A Double Standard
Now, some liberals might object that it is one thing for religious intellectuals to weigh in on matters of public policy, but quite another for redneck Bible thumpers to do so. Yet why should the educational level of a person supporting a particular policy matter to the evaluation of the policy itself? If a policy can be supported with serious arguments made by serious thinkers, what does it matter whether someone who is uneducated also supports it for less sophisticated reasons? Do liberals and secularists think twice about supporting their own favored policies simply because some uninformed and inarticulate rock star or Hollywood starlet might favor them too? Why does the liberal always judge his own creed in terms of its most sophisticated representatives, and yet insist on judging rival creeds -- conservatism and traditional religious belief, for example -- in terms of their least sophisticated representatives?
It will not do either to try to justify the liberal double standard concerning religion by regurgitating tired and tiresome clichés about religion's tendency to lead to wars, persecution, Inquisitions, Crusades, Galileo's house arrest, etc. For one thing, most of those who appeal to such clichés know very little about the actual history of the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the Galileo episode, and about how beholden the simpleminded popular image of these events is to Reformation and Enlightenment era polemics rather than to serious and objective historical inquiry. For another thing, the body count generated by such committed metaphysical naturalists and secularists as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other acolytes of the Marxist counter-religion is far higher than anything even the most fanatical jihadist has been capable of.
Finally, it is no good either to suggest that since we live in a pluralistic society, religious believers ought to keep their convictions off the table where public policy is concerned. For this point cuts both ways. Traditional religious believers have far more in common with each other, after all -- at least on questions concerning abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, and the like -- than they do with secularists, and they are more numerous then secularists, at least in the United States. So why, if we are going to play the "pluralism" card in the first place, shouldn't the secularists be the ones required to keep their deepest convictions to themselves and out of the public square? And if it is legitimate to mix secularism and politics, pluralism notwithstanding, how can it be any less legitimate to mix religion and politics?
This is not to deny that the fact of pluralism poses a serious political problem: it does, and I frankly confess that I have no idea how to solve it. But then, neither does the liberal, whose favored "solution," as I have argued elsewhere, basically amounts to the proposition that all views in a pluralistic society can be tolerated only so long as they submit themselves to the liberal's own idiosyncratic and highly contestable conception of justice. That this peculiar brand of liberal intolerance ought to be regarded as superior to the religious variety is a proposition the liberal seems strangely uninterested in trying to justify. Perhaps he bases it on faith.
