In his 2003 book How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Perez Zagorin observed that most citizens of Europe and America prize freedom of religion more highly than any other values and practices of Western liberal democracies. This comment may seem rather quaint today. Antiliberalisms have risen, in both religious and nonreligious varieties, which feature a suspicion, even contempt, for religious liberty.

　　In religious antiliberalism—whether Catholic integralism, Protestant establishmentarianism, or Christian nationalism (whatever that is)—religious liberty is seen as the nemesis of the unified commonwealth, in which the state must promote the true religion and, through diverse means, suppress religious dissent and heresy. On the other hand, proponents of nonreligious antiliberalism construe religious liberty as a cloak for oppression and discrimination by which religious people and institutions seek to impose their will and surreptitiously uphold their traditional positions of power. On this view, religious individuals and institutions are operating a discrimination racket. If this is the case, the logical response is not merely to expose it, but to shut it down.

　　All this paints a rather bleak picture of the future of religious liberty in America. And to make matters worse, we might note the obvious: these two kinds of antiliberalism are contradictory and vociferously opposed to each other. One group seeks to establish religion as politically regnant while the other wants to marginalize it or drive it out of the public sphere entirely. This context, if perpetuated, will put great strain on religious freedom. Despite all of this, however, I believe freedom of religion will survive, in part because it is supported by a deeper principle that cannot be eradicated, namely, the Golden Rule: Do to others what you would have them do to you.

　　The Golden Rule is a universal and immutable moral law. I will not argue this claim here, but a few orienting comments are necessary. In its simple form as given above, and if applied in a simplistic way, the Golden Rule is subject to various objections and contradictions that undermine it. However, moral philosophers such as R. M. Hare, Jeffrey Wattles, Thomas Carson, and Harry Gensler have defended sophisticated forms of the rule. For a concise and robust statement of the rule, we might use Gensler’s version: Treat others only as you consent to being treated in the same situation. Additionally, the fact that a form of the Golden Rule appears in almost every religious tradition is prima facie evidence of universality, while its perdurance from ancient times to today is prima facie evidence of immutability. But universal consent does not prove the rule’s universality, immutability, or even its validity. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis’s appendix on the Tao, for those who do not perceive the Golden Rule’s rationality, even universal consent and historical testimony won’t prove it.

　　Religious liberty is another concept that requires some clarification. By religious liberty, I do not mean religious toleration. Toleration implies a regnant state orthodoxy or established religion that allows religious dissent and diverse forms of religious practice. It implies a privileged status of one religion and its adherents and a subordinate status of all others. By contrast, religious liberty means that all citizens have, in Martha Nussbaum’s terms, “equality of standing in the public realm” regardless of their religious convictions or lack thereof, leaving them free to believe and practice according to their consciences. The concept and its application is, of course, far more complicated. For instance, religious liberty is not a license to carry out whatever an individual or religious group may want. But the central feature of religious liberty is the equal rights of all citizens to live according to conscience and not be relegated to second-class citizenship because of their religious convictions.

　　The Forever Wars of Religious Antiliberalism

　　The appeal to the Golden Rule as a foundation for religious liberty (or, early in its historical development, for religious toleration) is not new. In the sixteenth century, the French humanist Sebastian Castellio appealed to the Golden Rule in his case for toleration in the midst of the French wars of religion. He asked the French Catholics, who were persecuting the Reformed Protestants, “Would you like to be treated in this manner? Would you like to be persecuted, imprisoned, locked in subterranean cellars, given as food to lice and fleas, to rot in mud pits, to be kept in hideous dark places and under the shadow of death and, finally, to be roasted alive on a small fire, for not having believed or confessed to something which was against your conscience?” Not one to play favorites, Castellio applied the same principle to the intolerant Protestants: “I well understand that which some of you have taken to replying: namely that you are right, and they are wrong, and for that reason it is quite permissible to persecute and force them. But they are not permitted to do this to you, which is the same as if you said that it is quite permissible for you to seize the possessions of others, but that others may not seize yours. … [Y]ou are doing things to others which you would not like to be done to you.” For Castellio, the Golden Rule exposes the absurdity of religious persecution and its perpetual cycle of conflict.

　　Castellio’s historical context was much different than our own. As far as I can tell, none of today’s integralists, establishmentarians, or Christian nationalists are advocating that their opponents be roasted alive. Rather, they merely want the state to adopt the true religion (by that they mean their own) and to orient its citizenry toward the true spiritual good (again, as they have understood it). State power will be used to instruct and nudge those who dissent from the state religion. Just how much nudging will be necessary will depend on the responses of those nudged. Dissenters and adherents of non-majority religions may not be roasted alive, but they will still be subject to the religious “care” of the state, which means they will be treated as unequal participants in the public realm for not believing or confessing something that is against their consciences.

　　History reveals it is often the victims of religious persecution and suppression who understand most profoundly the good of religious liberty. The Golden Rule can lead us toward that good.

