Liberal Pluralism,Postliberal Genealogies and Theological History

Abstract

The postliberal genealogies of John Milbank, Brad Gregory, and Patrick Deneen refuse to disaggregate liberalism and thus denounce it wholesale. Likewise, these narratives are not sufficiently ambivalent in describing both modern liberalism and pre-modern politics. I respond to these narratives by disaggregating liberalism into various forms. I note how a certain version of political liberalism, rooted in the freedom of conscience, has important precedents in pre-modern Christianity. In view of this, I defend the plausibility of a historical interpretation positing a more positive, yet nonetheless ambivalent relation between important trends in Christianity and versions of modern liberalism, thereby calling into question the indiscriminate denunciation of liberalism posited as the ‘moral’ of these postliberal narratives.

Introduction

In her account of liberalism's history, Helena Rosenblatt suggests disputes about the meaning of the term have been common for centuries: ¹ ‘Liberalism has never been a fixed or unified creed.’ ² In the latest phase of this ongoing debate, postliberal critics allege liberalism is—as Brad Littlejohn explains—‘as much metaphysic as it is a system of government’. ³ For many of these critics—as we will see—liberalism depends upon a substantive anthropology. Liberals, these critics allege, interpret humans as acquisitive, atomistic individuals who think polities are generated by artificial contracts. The rationale of liberal politics, on this interpretation, is safeguarding individuals’ negatively defined, pseudo-proprietary rights. Liberalism spurns a politics of virtue or the common good and undermines fundamental Christian claims about anthropology and teleology. In contrast, for many of liberalism's defenders, political liberalism is compatible with a range of anthropologies. It concerns not a comprehensive metaphysics or philosophy of life but the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy like the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the pluralistic toleration and/or recognition of different religions and philosophies of life. ⁴ The difference between these two interpretations of liberalism is significant. If the latter class of interpretations are correct, to comprehensively denigrate ‘liberalism’ is to call into question essential aspects of government by consent and to, perhaps, license authoritarianism. If the former are correct, liberalism only pretends to be a means of accommodating difference. In reality, liberalism is a covert, pseudo-religion usurping the territory occupied by religion prior to secularisation. ⁵

The multiplicity of interpretations of liberalism lends credence to the thesis of this article: the term ‘liberalism’ is not suited for its explanatory role in important postliberal genealogies. I do not provide a single, essentialised definition of liberalism as a rival to the interpretation offered in these genealogies. Further, I grant some of the phenomena these genealogies criticise can be described as ‘liberal’ in certain senses of the term. Instead, I begin identifying some common themes within the postliberal, historical narratives of Patrick Deneen, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, and Brad Gregory. They depict liberalism as a rival anthropology to Christianity and comprehensive vision of the good. I make two critical observations about these genealogies: they refuse to disaggregate liberalism and thus describe it apocalyptically and are not sufficiently ambivalent in their description of both pre-modern and modern politics. These observations—without overturning the narratives in totality—open up space for historical narratives sketching a more positive account of the relation between aspects of Christianity ⁶ and certain liberal versions of pluralism. I focus not on every aspect of liberalism, but liberal pluralism in particular, because accounting for pluralism is a central motivation for a liberal politics and one of the key points of contestation in these genealogies insofar as they favour a polity more unified around a comprehensive vision of the good. ⁷ I proceed to disaggregate liberalism, distinguishing distinct contemporary liberalisms and furthermore, identifying an account of liberal pluralism rooted in the freedom of conscience. I conclude, suggesting that a different historical narrative, more positively—but nonetheless ambivalently—relating this sort of liberalism to important trends in Christian history and theology can be offered which is as plausible as these postliberal genealogies. ⁸ This sort of liberalism is not a pseudo-religion and does not propose a comprehensive anthropology or metaphysic. My argument is not a comprehensive vindication of all versions of liberalism against the breadth of charges offered in these genealogies; indeed, I sympathise with some of their concerns and agree many of their charges apply to certain versions of liberalism. Instead, I more modestly suggest that given the multiplicity of liberalisms and the fact that very influential—both historically and in terms of contemporary political philosophy—versions of liberalism do not fit the account of liberalism denounced in their narratives, the term ‘liberalism’ is not well suited for the explanatory role it serves in these narratives. More provocatively stated, these genealogies do not succeed in calling into question liberalism as such.

Postliberal Genealogies

A set of persuasive, we might even say seductive postliberal narratives, with some important commonalities, purport to describe liberalism's historical origins. I could not adequately summarise these sweeping narratives in brief compass, but allow me to highlight a few distinctive claims, centred on liberalism's approach to pluralism.

