The author apparently cannot imagine a world in which most of its inhabitants order their lives around deeply held religious beliefs. In other words, he cannot accept the world in which we actually find ourselves. Hence his shrivelled, anaemic anthropology: there is no spiritual dimension to human personality, no innate yearning for the holy, no conscience informed by belief in a just and loving God. Consequently, people of faith can claim no conscientious exemptions from the secular dictates of government. Running throughout Why Tolerate Religion? is a grievously flawed assumption: that the modern State needs no religious or transcendent ideals to restrain its worst impulses. Instead, it is free to impose its own secular vision of society upon faith communities at its pleasure.

"To impose such things, is, in effect, to command them to offend God," wrote John Locke, "which, considering that the end of all religion is to please him, and that liberty is essentially necessary to that end, appears to be absurd beyond expression."