Religion & Law

Alan Wolfe has an interesting review of E.D. Hirsch's new book, The Making of Americans.  Apparently Hirsch, as characterized by Wolfe, takes issue with school choice as a "conservative" movement:

School choice by its very nature militates against one of his major recommendations: the adoption of a common curriculum that all students must learn. Libertarianism, his analysis reminds us, is not the same as conservatism. Unquestioning reliance on the free market puts the individual and his or her immediate desires at the center of the moral universe, not unlike the cultural and moral liberationism celebrated during the 1960s. If the New Left was particularistic rather than universalistic, so are advocates of school choice. By contrast, Hirsch argues that we need more common space and not the invasion of the schools by consumer culture.

And then Wolfe adds:

[Religious schools] are not part and parcel of the common culture. Even if they are not narrowly sectarian, they still teach from a particular point of view. In doing so, their insistence on Christian or religious ways of knowing borrows from advocates of identity politics in the secular realm who insist that women or racial minorities have voices that must be heard in a multicultural curriculum. I for one do not believe that there would have been a religious revival in the 1980s without the countercultural revival of the 1960s as a model. If our common culture is fractured, religious communities must share the blame.

I agree that school choice need not be portrayed as "conservative," and that many Christians who are active in the public square today owe a lot to the identity politics of the past.  But the purported tension between the emerging pluralism in the educational sphere (of which I'm a fan) and a "common culture" is overstated, I fear.  There is a lot to say in response, but not having read the book yet, I'll limit myself to pointing out that a common culture is not a uniform culture, and that a shared civic culture is not necessarily precluded by a rich diversity of communities within that culture.  If we think of American civic culture as the lowest common denominator in terms of shared ideals about liberty, equality, and virtue, why would we need to discourage communities from inculcating values that transcend -- without necessarily defying or ignoring -- the lowest common denominator?  In that regard, does religious diversity itself threaten our common culture?