Australia is talking about religious freedom again. Allegra Spender wants to restrict the exemptions under which religious schools make decisions about staff and students. Last week leaders of the Plymouth Brethren were called before parliament’s electoral matters committee, with their members’ support for the Coalition at the last election under scrutiny. Different controversies, but both raise a question we find increasingly difficult to navigate: how much freedom should we have to act on religious and political convictions?

The Americans, as usual, are having a deeper, more fractured argument. Their ‘New Right’ is embroiled in a bitter dispute over Israel, antisemitism and obligations to allies. The National Conservatism movement, created and led by Yoram Hazony, with a promise of renewal through nation, faith and a rejection of liberal orthodoxies, is in the middle of the fracture.

On the anniversary of 7 October, at a NatCon conference in Jerusalem, American Christian nationalist William Wolfe explained that conservative Jews in the United States should ‘know their place’. He added that he did not mean it rudely, which was so nice of him. One reason given was that Republican-voting Jews have less standing because they constitute a very small part of the conservative coalition, given many more Jews vote Democrat.

Well, yes. Minorities do tend to be small. That is why we worked out, some time ago, that their civil standing should not depend on how many of them there are. See especially the two Johns (Locke and Mill).

Wolfe also said that demands that J.D. Vance more unequivocally confront antisemitism is just an attempt to restore dreaded neoconservative influence after Trump. So for him, a serious question about principle had become a test of allegiance. This was troubling stuff.

The NatCon experiment is showing us what happens when you throw the baby out with the bathwater. In the well-intended, earnest enthusiasm for a new political philosophy to solve the problems of our times, the NatCons actually contend that liberty itself is part of the problem. In doing so they abandon the lessons that took our forefathers centuries to work out.

Yet the conference also gave us some clarity. To Hazony’s credit, he invited Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, an evangelical Christian and no freewheeling libertarian, who offered a compelling defence of liberty as foundational to virtue. That his restatement of elementary propositions upon which the great republic was founded should be counted by him and others as a brave excursion into the New Right tells us how unanchored from first principles the movement has become.

Here, and across the West, these foundations need defending and putting into practice, not reinventing or, worse, abandoning. Don’t ask the state to produce what only a free soul can give, Boreing said. Refreshingly, Boreing also challenged the argument that rebuilding our sclerotic and appropriated institutions from the bottom up would take too long. Planting seeds was the work God commanded, even if the harvest was distant. The objection that it might take too long did not relieve us of the responsibility to begin.

What has taken a long time to unravel cannot be restored by snapping our fingers or anointing the right people – ‘kings’, as he put it. The claim that there is no time for persuasion or rebuilding what we have lost carries an authoritarian temptation. It is self-evident to any true conservative that no single leader can carry the burden that must be the work of so many.

Many of these Christians arguing with other Christians would know their history, which warrants retelling. In eighteenth-century Virginia, Baptist ministers could be imprisoned for preaching without a licence. Some refused to apply because they said that asking another man’s permission to proclaim the Gospel was intolerable. Their persecution appalled James Madison, who was raised in and a member of the established – and establishment – Church of England. Madison jumped in with the Baptists because his commitment to liberty was greater than his loyalty to his own church.

When it was proposed there be taxpayer support for only certain Christian teachings in 1784, Madison joined religious dissenters in opposing it and helped secure Jefferson’s famous religious freedom statute in 1786. The Baptists said it was better to win the argument through preaching and persuasion, without the government trying to move people in a certain direction. Madison, who was deeply religious, rejected outright the idea that government could interfere at all with religious conscience.

Deep religious conviction therefore drove the demand for religious liberty, and its protection in America’s Constitution and First Amendment. Our own section 116 drew on that inheritance putting limits on the Commonwealth establishing a religion. These protections were not intended to extinguish religion, but to permit it to flourish. But it was a recognition that compelling obedience cannot manufacture virtue; all people must have the freedom to choose virtue.

Back in Australia, Spender’s Bill targets exemptions for religious institutions concerning sexuality, gender identity and marital status. But calling it protection against discrimination does not settle the question of religious liberty. Balancing different  freedoms always requires trade-offs, but how much room will remain for a religious school to practise what it preaches? Barely any, on her reckoning. Her Bill is oppressive for religious liberty, full stop.

Likewise, allegations about the Brethren’s observance of electoral laws can legitimately be examined, but members’ support for the Coalition requires zero explanation. What business is it of the parliament to demand that anyone explain the political activity of other individuals, because they belong to a particular church?

I would rather encounter a well-dressed, polite and friendly member of the Brethren church at any polling booth than the busloads of aggressive, foul-mouthed union bruisers that Labor deploys en masse to booths in marginal seats. If we’re looking for virtue, give me the Brethren any day.

Those bickering Protestants in the founding era worked out that no man or government could order or even cajole virtue into existence: human beings must discover it for themselves. If we want families, churches, schools, associations and other little platoons to undertake the long work of rebuilding our societies, they need freedom to do it, including freedom to hold convictions others dislike. We should not only let the Brethren hand out, we should applaud it.