Liberalism and Religious Freedom: From Plurality to Ideological Balkanization

Religious freedom has long been a central tenet of modern liberalism, especially in the United States. Among the most decisive liberal arguments in favor of freedom of religion was that it was conducive to civil peace. That argument long seemed convincing. But over time the dynamics of religious and ideological pluralism can also lead to effects that are far less benign or pacific. Ironically, pluralism may lead to new forms of intolerance and ideological balkanization that endanger the peaceful liberal order.

We can trace that development by focusing on the arguments of two astute social scientific analysts: Adam Smith, who stands near the beginning of this history in the eighteenth century; and Peter L. Berger, who revisited the issue in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Perhaps the first formulation of what would become the favored liberal solution to the problem of reconciling multiple religions with civil peace came from Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan of 1651, arguably the most important work of political thought in the English language. Religiously inspired civil war was the great bane of early modern Europe and provided the backdrop for the rise of modern liberalism. Much of Leviathan is devoted to the issue of how to avoid that problem. Religious factions differed with one another over the interpretation of Scripture—and were willing to kill and be killed to enforce their interpretation of the road to salvation. In such extreme situations, Hobbes contended, the sovereign had to have ultimate authority over such interpretation. That was the book’s better-known, illiberal solution.

Yet near the end of Leviathan, Hobbes suggested an alternative to this authoritarian solution: complete freedom of religion, untainted by state power or preference. “To follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best. Which, if it be without contention … is perhaps the best [solution]” (Hobbes 1651, pt. 4, ch. 47, p. 385). That would become the preferred liberal strategy.

In the eighteenth century, the two intellectual giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, sparred over the issue of which political arrangement of religion was most conducive to civil peace.

The moral philosophy of Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was intended in part to explain the reasons for moral behavior to those who no longer believed in heaven and hell. But the philosophical explanation, he realized, was not accessible to all. Smith’s view of religion was that it expressed in metaphorical terms the reality that acting justly and beneficently was the source of greatest reward and happiness, while acting ignobly brings its own punishment. That this central insight of moral philosophy was expressed by religion not in terms of the rewards and punishments of conscience but in terms of reward and punishment in the afterlife made it all the more useful for influencing the behavior of those beyond the reach of philosophy. The core truth of religion, Smith thought, was that by acting justly and beneficently we fulfill the purposes of our creation, and so, Smith concluded that “religion enforces the natural sense of duty” (Smith 1982, 161–70, here 170).

Despite his skepticism regarding revealed religious truth, Smith was deeply concerned with the social functions of religion. He explored that theme in The Wealth of Nations (1776) in the course of a discussion of government expenses for “the institutions for the instruction of people of all ages.” Religious institutions, he asserts, provide “a species of instruction of which the object is not so much to render the people good citizens in this world, as to prepare them for another and a better world in a life to come” (Smith 1981, 2:788). His overriding interest was with the role of religion in retarding or promoting public order and public morals, since both public order and good morals were necessary if the economic and moral benefits of commercial society were to reach the lower orders.

Smith also attended to the political management of religious pluralism—that primary concern of European political theorists from Hobbes on. Smith presented his analysis as a rejoinder to his friend David Hume, a man described in the text of The Wealth of Nations as “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age” (Smith 1981, 2:790). Hume had argued that in most professions government need play no regulatory role, since customers in the market would decide upon the quality of the services offered. But Hume made a major exception in the case of the profession of the clergy, arguing that the very diligence of clergymen would be dangerous, “because, in every religion except the true, it is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the true, by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly, and delusion” (Hume [1762] 1983, 3:135–36). A religious skeptic, Hume did not believe that the doctrine of the established church (whether of England or Scotland) was “true.” But, like Hobbes, he was deeply concerned with the effects of religion on political order. In order to retain the support of their followers, he wrote, preachers of nonestablished sects would profess “the most violent abhorrence of all other sects,” and would propagate doctrines geared to “the passions and credulity of the populace.” Hume’s recommendation was that in the interests of public order and public morals the government ought to pay the salaries of established priests, “to bribe their indolence.” Their function was “merely to prevent their flock from straying in quest of new pastures” (Hume [1762] 1983, 3:136). Struck by the role of religiously motivated strife in seventeenth-century England, it was the very zeal of clergymen which he feared as a source of faction and civil war. The state, according to Hume, ought to fund the established faith in the interest of spiritual quality control and political order. (A version of this strategy has in fact been adopted in some modern Islamic states, in which the clergy are paid by the state, and often controlled by it to limit zealotry. In European states, such as England and some Scandinavian states, the existence of an established church funded by the state has, over the long run, tended to lead to religious indifference [Berger, Davie, and Fokas 2008, ch. 2].)

