Response to Tom

I appreciate Tom's response to the quoted paragraphs I posted from Legutko's book. I did intend them to be in conversation with Tom's post, just as I have made arguments at Mirror of Justice in the past in conversation with his posts regarding many of the points he makes below. We may not agree about a few things, but we do agree about others. I'll just mention a few of the agreements (one of which is a tentative agreement) before noting a possible disagreement.

Tom and I agree that churches and religious institutions have made social contributions in the past and continue to make them today. Tom and I also agree that churches and religious institutions should be permitted to continue to make these contributions notwithstanding their standing athwart various moral, cultural, and political values supported by the broader secular society.

I think, but am not as sure, that we also agree that any time churches and religious institutions must justify the sorts of contributions they make to the broader secular world, there is a danger that in so justifying themselves, they may feel pressure to compromise as to certain of their core beliefs. That can occur not only, as Tom writes, under such circumstances as when "Catholic colleges drop...major religious elements in order to be eligible for federal funding." It can also occur more subtly, as when a religious institution vying for a particular contract knows that it is less likely to obtain that contract unless it soft-pedals, or moderates, its views on particular political, moral, or cultural issues of interest both to it and to the broader secular polity. It might happen in the context of tax and other fiscal exemptions. Under circumstances which, as Tom said, religious freedom is not an accepted premise, but a premise that needs to be justified by religious institutions' contributions to secular society, it seems only reasonable to suppose that an increasingly secularizing society will want to see justifications that match up with its own premises concerning the public good. That might very well be dangerous both for religious freedom and for the continuing survival of the religious organizations' contributions to the social sphere. And that, I believed, was one of the points made in the paragraphs I quoted--that the twin dangers of conciliation and capitulation must be minded. One stratagem to circumnavigate this problem might be for the religious organization to focus its energies on ostensibly "nonpolitical" or "noncultural" issues. I doubt it is an effective stratagem, however. More importantly, though there may be a difference in pursuing secular aims and justifying one's aims in secular terms, keeping these two projects conceptually pure may be rather challenging over time.

Tom and I may disagree about what he has described as "the middle" and the sorts of arguments that are likely to persuade it. Those disagreements have been rehearsed in other posts, but they are relevant here, too. In fact, I took it to be a premise of Tom's post that as American society becomes more secular, the middle itself will shift, and therefore the sorts of arguments that will be persuasive to it will shift, too. Those arguments will need to be made, more and more, in the language of secularism and within the accepted premises of what makes for a "social contribution" and what does not, and less and less in a language which takes it as a premise that religious freedom is intrinsically good. Tom and I may also disagree, in that case, about the likelihood of the dangers of conciliation and capitulation that face religious institutions as those changes persist.