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In Search of Common Ground: An Upcoming Online Symposium

I look forward to participating, along with many friends and colleagues, in what promises to be a fascinating symposium on religion, secularism, and liberalism organized by Steven Heyman and Kathleen Brady and hosted by the Chicago-Kent Law Review: “In Search of Common Ground: Religion and Secularism in a Liberal Democratic Society.” The online symposium, scheduled for February 21, will be open to the public; the link is below. It’s a fabulous lineup of scholars and I’m very grateful to be among them:

Over the past several decades, America’s religious diversity has continued to grow rapidly, as have the percentages of Americans who either are not religious or are not affiliated with a specific religious group or denomination. At the same time, America’s deepening cultural and political divisions have often followed these expanding religious fault lines. These developments have raised new challenges for defining the relationship between law, religion, and secularism under the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment and beyond. At the Chicago-Kent Law Review’s Symposium, leading law-and-religion scholars who represent a broad spectrum of views will explore a range of doctrinal issues – such as free exercise exemptions, government expression and funding, and the meaning of religion under the First Amendment – and will discuss how people who hold very different worldviews can live together in contemporary society.

For more information, check the link above. Thanks!

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Christianity and American Democracy

Historically, the American approach to church-state relations has had two primary, and complimentary, influences: the Evangelical Christian tradition and the Enlightenment Liberal tradition, both of which support official state neutrality and freedom of conscience. A new book from Jonathan Rauch (Brookings) argues that Christian influence in the US is fading and that the historical bargain between Christianity and liberalism is falling apart. Although he’s an atheist, Rauch regrets this development, which he sees as a threat to America’s future. The book is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy and the publisher is Yale University Press. Here’s the description from Yale’s website:

What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In this provocative book, the award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch—a lifelong atheist—reckons candidly with both the shortcomings of secularism and the corrosion of Christianity.
 
Thin Christianity, as Rauch calls the mainline church, has been unable to inspire and retain believers. Worse, a Church of Fear has distorted white evangelicalism in ways that violate the tenets of both Jesus and James Madison. What to do? For answers, Rauch looks to a new generation of religious thinkers, as well as to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has placed the Constitution at the heart of its spiritual teachings.
 
In this timely critique Rauch addresses secular Americans who think Christianity can be abandoned, and Christian Americans who blame secular culture for their grievances. The two must work together, he argues, to confront our present crisis. He calls on Christians to recommit to the teachings of their faith that align with Madison, not MAGA, and to understand that liberal democracy, far from being oppressive, is uniquely protective of religious freedom. At the same time, he calls on secular liberals to understand that healthy religious institutions are crucial to the survival of the liberal state.

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Communalism in the Indian Constitution

Liberalism privileges the individual and teaches that the state is legitimate when it honors individual rights–including the right to religious freedom. A much older understanding conceives the polity in terms of communities, including religious communities, and teaches that the state has a duty to coordinate relations among them justly. An interesting-looking new book from Cambridge, India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion, and the Making of a People, argues that both understandings prevail in contemporary India: a formal liberalism and a practical communalism. The author is constitutional scholar Mathew John (Jindal Global Law School, India). Here is the description from Cambridge’s website:

This book speaks to debates on law, constitutionalism, and the contested terrain of political identity in modern India. Set against the overwhelmingly liberal design of the Indian Constitution, the book demonstrates a tendency in the Constitution and its practice to identify the Indian people in parochial and communal terms. This tendency is identified as India’s Communal Constitution and its imprint on contemporary constitutional practice is illustrated by drawing on the constitutional practice as it addresses religious freedom, personal law, minority rights and the identification of caste groups. Thus, casting the Constitution and its practice as a field of contest, the aspiration to define the Indian people as a community of individual citizens is brought face to face with its antagonists. The most significant of these antagonists is the tendency to cast the Indian people as a collection of communities which this book examines and details as India’s Communal Constitution.

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Davidyan on Liberalism and Religion

This past July, the Center co-hosted a conference with LUMSA University in Rome, “Liberalism’s Limits: Religious Exemptions and Hate Speech.” The conference, which addressed the challenges that religious exemptions and hate-speech regulations pose for liberalism, was divided into three workshops, for which participants submitted short reflection papers. Professor Gayane Davidyan (Lomonosov) submitted the following paper for Workshop 2, on religious exemptions, which we are delighted to publish here:

Slightly expanding the problem of our discussion, I will go beyond the borders of the United States and Western Europe, and pose a general question: arising on a certain soil under favorable historical conditions, is liberalism a national phenomenon, inherent only in a particular type of society or state? People with liberal views and values ​​live at all times and across the globe. Even in dark times, in conditions of slavery and serfdom, thinkers wrote about the values ​​of freedom and law; historical figures like Spartak, Emelyan Pugachev fought for this freedom.

