Don’t miss this insightful conversation about why many militant secularists seem to be unable even to understand what the fuss is all about when they demand that businesses, schools, etc. operate on purely secular terms. Among much else, Jonathan Haidt’s social psychology of morality is invoked – correctly, I think – to explain how secularists lack the necessary mental apparatus to make sense of our claims to religious liberty because the ideas are simply absent from their social context.

Also important is the point that the institutional environment that forms these militant secularists doesn’t fully practice what the secularists preach. Often they welcome open discussion of ideas. And I would add that the higher up you go on the ladder of prestige and social importance, the more this is the case. This is relevant because, however many horror stories we may hear about totalitarianism at third-rate colleges, the people who actually run the institutions at the top of American civilization are not formed in such places. At Yale I never encountered any attempt to prevent me from fully speaking my mind on account of my belief in God and my insistence that he was relevant to political science, and I can only remember one occasion on which there was such an attempt to silence me because I was conservative. That’s actually a pretty good track record of openness and real pluralism!

This point is important, I think, for reasons we canvassed early in the history of Hang Together, in the form of a spirited debate between Dan and myself. (See here for my view; I let Dan have the last word – for the time being – here.) The question at hand boiled down to, are they always malevolent, or could they sometimes be ignorant?

I think Haidt’s work on the social psychology of morality, and other factors, would lead me now to say that this dichotomy is too simple. There are large spaces in between the merely ignorant and the purely malevolent. And the militant secularists are probably mostly living in those spaces.