Notre Dame Law Review Symposium, Liberalism, Christianity, and Constitutionalism:
Steven Smith (San Diego), Christians and/as Liberals?, 98 Notre Dame L. Rev. ___ (2023):
Recently, as part of a more general examination and criticism of liberalism, the relation between Christianity and liberalism has been much discussed. Some critics, sometimes associated with the label “integralism,” argue that Christianity and liberalism are fundamentally incompatible. Examining both consistencies and inconsistencies, this article argues to the contrary that liberalism may be, for now, for us, in our historical circumstances, the alternative that prudent Christians should prefer. …
From this point of view, a properly governed and genuinely liberal regime might indeed be the best that a Christian should hope for, short of the end time when (Christians believe) the true King and Prince of Peace will rule. Liberalism might be, to borrow from Winston Churchill, the worst form of government except for all the others. In a genuinely liberal regime, people would be governed by ideals that at least derive from basic Christian beliefs, and by a regime that adopts as its central purpose protecting and promoting the ability of people (including Christians) to live and even to proselytize in accordance with their beliefs. At the same time, such a regime would not adopt the un-Christian and self-defeating tactics of using force and violence to enforce Christian beliefs that are efficacious only if sincerely and voluntarily embraced. The novelist Walker Percy, when asked why he was a Catholic, used to answer “What else is there?” Asked why he or she is a liberal, a Christian today might respond with the same question.
Richard W. Garnett (Notre Dame), Why Liberalism and Constitutionalism Need Christianity:
[C]onstitutionalism and liberalism—and liberal constitutionalism—need Christianity. Indeed, the “separation” between church and state that has long been treated, with more or less care, as a foundation of the American law of church and state is better regarded as a limit imposed by the former on the latter than vice-versa. Correctly understood—and, to be sure, it often is not—this “separation” stands as a safeguard against governments tempted to assume for themselves the power to direct religious life. It is a limit on government and such limits, again, are essential to liberal constitutionalism. Our Constitution separates church and state to curb the ambitions and reach of governments. In and through our constitutionalism, “Caesar recognizes that he is only Caesar and forswears any attempt to demand what is God’s.” The differentiation between religious and political authority means that Christianity is not merely a recipient of constitutional protection; it is a safeguard for the enterprise of constitutionalism.
Both liberalism and constitutionalism involve tensions—tensions between liberty and limits, and tensions between the paired aims of empowering and constraining political authority. Christianity, and the dualistic claim at the heart of Christian political theology, is well suited—maybe uniquely so—to provide these limits. Liberalism, after all, is hospitable to temptation, as Patrick Deneen and others have reminded us, to comprehensiveness, to boundary-crossing, to a disregard of limits. This is a temptation to insist on congruence, and to—ironically, perhaps—rely on state power to guarantee, at the expense of non-state associations and authorities, the liberty it promises.
Philip Hamburger examined closely this temptation, and the tools—indeed, the new “pathways of power”—that governments employ when indulging it, in his recent book, Purchasing Submission. Among other things, he argues that a certain kind of comprehensive, impatient-with-limits liberalism is subtly undermining constitutionalism. Bit by bit, using the soft power of carrots and sticks, conditions and concessions, this statist version of liberalism picks away at the forms, boundaries, rivals, and authorities—including, especially, religious institutions, associations, and communities—that would complement, but also check, its reach. In this way, liberalism not only undermines constitutionalism and Christianity but also itself.
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