Since the Second Vatican Council, and not just in the context of the fall of Communism, the role of the Catholic Church in pressing for religious freedom is difficult to dispute. The international ministry of Pope St John Paul II is a case in point, advocacy coming straight out of the experience of deprivation.

Returning to the US in 2014, this historical perspective, the lessons Catholics learnt from losing, suggests two things. First, though it is crucial to guard against alarmism — it's not as if American evangelicals are being subjected to the fate of their spiritual siblings in Iraq — it does feel as if laïcité has arrived in the US 100 years after it did in continental Europe. Religious discrimination, as Kent puts it in King Lear, follows "an old course in a country new". To make the comparison will prove an intelligent, sensitive way for people of faith to respond to being culturally marginalised. It is particularly important to observe, as we have seen, how aggressive secularism has it in for the public presence of the Church.

Second, if the experience of losing taught believers about the reciprocity of religious liberty rights, perhaps this is a truth they now need to press home to their opponents. The Church learnt, to cite Sturzo again, that "if the Church demands [liberties] for herself, she supposes such liberties are general for all". Maybe now she needs to turn this around and ask universities, courts and governments whether, if liberties are general for all, they should be for the Church too. Maybe the US interdenominational Christian student movement InterVarsity should swallow its pride, overcome its anger and — with a gentle heart — say to the the Alliance of Happy Atheists at the Californian state universities, "We recognise your table at the freshers' fair. Will you recognise ours too?"