Why Can’t We All Just Disagree?
Bettina Krause September/October 2025In 1813 a bookseller in Philadelphia unknowingly broke the law by selling Thomas Jefferson a book. In those pre-Amazon days, Nicolas Dufief served as Jefferson’s “book agent,” tracking down titles that interested Jefferson and arranging to have them shipped from Europe to Monticello.
The transaction in question seemed simple enough. A title from a French author had caught Jefferson’s eye, so Dufief duly wrote to the publisher in France and paid him $2 on Jefferson’s behalf. And that was that.
Until, that is, a few months later when officers of the law arrived on Dufief’s doorstep threatening arrest and prosecution for selling literature that was blasphemous and subversive to good order. The book Dufief had ordered, On the Creation of the World, or the System of Primitive Organization, apparently contained some rather alarming religious views.
Dufief appealed to Jefferson for help. In panic he asked, Please, can you write a short note affirming that I served only as a middleman in this transaction?
Jefferson’s response, which you can read in the Library of Congress archives, was far from the simple letter that Dufief requested. In fact, it’s vintage Jefferson. Climbing onto his high horse, Jefferson proceeded to do what he did best—expound at length on abstract principles of law, politics, and philosophy.
He wrote: “I really am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion: that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? And are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens?”
Jefferson says that he has been studying the new Spanish constitution, which names the Roman Catholic Church as the official state religion and pledges through “wise and just laws” to protect Catholicism and prevent the exercise of any other faith.
Those who are prosecuting you, writes Jefferson to Dufief, are doing precisely the same thing. They are giving their theological convictions the force of law and thus flouting foundational American values. They are upending the “liberty for which one generation has sacrificed life and happiness.”
(Dufief was less than impressed with this masterpiece of philosophy and prose. Thank you, he wrote back to Jefferson. But can you please just send the short note I requested in the first place?)
The Common Good Problem
The point is this: the American republic was the first nation to be founded on ideals of liberty rather than blood lineage or military might. The Founders dared to imagine a nation whose strength would rest on its ability to mediate dissent rather than enforce consensus.
It’s no surprise, then, that America’s charter documents aren’t blueprints for forging conformity—whether on religion, politics, moral values, or any other deeply held belief or worldview. Instead, they presuppose conflict. They have the built-in assumption that people will always disagree.
Our Constitution and its amendments aim instead at ordered liberty—a society in which citizens with wildly different belief systems can peacefully live, work, worship, and participate equally in civic life. Clearly our history shows that this aim has never been perfectly realized; but even so, it remains the true north of our constitutional order.
I was thinking about all this recently as I was reading a review copy of a forthcoming book called The Limits of Liberty, by philosopher Sarah Conly. Her critique of the idea of liberty is that it has no inherent value; that we have made an idol of it for its own sake. Rather, she argues, liberty has value only when its consequences are “good” for society. Liberties that generate “bad” consequences for society can, and in some cases must, be restricted.
The problem, of course, lies with her use of the always-contested words “good” and “bad.” Political philosophers who use them generally assume one thing: that their understanding of what’s “good” and “bad” for society at large is morally superior to any other.
Visions of the common good look radically different depending on one’s deep religious or moral commitments. For someone such as Adrian Vermeule, Harvard law professor and author of the book Common Good Constitutionalism, pursuing the common good requires “a candid willingness to ‘legislate morality.’ ”1 And for Vermeule, this morality is informed by both his Catholicism and his understanding of natural law.
At the other end of the spectrum, Conly’s understanding of the common good elevates “objective” social utility. Within her framework, for instance, individuals could sometimes be forced to limit their family size or be required to eat a vegetarian diet for the good of the environment.
For Conley, religious expression should also be curtailed if it conflicts with important social values. For instance, she entertains the idea that gender discrimination within the Roman Catholic clergy should simply be eliminated by law. “That sex discrimination is wrong is uncontroversial,” she writes. And besides, she reasons that “the idea that sex equality diminishes, rather than increases, the church’s ability to counsel, mentor, and guide makes no sense.”
And Conly is right. It doesn’t make sense—to her. In fact, most religious free exercise claims make no sense to those looking on from the outside, especially if their perspective is wholly secular.
A Greater Danger
Our Founders were unwilling to prescribe a common good in matters of religion. They rejected the idea of state-enforced orthodoxy in speech or opinions. They protected rights of assembly and petition. In short, they not only created space for dissent; they elevated it as a core constitutional value.
Our founding commitment to dissent is under fierce attack today. Academics such as Vermeule, Conly, and others may be providing philosophical frameworks for this, but these attacks have a far more formidable source: us.
Whether we’re on the left or right, we are increasingly committed to “winning” culture war battles at any cost and unwilling to look for commonsense accommodations when rights and worldviews collide. We label those we disagree with as “evil” and seek to censor uncomfortable ideas or viewpoints. And in doing this, we relentlessly narrow space for dissent—religious or otherwise—in American public life.
With our many conflicting views of “good” and “bad,” it’s always going to be hard to negotiate shared space. But our Founders understood a larger reality: the challenges—and dangers—of trying to enforce conformity are infinitely greater.
1 Adrian Vermeule, “Beyond Originalism,” The Atlantic, Mar. 31, 2020.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.