Confident Pluralism — John Inazu

Confident Pluralism:
Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference

Confident Pluralism argues that we can and must live together peaceably in spite of deep and sometimes irresolvable differences over politics, religion, sexuality, and other important matters. We can do so in two important ways – by insisting on constitutional commitments that honor and protect difference and by embodying tolerance, humility, and patience in our speech, our collective action (protests, strikes, and boycotts), and our relationships across difference.

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Reviews and Endorsements

Every once in a while, a book comes along that perfectly suits a cultural moment – not by reflecting the prevailing ethos, but by challenging it at the deepest level.

— Michael Gerson, Washington Post

John Inazu has addressed a question as old as our republic and as current as protests in Ferguson: with strongly felt differences, how can Americans live together as one people? In words both scholarly and inspiring he confronts the notion that we serve the good of the whole when we silence the voices of the few. As a law professor, he argues for stronger legal protections for voluntary, often dissenting, groups, and as a concerned citizen, he calls us to listen to and respect those with whom we strongly disagree. In an age of rants on social media and campus speech norms, John Inazu has shown us the way to a more inclusive and tolerant nation. Confident Pluralism is important reading for our time.

— John C. Danforth, former United States Senator and former Ambassador to the United Nations

Too many people view the freedom to pursue one’s beliefs and associations as important to their own interests, but not for the sake of others. In this timely book, Inazu shows how all people, even those with deep-seated disagreements, can benefit from these freedoms and live together in civil society.

— Michael McConnell, Stanford Law School

Inazu’s Confident Pluralism is a remarkable book that grabs by the throat the most profound problem we face: the question of whether we can live truly with each other, not merely alongside each other, in situations where we genuinely feel most alienated from, and even threatened by, one another’s beliefs or behaviors. With a good lawyer’s acuity and a committed citizen’s painful honestly, Inazu probes for the places where our differences are most tender—race, religion, sexuality—and demands that we address those concerns for what they are. Inazu ultimately hopes—as all our best public thinkers have hoped—for more from us than just resigned indifference. The book’s real bravery means it will make almost all of its readers uncomfortable at different points, and its admirable ambition means that it takes that discomfort as an inevitable, if unintended, consequence of its aims.

— Charles Mathewes, University of Virginia

Confident Pluralism is important both as a theoretical book and as a practical one. Inazu’s unusually thoughtful treatment builds on theories of pluralism to show how contemporary legal doctrine and civic engagement can and should put that pluralism into practice.

— William Baude, University of Chicago Law School

Confident Pluralism is a great and important book. It’s a way forward. Get it. Use it.

— Timothy Keller, author and pastor

We are a nation that has become deaf to the other side, to the possibility that ‘the other’ has insights, belief, ideas, or values worth recognizing and considering. So good for John Inazu, in his fine new book Confident Pluralism, for taking on the issue and beginning to create a legal framework to understand how we might move the country back to a place where it was acceptable to disagree and a public necessity to occasionally entertain the idea that the other side might have a perspective worth considering.

— Ken Stern, President of Palisades Media and former CEO of NPR

Much of the discourse around diversity these days highlights the differences that people like. Confident Pluralism unabashedly raises a much harder, and more interesting, question: how do we think about diversity when it involves the differences we don’t like?

— Eboo Patel, founder and president Interfaith Youth Core

If America’s diversity is going to continue to be a national strength, we need structures and laws that respect and facilitate diversity. Confident Pluralism offers a difficult but worthwhile vision for how to ensure the American family has room for all.

— Michael Wear, founder of Public Square Strategies and author of Reclaiming Hope

Inazu’s book should be read by all who desire a more civil, thoughtful society than the one in which we find ourselves.

— Carl Trueman, First Things

The key question at the heart of Inazu’s hope and pains is this: How might truth and diversity co-exist, sometimes in an interdependent relationship, sometimes simply surviving side by side? How do we live out our convictions—and protect those of others—in an increasingly diverse society, and not just increasingly diverse, but more feverishly diverse, more separated by creed and worldview, subculture and life experience, networks and information flow?

