Free markets needs to be guarded in order to stay free – otherwise the first few to make money will spend that money cutting down rivals and gaining a monopoly.

In the same way, “liberalism” – or “liberal democracy” – appears to have started out being about freedom, including freedom of religion – but now the people who embrace those ideas want to make them into a religion – one so rigid it allows no room to think or feel anything but what you’re told to think or feel, which isn’t very “liberal”.

Of course, these words get thrown around so much – and misused, and appropriated – that it can be hard to know who means what by anything. But there is a noticeable disconnect between the people who today use the word “liberal” vs. what the word has meant in the past.

There is no such thing as a “neutral” structure – a perfectly poised equilibrium (would that be median or mean?) is not stable and will not last. Both groups will seek to appropriate and “own” the “neutral” structure, defining norms in their own language.

Healthy, properly functioning checks and balances – not a supposedly “neutral structure” – are what prevents excess.

I am nearing the end of a book project on authority, office and the imago Dei in which I reflect on these issues in more detail and at greater length. I’ll let everyone know when it’s published.

This may seem like an academic point, but it is practically important because the marginalization of religious discourse rests on this assumption that there are such neutral structures that by virtue of their structural necessity eventually require the marginalization of non-neutral religious modes of life. The US Supreme Court has and will be deciding cases that rely on such an assumption, e.g. whether a church can discriminate against state-determined protected classes of citizens (Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).

My concern is along those lines.

In the meantime I think you assume unduly that pluralist democracy necessarily assumes a contractarian account of political obligation. The marriage issue is, of course, subject to another interpretation than the one you give above. To grant the state the normative competence to alter the definition of marriage presupposes a particular “thick” account of justice leaning heavily towards a liberal individualism, which is itself highly contestable in a pluralistic society.

By contrast, many would argue that, in a democracy limited by constitutional constraints, the majority — or even an especially loud or entrenched minority — does not have the authority to alter a nonstate community such as marriage through the political apparatus. If I understand your point above, I think you would respond to this argument by observing that the majority is thereby imposing its definition of marriage on everyone else, including dissenting minorities. But this can hardly be avoided. The issue, as I see it, is whether such imposition can be a just imposition, to which I believe a positive answer must be given if we are to maintain a common legal framework binding on all.

To do justice to marriage as an institution requires some general agreement on its meaning. Otherwise it becomes an empty category whose content is entirely malleable. A lot of mischief has been and will continue to be done by those attempting to fill the definitional vacuum while claiming neutrality with respect to norms for marriage. A pluralistic democracy cannot simply be a jural free-for-all but must be grounded on certain basic principles, as Walter Lippmann and many others have understood. I am not convinced that the social contract is adequate in this respect. In fact, I think that over the long term it is fundamentally incompatible with the rule of law.

It seems to me that the normative distinctions you want for certain kinds of communities are incompatible with room you want in society for minority rights, including religious minorities. For such a community, their church is no mere voluntary institution, but the state needs to treat them that way, lest it privilege certain kinds of groups over others.

Something similar can be said of socialism. Common ownership is a reality of human life. Corporate and individual agents alike can be said to own property. The error of socialism is to assume that a single form of communal ownership can supplant all the others, squeezing out the huge variety of individual and corporate owning agents.

The problem with the current debate on liberalism or socialism is that few people seem to make this basic distinction. The Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck and philosopher D. Vollenhoven spoke of the distinction between structure (e.g., democratic institutions) and direction (e.g., liberalism as an ideology), which is relevant here.

If one added the creation of a privatized religio and church to the first meaning of liberalism, the connection between the two would become particularly evident.