Smith responded to Hume with a thought experiment. He began by accepting Hume’s goal of civil peace, but suggested a very different mechanism for attaining that goal. What, he asked, if politicians “dealt equally and impartially with all the different sects” and “allowed every man to chuse his own priest and his own religion as he thought proper”? The result, he anticipated, would be “a great multitude of religious sects” in which each preacher would exert himself to maintain and enlarge the number of his disciples (Smith 1981, 2:792). But the very multiplicity of sects, Smith argued, would curb the negative outcomes that Hume feared:

The interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous and troublesome only where there is, either but one sect tolerated in the society, or where the whole of a large society is divided into two or three great sects…. But that zeal must be altogether innocent where the society is divided into two or three hundred, or perhaps into as many thousand small sects, of which no one could be considerable enough to disturb the publick tranquillity. (Smith 1981, 2:792–93)

Once there are myriad competitors for religious allegiance, a new dynamic would take hold, Smith predicted. For, “seeing themselves surrounded on all sides with more adversaries than friends,” Smith hypothesized, the preachers of each denomination would become more moderate. The relative weakness of each denomination would ensure its need to be tolerated by others, thus creating a disposition to tolerate others in turn. The result of the respect for other faiths necessitated by the structure of the situation, Smith reasoned, might even lead each denomination to make “the concessions which they would mutually find it both convenient and agreeable to make to one another.” Ultimately, they would each reduce their doctrine “to that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established.” Thus the legalization of zeal and fanaticism might promote a certain degree of convergence, or, if you will, product standardization, in the direction of toleration, moderation, and rational religion (Smith 1981, 2:793–94). During debates on the creation of an American constitution, this logic of the neutralization of ideological zeal through the multiplicity of contending factions was adopted by James Madison in Federalist, number 10.

Another of Smith’s insights was that under conditions of religious freedom, different clergy would engage in product differentiation to appeal to a variety of needs, tastes, and dispositions. He examined the major established, dissenting, and sectarian Christian denominations of his day and explained their relative failures and successes in terms of the structure of incentives in what might be called the market for souls.

Smith was writing in an era when the expansion of urban industry was drawing people from the countryside into the cities. The speed with which these new communities came into being far outstripped the capacity of the established Church of England to adapt. Most parishes had depended financially upon paternalistic landowners, who were not to be found in the newer urban centers, where existing parish structures were inadequate. The gap was eventually filled by revivalist Methodists, who concentrated their energies on the lower classes and were most successful in the new industrial centers.

The sectarian preachers, Smith claimed, were more successful among the upwardly aspiring lower classes. That was not only because their economic dependence on the contributions of their flock gave them a material incentive to proselytize, but also because they delivered a moral and religious message that was most suited to the social needs and intellectual attainments of the lower classes. These messages the established clergy were no longer capable of delivering, for reasons that Smith explained institutionally. The clergy of the established church were university educated and found it difficult to appeal to a less-educated audience. The insurgent preachers, by contrast, were quite able to preach the message of fire and brimstone as the rewards of sin.

There were, broadly speaking, two systems of morality in society, Smith claimed. One system was indulgent, the other strict. These moral systems were correlated to economic class. The rich in general and particularly “people of fashion” tended to favor the more indulgent system. The more successful among the common people, by contrast, tended toward the austere system, because they knew that liberal morals would be disastrous for them. “The vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most enormous crimes,” Smith explained. Thus, “the wiser and better sort of the common people, therefore, have always the utmost abhorrence and detestation of such excesses, which their experience tells them are so immediately fatal to people of their condition” (Smith 1981, 2:794).

Smith argued that the messages preached by the clergy of those denominations seeking to orient themselves either to the lower classes or to the upper classes differed because of the different moral tastes of their potential flocks (Smith 1981, 2:794–96.). Thus, there was product differentiation and segmentation.

Now let us move forward two hundred and fifty years, where legitimated religious multiplicity had become the norm, at least in most Western societies.

The sociologist Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) explored the effects of multiple religions and worldviews in modern, liberal societies and the challenges they posed not only to religious institutions, but also to social and political ones. Berger explored these challenges and dilemmas with great perspicacity during the five decades that separated his early work The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967) and his late work In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic (2009, written with his Dutch colleague, Anton Zijderveld).

