Secular liberalism is coping with a shock. Religion confronts it and alleges that its claims to neutrality are false. Counterintuitively, we find religious conservatives in postmodern mood. Like feminists and postcolonialists, they seek to unmask liberalism's universalist pretensions. Just as liberalism is accused of having patriarchy and colonialism structurally present at its birth, so, too, the crushing of churches was part of liberalism's founding mission. These challengers offer not only a historical claim about liberalism's partisan roots, but a philosophical claim about liberalism's mistaken ontology. The challengers argue that, willy-nilly, we all come into the world as “encumbered selves,” born into communities of shared cultures, values, and understandings. And religions are emphatically constitutive of many of those ethnicities and identities. Put another way, while we might have thought that all the critics of Rawlsian liberalism were left-leaning secular communitarians, we find that, for many, it is Christianity, and often of a conservative hue, that provides the substance of community. John Perry calls this strange congeries of anti-Rawlsianism a “turn to loyalty,” grounded in a recognition that abiding commitments of conscience and of shared ethical value may prove at odds with liberalism's dogmatic insistence that these be left at the door when we enter civil society. Irresistibly iconic is the recent discovery of Rawls's youthful engagement with theology.

Perry's book is about America's culture wars, examined through the lens of Locke, Rawls, and the “theocons.” It is an absorbing read, a little loose-limbed and discursive, but an illuminating entre into the theoretically serious branch of the religious Right and of Christian-oriented liberalism. For a European reader like myself, it is revelatory of America's current mindset. In Britain, it is surprising how limited is the political traction of a “culture war” of religion vs. liberalism. Perhaps it is because the coalition of “faith groups” is doing rather better than it sometimes pretends. True, gay marriage is causing waves. But, per contra, why do British secular liberals so tamely accept tax-funded “faith schools,” which are, for unbelievers, superstition on the rates and a form of state-sanctioned apartheid?

Perry wants his Locke not to turn a Rawlsian blind eye to religion, but to provide the tools for a Christian critique-from-within of liberalism, a version of Locke that concedes something but not too much to the “theocons.” Perry and his Locke are latitudinarians: neither Rawls nor Jerry Falwell, neither the “shrill whining” of the new atheists nor the “bigotry” of fundamentalists. His instrument is a Locke both Christian and liberal. We gather that the theocons and Christian liberals, where they do not demonize Strauss-style Locke for irreligion, tell us that Locke was indeed a Christian, and that a Lockean polity is not minimalist-rights-protecting but interventionist-virtue-promoting. The oddity here is that a wheel is being reinvented. Perry makes no mention of John Dunn's seminal 1969 book, which unveiled a Locke of profound religious commitment. The paradox is that, for Dunn, this made Locke alien and unserviceable in our world; for the theocons, the conclusion is the opposite. Perhaps it is the strange power of Straussian denials of Locke's religiosity in America that makes Lockean Christianity seem a startling discovery.

Perry has some astute readings: instead of the usual emphasis on the centrality of Locke's argument about the separate purposes of church and state, he takes seriously Locke's theological claim that toleration is a “mark” of the true church; he notes Locke's recognition of the propensity of people to subvert civil society through “pretenses of loyalty” to conscience; and explains Locke's forensic principle, apropos the sacrifice of cows, that anything done in religion's name is tolerable if, when stripped of religious ritual, the same action can safely be done in the marketplace. He wants to downgrade our narrow preoccupation with Locke's apparently Jeffersonian wall of separation, when he set out to “distinguish exactly” the business of religion and civil society.

Perry's history of Locke's context could be thicker. There is nothing here, for instance, on early modern arguments—many of them theological—in defense of religious coercion, nor any discussion of Protestant antipopery. And, although Perry seeks to distance himself from the anachronistic but “rhetorically indispensible” “custody battle” over Locke's legacy, his Locke stubbornly remains “the founder of political liberalism.” Yet, as a thoughtful survey of liberalism's encounter with theoconnery this is a vital and capacious handbook. There are some nice aperçus: we are not to imagine Locke saying “off with the visor of religion and on with the veil of ignorance”; and there are some jaunty paraphrases of Locke: “the church does not wield coercive power for the same reason that the Oxford Rowing Club does not.”

Perry insists that we must see that the theocons do enter the domain of public reason. That is to say, they do not opt out of shared terms of reference by simply invoking scriptural authority. They argue that this or that moral practice promotes or subverts the civil good, and that Christian moral precepts underwrite liberal foundations. Numerous aspects of, and authors in, the liberal/religion encounter are thoughtfully dissected. He discusses not only familiar names from university curricula in secular political theory (Kymlicka, Nussbaum, Sandel, Waldron), but also a legion of theologians, absent from those curricula, and mostly new to me: J. Budziszewski, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, William Sampson, Thomas West, Nicholas Wolsterhoff. And who would have thought that the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain would make such a comeback? I thought he just gathered dust on my father's 1940s Catholic bookshelf.