If you haven’t seen The Lego Movie, go see it. It’s hilarious. The entertainment value is well worth your money. I expect that some of the pop culture gags in this movie will be referenced by nerds around their digital water coolers for some time to come. And the gags are almost all visual, so it’s going to be a lot funnier on the big screen than it will be in your living room.

Don’t go expecting deep wisdom, just go expecting a great time, and you’ll have one.

Now, to business. Do NOT read the rest of this article until after you’ve seen both The Lego Movie and Frozen (subject of my most recent Pass the Popcorn article over at JPGB). Major spoilers lie ahead.

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I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.”

And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?”

After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The thing I liked most about The Lego Movie is not what it triumphantly accomplishes – great comedic entertainment – but what it aspires to accomplish and utterly fails at. The people who made The Lego Movie are smart enough to realize that the central moral teaching of today’s Hollywood culture – “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” – has reached a point where it’s corny, stale and pathetic. Nobody buys that stuff anymore. It “sounds like a cat poster.” The makers of The Lego Movie aspire to breathe new life into it, to restore it to vibrant credibility as a source of moral storytelling, to resurrect it from the grave of mockery and irony and place it back upon its throne as the ruling authority of the culture. And after all their efforts, which are very impressive, they are utterly unable to pull it off. The bankruptcy of “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” remains, in the end, just as obvious as it was when the movie started. And seeing that made me happier than all the jokes in the movie combined.

The enemy’s armor is starting to buckle. Slowly, inch by bloody inch, the cracks are being pried open – by the intrinsic weakness of the enemy’s ideas as much as by anything we do. The Lego Movie made me feel more strongly than I’ve ever felt before: we can really win this thing.

The Lego Movie and Frozen are both examining what may well be the most important question facing our culture. They are not about the culture war as such, but they are about the core question of the meaning and purpose of human life that lies behind the culture war.

This is a powerful head-to-head match. The Lego Movie and Frozen are two of the most successful movies of recent years. They rank 96% and 89% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, a level that few arthouse movies achieve, let alone wide-release, big-budget movies made for mass audiences. Frozen already has a respectable rank among the highest-grossing movies of all time (inflation adjusted), and will probably end up tapering off with total box office receipts just shy of $1 billion. The Lego Movie is well on its way to a similar or (probably) even stronger domestic performance, although it remains to be seen whether overseas audiences (which have flocked to Frozen in huge numbers) will resonate with The Lego Movie’s highly specific pop culture references.

Neither of these movies speaks directly to the issues that divide us. The Lego Movie does not talk about gay marriage. Perhaps more important, neither of these movies is speaking from within a clearly identified cultural subgroup, so no one can “claim victory” based on the success of either movie. If you told me the people who made Frozen were Christians I would not be at all surprised, but if you told me they were secular Jews who had been reading a lot of Aristotle I would not be surprised by that either.

However, the deeper rift that causes the culture war – the issue behind the issues – is self-expression versus self-renunciation. The Lego Movie speaks for self-expression – “everyone is special, if you just believe in yourself!” Frozen speaks for self-renunciation – as Olaf says, “love means putting other people’s needs ahead of your own.” Or how about the dialogue in the climactic scene: “You sacrificed yourself for me?” “Of course. I love you.”

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What makes the juxtaposition of these movies even more profound is that each of them is aware of the limitations of its own view, and gives important ground to the other side.

One of the most important scenes in Frozen is the power ballad “Let It Go,” in which Queen Elsa declares her independence from the human relationships that have oppressed her. A few of the verses point us back toward to the larger arc of the movie’s theme – alone on the mountain, she sings, there are “no rules,” “no right” and “no wrong.” That’s going to be important later; it’s the first step toward her sister’s death. But the bulk of the song is strongly sympathetic, and rightly so. For the sake of her people, Elsa has been carrying a great burden her whole life – a burden that has divided her deeply and bitterly from her only remaining family. To carry out an act of love for her sister and her people, she has been forced to live in a world that is totally without love of any other kind. And it is totally irrational and unjust that this burden was placed on her. She is right to feel ill-used; she has been ill-used. However wrong her way of dealing with it may be, she is right to feel that she neither could nor should live that way for the rest of her life.

She sings:

Here I stand

In the light of day!

Let the storm rage on!

The cold never bothered me anyway.

Considering the injustices she has suffered, if your spirit is not soaring for her when she sings this, you have a heart of stone.

Frozen’s championing of self-renunciation over self-expression is so successful because it acknowledges the limits of self-renunciation. It upholds, powerfully, the individual’s need for dignity, justice and freedom, and it offers a vision of self-renunciation within which these needs can be met. It can win converts – and if you read what some people are writing about this movie, you’ll see that it is in fact winning converts – because it meets you halfway. You will not be required to renounce individual dignity, justice and freedom if you give your heart to what Frozen is offering you.

