and loyalty to a particular bounded community like a nation or locality.20
The truth in the idea of conservatism as a disposition is that it does indeed often begin with a collection of prerational commitments and affections rather than a set of abstract principles, but any developed conservative philosophy contains more than just a set of affections. It is helpful to distinguish two major strands of conservative thought: a rationalist strand, in which normative principles supposed to be discernible through reason alone are foundational, and a traditionalist one, which starts with a lived tradition of social practice and discourse.
This distinction is primarily one of how to know the good, but it does not necessarily lead to a divergence in substantive political values. Traditionalists can derive substantive values like loyalty or sanctity from the social practices to which they are prerationally committed, and it is similarly possible for rationalists to provide a reasoned justification for tradition: the truth of a tradition’s core commitments could be knowable through reasoned arguments, but it might be unnecessary for most ordinary adherents to master these, while discerning these commitments’ detailed implications might require at least a presumption in favor of past authorities. Edmund Burke, a canonical founding father of conservatism, embodied a synthesis of both strands: he held that there exists a transhistorical, rationally grounded natural law, but that reason cannot easily discern how best to instantiate this law without relying on accumulated historical wisdom. Thus, argued Burke, most people, most of the time, are justified in relying on custom and tradition.21 Muslims might note an affinity with the presumption in favor of relying on the legal rulings of one’s school, or madhab, which does not preclude the root justifications of any specific opinion from being knowable through reason.
How then might a conservative rationale for religious liberty function? I cannot argue here that the commitments of either rationalist or traditionalist conservatism entail any particular rationale. Much will depend on precisely what the rationally knowable values or the relevant traditions actually are, and here conservatives often differ among themselves. Conservatives have, at different times and places, appealed to “God, history, biology, and science, as understood by different generations” as political foundations.22
I will, however, argue that both strands of conservatism can provide a rationale for religious freedom, and hence a secure Muslim presence in the Western political imagination, that could be more stable and less self-defeating than the liberal one is proving to be. Indeed, the two most outstanding recent theorists of rationalist and traditionalist conservatism—respectively, Robert P. George and Roger Scruton—have in fact articulated the bases of rationales that have these virtues.
Roger Scruton (d. 2020) was widely recognized as one of the English-speaking world’s most important conservative intellectuals. The author of four separate books defining or explaining conservatism,23 he combines Burkean themes with insights from Hegel’s philosophy. Various British Conservative Party politicians, somewhat dubiously, claim him as an intellectual influence, but his legacy is as an intellectual “gadfly,” an uncomfortable challenge to the assumptions of the regime, not a mentor to rulers.24
Scruton bases his traditionalism, which purports to build on the instinctive intimations of ordinary people not corrupted by liberal dogma, on a Hegelian analysis of the mind, in which persons attain self-consciousness through mutual recognition. Scruton thinks human cognition is characterized by a kind of “dualism” in which the objective knowledge of the external world as yielded by science is distinct from the understanding and insight that we can obtain through art and emotion. The idea of God, which transforms our perception of the world from inert matter to an enchanted space, belongs, for Scruton, to the second category. This, however, does not make religion subjective or arbitrary; rather it is an expression of deep truths about the nature of consciousness itself, truths that are also normative inasmuch as a life lived in ignorance of them is lacking an essential dimension of fullness.25
Scruton’s conservative thought consists of the outworking of this normative account of human consciousness in various domains of life such as art, family relationships, and political belonging. His corpus of works exploring religion, nationhood, aesthetics, and culture comprises an account of some of the diverse manifestations of the human spirit’s natural inclinations, resting on a background anthropology of situatedness, sociality, and limitation that is inimical to the liberal vision of bare, desire-ridden atoms.