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation suggests the wars of religion occasioned by the Reformation led society to distrust theological claims. Theological disagreements were increasingly seen as irrational and irresolvable. ⁹ This contributed to the privatising and subjectivising of religion. Around the same time, a philosophical anthropology drawn from late medieval theology interpreted human persons in increasingly atomistic terms. Society, no longer ordered around a religious vision of the common good, was justified merely insofar as it served the private interests of individuals, conceived as monadic bearers of rights. ¹⁰ These trends contributed to the rise of an amoral politics aiming merely to manage competing interests. ¹¹

Patrick Deneen tells a not wholly dissimilar story in Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen suggests both the progressive left and libertarian right wings of modern liberalism depend upon an individualist, voluntarist anthropology opposed to Aristotelian and theological accounts of the person. The libertarian right seeks to control and remake external nature, while the progressive left extends this vision aiming to control and remake human nature itself. Liberal institutions encourage the monadic, self-interested lifestyle liberal philosophy posits, as liberal states erode social norms and communal bonds, generating an impersonal, bureaucratic regime. ¹² Liberalism, for Deneen, falsely claims to be neutral with respect to religion. In reality, it generates an oppressive pseudo-civil religion privatising other religions in the interests of state hegemony. ¹³

Finally, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst suggest secular liberalism replaces a politics of virtue rooted in the common good with an individualist, nominalist politics operating by impersonal procedure. The core of liberalism is its false philosophical anthropology drawn from the via moderna rooted in the rejection of teleology and participatory metaphysics. ¹⁴ Liberal societies are not accidentally but ‘incorrigibly atomistic’. Instead of a politics seeking to generate through dialogue a shared vision of the common good, liberal politics aims merely to balance the competing rights claims of acquisitive individuals. ¹⁵

These narratives are appealing. Many people experience modern life as increasingly isolated and the decline of mediating institutions and third places—of churches, bowling clubs, trade unions, and so on—is widely discussed. ¹⁶ It is easy to feel a sense of what Charles Taylor describes as a modern ‘malaise’ ¹⁷ and to wonder if something fundamental has gone wrong in modern societies. These postliberal narratives also provide a plausible explanation of tensions between liberal values like equality and the toleration of different religious beliefs and practices. ¹⁸ They describe liberalism as a pseudo-religion, aiming not to accommodate traditional religions but to covertly replace them. Other philosophers and political historians affirm somewhat similar accounts of liberalism even if they do not share the broader normative commitments of the postliberal genealogists we surveyed. Pierre Manent, like the postliberal genealogists, presents liberalism as a rejection of a politics of the good and a teleological conception of humanity in favour of the artificial creation both of civic norms (Hobbes) and humanity's moral nature (Rousseau). ¹⁹ John Gray says liberalism's ‘avowed goal is to liberate human beings from identities they have accidentally acquired [including religion. So that] stripped of these contingencies, they can be whatever they wish.’ ²⁰ For Marcel Gauchet, religions in their most pure form aim to comprehensively organise society. He narrates a long history, beginning prior to the axial age, of religion's gradual displacement by liberal secularism. ²¹ However, whereas Deneen, Milbank, and Gregory tend to blame trends they dislike in Christianity—nominalism, voluntarism, Protestantism, and so on—for the rise of liberalism, Gauchet thinks basic monotheistic assumptions about divine transcendence unintentionally prepare the way for the replacement of religion by liberalism. ²²

Furthermore, one does not have to look far to find versions of liberalism which do serve as something akin to a replacement for religion. This is certainly the case with some previous philosophical versions of liberalism, ²³ but also for some contemporary accounts. For example, the influential theorist of liberalism Joseph Raz offers an account of liberalism involving a radical account of autonomy in which a person's well-being is determined by their freely elected goals. This vision generates a distinctive moral system ²⁴ including a strong form of value pluralism. ²⁵ In a manner recalling the worries of the surveyed postliberals, he imagines a society embracing his autonomous vision will increasingly ‘change the character of the family’, transforming it ‘into a somewhat different social form’. ²⁶ In all, Raz's liberalism is a pseudo-religion with a distinctive anthropology, ethics, and comprehensive vision of the good.

In sum, we should not too quickly dismiss these postliberal stories, yet two observations open up space for a different sort of response to liberalism.

Two Observations

These genealogies refuse to disaggregate liberalism and thus describe it apocalyptically. For Gregory, liberalism simply is a ‘socially pervasive embodiment of a morality of the good’. ²⁷ This leads to a number of strident claims: ‘The modern democratic state, then, with its politically protected guarantees of freedom of religion and irreligion … [is] the institutional incubator of … relativism—the view that all truth claims can only be a matter of individual, subjective, and irrational personal preference.’ ²⁸ The rise of toleration among Reformed theologians and Anabaptists and the way this subsequently influences the Second Vatican Counsel is ‘in direct opposition to Jesus's commands’. ²⁹

Deneen is similar, flatly denying that liberalism can be construed merely as a constitutional order. It is a comprehensive philosophical view. ³⁰ For Deneen, ‘Liberalism is a denial that there can be any objective good for humans that is not simply the aggregation of individual opinion.’ ³¹ Therefore, liberalism can only be embraced or eliminated wholesale. ³² For Deneen, since liberalism inevitably oscillates between anarchy and authoritarianism, it must be wholly eliminated. ³³

Confronted with modified liberalisms, Milbank and his co-author Adrian Pabst insist that no revised, non-comprehensive version of liberalism ‘is, or could possibly be, theoretically available’. ³⁴ Never one to be outdone when it comes to apocalyptic denunciation, for Milbank, liberal democracy is implicitly in league with totalitarianism and is a ‘mode of nihilism’. ³⁵ Or again, a dour perspective on human selfishness and vice bequeathed ‘to all liberalism a hypocritical notion of private liberty … that must always both mask and serve an utterly impersonal and universally enslaving mechanism’. ³⁶

In sum, all three authors have a reified, singular account of liberalism funding their wholesale denunciation of it. They claim political or constitutional forms of liberalism collapse into comprehensive philosophical liberalisms ³⁷ and are pseudo-religions. They also tend to define liberalism in thoroughly Hobbesian terms. ³⁸ It is grounded in an artificial social contract involving atomistic, self-interested individuals (even though the most influential contemporary philosophical proponents of liberalism sharply distance themselves from Hobbes ³⁹ ).