The Lego Movie, likewise, sees the limits of self-expression. The silly self-indulgence that tends to prevail among the professional champions of self-expression is mocked just as mercilessly as the culture of conformity against which they are reacting. As in: “Wyldstyle? Hey, are you that student I had once who was so insecure she kept changing her name?” Or how about when Batman turns on his subwoofers (“DARKNESSSSSS!!! NO PARENTS!!!!”) and Wyldstyle lectures Emmet: “This is real music.” Or the fact that the good guys need to learn to follow rules and work together as a team in order to win.

And then of course there’s Cloudcuckooland. It’s a place of no rules, where everyone is happy. But of course there are actually lots of rules (“no negativity!”), there is no consistency, and everyone is repressing the authentic human emotions that are inconsistent with the self-expressionist utopia – pushing them way deep down where no one will ever, EVER FIND THEM!!! (Thanks to the decay of education under the dead hand of the government monopoly, it is my duty to inform you that the name Cloudcuckooland is not original to The Lego Movie.)

But don’t be fooled by any of this. Make no mistake, the heart of The Lego Movie is “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” Like Frozen, The Lego Movie is about the relationship between the individual and society. The two diagnostic questions that reveal the fundamental opposition between these movies are:

1. What is the function of social conventions?
2. What happens to individuals who withdraw from them?

In Frozen, social conventions can be a source of injustice, such as the treatment of Elsa; however, at a more fundamental level they are the necessary context for love, which is what makes our lives meaningful. Consider Elsa telling Anna not to marry the man she’s just met – that’s social convention, too. When Elsa withdraws from the restraint of social conventions, she turns cold and becomes the murderer of her own beloved sister.

In The Lego Movie, social conventions can be a temporary help to accomplishing shared goals, such as the master builders learning to build together; however, at a more fundamental level they are a system of control that inhibits self-expression, which is what makes our lives meaningful. The good guys establish a small set of temporary social conventions in order to accomplish their goal, but their goal is the elimination of the larger role of social conventions as the permanent, taken-for-granted basis of shared life. Those who withdraw from social conventions become (for the most part) free and happy; these liberated individuals make temporary use of social conventions in order to re-enter the world of social conventions so they can liberate others from that world and help them, too, escape from conventions into the freedom and happiness of unlimited self-expression.

Consider two other issues that illuminate the difference. One is the resolution of the villains’ stories. The Lego Movie partakes of one of the most horrible Hollywood cliches: the villain is instantly transformed into a hero once he’s told that he’s special if he just believes in himself. He was never really evil, he was just never told he was a special snowflake. We know this because, astonishingly, he actually says “Nobody ever told me I was a special snowflake!” Well, jeez, buddy, if that was all you wanted, no need to destroy the world over it. All you had to do was ask.

By contrast, the villains in Frozen – even Queen Elsa – are really evil. Elsa is sympathetic, so to make sure we understand, the movie has to have the wise old troll make it explicit that yes, she’s evil. Redemption is possible, but it doesn’t come cheap. “The head can be persuaded, but the heart . . . ” It requires an extremely painful act of self-renunciation. The good guys can help with this – Elsa’s heart changes in response to Anna’s self-sacrificial love for her. But “it is the shedding of blood that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17:11; Hebrews 9:22). And, of course, two out of the three villains in Frozen remain just as evil at the end as they were in the beginning. God bless the makers of this movie for having Anna, not Kristoff, manifest the inevitability of justice. Wham! Right in the kisser! If anybody is ever so foolish as to attempt to murder my daughter, that’s what I want her to do.

A final contrast – small, but worth noting – is the two movies’ view of religion. This is unobtrusive in both movies, but unmistakable.

In Frozen, religious authorities are – naturally, organically, unremarkably and unproblematically – woven into the fabric of the social conventions that provide the necessary context for love. Do not miss the significance of the fact that it is a bishop who puts the crown on the queen’s head. For more than a thousand years that was the central cultural ritual reaffirming that all social conventions (represented by the monarch) exist to facilitate love (represented by the bishop).

Did you catch the view of religion in The Lego Movie? “The prophecy is made up, but it’s also true.” That is precisely the view of religion among the most philosophically advanced advocates of self-expression. It runs right back to the great master and founder of the movement, Rousseau, and since time immemorial it has been the view implicit in all the spontaneous mythological religions (you know, Zeus and Apollo and all that). The whole idea that religion is merely the superstitious holdover of a bygone era, fated to pass away inevitably with progress, was always boob bait. It plays to the prejudices of those who have been wounded by the church – and to our shame, that’s a big crowd of people to play to. But the really great apostles of self-expression have always been pro-religion – as long as it’s religion of a certain kind. Religion in its proper form is “useful narrative.” “These are stories that we find it helpful to tell ourselves,” as I heard one of them describe the Bible. Religion is entirely invented, and yet in spite of the fact that we make it up for ourselves, it still expresses – and uniquely expresses, in ways you can’t get from anything else – a deep truth about the universe. Bad religion is religion that claims to be a real revelation, the actual voice of the divine speaking to man. Good religion is “made up but also true.”

