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But a test of liberalism�s commitment to liberty should be precisely whether it can tolerate the �intolerant��that is, those who make absolute claims for their beliefs. This in turn is part of liberalism�s larger test�whether it can function nonideologically, providing maximum freedom for contending viewpoints, or whether it is itself a comprehensive ideology that demands adherence�

If the Constitution respects not religion as such but merely �conscience,� then it follows that the state�s endorsement of certain controversial secular positions is no different from its endorsement of religious beliefs. The implications of this view are evaded by treating the First Amendment as embodying two contradictory meanings, which thereby gives nontheistic ideologies a competitive advantage. As Jesse Choper has pointed out in Securing Religious Liberty (1995), the �establishment clause� has no secular equivalent�no promise not to establish a secular code of belief.

In identifying the interests of the state, in formulating some concept of the public good, comprehensive liberals exclude religious believers as such from citizenship, even though a very high proportion of citizens define themselves as religious. A large majority of the nation is thus required to acquiesce in the use of governmental authority precisely for the purpose of undermining their own beliefs, even of impairing their ability to inculcate those beliefs in their children. By redefining �free exercise� and exalting the �establishment clause,� separationists have in effect �established� their own hostility to religion.

Extreme separationists justify restraints on religious liberty on the grounds that religion tends to foment divisiveness. But they impose no such restraints on divisiveness of a secular kind. Ironically, liberals who are quick to detect signs of political repression even in democratic societies now justify the restriction of religious liberty on precisely the grounds traditionally used to justify political repression�that full freedom cannot be granted to those who allegedly would use it to undermine the regime of freedom. It is, to say the least, paradoxical to restrict religion undemocratically because it is deemed to be insufficiently supportive of democracy.

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Writing during the Occupation of France by Nazi Germany, Henri de Lubac, S.J., proposed that the civilizational crisis in which Europe found itself during World War II was the product of what he called �atheistic humanism��the deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, in the name of authentic human liberation. What biblical man had perceived as a liberation from the whims of the gods or fate�the self-revelation in history of the one God who was neither a willful tyrant nor a remote abstraction�atheistic humanism perceived as bondage. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God.

This, de Lubac suggested, was something new. It was not the atheism of skeptical individuals looking to discomfort the neighbors. This was atheistic humanism, atheism with a developed ideology and a program for remaking the world. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas can have lethal consequences. At the heart of the darkness inside the great mid-twentieth-century tyrannies, de Lubac discerned the lethal effects of the marriage between atheistic humanism and modern technology. He summed up the results of this misbegotten union in these terms: �It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.� That is what the tyrannies of the twentieth century had proven�that ultramundane humanism is inevitably inhuman humanism.

European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences for European public life and European culture; indeed, that conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe�s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale. That crisis of civilizational morale, in turn, helps explain why European man is deliberately forgetting his history. That crisis of civilizational morale helps us understand why European man is abandoning the hard work and high adventure of democratic politics, seeming to prefer the false domestic security of bureaucracy and the false international security of the UN system. That crisis of civilizational morale is why European man is failing to create the human future of Europe.

Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Christopher Dawson took exception to the suggestion that modern European civilization was �pagan.� Paganism was rife with religious sentiment, Dawson recalled; what was going on in mid-twentieth-century Europe was something different. True, many men and women had ceased to belong to the Church; but rather than belonging to something else, rather than adhering to another community of transcendent allegiance, they now belonged nowhere. This �spiritual no man�s land,� as Dawson characterized it, was inherently unstable and ultimately self-destructive. Or, as the usually gentle Dawson put it in an especially fierce passage, �a secular society that has no end beyond its own satisfaction is a monstrosity�a cancerous growth which will ultimately destroy itself.� One wonders what Christopher Dawson would say today.