My second observation is that these stories are not sufficiently ambivalent in the way they represent pre-modern and modern politics. It is important here to avoid caricature. These narratives are not nostalgic if by ‘nostalgic’ we mean presenting the pre-modern world in rosy terms. There are clear denunciations of the moral failures of pre-modernity. However, an uneven, nostalgic flavour nonetheless pervades these narratives, as modern political arrangements are denounced apocalyptically while pre-modern political arrangements are described with significantly more nuance.

For example, in a chapter ironically entitled ‘Against Nostalgia’, Gregory aims to expose the failures of not only modernity but also Medieval Christendom. However, the failures of post-Medieval movements are rooted in their theoretical commitments, whereas Medieval failures only arise when its laudable ‘comprehensive sacramental worldview’ is not consistently implemented. ⁴⁰

With respect to pluralism, Gregory suggests that a reorganisation of political power according to a Christian ethic of caritas better reckons with religious difference than modern toleration. ⁴¹ Yet he is very light on specifics. This is a significant lacuna. Gregory laments the irreconcilable pluralism supposedly engendered by the Reformation. However, on at least one plausible interpretation, the reason pre-Reformation, European pluralism was, in a certain external regard, more easily contained within an ecclesial structure was in part because of the sorts of highly ⁴² coercive force Gregory disavows. Without a concrete political vision explicating how an ethic rooted in Christian caritas can contain disagreements without state sponsored, violent coercion, Gregory is in danger of wanting to have his cake and eat it too, imagining a society less reliant upon coercive force with less pluralism. It is precisely the unavoidable fact of pluralism that is the fundamental rationale for many versions of liberalism. ⁴³

Milbank's thought is complex and there are a host of ways in which he is not just modern but postmodern. Yet despite admitting the failures of the Middle Ages, he often speaks as if one faces a binary choice between pre-modern and modern political orders. ⁴⁴ His own proposal for managing difference is as hazy as Gregory's, as he affirms that justice cannot be ‘content with less than absolute social consensus and harmony’ ⁴⁵ and yet hopes to attain this consensus through ‘non-coercive persuasion’. ⁴⁶ Milbank is clear that consensus will not be attained through liberal proceduralism ⁴⁷ but how it will be attained is unclear. ⁴⁸

Deneen is in certain ways the least nostalgic. He not only recognises the inconsistency of medieval Christianity but with respect to a number of matters, ⁴⁹ thinks one should not pine for a simple return to pre-liberal politics. ⁵⁰ Yet this intensifies questions regarding his essentialising rhetoric of denunciation. ⁵¹ If there are important and fragile achievements associated with liberalism, as Deneen grants, is he right to ask for a ‘regime change’, ⁵² and a ‘liberation from liberalism itself’? ⁵³

An easy way to misread these postliberals is as theocrats seeking to straightforwardly impose their religion upon others. A comment from Eric Gregory about Milbank applies to Deneen and Brad Gregory as well: When one moves past the rhetoric to what is concretely proposed in terms of policy, what is encountered, while vague, is not always radical. ⁵⁴ Milbank and Pabst, for example, desire—amongst other things—an increase in mediating institutions, greater subsidiarity, forms of tolerance that are not merely procedural, and a political secularism that nonetheless is not hostile to religion. ⁵⁵ This again presses the question of whether these genealogists are justified in their tone of apocalyptic denunciation? Might it be that instead of a secret sympathy between liberalism and nihilism as Milbank suggests, there is—in important regards—a secret sympathy between these narratives of postliberalism and versions of modern liberalism itself? This begins to lend credence to the thesis organising this article: might ‘liberalism’ be too fissiparous to serve the central, negative explanatory role it does in these genealogies?

Applying the Two Observations

I have observed these postliberal stories are not sufficiently ambivalent regarding pre-modern and modern politics and refuse to disaggregate liberalism, thus stridently denouncing it wholesale. However, I have not, like some critics, objected in principle to this style of generalising, wide-ranging genealogy.

Isaiah Berlin makes the intuitive point that even if it we cannot finally distinguish a historical fact from our evaluation of that fact, there is still an important distinction to be maintained between a recording of facts and an interpretation. Even if the borderline is not fixed, he suggests, there is difference between saying ‘Stalin is dead’ and saying ‘Stalin exterminated a great many peasants … because in his infancy he had been swaddled by his nurse and that this made him aggressive’. ⁵⁶ If there is a place for large-scale narratives of the sort we have surveyed, it will be if they are recognised as works that lean more in the direction of ‘interpretation’ than other styles of historical writings (as exemplars of this sort of scholarship recognise ⁵⁷ ).

John Bowlin draws on a well-known categorisation from Richard Rorty to describe postliberal genealogies ⁵⁸ as exercises in Geistesgeschichte. A Geistesgeschichte is an intellectual narrative with a moral ⁵⁹ that often serves to justify the author's posture towards the present state of things. ⁶⁰ Rightly recognising the genre of these stories means they should be judged accordingly. We should not expect the exacting detail of other genres and the moral of the story can be called into question if plausible, rival interpretations are offered for the totality of the story, calling into question the moral.

