When do your delusions become my problem?

The European culture that gave rise to modern American culture accepted the principle of freedom of thought only after bloodily exhausting the alternatives. The Reformation kicked off by Martin Luther in 1517 attacked the orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism, which attacked back, producing ugly and dispiriting wars across much of Europe. These lasted more than a century, concluding in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, by which the principal powers agreed to let each country mind its own religious business.

Governments were still allowed to enforce orthodoxy within their borders. But when the cross-border confessional detente didn’t bring down the wrath of heaven, people in different countries began to demand the same for themselves personally. Acceptance took time. America embraced freedom of religion at the federal level with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, but states could discriminate among sects and did so for decades more. Britain tolerated Protestant dissenters from the Church of England starting in 1689 but Catholics and Jews had to wait until the nineteenth century to exercise full political and civil rights.

Freedom of religion was a large part of freedom of thought but not the whole. Significantly the Bill of Rights makes no mention of freedom of thought. Expressions of thought such as speech and writing are protected, but not thought itself. As a practical matter, this was because the lawyerly James Madison realized that thought can be inferred only from its expression. More profoundly, Madison and his colleagues didn’t want government policing their thoughts, the final refuge of freedom.

In America the policing of thought has sometimes been a bother but rarely a systemic problem. Communists were scrutinized during the 1950s and more than few lost their jobs, but they weren’t imprisoned for their beliefs per se. 

Yet the politics of thought is about more than policing. The basis of religious freedom is the idea that your religious delusion won’t keep me from getting into my religion’s heaven. You can go to hell for all I care.

In practice, though, many believers do care about others’ religious delusions. They fear the corruption of youth and so press to have their religion installed in schools. When told that this makes nonbelievers uncomfortable, their response—not always overt—is that the nonbelievers should be made uncomfortable. The discomfort will encourage them to mend their ways.

Other effects are more subtle. Certain sects believe the end of the world is nigh. Persuading them to support investment in the community’s longterm future is difficult. In this case, as in many others involving religion, the imputation of delusion is reciprocal. Most people think the end-is-nigh minority are deluded, while the minority think the majority are the deluded ones.

The charges of delusion aren't confined to religion. Public-health authorities during the covid pandemic tore their hair at the conspiracy claims leveled against the development and distribution of vaccines. Here the model of noninterference in divergent thinking was sorely tested, in that the conspiracy theories caused many to refuse vaccination, and the refusals led to deaths that could have been avoided.

Climate change is another area where freedom of thought can stymie policy. With each passing year, fewer people deny that change is occurring. But many still refuse to accept that humans are causing the change. They accuse climate warriors of conjuring anthropogenic climate change to justify a deep-state agenda. The climate believers think the deniers are delusional or cynical or both. The result is that little gets done.

The free-speech answer to ill-informed speech is better-informed speech. The Bill of Rights was a product of the Enlightenment, and the foundational premise of the Enlightenment was that humans respond to reason. Delusion yields to evidence.

What if this is not so? Indeed, where’s the evidence that it is so? Delusion is a harsh word for a conviction you consider unfounded. A kinder construction would be a faith you don’t share. There are lots of religions on earth. They vary in theology and practice. In polite company in the post-Westphalian West we don’t call other people’s religions delusional. But whether delusion or faith, a religious belief system is rarely susceptible to reasoned disproof. In fact, it often appears that the more unreasonable faith claims are, the more tightly their adherents hold them. Religions start as cults, and cults distinguish themselves by their counterintuitive beliefs.

Can a pluralist democracy survive in a world where reason is devalued? How can I persuade you if you won't listen to reason? How can you persuade me if I won't? If it's your beliefs against my beliefs, will we not re-fight the wars of the Reformation, with party labels rather than sectarian ones?