Religion and the Liberal State Once Again

Nothing gets the juices and the comments flowing better than a column on religion and the liberal state. But before attempting a response to the issues raised by readers of my previous column, I would like to offer a couple of clarifications.

First, by “liberal” and “liberalism” I do not mean, as some posters assumed, a position on the political continuum at the other end of which would be “conservative” and “conservatism.” Liberalism is the name of an enlightenment theory of government characterized by an emphasis on procedural rather than substantive rights: the law protects individual free choice and is not skewed in the direction of some choices or biased against others; the laws framed by the liberal state are, or should be, neutral between competing visions of the good and the good life; the state intervenes aggressively only when the adherents of one vision claim the right to act in ways that impinge upon the rights of others to make their own choices.

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Oor | About Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami, and this semester is Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 13 books, most recently “Save the World On Your Own Time.” “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama, will be published in October. “How to Write a Sentence,” a celebration of sentence craft and sentence appreciation, will be out in January 2011.

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