Does liberalism contain the seeds of its own undoing by allowing tolerance of intolerance? Look at the growing anxiety about curbs on free speech in universities, and you might suspect that the answer is yes. Writing recently in the Times Literary Supplement, the philosopher John Gray recalled that social democrats, conservatives, liberals and Marxists once worked alongside each other in a spirit of free enquiry, despite their deep differences of outlook. Cherished orthodoxies were not unknown; sometimes dissenters had trouble getting heard.
“But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to . . . end their careers. An inquisitorial culture had not yet taken over.”1
But it has now – and the shift is becoming more and more marked in politics. The secular liberal State now claims more than its due, including the right to govern a citizen’s conscience and set norms as though the government were the only force in society that mattered. In other words, the so-called liberal State isn’t liberal at all. Among other things, it needs religion to provide a crucial reminder of its limits, as well as richer visions of human flourishing with deeper foundations than the thin soil provided by a principle like ‘tolerance’ alone.
The suggestion of a spiritual cure to our malaise comes from Rowan Williams, in a recent lecture on the Victorian historian Lord Acton’s thinking about political and religious liberty.2 The former Archbishop of Canterbury had a subtext. His not very coded message was that Acton, as a Catholic with a keen eye on the rights of minorities, was rolling the pitch for a classically liberal model of Church–State relations which contrasts sharply with the prescriptive models of liberalism we see today.
Given past and continuing evidence of religious authoritarianism, how can self-aware Christians, Muslims and others answer the very influential view that religion should be a purely private matter? By quarrying the thought of many forebears besides Acton, Williams has long shown a talent for reframing stale-sounding debates in fresh ways. As archbishop, for example, he distinguished between good and bad models of secularism, respectively the ‘procedural’ and the ‘programmatic’.
Procedural secularism grants no special privileges to any particular religious body, but denies that faith is merely a matter of private conviction. It should at least be allowed to nourish the public conversation. Williams continues to see so-called programmatic secularism in a far less positive light, because it insists on a ‘neutral’ public arena and hives religion off into a purely private domain. Rather than resolving clashes of outlook, programmatic secularism risks inflaming social conflict by stoking resentment among faith groups.
In a series of addresses over the past 15 years, Williams has proposed ‘interactive pluralism’ as a recipe for harmony. This encourages robust dialogue among faith communities and between them and the State. No one has received the whole truth ‘as God sees it’, so all have something to learn. Such a model contrasts with the subjectivity implied by multiculturalist attitudes. As indicated, a tag such as ‘tolerance of diversity’ can conceal a multitude of sins.
Acton’s ideas – spelt out in addresses and essays during the 1870s – are worth revisiting in more detail. The future Professor of Modern History at Cambridge made the eye-catching claim that religious liberty or freedom of belief is the foundation of all other liberties, and that political liberty in turn underpins the health of religious communities. The rationale for this lies in his definition of liberty as: “the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty. Against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion, the State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere.”3
The State and religious communities thus owe something to one another. If one is to be free, the other must be free. And the State has a duty not only to respect conviction and conscience – especially the conscience of a minority. It also has an obligation not to be swallowed up by any religious body and not to assimilate itself to one faith group. The State, then, is not a Church. The State guards the possibility of there being ‘Churches’ – Acton’s shorthand for communities of conviction and conscience – and the existence of these communities of conscience stands before the State as a challenge and reminder of what it is and isn’t. From this follows a crucial inference. Since the State is the authority that permits you to follow your conscience, it cannot claim the right to dictate what you believe. If it does, you have a severe problem.
It may seem counterintuitive to suggest that religion can only flourish when the State as such isn’t religious, but the point is certainly grasped by T. S. Eliot in his Essay on the Idea of a Christian Society. This is the text in which the devoutly Anglican poet says that he would prefer to have a competent atheist running a government than an incompetent believer. His point is that the State has its business, but that business has boundaries. Williams’s conclusion is forthright, especially in view of his own left-wing allegiances:
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