One Country, One Religion?

Michael Flynn, who once had a distinguished career in the military culminating in his leadership of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has more recently spiraled down into election‐​overturning and appearing at Alex Jones rallies. At one such recent rally, he drew headlines for his declaration thatIf we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.For centuries, even millennia, that was a commonly held view. But as I wrote in The Libertarian Mind:The Reformation contributed more to the development of liberal ideas. The Protestant reformers, such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, were by no means liberals. But by breaking the monopoly of the Catholic Church they inadvertently encouraged a proliferation of Protestant sects, some of which—such as the Quakers and Baptists—did nurture liberal thought.After the Wars of Religion people began to question the notion that a community had to have only one religion. It had been thought that without a single religious and moral authority, a community would witness an endless proliferation of moral commitments and literally fall to pieces.That profoundly conservative idea has a long history. It goes back at least to Plato’s insistence on regulating even the music in an ideal society. It has been enunciated in more recent times by the British jurist Patrick Devlin, who argued that “society is entitled to enforce its constitutive morality, whatever it happens to be, in order to prevent social disintegration,” and by the socialist scholar Robert Heilbroner, who wrote that socialism requires “a deliberately embraced collective moral goal” to which “every dissenting voice raises a threat.” And it can also be heard in the fears of the residents of rural Catlett, Virginia, who told the Washington Post about their worries when a Buddhist temple was built in their small town: “We believe in one true God, and I guess we were afraid with a false religion like that, maybe it would have an influence on our children.”