In what follows, I offer a rival interpretation that challenges one of the key morals of these postliberal stories. This moral is that a host of modern ills derive from ‘liberalism’, rigidly defined as a pseudo-religion or philosophy of life with an atomistic anthropology rejecting a virtuous, Christian-inspired politics of the common good. I do so, first, by disaggregating liberalism and second, building upon this disaggregation, by suggesting that historical narratives sketching a positive relation between elements of Christianity and certain versions of liberalism are as plausible as these postliberal narratives denouncing liberalism in toto as a destructive pseudo-religion covertly seeking to replace Christianity. ⁶¹ This more modest claim should be enough to suggest that ‘liberalism’, as such, is not well suited to serve the explanatory role it does in these genealogies because there are highly influential historical accounts and contemporary defences of liberalism which do not cohere with their definition of liberalism.

Liberalisms

Liberalism should not be represented as single, essentialised phenomena but rather as a variegated one.

With respect to the history of liberalism, Helenna Rosenblatt contends in a detailed account analysing the use of the world ‘liberal’ and its cognates:

[Historically] liberalism had nothing to do with the atomistic individualism we hear of today. [Liberals] never spoke about rights without stressing duties. Most liberals believed that people had rights because they had duties, and most were deeply interested in questions of social justice. They always rejected the idea that a viable community could be constructed on the basis of self-interestedness alone. Ad infinitum they warned of the dangers of selfishness. ⁶²

Furthermore, she suggests, far from lassiez-faire economics being ‘classical’, no single economic policy characterised liberalism at any point in its history, with liberals favouring different levels of economic interventionism. ⁶³ Forms of liberalism restricting the state's role primarily to the defence of rights are, according to Rosenblatt, a recent phenomenon. Instead, most liberals view politics as oriented to the common good. Their egalitarianism and objections to aristocratic forms of government derived from a worry that in such polities, it was not truly the common good that was protected but the good of a subset of persons. Far from being amoral, for most liberals, a cultivated citizenry, habituated to act generously—i.e. ‘liberally’ in a broader sense—was an indispensable foundation for a liberal polity. ⁶⁴ Yet with that said, as mentioned at the outset, an implication of Rosenblatt's story is nonetheless that liberalism is very diverse and liberals whose views constitute exceptions to each of these aspects of liberalism can be identified. ⁶⁵

Rosenblatt's history of liberalism suggests that historically, many (perhaps most) forms of liberalism do not fit easily within the reductive liberal ‘mold’ one finds in the postliberal genealogies. When one examines contemporary accounts of liberalism in philosophy and political theology a similar conclusion arises. Some contemporary versions of liberalism are ways of life, ⁶⁶ others are political philosophies, others are constitutional orders, while others are combinations of the foregoing. With respect to liberalism as a political philosophy, some versions of liberalism are comprehensive visions of the good. ⁶⁷ Many, but not all of these comprehensive liberalisms are perfectionist theories about the fulfilment of human persons. Other versions of liberal political philosophy purport to be merely political accounts for the ordering of a pluralistic common life. ⁶⁸ Other—I suspect most—contemporary liberal philosophies sit in between these two extremes, e.g. versions of ‘moderate’, ‘minimal’, or ‘weak’ liberal perfectionism. ⁶⁹ In a prior generation, the chief rival of liberalism was communitarianism. Communitarians worried, amongst other things, about the individualism and rationalism of liberalism. Yet the distinction between liberalism and communitarianism is increasingly seen as opaque, with prominent communitarians like Charles Taylor suggesting they advocate for better versions of liberalism. ⁷⁰ Influential movements within liberalism like ‘New Liberalism’ emphasise positive as well as negative rights and duties and reject the false choice of prioritising either individual or community, liberty or equality. ⁷¹ Furthermore, attempts to distinguish early modern, comprehensive liberal philosophies associated with figures like Hobbes or Rousseau from liberalism as a contemporary practice and constitutional order are very common. ⁷² Within political theology, influential figures like Oliver O’Donovan or Paul DeHart distinguish contemporary neo-liberalisms from earlier forms of liberalism rooted in theological beliefs about the human person and common good. ⁷³ For O’Donovan, an aspect of the appeal of earlier forms of liberalism is their emphasis on ‘conscience’, which implies a transcendent end for human persons. ⁷⁴ Again, this suggests we should be sceptical about the postliberal claim that liberalism is essentially and unavoidably a pseudo-religion involving not only a political theory but a controversial metaphysical account of the person and comprehensive vision of the good. In what follows, I deploy O’Donovan's identification of the importance of conscience to discuss a related family of liberal views regarding pluralism not easily reconciled with the account of ‘liberalism’ denounced in these postliberal narratives.