As you know, the foundations of modern European liberalism begin to take shape in the 16th-17th centuries. John Locke, in “Two Treatises on Government,” formulates the most important principles that formed the basis of the future political and social liberalism: economic freedom as the possession and use of property, and intellectual freedom, including freedom of conscience. The second principle, in his opinion, is the right to life, personal freedom, and private property. People fought for a long time to obtain and assert these rights and values and are still fighting every day. The most advanced ideas of liberalism had a great influence on Russian reality at the end of the 18th century. Empress Catherine the Great, studying the ideas of Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and Voltaire, wrote an order to the deputies of a special legislative commission in order to change the concept of royal power in Russia. Liberal ideas developed further and led to fairly liberal reforms in the second half of the 19th century. However, the reception of Western European liberal ideas in Russia did not take place. And against the background of a strong absolute monarch, all these reforms seem to be “quasi-reforms.” Does this mean that liberalism as a system of organizing social and state life can form the basis only for some states that have a special specific path of development, a special culture, and other features? I would not agree with this, since the desire for freedom, dignity, and the preservation of life are the basic needs of a person with any worldview, and one can hardly speak here about the advantage of one civilization over another.

But liberalism is not only ideas; it is also necessary that a sufficient social environment exist for their perception. In Russia, it was clearly insufficient. And here, the problem was rooted. The limited social environment made it impossible to realize the liberal concept. This was the reason why ideas remained ideas.

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A Writeup on This Month’s Conference in Rome

Here’s a writeup (with photos!) on our conference this month in Rome, co-hosted with LUMSA University, on liberalism, religious exemptions, and hate speech regulations. We’ll post papers from the conference in due course. Meanwhile, thanks to the participants: keynoters Cesare Mirabile and Chantal Delsol, and Professors Stephanie Barclay (Notre Dame); Paolo Cavana (LUMSA); Gayane Davidyan (Lomonosov); Richard Ekins (Oxford); Monica Lugato (LUMSA); Adelaide Madera (Messina); Javier Martínez-Torrón (Complutense); Marco Olivetti (LUMSA); Andrea Pin (Padua); Jeffrey Pojanowski (Notre Dame); Angelo Rinella (LUMSA); Steven Smith (San Diego); and Kevin Walsh (Catholic University of America).

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Next Month in Rome: “Liberalism’s Limits”

Next month in Rome, we’ll celebrate 10 years of cooperation with our colleagues at Universita LUMSA with the latest in our conference series on comparative law and religion: “Liberalism’s Limits: Religious Exemption and Hate Speech.” (Hard to believe we’ve been doing this for 10 years)! The conference description is below and details are here: If you’re in Rome, please stop by and say hello!

Liberal democracies historically have prized autonomy and freedom as fundamental political commitments. In doing so, they also have emphasized the individual’s freedom of religion and freedom of speech as sitting at the core of their political systems. Yet in religious exemption — the right of individuals to receive an accommodation from complying with generally applicable law on the basis of religious scruple — and in what some in these polities call “hate speech” – speech conveying deeply insulting, vilifying, discriminatory views against a target group – liberal regimes face serious challenges to their own core principles. This conference will examine the problems posed by these issues for the continuing viability of liberalism in Western democracies.

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Of Montaigne and Liberal Tolerance

Following on Marc’s recent posts on skepticism and knowledge, here is an interesting-looking new book from Notre Dame Press: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, by philosopher Ann Hartle (Emory). As Donald Frame once observed, Montaigne expressed skepticism about customs and culture (“Que sais-je?”), but never about the ultimate authority of the Church and its teachings about eternal life. In fact, accepting certain background assumptions about eternal truths may have allowed Montaigne space to tolerate diverse opinions about wordly things. In her new book, Hartle suggests that what she calls Montaigne’s project of “civility” depends on taking “sacred tradition” for granted. Perhaps, as a practical matter, liberal tolerance requires that a society accept certain assumptions without debate, so that doubt can be expressed on other subjects. What do I know? It’s worth thinking about.

Here is the publisher’s description:

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches. What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

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On Corporate Activism and American Polarization

In First Things today, I write about recent corporate activism and what it reveals about our deep cultural polarization. More and more, employees and customers expect that firms will take stands on contested political issues. This wasn’t supposed to happen. According to liberal theory, the market is supposed to diminish conflicts over religion and big questions. What’s going on?

