Roger Williams, religious freedom, and the problem of common morality

At Reason Nick Gillespie writes appreciatively of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams, and sees him as a model for religious liberty and secular government that is still applicable today.

While it’s true that the baptist Williams believed that it was wrong – for impeccably theological reasons – for government to try to coerce belief, he did think that civil government should enforce the “second tablet” of the Decalogue. But this would hardly sit well with Reason-type libertarians and other secularists!

It seems to me that the limits of applying Williams’ vision to our time arise because he, like virtually all pre-modern Christian thinkers, identified the Decalogue with the natural moral law that was accessible to all people without need of special revelation.

But nowadays it’s fashionable to think that moralities are irreducibly particular and are outgrowths of specific traditions, rather than being common to all reasonable people. The problem with this is that, in a pluralistic society such as our own, it’s not clear what, if any, common morality that leaves us. And “separation of church and state” doesn’t settle it because, if there is no universal morality then we still have to decide which morality will hold sway in the public sphere. And, according to this view, all morality is “religious” in the sense that it belongs to a particular tradition.