In a widely cited article, Judith Shklar critiques those—like our postliberal dialogue partners—who root liberal pluralism in the anthropology of early modern figures like Hobbes. Shklar says that for many, the core of liberalism is the freedom of conscience. She notes the theological roots of this idea, suggesting its historical origins reside in the belief that each person is a bearer of something ‘sacred’. However, even if the connection between the conscience and God is severed, such a liberal view ‘is still defend[ed] on the original grounds that we owe [freedom of conscience] to each other as a matter of mutual respect’. She locates ‘Liberalism's deepest grounding’ in a horror arising in the face of the oppressive contradictions of the dictates of conscience. ⁷⁵ Even liberals who do not share Shklar's pessimistic and non-perfectionist views ⁷⁶ often identify a, or even the core of liberalism as a respect for conscience, thinking this respect generates corollary commitments regarding freedom of religion, expression and association. ⁷⁷

Let us consider another influential contemporary liberal, Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum likewise thinks liberalism should not be identified with, as the postliberal genealogies suggest, a filled-out philosophical anthropology. Instead, it is rooted in some stripped-down anthropological commitments regarding conscience and the duty to respect other persons. The reason political liberalisms seek to grant space for pluralism is because insofar as we respect other persons, we respect their basic life choices. ⁷⁸ Nussbaum admits that many contemporary accounts of liberalism fall short of this ideal—sometimes, for example, setting up standards for what counts as ‘reasonable’ religious doctrines which denigrate forms of religion or by offering comprehensive accounts of human nature and moral life that rival it. ⁷⁹ She concludes, agreeing with our postliberal genealogists, these versions of liberalism are in danger of appearing as ‘a form of religion’. ⁸⁰ Yet these are only one sub-set of liberalisms, not liberalism tout court.

She appeals to Jacques Maritian to exemplify how a religious person or any person with their own comprehensive doctrine, religious or not, should relate to liberalism. ⁸¹ The root of liberal tolerance and recognition, on this interpretation, is not theoretical agreement as to why humans are deserving of respect. It is not, in short, a philosophical anthropology per se, but nor is it wholly neutral. Liberal tolerance is rooted in the minimalist view that because humans are worthy of respect they should have a freedom of self-disposal with respect to their most fundamental commitments about what constitutes a good life. ⁸² The reason for affirming respect for conscience ⁸³ depends upon the comprehensive doctrine a person or community affirms. Christians like Maritain oftentimes root that respect in a more comprehensive account of natural law ⁸⁴ or humanity's creation in the divine image and teleological orientation towards union with God. ⁸⁵ This implies that it is misleading to think that ‘liberalism’, because it only requires some minimal beliefs about the person, involves a bare, nominalist anthropology without teleology, virtue, or consideration of a person's end. Liberalism of this sort expects Christians to affirm respect for conscience on the basis of their substantive anthropological commitments. Liberalism itself, on this interpretation, does not define what a person is, i.e. give a substantive moral and metaphysical ontology of the person, but merely identifies a minimal set of agreed-upon beliefs about a person generating a common respect for conscience. As Charles Taylor and Jocelyn Maclure argue, a liberal political secularism rooted in freedom of conscience hopes that ‘peaceful coexistence will be based not on the secular equivalent of a religious doctrine but, rather, on a range of values and principles that can be the object of an overlapping consensus’. ⁸⁶ Maritain's own account of conscience is rooted in his belief that every person's end is God. ⁸⁷ Maritain, and contemporary Catholic social teaching, suggest that precisely because every creature is made to, by an act of will, unite to God, their freedom to seek their ultimate good in God must be preserved and respected. ⁸⁸ Therefore, the reason a Christian theologian like Maritain respects conscience is not rooted, as the postliberals allege, in a vision of the human person as a monadic individual without teleology. Nor is it rooted in a purely negative freedom to will whatever one wants. Instead, it is rooted in an account of the human person insofar as the person is oriented to freely unite with God as their end. ⁸⁹ This is important, because as I have explicated, the postliberal critics suggest a ‘voluntarist’ conception of the person is inseparable from liberalism. Michael Sandel contrasts this ‘voluntarist’, ‘freedom of choice’ approach, with a ‘freedom of conscience’ view. The latter perspective, which he associates with early modern liberals like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, is not about a right to believe whatever one wants but the right to exercise religious duties according to the dictates of one's conscience. ⁹⁰ Theologians like Maritain fit with this latter tradition—even if they strongly disagree with Madison and Jefferson in other regards. It is the duty—rooted in the teleological orientation of human nature—of every person to freely will union with God that grounds their limitations upon coercion when it comes to matters of conscience.

In sum, the sort of liberalism represented by Nussbuam and the others cited admits that just as liberalism does not give a comprehensive account of the person, but nonetheless does require some minimal anthropological agreements, so too liberalism does not propound a comprehensive theory of the good, but nonetheless affirms a thin theory of the good rooted in respect for conscience. ⁹¹ It is thus right to say that this sort of liberalism is not wholly neutral about the good but wrong to think it is a comprehensive vision of the good akin to most religions. ⁹²

