Full exposure would mean placing one's liberal Catholic perspective in relation to conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant insights. It is striking, for example, that a book on ''the American experience of religious freedom'' does not confront the connection between sin and religious freedom. For many conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants that is the heart of the matter. For them freedom itself, not just religious freedom, is paradoxical rather than straightforward. Reinhold Niebuhr used to say, paraphrasing St. Paul.
People make a mess of their freedom.
They hide their self-aggrandizing behind soothing pronouncements. Contending with Niebuhr's liberal-conservative synthesis would be an excellent way for a liberal Catholic like Noonan to clarify his approach to religious freedom. Some conservatives will argue that human sinfulness makes a separate-spheres norm ill advised. They will say that religion, in its battle with secularism and relativism, needs the weight of official promotion. Niebuhr's general perspective allows a liberal to agree with conservatives about the power of sin while rejecting their desire for state endorsement of religion.