Hegel sees consciousness as undergoing a historical progression culminating in the “ethical life” of mutual recognition. Scruton transforms this social-historical process into a dynamic of individual soul making, whereby we come to freely recognize unchosen obligations and embrace a life of duty, gravity, and piety. The culmination is a vision of man both free and bounded, dependent on his communal formation but autonomously recognizing and embracing this connectedness and the moral standards embedded in it. The overall direction of Scruton’s project points to a philosophy of mankind’s moral constitution, or fiţrah. Pursuing this anthropological project, Scruton argues that art can potentially express intelligible truths,26 affirms the indispensability of cultural standards that transcend the fulfillment of arbitrary preferences,27 and (in a notable work that earned the grudging admiration of many liberals for its rigor) demonstrates the incoherence of a normative account of sexual conduct that ignores the phenomenology of purity and corruption.28
Following that conservative love of the familiar and the actual, much of Scruton’s work focuses on the Western and British traditions to which he was heir. Yet Scruton’s recognition of the centrality of tradition to human values did not lead him to a narrow chauvinism—which, as we see in the populist right, so often arises from the deracination it professes to abhor—but impelled him toward an ecumenical attitude to cultural and civilizational achievement. If human reasoning necessarily begins with a particularistic standpoint, built up from the interpersonal ties of our subjective constitution as conscious agents, then we must accept that any tradition is a valid starting point for intellectual inquiry. Thus, Scruton embraces the conclusion that the Islamicate civilization is among those that, building on tradition’s solid ground, go on to soar the intellectual heights.
His traditionalism, then, is not identitarian but ecumenical. His philosophy is particularist but not relativist: while we start as subjects constituted by a particular tradition, we can nevertheless discern at least some transcendent and universal truths through systematic reflection on the deep structure of our consciousness. Indeed, while outwardly an Anglican churchgoer, Scruton came to endorse the Islamic notion of divine tawhid, or perfect oneness, as more congruent with this structure than the Trinitarian conception.29 Here, his observation that the Church of England “purloined the sacraments”30 for a purpose more obscure—but more grounded—than manifesting a high Christology seems almost to converge with Murad’s claim that Christianity’s “Hellenic mysteries” were “ill at ease” in England.31
Roger Scruton
Scruton was well-known as a critic of liberal multiculturalism. Later, however, he came to believe that minority cultures need not lose their distinctiveness as long as their members accept the political “first-person plural” of the nation.32 Although he wrote penetratingly on the political project of accommodating religious and philosophical pluralism,33 he did not systematically explore how his traditionalism could ground a rationale for religious freedom. Nevertheless, I think that ecumenical traditionalism can provide a powerful rationale, one that has two distinct advantages over the liberal efforts.
First, ecumenical traditionalism provides a powerful argument for respecting religious traditionalists that can speak even to dogmatic relativists like Bloom’s students and their heirs. Their relativism, as Bloom showed us, is experienced as something more like an existential commitment than a reasoned position, making it hard for expressivists to see how any reasonable, good-willed person could disagree. Thus, liberal arguments that abstain from commenting on how we ought to form our beliefs about the good, and that therefore do not directly expose the nonrational bases of these existential commitments, are not illuminating enough to penetrate the relativist fog. Yes, the expressivist will say, a reasonable individual could believe in God as a personal commitment, but they couldn’t actually view the gender binary as objectively true!
By contrast, the traditionalist argument appeals to a deep and compelling normative account of how basic convictions should be formed, which can help render the relativists’ own psychological formation more transparent to themselves. By thinking of themselves as socially formed beings, expressive individualists can come to see that they, too, rely on implicit metaphysical and meta-ethical assumptions and that they acquired these through encounters and dialogue with others. Thus, by analogy, they can come to see how immersion in a different tradition might lead a person to reasonably affirm different values not just as personal preferences but as truth-seeking (but fallible) convictions about reality.
The second great advantage of ecumenical traditionalism is its abandonment of liberalism’s commitment to the “naked public square” that pretends to treat all faiths and philosophies equally but increasingly makes room only for expressivist pseudo-religion. Hence, liberal neutrality seeks to dismantle traditional paternalistic “morals laws” as it removes religion from the public square and allows ideologies committed to coercive liberalism to fill the spiritual vacuum these policies created.
Scruton’s political philosophy is comfortable with noncoercive forms of religious establishment that keep the public square fully clothed in meaning. Indeed, it praises the historic role of Christianity in general, and Anglicanism in particular, in keeping up the “vast moth-eaten musical brocade” that leant political life dignity and beauty.34 It also allows that some paternalistic laws, by limiting individual choice, can enhance human flourishing and even freedom. Scruton’s Hegelianism conceives freedom not as an attribute of atomized individuals but as something emerging from the communal bond that constitutes us as conscious subjects.35 Liberty is not a claim of the atomized subject over and against the social order but a collective achievement, and paternalistic laws may strengthen the social bond that gives rise to it.