One of the key conceptual coinages with which Berger explored these issues was his notion of “plausibility structures.” The idea, in a nutshell, is this: to the extent that knowledge is socially constructed or conditioned, what counts as plausible “knowledge” depends on social context. A key function of institutions such as religions, political parties, or professional milieus is to render certain ideas into premises, that is, to make them taken for granted, and to render other ideas inadmissible or unthinkable. One of Berger’s favorite examples was the notion of natural law, which is taken for granted as true, rational, and universal in Roman Catholic circles, but is often regarded with skepticism outside of such circles.

The driving historical force behind the phenomena that most interested Berger was what he called “pluralization.” Over time, Western societies developed mechanisms by which diverse religions could coexist in the same polity, under conditions of social peace. This process of pluralization set the stage for the condition that Berger dubbed “plurality,” “a situation in which diverse human groups (ethnic, religious, or however differentiated) live together under conditions of social peace and social interaction with one another” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 7).^[1] They might embrace this condition as intrinsically desirable, subscribing to an ideology of pluralism. Or, like the Roman Catholic Church, they might come to accept religious plurality as a given without legitimating it theologically or ideologically.

Whether embraced or resisted, plurality created novel challenges for institutions, religious and otherwise. For peaceful social interaction with people of different worldviews sooner or later fosters the suspicion that different beliefs and practices may not be “perverse, insane, or evil. Slowly but surely, the thought obtrudes that, maybe, these people have a point. With that thought, the previously taken for granted view of reality becomes shaky.” The result is what Berger called “cognitive contamination” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 9–11). With that, previously taken-for-granted identities start to become precarious. One of his key corollaries is that under modern conditions, religious identity—and eventually, other identities—are no longer perceived as a matter of fate, but of choice. Religious communities thus become voluntary associations, sometimes in spite of their traditional theology (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 18–20).

This sets into motion a variety of processes, some of which Adam Smith had anticipated and some of which he had not.

Under conditions of plurality, the fundamental structure faced by all religions is that of market competition. They must compete to hold on to existing adherents and to make new ones (through proselytization). That in turn gives rise to several typical processes. Religious officials must now adapt their product (their message) to their audiences. They do so in two ways: through product standardization and product differentiation.

One effect of market competition is a degree of product standardization, as Smith had predicted. As Berger states,

Insofar as the religious “needs” of certain strata of clients or potential clients are similar, the religious institutions catering to these “needs” will tend to standardize their products accordingly. For example, all religious institutions oriented toward the upper-middle-class market in America will be under pressure to secularize and to psychologize their products—otherwise, the chances of these being “bought” diminish drastically. Thus even the Catholic priest in suburbia is much less likely to talk about Fatima than to engage in a “dialogue” with some available psychiatrist on “religion and mental health.” His Protestant and Jewish colleagues, of course, are likely to have legitimated their whole operations as some kind of family psychotherapy long ago. (Berger 1967, 185–86)

Here, Berger’s diagnosis of the religious situation in 1967 comports with Smith’s prognosis of 1776.

At the same time as they compete, the structure of plurality means that religious communities must also cooperate. Recognizing that their coexistence depends on a degree of mutual tolerance and even respect, they are incentivized to engage in “ecumenical” and “interfaith” activities “which civilize and to a degree regulate the competition” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 22).

Yet in keeping with this marketlike structure, religious organizations that seek to remain competitive must also engage in product differentiation. They must argue that for one reason or another—historical, theological, therapeutic, or aesthetic—their brand is actually superior, and that potential adherents ought to choose them rather than some religious or secular rival (Berger 1967, 184–86). And they try to discover the preferences of their potential cust­omers—preferences that are likely to vary depending upon class, region, or ethnicity, as Smith had argued in regard to the Methodist sects.

So far, so Smithian. Yet, there are some results that Smith had not anticipated.

On the personal level, Berger observed, plurality can create a sense of meaninglessness or paralysis. Encountering numerous, divergent perspectives about what to believe leads to doubt, and if that doubt leads to the conclusion that there is no truth, or no way to make compelling choices between the alternatives at hand, the result can be a sense of spiritual vertigo or meaninglessness (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 48). That in turn creates a market for various therapeutic practices, ideologies, and institutions that promise to fill the void and guide their followers to their “real” or more reliable identity. New institutions emerge that offer individuals an entire package of “beliefs, norms, and identities” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 18).

