An excerpt from the review:
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Horwitz writes convincingly that the prevailing academic approach to law and religion, in which abstractions like equality and neutrality are taken as foundational touchstones for resolving religious liberty conflicts, has led to a stale and unedifying impasse. There were impeccable historical reasons for theorists of religious liberty to assiduously keep their distance from the black dragon of religious truth. Centuries of war and blood-soaked religious persecution are evidence enough. But the “liberal consensus”—one of whose primary tenets is that the state ought to remain resolutely neutral on the nature of the good and the true, and certainly on the question of religious truth—shows signs of strain from without and within. From without, religious people have for some time complained that the naked public square short-circuits any place for religion in public life. From within, assorted nonbelievers charge that liberal neutrality displays a pusillanimous incapacity to destroy what Voltaire knew needed destroying—écrasez l’infâme!
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