　　More than a century after Castellio, Pierre Bayle, in his philosophical commentary on Christ’s parable of the feast, developed an argument against religious coercion that echoes the Golden Rule. He began by articulating the traditional Christian position that it is a sin to act against one’s conscience. Then he supposed that there is a divine law like this: Whoever is convinced of the truth should use force to establish it and to suppress religious error. If this is the case, the divine law applies equally to the self-styled orthodox and the supposed heretics. Everyone is obligated to use force to establish their own religion because to fail to do so is to sin against conscience, which ought never to be done. The result, of course, is the perpetual religious conflict that afflicted early modern Europe. Writing in the voice of once-oppressed believers who now have power over their former oppressors, Bayle brilliantly emphasizes the point: “You have taught me one lesson that I did not know before, I am obliged to you for it; you have shown me from the Scriptures, that God enjoins the faithful to distress false communions; I shall therefore fall to persecuting you, seeing I am the true church, and you idolaters and false Christians.”

　　One might object that Bayle begins with the wrong divine command. That is, one might suppose that the command is not that the person convinced of the truth must seek to establish it, but that true religion ought to be established and false religion suppressed. Thus the central point is truth itself, not one’s subjective conviction concerning the truth. But this objection only makes the argument more poignant because, as Locke memorably put it in his Letter concerning Toleration, “Everyone is orthodox in their own eyes.” Even if we grant that there is religious truth, and that individuals can know it, there is still no publicly accessible authority by which to evaluate and certainly decide between conflicting religious truth claims, and it is dubious to assert that a state can know the supernatural good with the requisite degree of certainty to justify the unequal treatment or suppression of its citizens in matters of religion. As Cécile Laborde has put it, “The first wrong of the religious state is that it does not provide its citizens with reasons that are accessible in democratic deliberation.” Thus religious antiliberalism creates a context for forever wars as one religious group gains ascendancy and suppresses others only to be replaced by a new reigning orthodoxy that exacts its revenge.

　　Nonreligious Antiliberalism’s Self-Contradiction

　　The Golden Rule also provides reasons for nonreligious antiliberals to rethink their suspicion toward religion. As many commentators have pointed out, Western societies are awash in a sea of suspicion about everyone and everything, particularly when it comes to people and institutions of authority or influence. Trust in institutions remains at historic lows. It seems everyone—according to someone else—is acting in bad faith and running an evil and oppressive backroom operation that must be exposed for what it really is. Nothing and no one is as they seem. It’s all a racket.

　　Not surprisingly, this culture of suspicion destroys social cohesion, civility, and general neighborliness. It’s even more destructive when directed at our neighbors’ most deeply held religious beliefs and practices. Want to lose friends and alienate people? Treat their religious beliefs and practices as insincere or malicious. But suspicion ultimately fails as a principle and posture of civil discourse. For one thing, it is not universalizable. In Kantian terms, one cannot will that suspicion be a universal law because to do so is not only destructive of societal goods but also logically self-defeating. The maxim Doubt everything, like the alchemist’s universal solvent, eats itself.

　　Furthermore, it requires a rather jaundiced eye to see one’s religious neighbors as merely running a discrimination racket. Religious individuals, rather, are taking seriously the pursuit of ultimate meaning and seeking to order their lives according to ancient and time-honored understandings of humanity and the divine. I doubt that those who construe religious convictions as cloaks of discrimination would want their own deepest convictions treated the same way. Do protestors on college campuses like it when critics label their efforts as “performative outrage” or “virtue signaling,” as though their convictions were merely insincere forms of social conformity? Maybe the Golden Rule can help us to not assume we can peer into our neighbors’ souls and discern the “real” reasons for their actions. It at least counsels us to consider questions of truth, morality, and trustworthiness before we label or dismiss our neighbor.

　　The Scots-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson warned of the danger of this kind of presumption, which attributes “cunning, shrewd insinuations” and selfish motivations to others’ actions. No good can come of it. Rather, it “must be fruitful of nothing but discontent, suspicion, and jealousy: a state infinitely worse than any little transitory injuries to which we might be exposed by a good-natured credulity.” But Hutcheson was not naïve. Good-natured credulity does not mean that we ignore questions of truth and morality, much less that we countenance what is evil. Instead, it calls us to resist loving the “zealots” of our “own sect” merely for their “fury, rage, and malice against opposite sects.” As Hutcheson perceptively notes, that sort of party prejudice actually impairs our ability to evaluate questions of good and evil. Indeed, we all want to be treated with a good-natured credulity that resists suspicion, presumption, and party prejudice, and we should treat our neighbors as we want to be treated. Additionally, the prevailing winds of a culture can shift, and all people should have the right to act according to their sincere religious convictions regardless of what political and ideological forces hold sway in the culture. There may come a time when critics of conscientious religious convictions will need recourse to defend their own sincerely held convictions from government coercion.

　　This highlights another feature of today’s antiliberal discourse: a lack of concern for conscientious convictions in general and an eagerness to impose our will on social and political opponents. We may not be able to change our opponents’ minds or coerce their beliefs, so the logic goes, but we can at least force them from the public sphere and render them social pariahs. As with religious antiliberalism’s failure to grapple with the reality of shifting state orthodoxies, so nonreligious antiliberalism fails to see that an antireligious social climate may not always be regnant, and there may come a day when antiliberals of all stripes will wish they had promoted a political climate informed by the Golden Rule rather than by suspicion. History reveals that it is often the victims of religious persecution and suppression who understand most profoundly the good of religious liberty. The Golden Rule can lead us toward that good and guard us from creating or becoming the next victims of the tyranny of state orthodoxies.