So much for criticism of establishment from within the churches themselves. Much more considerable, in my opinion, is the secularist critique. In a nutshell, this is that since we now live in a liberal, plural society, it is unfair for any one religion to be privileged; and that public institutions and rituals should therefore be "neutral"  with regard to rival views of the world.  

My response to this takes its cue from an unlikely quarter: namely, the thought of the pre-eminent theorist of liberal politics in recent times, the late John Rawls. Rawls's later work is motivated by awareness that liberal values and the larger views that support them are not universally held, and that a liberal ethos is therefore contested and vulnerable. There will always be views that would suppress it — what he calls "unreasonable" comprehensive doctrines — and there is no guarantee that these will not prevail,  as they did in the case of the Weimar Republic. The virtues of tolerance, of being ready to meet others halfway, of reasonableness, and of fairness comprise political capital that can depreciate and that constantly needs to be renewed. Consequently, Rawls tells us, "the problem of stability has been on our minds from the outset".  

So a liberal point of view is not neutral. It is not a view from nowhere. Liberal space is not indefinite. It is bounded by certain moral convictions, which are expressive of a certain understanding of human beings. Some worldviews will not support a liberal ethos; and some will actually corrode it. So if a liberal ethos is to survive, supportive views have to be fostered by public institutions, and corrosive ones (somehow) suppressed: "The principles of any reasonable political conception," writes Rawls, "must impose restrictions on permissible comprehensive views, and the basic institutions those principles require inevitably encourage some ways of life and discourage others, or even exclude them altogether." 

At this point I need to make clear that there are different kinds of liberalism, and different kinds of liberal ethos. Some, like Rawls's, are humanist, in that they presuppose a high notion of objective human dignity. The libertarian version is not humanist, I think, in that its logic collapses dignity into individual autonomy and ends up affirming consensual cannibalism of the kind that Armin Meiwes and his willing victim practised ten years ago in Germany.