Believing as it does in the (complex) unity and rationality of things, Christian humanism endows human conversation with a serious moral significance. It also has the resources to grace it with generous, "liberal" virtues: openness to being taught and corrected, since it sees humans as finite and fallible; readiness to confess conversational dishonesty, since it also sees them as sinners; respect for others as potential speakers of the truth, since it regards everyone as a potential medium of God's Word; tolerance of strange and unwelcome views, since finitude and fallibility preclude the identity of the familiar and the true; patience with frustrations in understanding, since truth is as much self-revealing as grasped, and since faith sustains the hope that what is now seen through a glass darkly shall yet be seen face to face; and forgiveness as a reaction to conversational injustice, since all victims are perpetrators too. 

Surely, however, this account of Christianity and its Anglican expression is, as one critic of an early draft of this chapter put it, "a tad idealistic". How does their vaunted liberal humanism square with Christianity's actual history of authoritarianism and repression? And how does it square with the Church of England's record of persecuting Roman Catholics and nonconformists, with its ownership of slaves in the West Indies, with its grudging admission of women to the priesthood and episcopacy, and with its persistent exclusion from these of practising homosexuals? 

The first thing to say in response is that no society can avoid asserting the authority of an orthodoxy against its heterodoxies, if necessary by means of coercive law. As we saw above, even John Rawls admitted as much of liberal societies; and as we shall see below, what Rawls admits, Martha Nussbaum unwittingly corroborates. "Liberal" is a relative term. Only totalitarian societies are simply illiberal; others are more or less liberal. Even medieval Christendom — now a secularist byword for violent, authoritarian repression — allowed public space for disagreement and tolerated the expression of controversial views. If that were not so, then there would have been no scholastic disputations in the universities. The difference between pre-modern Christian societies and contemporary liberal ones is a matter of degree, not kind. Modern liberal societies have their heretics too: sexists, racists, and homophobes, of course, but now also public critics of homosexual practice, as well as employees who express their religious faith in "secular" institutions. If such societies do not execute dissidents, then that is largely because they can take for granted a far greater degree of social peace, thanks to unprecedented wealth, health and political control. To be fair, it is also because Western societies have learned through gradual liberalisation that social cohesion can survive a greater measure of plurality than was previously supposed. Note, however, that the issues of social cohesion and national identity in the face of cultural and moral diversity are still very much with us; and while traditionally the preoccupation of conservatives, they now disturb the sleep of post-multiculturalist liberals.