The key distinction underlying classical liberalism is the distinction between the private and the public. This distinction allows the sphere of political deliberation to be insulated from the intractable oppositions that immediately surface when religious viewpoints are put on the table. Liberalism tells us that religious viewpoints should be confined to the home, the heart, the place of worship and the personal relationship between oneself and one’s God.
When the liberal citizen exits the private realm and enters the public square, he or she is supposed to leave religious commitments behind and function as a stripped-down entity, as an abstract-not-full personage, who makes political decisions not as a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim but as what political scientist Michael Sandel calls an “unencumbered self,” a self unencumbered by ethnic, racial, gender, class or religious identities.
Fish writes, “There are three responses one might give to these questions and to the cultural defense when it is invoked. (1) I see your point; you were acting in the grip of a sincere belief; go and sin no more (2) That may be the way they do it back home, but you’re here now and our laws trump your culturally acquired beliefs, and (3) That may be the way they do it back home, but here we do it differently, and the way we do it here is the right way and should be the way it’s done in the culture you came from.”
The founders write of “inalienable rights,” and operating within Fish’s three categories that implies answer (3) expressed in terms of (2). The natural law given by the one true God to all men is most fully expressed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and the ethical teachings of Scripture are the foundation of morality and law. Alternatives lead to slavery.
And if they are not then everything is up for grabs. And the most powerful block wins. In short a formula for perpetual civil war. After all what privileges the “neutral (no such thing) worldview?