Thus, religious conservatives who think the state should in some way recognize a traditional understanding of marriage, gender, or sexuality need not feel that a commitment to religious freedom amounts to an endorsement of the radical moral permissiveness associated with contemporary liberalism just because both of these are related to liberty. We can meaningfully argue from the value of liberty, understood as an emergent property of ordered sociality, without implying a commitment to liberal anthropology. Neutrality is rejected, but tolerance is preserved, and the entropic dynamic of liberalism’s descent into coercion is avoided. An account of religious freedom need not collapse into an account of freedom simpliciter.
Robert P. George, recognized as the intellectual leader of American religious and social conservatism, is an adherent of the natural law tradition of ethical thought, which, in the “new” form associated with the legal philosopher John Finnis, holds that there exist certain objective, intelligible goods—among them are life, knowledge, religion, marriage, and recreation36—as well as objective “principles of practical reason” that determine how to pursue these goods, which are recognizable by all humans independently of theology or revelation.37 These goods are incommensurable rather than being ingredients in a formula that aims to maximize overall happiness or pleasure, each of them must be respected in every action, and we must never act against any of the basic goods.
The natural law tradition is closely linked to Catholic social and political thought, but—in the view of George and Finnis—separable from it. The precepts of natural law should be fully accessible to persons of all faiths or none, thus grounding a kind of “public reason” appropriate for governing deeply plural societies.38 Even where Catholics predominate, Church tradition intentionally accords a wide and deep role for secular reasoning about the common good, for while revelation confirms and extends the natural law, the law’s detailed determinatio is not a domain where theologians have exclusive competence.39
Moreover, George and Finnis revise the classical, teleological natural law tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas in a pluralistic direction. The “newness” of the “new natural law” consists in its independence of teleological metaphysics. Even persons who adopt the modern distinction between facts and values should, on this account, be able to accept the natural law’s conclusions on controversial matters like sexual morality, for these are grounded not in a metaphysical biology but our shared perception of intelligible goods and reasonable means of respecting them.40
George, while identifying himself with the broadly Thomist “central tradition” of premodern Western thought, argues that this tradition has been far too sanguine about the prospects for religious consensus and state-imposed morality. Aquinas ascribed too little importance to the genuine value of freely practicing even false religions and to how natural goods can be combined differently in the diversity of human experience. George praises the subsidiary role of families and civil society in promoting virtue, which can prevent mere outward conformity driven by fear of an overmighty coercive government.41
Nevertheless, he holds that the state can, when necessary, support the role of other institutions in upholding a positive “moral ecology.” For George, the liberal insistence on a right to so-called moral privacy—as opposed to the prudential judgment that “private” spaces like the home should be presumptively immune to state surveillance—is indefensible when we reject liberalism’s moral voluntarism. The “right to do wrong” is a shadow of prudence and restraint, not a sovereign individual’s claim to immunity against legal paternalism.42 George, therefore, converges with Scruton in supporting the state’s duly qualified right to encourage virtue and penalize vice, so long as it respects the religious liberty of atheists and does not forbid actions that are, in some citizens’ opinions, religious obligations (ritual peyote is in; recreational marijuana is out).43
Robert George
If George’s theory can provide the stable rationale for religious freedom that liberalism cannot, then even if some of our religious traditions—perhaps including many interpretations of Islam and of Protestant Christianity—harbor reservations about discerning natural law by unaided reason, we can still see the practical value of arguing from basic goods that seem to be shared by most religious and philosophical traditions. An incompletely theorized agreement is no crime. Moreover, as we will see below, it may be possible to endorse George’s account of religious freedom without embracing the rest of his natural law theory.
George’s rationale for religious freedom lies in his conception of the “good of religion.” By “religion,” here George does not mean practice or belief oriented to a conception of God or gods, but something more universal: religion is the action of “enquiring as best one can” as to “whether there is some ultimate, more-than-human source of meaning” and orienting one’s life around one’s best answer. To be a genuine exercise of religion, an act aiming at such orientation cannot be forced, so recognizing the good of religion implies a right to religious freedom, broadly construed as the freedom to reflect on, discuss, and act on one’s convictions about life’s ultimate source of meaning, or lack thereof.44
As did Scruton’s account of religious freedom, George’s rationale avoids the twin liberal pitfalls of an inability to convince expressivists and a specious aspiration to a neutral public square. The argument does not depend on accepting any particular religion as true, or even on rejecting atheism. Religious believers more sympathetic to divine voluntarism (the notion that there is no ethical value except in following God’s revealed will) need only accept that freely choosing to pursue religion is a good, even if they accept this for different ultimate reasons from those George cites. Even if we think there is no determinate moral knowledge without freely given grace received through Christ or acceptance of the precepts of the shariah, we can still follow George’s reasoning much of the way.
