One of the moves that many evangelicals are making today is toward an argument for tolerance via the desirability of pluralism as a value in our public square. Russell Moore makes this argument in some shape or fashion every time he talks about religious liberty. Likewise Alan Noble and Michael Wear’s promising new project, Public Faith, explicitly frames pluralism as a social good to be protected. Andrew Walker, meanwhile, seems to have similar ideas, as he calls on supposedly more broad-minded liberals to rein in their more zealous allies.
The difficulty here is that popular-level western culture, if we are even unified enough to use that term, possesses no basis for such pluralism. Put another way, pluralism is not a self-justifying political ideal. It arises from more basic, elementary principles. The founding principle of the current regime, a radical individualism that denies (sometimes quite explicitly) the existence of any mediating institutions between individual and state, has no basis for such pluralism.
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