What of the question, raised in our summary of the postliberal genealogies, about borderline cases in which someone's conscientious religious practice seems to disrespect another person or treat them unequally? None of these issues are susceptible to immediate resolution. A liberal polity will involve an imperfect negotiation between not easily reconciled values like equality and freedom of conscience. Yet there is an important body of literature outlining a variety of responses to conflicts between different liberal values, particularly related to religious matters. A magnificent survey of and contribution to this literature is Cécile Laborde's Liberalism's Religion. ⁹³ Laborde offers an exhaustive survey of the variegated tradition of ‘liberal egalitarianism’. This tradition includes a diversity of approaches to the question of how to relate religious freedom to other liberal values. Laborde rejects, as a self-serving secular myth, the claim that tolerance arose only when early modern liberalism banished religion from the public square, suggesting, like Shklar, that tolerance has important roots in Christian theology. ⁹⁴ In a striking example of her approach to liberal pluralism, Laborde imagines two liberal states: Secularia and Divinitia. Amongst other things, Divinitia symbolically recognises one religion but does not infringe on the equal citizenship of non-adherents. Secularia does not symbolically recognise any religion. Divinitia has religiously inspired laws but aims to avoid unreasonably infringing on the personal liberty of its citizens. Secularia has no religiously inspired laws. Divinitia has restrictive laws with respect to abortion, euthanasia, and other bioethical practices. Secularia does not. In Secularia, there are no special accommodations for religious citizens but nor are they uniquely discriminated against. There are uniquely religious accommodations in Divinitia. ⁹⁵

Laborde strongly prefers Secularia, ⁹⁶ but she recognises that both Secularia and Divinitia are liberal and legitimate. Even within a liberal order, she concludes, there is widespread scope for disagreement about justice because of opposing ways of weighing distinct liberal principles, disagreements about non-comprehensive values regarding the good, and due to the many instances in which we cannot help but draw controversial ideas about the good, rooted in our religious and philosophical doctrines, into public deliberation. ⁹⁷

This raises a pressing question for our postliberal genealogists. How does the concrete vision of politics they offer differ from Divinitia? Would the laws of their proposed society not only be religiously inspired but coercively trample on the views of the irreligious? Would their ideal society not merely symbolically recognise the truth of one religion but in explicit and implicit ways imply citizens who do not accept this religion are less than full members of the body politic? I suspect the answer in both cases is no. ⁹⁸ In which case, however, their vision of political pluralism sounds in important respects like a version of liberalism, not a society that is truly aliberal.

As noted at the outset, my aim is not to identify a single correct view of liberalism but rather, more modestly, to suggest the term ‘liberalism’ is not suited for the explanatory role it plays in the genealogies outlined above. Not only is liberalism historically diverse, some of the most important historical and contemporary versions of liberalism fail to have the features identified as the ‘core’ of liberalism in the foregoing narratives. Likewise, versions of liberalism like Laborde's imagined Divinitia sound, in some respects, very much like the sort of politics postliberals commend. This provides an important objection to the wholesale denunciation of liberalism in these narratives.

A Different Interpretation of the History of Christianity and Liberalism

The foregoing section argued important forms of liberalism are not comprehensive religious or normative anthropologies but are rooted, more minimally, in the respect for conscience. This questions the explanatory role liberalism plays in the postliberal genealogies, since they denounce liberalism wholesale, interpreting it as a comprehensive, nominalist, amoral anthropology and politics. In this section, I build upon that argument to question the overly optimistic portrayal of pre-modern politics and correspondingly pessimistic portrayal of modern politics in these genealogies. The genealogies present the rise of modern liberalism as a tale of decline and defection from Christian and Aristotelian anthropologies and political theologies. In contrast, in this section, I suggest strands of patristic and medieval Christianity affirmed, in a tension-ridden form, the freedom of conscience. Therefore, certain forms of liberalism are as plausibly seen as developments of rather than simple defections from pre-modern, Christian anthropological and political commitments. ⁹⁹ This suggests postliberal descriptions of liberalism as the simple displacement of a virtuous politics rooted in Christian principles fail to account for an equally plausible narrative which sees certain central versions of liberalism as an outgrowth, rather than contradiction, of important claims of Christian moral theology.

A wide-ranging recent study by Robert Louis Wilken pushes back against claims that the historical roots of religious freedom lie solely in the enlightenment. Wilken traces the distant, historical antecedents of religious freedom to patristic theologians like Tertullian and Lactantius. For them, faith involves freely embracing God in accordance with one's conscience and cannot be coerced. ¹⁰⁰ He traces the progress of this belief across time. Despite being practically contravened in a host of ways, this perspective was largely maintained across the Patristic and Medieval eras. In the Reformation, conscience was pivotal for both the Reformers and their Roman Catholic interlocutors. The most commonly recounted moments in the lives of both Martin Luther and Thomas More involve appeal to conscience. In many pre-Reformation, Reformation and post-Reformation theologies, twofold government/swords or two kingdoms doctrines did not advocate for, of course, anything like a modern ‘separation’ of church and state but nonetheless affirmed that the individual is subject to political authorities only in ‘external things’, since God alone rules the soul. ¹⁰¹ This led, for Wilken, to an uneasy settlement, in which public expressions of religion were highly regulated but there remained an insistence that the conscience itself was free and could not be compelled. ¹⁰²

Ian Christopher Levy offers a parallel argument to Wilken's, likewise noting how widespread the appeal to freedom of conscience is amongst medieval theologians, identifying this as a pre-modern version of tolerance, albeit one distinct from modern tolerance. ¹⁰³ Yet he also notes a common—and unstable—medieval distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘conditional’ compulsion. Absolute compulsion, such as physically forcing someone to the baptismal font, was deemed incompatible with the freedom of conscience. However, conditional compulsion, not thought to violate conscience, allowed for conversions or baptisms ‘encouraged’ via torture, physical blows, confiscation of property and threats. ¹⁰⁴ Therefore, despite the many flaws in modern approaches to toleration ably identified by our postliberal genealogists, there is also good reason to wonder whether medieval visions of tolerance adequately do justice to their own commitment to freedom of conscience. This is a central theme of Wilken's narrative. There is an unresolved ambiguity in much historical Christian political theology—even granting the complex, nuanced arguments offered in favour of rather harsh forms of coercion ¹⁰⁵ —insofar as the freedom of conscience is affirmed but the public practice of religion regulated in highly coercive ways. ¹⁰⁶ There is an irony here. Postliberals lament liberalism's ‘privatising’ of religion. Yet this traditional claim that the conscience of religious minorities can be respected even while the public rituals of religion are highly restricted, involves a severe privatising of minority religion.