George offers a powerful rationalist response to the expressivist’s indifferent shrug. It shows, from premises palatable to an expressivist, that religious freedom must encompass those who reject relativism, for attaching no importance to the question of one’s eternal fate is a palpably irrational attitude. If there is a nonzero chance that eternal life exists, the question of eternal fate is of infinite importance even if one personally believes the chance is zero but holds this belief with less than absolute certainty. And if eternal fate is conceivably (even if very improbably) connected to mastering passions or restraining desires, the expressivist is rationally compelled to concede that religious traditionalism can be reasonable and that its expression and teaching are worthy of protection. Again, we see that a willingness to make normative epistemic claims penetrates the defenses of modern, agnostic souls in a way that the cabined and cribbed arguments of neutral liberalism cannot replicate. Thus, though George’s scheme will obviously not give expressivists everything they want, it respects them in a way that coercive liberalism does not respect traditional religious believers: it is ultimately grounded in reasons they can recognize.
The religious freedom George’s rationale supports is primarily negative liberty, a right against being coerced into religious (or nonreligious) performances or professions. We have seen that it is perfectly compatible with virtue-based “morals laws,” so long as they respect the religious scruples of dissenters. It is compatible also with a state promoting religious activity as a positive good, so long as it does not seek to coerce the nonreligious: George rejects the dominant postwar interpretation of America’s Establishment Clause and believes the state may legitimately “favor and foster religion generally” through noncoercive means.45 Thus, George supports prayer in public schools and even the legitimacy of state-level religious establishments. Liberalism’s push for the unsustainable naked public square, the vacuum so abhorred by human nature and so clearly now filled by ersatz religions that sacralize identity, is again averted.
Throughout this essay, we have confronted the often fraught relationship between political theory and practice. Liberal ideology, despite valorizing tolerance and diversity, produces a society often unwittingly united around a monoculture that affirms individual self-expression but weakens the grounds for real diversity. The liberal case for religious freedom flounders on the rocks of a social reality that does not conform to the theory’s predictions. Burke warned of this long ago: when we suppose theoretical coherence an adequate proxy for social viability, the prospect of the gallows lies at the end of every academic vista.46
Conservative rationales, by contrast, can penetrate the monoculture’s unreasoned and intolerant assumptions precisely because conservatism does not try to abstain from judgments about the true, the good, and the beautiful. Liberalism has made great contributions to our understanding of justice in religiously and philosophically plural societies, but conservative philosophy shows that practicing tolerance can accommodate the embodiment of truth in political life. Clearly, much work, both theoretical and practical, needs to be done to show how the conservative rationales for religious liberty would be sociologically stable over time, but it is significant that they at least avoid the source of instability presently driving descent into coercive liberalism.
Philosophical conservatism is of course an ideology of the right, but much of the right today is conservative in name only, having traded an intellectual vision for identitarian ignorance. This intellectual vision, properly understood, rejects the liberal neutrality, the specious abstinence from judgment, that has produced so much of our present crisis. Conservatives recognize a truth that liberals do not: the theory of neutrality cannot work in practice, because the human urge to erect a “sacred canopy”47 over collective life is too strong.
It is not, I think, a coincidence that the two thinkers examined here, who have successfully systematized conservative philosophy more than almost anyone else, have also been among the conservatives most open to the contributions of Islam to our shared civilizational heritage.48 George has long called on the right to reject its Lahabite prejudices. In his view, Muslims are “natural allies”49 in what Murad called an alliance sacrée of Abrahamic believers.50 Scruton, meanwhile, looked favorably upon tawhid and the Islamic tradition—and so perhaps intellectual conservatism can help recover a civilizational vision that transforms the Judeo-Christian into the Abrahamic. Muslims’ awareness of that vision’s richness might at least help them see the perils involved in allying with a liberal left committed to the logic of a false and dangerous anthropology.