All this is happening because, contrary to the doux commerce thesis, people do not easily check their values at the door when they enter the marketplace. And in a society as evenly divided and politically saturated as ours, it’s only natural that many people will want the firms for which they work or with which they do business to reflect their side in public debates. “Employees today…want to know what you stand for,” one CEO recently told the Wall Street Journal. That goes for customers, too. In fact, firms may no longer have the option of staying silent on public controversies, since customers increasingly expect corporations to have political and social commitments. “[I]n these fraught times,” a corporate lawyer recently explained at Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance, customers often construe silence on a political controversy as itself “a statement.” 

Liberalism depends for its success on habits of mind that liberalism itself cannot create. The doux commerce thesis works fine where people mostly agree on public controversies, or where people believe they can safely remain indifferent to them. In a society like ours, though, where views are polarized and politics is everywhere, it is naïve to think the market will be an exception, or that commerce will somehow cause people to forget about their deep disagreements. Until America reaches a new social equilibrium, our market is likely to be as contentious as everything else.

You can read the essay here.

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Too Much Liberalism or Not Enough?

Our friend and Tradition Project member, Patrick Deneen, argues that America’s cultural crisis, and the West’s more generally, reflects an excess of individualism that is liberalism’s inevitable consequence. A new book from Encounter, Burdens of Freedom: Cultural Difference and American Power, maintains that our problem is the opposite. America’s cultural decline reflects not an excess but a lack of individualism or, more precisely, an inability to deal with the challenges posed by cultures and peoples who do not endorse can-do individualism the way that America does. (The point about the salience of cultural differences reminds me of Huntington, though Huntington didn’t draw normative lessons, at least not in The Clash of Civilizations). Readers can make up their own minds who has the better argument, though I side with Deneen, myself. The author of the new book is Lawrence Mead (NYU). Here’s the description from the Encounter website.

Burdens of Freedom presents a new and radical interpretation of America and its challenges. The United States is an individualist society where most people seek to realize personal goals and values out in the world. This unusual, inner-driven culture was the chief reason why first Europe, then Britain, and finally America came to lead the world. But today, our deepest problems derive from groups and nations that reflect the more passive, deferential temperament of the non-West. The long-term poor and many immigrants have difficulties assimilating in America mainly because they are less inner-driven than the norm. Abroad, the United States faces challenges from Asia, which is collective-minded, and also from many poorly-governed countries in the developing world. The chief threat to American leadership is no longer foreign rivals like China but the decay of individualism within our own society.

The great divide is between the individualist West, for which life is a project, and the rest of the world, in which most people seek to survive rather than achieve. This difference, although clear in research on world cultures, has been ignored in virtually all previous scholarship on American power and public policy, both at home and abroad. Burdens of Freedom is the first work to recognize that difference. It casts new light on America’s greatest struggles. It re-evaluates the entire Western tradition, which took individualism for granted. How to respond to cultural difference is the greatest test of our times.

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Mitchell, “The Limits of Liberalism”

9780268104290Everywhere today, thinkers are evaluating the continued viability of the liberal project. Some argue that liberalism has run its course, the victim of its own success; others, that liberalism still has something great to offer, if we can salvage it; and others, that the crisis in liberalism is exaggerated and that liberalism is still the only political game in town. A new book from Notre Dame Press, The Limits of Liberalism: Tradition, Individualism, and the Crisis of Freedom, by government professor Mark T. Mitchell (Patrick Henry College), seems to fall in the first camp. Mitchell argues that liberalism’s rejection of tradition has created a false conception of the self, which has led to a false conception of liberty. He argues for a reconstruction of tradition as an antidote to liberalism’s failings. Looks very interesting, especially for those of us involved in the Tradition Project. Here’s the description from the Notre Dame website:

In The Limits of Liberalism, Mark T. Mitchell argues that a rejection of tradition is both philosophically incoherent and politically harmful. This false conception of tradition helps to facilitate both liberal cosmopolitanism and identity politics. The incoherencies are revealed through an investigation of the works of Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Polanyi.

Mitchell demonstrates that the rejection of tradition as an epistemic necessity has produced a false conception of the human person—the liberal self—which in turn has produced a false conception of freedom. This book identifies why most modern thinkers have denied the essential role of tradition and explains how tradition can be restored to its proper place.

Oakeshott, MacIntyre, and Polanyi all, in various ways, emphasize the necessity of tradition, and although these thinkers approach tradition in different ways, Mitchell finds useful elements within each to build an argument for a reconstructed view of tradition and, as a result, a reconstructed view of freedom. Mitchell argues that only by finding an alternative to the liberal self can we escape the incoherencies and pathologies inherent therein.

This book will appeal to undergraduates, graduate students, professional scholars, and educated laypersons in the history of ideas and late modern culture.