Another example of this tension arises in Jed Atkins’s account of the origins of religious toleration not in the enlightenment, but in the North African theology of Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Augustine. For these figures, religious freedom involves ‘the right to use one's freedom (ius libertatis) to worship according to one's own will, which includes the right to articulate and externalise one's religious commitments’. At their best, they endorse more than merely an internal freedom of belief, because conscience ‘cannot be abstracted from an individual's participation in the practices of particular communities’. If it was, Atkins concludes, religion would be wrongly privatised. ¹⁰⁷ Yet in an extended discussion of Augustine's treatment of the Donatists, ¹⁰⁸ Atkins identifies a potential inconsistency, insofar as Augustine, in curtailing their religious practice, does not offer to the Donatists the possibility of ‘externalising’ their conscientiously held beliefs. ¹⁰⁹ In sum, Atkins likewise identifies important roots of the freedom of conscience and even freedom of religion in the Christian tradition and yet also identifies a not fully resolved tension related to the public practice of minority religions.

In his account of the evolution of conscience in early modernity, Dafydd Mills Daniel argues contra totalising theological critiques of the Enlightenment from figures like Gregory and Milbank that many early modern figures appealing to conscience to ground political toleration did so to oppose the naturalisation and privatisation of practical reasoning and the absolute authority of the individual. ¹¹⁰ In a diverse Anglican and Reformed tradition Daniel traces, conscience is neither simply the individual's judgement, God's judgement, or the product of natural law, but combines elements of all of these. This tradition aimed to avoid positing a form of individual moral autonomy rooted in private judgement, while also rejecting that the commands of God are simply arbitrary and external. While some early liberals evince a secularising interpretation of conscience as mere private judgement, others like the Calvinist signer of the Declaration of Independence John Witherspoon appealed to this richer view of conscience rooted in natural law to ground freedom of religion. ¹¹¹ In sum, as Mills shows, not only the pre-modern roots but some important developments of conscience in enlightenment forms of liberalism resist the view of the postliberal genealogists for whom appeals to conscience amount to secularised individualism.

All of this undermines the tendency to one-sidedly condemn modern, liberal approaches to toleration and freedom of conscience. Wilken's narrative culminates in describing early modern doctrines of toleration like Locke's, noting the way they depend upon this foregoing tradition. Wilken's conclusion is not that liberty of conscience is the unique province of Christianity, nor that liberal versions of toleration are identical to these various pre-modern traditions but, more modestly, he suggests public toleration rooted in respect for conscience is birthed, not solely from exhaustion after decades of religious conflict but from ‘the spiritual passions and intellectual energy of Christians. Men and women of faith [who] knew, as Tertullian had written in the third century, that religion cannot be imposed from without.’ ¹¹²

Given how central respect for conscience is for important versions of political liberalism, this story goes some way to offering an interpretation of central aspects of liberalism's origins which is more positively related to important trends in Christianity. Ironically, given how central he is as one of, if not the, central liberal figure in the foregoing genealogies, Hobbes is a vociferous opponent of toleration rooted in the freedom of conscience. According to Amy Gais, Hobbes worries liberty of conscience undermines social stability and posits the individual as sovereign. Instead, more reminiscent of some of the forms of postliberalism, Hobbes proposes a programme of civic education to generate a normative consensus across society. ¹¹³ This problematises the way a supposedly liberal anthropology and metaphysics is posited by postliberal genealogists as inseparable from liberal politics, insofar as unlike many other liberal thinkers, Hobbes is more ‘nominalist’ and ‘individualist’ in his anthropology and yet offers an approach to toleration strikingly distinct from most forms of liberal pluralism.

There are, of course, many other historical descriptions of liberalism parallel to the ones I discuss, offering reasons to think important values related to liberal approaches to pluralism have important precedents in the Christian tradition that have little to do with a loss of teleology or monadic nominalism. ¹¹⁴ As Perez Zagorin says, summarising his own history of the rise of religious toleration, far from being non-religious, the rise of tolerance in the West ‘was itself very largely inspired by religious values and was fundamentally religious in character’. ¹¹⁵ Even if potentially overstated, Charles Taylor's claim that ‘Western liberalism is not so much an expression of the secular postreligious outlook as it is … a more organic outgrowth of Christianity’ ¹¹⁶ is as plausible as the one-sided postliberal genealogies we have sketched. There is unsurprisingly therefore a family of views which Linell Cady labels ‘common ground’ or ‘religious’ secularisms, which interpret ‘Christianity as the historical ground and civilisational context within which the distinction between religion and the secular is made … Christianity constitutes the wellspring from which secular democratic institutions, liberties, and values draw sustenance.’ ¹¹⁷

