Arguing that the Supreme Court should reconsider its current jurisprudence regarding religious exemptions from certain laws, William Haun invokes a conception of religion’s role in a free society shared by James Madison and other Founding Fathers. Haun, in making this argument, contends that religious freedom is not simply a variant of the general freedom of expression, but stems from the recognition that religion is necessary for the flourishing of liberal democracy:

As our founders recognized, diluting religious exercise poses a problem for political liberalism; self-government presupposes certain moral virtues that religion cultivates and liberalism does not. In a culture that does not appreciate a distinct contribution from religious exercise, engagement with religion, both personally and in public life, will erode—along with the corresponding cultivation of religious exercise’s personal and public goods.

[R]eligious liberty’s place in American society’s common good . . . is not superseded by liberal values. Rather, religious liberty is a prerequisite to, and sustainer of, self-government. Duties to the “Universal Sovereign,” to use James Madison’s term, are prior to—and take precedence over—duties to the political sovereign. Ensuring space for the fulfilment of religious obligations provides an enduring limit on state power. [With the benefit of religion], a culture is inherently oriented toward the recognition of transcendent, eternal truths, which are the basis for religious duties.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, this makes religious exercise (unlike individual autonomy or some other theoretical liberal value) uniquely disposed to turn citizens away from the vice that, as our founders recognized, free political institutions can, at best, mitigate: the ambition, empowered by unrestrained, theorized ideals, to bulldoze any institutions or practices that stand in the way of utopian goals or base desires.

[Madison’s] Memorial and Remonstrance . . . argues that freeing religious exercise from political control will allow religion to “flourish”—not simply be tolerated. Madison would subsequently make this point explicit in an 1819 letter to Robert Walsh. There, he celebrated the enhanced “number, . . . industry, and . . . morality of the priesthood and the devotion of the people” that followed from Virginia’s disestablishing its official church and “putting all sects at full liberty and on a perfect level.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.