— Anne Snyder, Philanthropy Roundtable

American society is becoming increasingly diverse. As that happens, the public square becomes a crowded, and sometimes hostile, place. At times it seems there is no longer room for meaningful public debate. Inazu sets forth a framework for public square engagement that allows citizens to live according to their convictions while actively participating in a diverse society.

— Josh Wester, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission

Readers will find much of value in Inazu’s brisk and winsome vision for an American polity newly reoriented toward confident pluralism.

— Jordan Ballor, The Gospel Coalition

One of the great virtues of Inazu’s work is that it attends to both culture and institutions. Confident pluralism both prescribes the kinds of institutional and legal changes that would protect the groups and associations that make genuine pluralism possible, and it describes the habits and inclinations that would make those institutions effective.

— Bryan McGraw, Wheaton College

Confident Pluralism is an illuminating account of how the American experiment, in both law and culture (and the intersections of the two), might help us foster a modest unity of public goals. Inazu surveys relevant constitutional doctrines—the right to associate, the features of the public forum, the vexed legal dimensions of public funding—with a brevity that also manages to be thorough and clear. His discussion of civic culture is aspirational and guardedly optimistic, but not Pollyannaish.

— Kevin den Dulk, Comment Magazine

The 2016 presidential election, assuming both Clinton and Trump are the nominees, may well be the ugliest and most vicious election many of us will have ever seen. There’s no easy or quick way out of this. It will require some large number of Americans to re-think how we are to engage in politics in this era of rage and polarization. Toward that end, Inazu has written Confident Pluralism. It’s so unfashionable, so unrealistic, so out of touch. It’s chic to be cynical. Except for this: Disagreeing with others, even passionately disagreeing with others, without rhetorically vaporizing them is actually part of what it means to live as citizens in a republic. The choice is co-existence with some degree of mutual respect – or the politics of resentment and disaffection, the politics of hate and de-humanization.

— Peter Wehner, Commentary Magazine

Confident Pluralism makes an important new contribution to our discussion of pluralism and the public good. While Inazu attends to important systemic concerns about constitutional law and precedent, he also rightly recognizes that forging a common life in the midst of deep directional diversity requires specific dispositions of tolerance, humility, and patience.

— James K.A. Smith, Calvin College

Into this polluted political atmosphere comes a different sort of academic. Inazu is proposing a national cleanup effort to make our public life more pleasant and productive….We should not downplay the stakes. Tolerance, humility and patience are not the ornaments of a democracy, they are its essence.

— Washington Post

Inazu has presented an accessible and thoughtful case for pluralism in contemporary America. It will not convince all the skeptics. But perhaps it can start a conversation that will continue in the spirit with which Inazu wrote: confidently putting forward ideas, and considering alternatives with humility, patience, and generosity.

— The New Rambler

Inazu’s vision is an attractive one, and we would all be better off if our political institutions were less eager to intervene in our associational lives—and if those associational (and private) lives were characterized more by tolerance, humility, and patience.

— Books & Culture

Confident Pluralism is a reminder that—whatever our preferred groups and approved politics might be—bracketing disagreements and building friendships across divides is the essence of ‘diversity work’ in our fractious republic.

— Sojourners

Holding together a diverse nation of strongly held interests has been the great American project since our beginning. Inazu calls us to make it our project today.

— The Christian Century

Inazu has emerged as one of the leading scholars on freedom of association and religious freedom.

— Library of Law & Liberty

Confident Pluralism names the challenge we face as a society that is made stronger by being more diverse and more dynamic, and weaker by being more divided and fragmented at the same time. The answer to that challenge, as Inazu suggests, lies in taking pluralism seriously and framing a political conversation that focuses on our successes rather than dwelling on our failures.

— Yuval Levin, author of The Fractured Republic

We need a unity in this country that is not at the expense of our differences. And that is what Confident Pluralism is about. It’s finding what unites us in order to help us negotiate those deep divisions over matters that are very important in our lives.

— Charles C. Haynes, founding director of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute