Although she is a proudly American opponent of religious establishment, Martha Nussbaum inadvertently corroborates this argument. On the one hand, she holds that, in affirming a particular religion as orthodox, a state necessarily reduces dissenters to second-class citizens, denying their basic equality and sanctioning "dignitary affronts in the symbolic realm".  "Our [American] ‘fixed star'", she tells us, "is that no...[religious] orthodoxies are admissible." Her solution is essentially Rawlsian: "The hope is that public institutions can be founded on principles that all can share, no matter what their religion. Of course these institutions will have an ethical content, prominently including the idea of equal respect itself. But they should not have a religious content." This amounts to Rawls's "overlapping consensus", comprising a set of "free-standing" moral principles endorsed by a variety of comprehensive doctrines.  

On the other hand, and without any visible embarrassment, Nussbaum admits that respect for individual conscience does not mean that every religion and worldview must be equally respected by government. "Extreme views, which contradict or threaten the very foundations of the liberal constitutional order and the equality of citizens within it, must be resisted — certainly if they seek to find practical embodiment, but even if their mere verbal expression becomes a threat. Such views "will not...be able to present their ideas in the political sphere on an equal basis with other ideas". Nevertheless, Nussbaum herself believes that in such a situation,"people [as distinct from their menacing deeds and words] are all respected as equals".   

What Nussbaum fails to notice is that her preferred liberal polity would itself establish an orthodoxy from which dissenters — be they sexists or racists or xenophobes or simply religious believers who hold that the public acknowledgement of God is basic to political health — will feel alienated. Some of them might even feel that their dignity is being affronted. According to Nussbaum, however, they need not. Ironically, she confirms that an established orthodoxy of some sort is actually inevitable; that some are bound to find themselves more or less on the wrong side of it; and that contradiction, even suppression, of dissent need not amount to an offence against equal dignity.    

The justification for endowing the Church of England with the privilege of establishment, which I have so far advanced, is three-fold: first, that it represents a worldview that is supportive of a liberal humanist ethos; second, that its particular form of establishment has not involved civil and political penalties for non-Anglicans for well over a century;  and third, that its public orthodoxy can contradict the worldviews of some citizens without offending against their equal dignity. A fourth ground, which I add now, is that the Anglican establishment is supported more or less actively by a majority of citizens. I add this simply because it would be politically difficult (although neither impossible nor irrational) to maintain establishment in the face of an actively hostile democratic majority.