That, for Berger, helps explain the ongoing attraction of fundament­alism—religious or political. Fundamentalism is a response to the condition of plurality created by modernity; it is a “project which tries to restore the taken-for-grantedness of religion, where supposedly there is no doubt.” It operates by trying to close off social contact with outsiders as much as possible, as in the case of the Amish or the Satmar Hasidim, sometimes by making minimal concessions to the market economy that require coming into contact with outsiders. The irony is that “despite its common claim to be conservative, to go back to the alleged golden age of a particular tradition, fundamentalism is very different from traditionalism. The difference can be simply put: Traditionalism means that the tradition is taken for granted; fundamentalism arises when the taken-for-grantedness has been challenged or lost outright” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 72). Yet since there is always a memory or tacit awareness that choice is indeed possible, the fundamentalist project is inherently fragile, leading to a tone of aggressive certitude (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 73). When fundamentalism aims to create or preserve a sectarian subculture, it tries to form a “micro-totalitarianism” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 79). When it aspires to conquer society as a whole, it tends toward totalitarianism tout court, the creation of a state that controls information, so that views that might call the dominant worldview into question are kept at bay (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 75–76).

Part of the strategy to retain adherents under conditions of plurality is that of social and cultural encapsulation, that is, the creation of a subculture in which members are “protected” from cognitive contagion by minimizing social and cultural contact with outsiders. Such practices include separate educational and social institutions, voluntary endogamy, and other restrictions on close contact with others (Berger 1967, 68–69; Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 81–82). They also include “cognitive defenses”: avoiding sources of information that call the group’s taken-for-granted assumptions into question, and “classifying the bearers of dissonance under a category that totally discredits them and anything they might have to say—they’re sinners or infidels, they belong to an inferior race, they’re caught in false consciousness because of their class or gender” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 32–33).

For all its manifest virtues, then, the process of pluralization creates the potential conditions for its own dissolution. On the one hand, once doubt becomes so pervasive that individuals can find no good reason to select one way of believing and living over another, it fosters nihilism and decadence, which Berger defined as “a situation in which the norms that hold a society together have been hollowed out, have become illusionary and likely risible, and (most important) have undermined the trust that other people will behave in accordance with collectively shared norms” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 68). The spread of fundamentalism—whether religious or political—with its antipathy to rival views and its self-reinforcing social and informational bubbles, leads to balkanization, and that, too, undermines social cohesion. When that occurs, “the final outcome may be all-out civil strife, between radicalized subcultures and the majority society, and/or between/among the several subcultures themselves.” Berger concluded that “if the danger of relativism to a stable society is an excess of doubt, the danger of fundament­alism is a deficit of doubt. Both extreme uncertainty and extreme certainty are dangerous” (Berger and Zijderveld 2009, 87).

Berger was a liberal conservative who believed that the calling into question of long-held beliefs through confrontation with those of other faiths could lead each faith to a more refined and enlightened understanding of what was most valuable in its own tradition. But observation led him to conclude that the liberating effects of plurality could be personally disorienting and politically destabilizing. It could lead to the fear that there is no truth, with the threat of meaninglessness. When that happens the search for meaning leads to new fundamentalisms, which provide meaning to their adherents. But to retain its plausibility, fundamentalism of any sort must try to create an informational envelope and a social envelope and engage in the demonization and anathematization of rival sources of knowledge.

The dynamic Berger described provides a useful lens with which to understand the merging of religion and politics evident in the United States. On the one hand, there is what is variously known (by its advocates) as social justice ideology, wokeism (by its opponents), or what Wesley Yang has dubbed “the successor ideology.” Analysts such as John McWhorter (2021) have remarked upon the religious (or if one prefers, pseudo-religious) elements of anti-racism. But that ideological umbrella increasingly extends to a shifting set of cultural preferences, such as gender-identity understandings of sexuality, as explored by Helen Joyce (2021). These preferences increasingly differentiate, where they do not actually define, liberal Protestant denominations as well as the liberal varieties of Judaism. Conversely, one finds a merging of evangelical Protestantism with a peculiar brew of Trumpism and anti-vaccination convictions in what both its advocates and opponents term “MAGAland.”

The desperation and intolerance with which these sides confront one another attest to their awareness that their dogmas cannot be taken for granted. Hence the relentless attempts to anathematize the other, in order to discourage one’s own adherents from questioning the taken-for-granted premises of one’s side. The rise of the internet, and especially of social media, makes it easier and more likely to be exposed to alternative views, thus threatening what Berger called “cognitive contamination.” That helps explain the fervor and rancor with which representatives of other views are attacked and mocked.

In the five years since Berger’s death, the cultural-political balkanization and decline of trust that he saw on the horizon has only intensified. No guiding hand, visible or invisible, is at play. The dialectics of religious and ideological plurality, the heart of the liberal project, have created new challenges for the liberal order.