Samuel Moyn rightly objects to the ways vindicatory narratives can be deployed to downplay the illiberalism of the Christian past and claim sole credit for all that is good in modern politics. I agree entirely. Yet in objection to such accounts, Moyn does not deny the deep interconnection between Christianity and liberal pluralism. Moyn's own work on the international acceptance of human rights discourse in the twentieth century suggests the spread of the language of human rights is inseparable from Christian theology. He even says, hyperbolically, the problem ‘is not … that Christianity accounts for nothing, as that it account for everything’. Europe ‘drew nearly everything from Christianity in the long term’. ¹¹⁸ Granting that this is hyperbole, it is on the right track. I claim not that Christianity is the sole source of liberalism but that modern Western societies are in complicated ways marked by the Christian faith. Therefore, Christians should hesitate before denouncing wholesale central aspects of contemporary Western moral and political thought, for in so doing, they will likely denounce a great deal that is central to their own tradition. ¹¹⁹

In sum, I am suggesting that adjacent to the postliberal interpretation of liberalism's history we place an equally plausible historical interpretation, offering a multifarious description of liberalism and a more positive account of how certain liberalisms grounded in the freedom of conscience positively relate to important strands of the Christian tradition. Insofar as this interpretation is as plausible as the postliberal narratives, we have good reason to think ‘liberalism’ is not a term well suited to serve the explanatory role it does in their narratives, insofar as important versions of liberalism do not amount to an individualist, nominalist, purely contracturalist approach to anthropology and politics. Rather than seeing the rise of modern liberalism as a simple defection from Christian anthropological views, one might plausibly view it as a development pre-modern Christianity's unstable affirmation ¹²⁰ of the freedom of conscience.

Conclusion

Important historians and contemporary theorists of political liberalism describe it in ways that do not fit these postliberal genealogies. They do not deny that liberalism involves a ‘thin’ theory of the good, nor that it involves any anthropological assumptions whatsoever. Instead, they offer a more limited account of the state's aims, relying upon a shared, thin theory of the good and minimal set of anthropological commitments which should be endorsed on the basis of more maximal accounts of the good and human person. These commitments in many cases historically derive, in certain respects, from important elements in Christian anthropology, in particular, theologically inspired accounts of conscience. I further noted that many contemporary liberal theorists lament the way in which some contemporary liberal philosophies and policies denigrate traditional religions and unfairly exclude religion from public discourse. The postliberal critics of liberalism make some essential observations in this regard. It is thus no objection to my more positive yet ambivalent account of liberalism to note the numerous ways in which contemporary politics falls—at times radically—short. ¹²¹ The question is whether in the face of such failures, we should turn to aliberalism or better, more nuanced forms of liberalism? Indeed, the postliberals cited, at times agree that a differently organised state is not necessarily the key solution for contemporary ills. ¹²² Yet therefore once we, as they neglect to do, disaggregate liberalism as a political theory from liberalism as a comprehensive way of life, we might—with liberal figures beloved of many postliberals like Tocqueville—suggest it is in a society with robust mediating institutions and flourishing faith traditions that a liberal politics is likely to flourish. ¹²³ Perhaps a liberal, democratic state is not the primary obstacle to more just societies increasingly pursuing the common good. Might increased participation in mediating institutions, commitment to the common good, and a growing moral consensus best be encouraged through a variety of forms of social and religious political (broadly construed) activity but not by an aliberal state? Might ‘liberalism’ not be a suitable phenomenon to serve the explanatory role it does in these postliberal narratives, namely as a comprehensive philosophy of life generating much of what ails modern life?

Nonetheless, these postliberal genealogies seem to have gained traction precisely because of their totalising rhetoric. In the preface to Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout admitted that a prior generation of liberal denouncers made important contributions. Further, he granted that—as with our postliberal genealogists—‘it is possible to find passages in which they soften, or even retract, many of the controversial things they have said’. Nonetheless, he suggests the interest in their work is often generated by their apocalyptic, denunciatory tone. However, he worries this rhetoric had ‘outlived’ its usefulness. ¹²⁴ Stout later clarified that he did not object to prophetic rhetoric as such but to a view of ‘liberalism’ or ‘modernity’ as ‘a single ambition or project’ rather than a ‘complicated mixture of triumphs and catastrophes’. ¹²⁵ Though I have a different set of dialogue partners, I agree with Stout, first, because I appreciate many aspects of these postliberal narratives, including their pathos. Yet second, as Stout alleged of prior anti-liberals, I worry that presenting the relation between ‘traditional’ Christianity and liberalism as wholly antagonistic is not only explanatorily unhelpful but also is likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate contemporary political tensions. It is liable to make liberal individualists more afraid of authoritarian religion and might even embolden some genuine religious authoritarians. Likewise, it is liable to make religious traditionalists more enraged at a monolithic secularism demanding conformity and might even embolden some secular illiberals. A more complicated history of liberalism, positing an ambivalent and in certain respects, more positive relation between important forms of liberalism and aspects of Christian theology has the benefit not just of being more accurate but of funding a modern politics aiming, via imperfect dialogue and negotiation, to respect the divine springs of conscience in every person without exception.