Ezra Klein

How much is the tension between the Catholic Church?

and liberals or liberalism, how much is it around what I think of as liberalism's first significant political idea?

Because so far we've been tracking this almost virtue that is a way for the powerful to think of themselves as developing in a way that is pro-social, if I were to be, I think, straightforward about it.

It's not a way to reorder society.

But this idea of generosity is

towards your fellow citizen begins to flower into an idea of toleration when that is more radical.

And toleration is a way of reordering society.

So can you tell a bit of that story, how we get from, you know, liberality to actual arguments for toleration, and then how that begins to put, you know, liberals in tension with religious authorities?

But before we go into the Catholic Church's reaction, I want to spend a moment on this because from where we sit now in the United States of America, I don't think religious tolerance strikes many people as a particularly radical idea.

It is taken broadly for granted.

And I'd like you to paint a little bit more of the picture of what is the context into which this argument is beginning to play out.

And the relationship to religion is like a fundamental divide in societies, and the stakes are very high for people who believe.

So just tell me a little bit about what is the situation into which this argument over religious toleration is entering.

I want to look more closely at something you said early in that answer, which is that tolerance, toleration in this framing is not just a nice, civically virtuous thing.

It's not about being polite.

That there is a theory here about the marketplace of ideas.

One of the other books on liberalism I've quite liked is Edmund Fawcett's Liberalism, the Life of an Idea, I think is the subtitle.

And he makes more than you do of the idea that central to liberalism is the idea that in a conflict-ridden, disputatious society, that you can turn difference into something constructive through argumentation, through the exchange of ideas, that tolerance and other things that are built on it, freedom of speech, et cetera, that it's not about being nice.

It is about this...

which sometimes proves out and sometimes does not go as well as people hope, that you can make disagreement not into something that tears societies apart, but into something that refines them and makes them better and helps people find peace.