The effort to resuscitate self-expression, as I said, is very impressive. But it fails, and I think the failure is pretty obvious.

It was daring of them to go so far out of their way to make the message so overt and so corny. They see that only this will do. The message really is corny – in real life, enough people have been hurt by “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” that the bloom is off the rose. People have seen through it. I don’t mean people are in active rebellion against it; for the most part, they’re not. But they’re also not drawing any spiritual sustenance from it. It’s not inspiring. It’s not uplifting. The “useful narrative” is no longer useful.

This is what The Lego Movie attempts to reverse. They wear the corniness of it on their sleeves in order to disarm us. They get us laughing at it in order to establish that they, too, have “seen through it.” They’re in on the joke. Just as Frozen is not asking you to give up dignity, justice and freedom for the individual, The Lego Movie is not asking you to give up your sense of superior wisdom and ironic detachment from social convention. Don’t worry, The Lego Movie is saying, you can still laugh at cat posters. That’s okay! We do too!

However, especially in the scenes between the two human characters, the movie goes on to say: But do you see why that message was powerful in the first place? After all, there would have been no cat posters to begin with if “believe in yourself!” had not resonated with people at a very deep level. Something real, something deeply important to what it means to be human, was behind all those moronic cat posters that you and I both laugh at. Nobody laughs when a father comes to realize he has valued the integrity of his Lego collection more than he has valued the personality of his son.

And yet . . . and yet . . . the ending is just so obviously unworthy of the aspirations. First of all, the plot resolution is totally unsatisfying. The instant conversion of the villain into a hero when he is simply told he’s a special snowflake is the obvious crux of this. But it is also clear in the outrageously arbitrary transition of Lucy’s girlfriend status from Batman to Emmet. With Batman’s totally unexplained approval! Who would have expected that a movie so reverential toward Batman could so utterly emasculate him? The movie’s inability to give us a satisfying ending reveals, I think, the bankruptcy of the underlying worldview.

(And notice the objectification of women involved in her “girlfriend status” throughout the movie. “It’s totally serious, my boyfriend will beat you up if you make a pass at me!” And in the ending, it is taken for granted by all parties that the guy who saves the world is entitled to the girl. She is, from start to finish, a trophy. The culture of self-expression always ends in the objectification of women, because that is what the natural sexual desires of both men and women produce when they are not channeled by a culture of self-renunciation. But I digress.)

At a deeper level, the movie never really transcends the subordination of belief to irony. Granted, as I said, part of the strategy is assuring us we don’t need to give up irony. However, for The Lego Movie to succeed, we would have to walk out of the theater feeling, in spite of our irony, that we really can believe in ourselves. And this I do not expect to have been the case for very many people.

I expect so not only because of my own experience with this movie. I am too heavily inoculated against “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” for my experience to be a safe predictor. I expect it primarily because the movie produces no new language of self-expression. To pull this off they would have had to have given us a new way of saying it, a way of affirming the message that hasn’t been ruined by irony. But they don’t. Right up to the very end, they’re still repeating “everyone is special if you just believe in yourself!” and all the other tired old formulas that they themselves have just spent the whole movie mocking. They have given us nothing to think or say about the meaning of our lives that is not, primarily, an object of ridicule.

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton wrote that a civilization enters decline not when its bad things get worse, but when its good things lose their power – “its cures do not cure and its blessings refuse to bless.” The Lego Movie proves that the cult of self-expression has become, for us, the cure that will not cure and the blessing that will not bless. Frozen proves that self-renunciation could become – “for the first time in forever!” – the renewed cultural source of a renewed civilization.

Frozen. Go see it. Not optional. More here.

Robert George says there are a lot of Muslims who love their neighbors, and we need to make common cause with them. He’s right! But how?

I find it completely plausible that in his personal interactions with the people he describes, George has encountered forms of Islam that both preach and practice love for neighbor. But that sort of Islam does not appear to have achieved a high level of public, institutional expression in the United States. Indeed, it is a reliable guideline that the larger and more prestigious an Islamic organization is, the more frequently it is quoted or featured in the major media, and (above all) the more money it has, the fewer degrees of separation one seems to find between that group and organized terrorism, or at minimum organized ideological networks that openly preach and practice hatred of neighbor. While there are individual voices standing against these organizations, for most of us there is no practical path to build alliances with “Islam” so long as these are the voices of individuals and not organizations. Those of us who have not had extensive personal experience with Islam (of any kind) are left without many practical options for making common cause.

This situation is, of course, a by-product of many decades of careful network-building and ruthless squelching of internal dissent by the militant enemies of civilization, funded by oil money. I would therefore submit for consideration the following proposition: that the first and most practical way most of us can make common cause with Muslims who love their neighbors is by doing more to oppose those who hate their neighbors. To do so is neither for nor against Islam, but it is emphatically to be for Muslims.

Few have suffered as much at the hands of Islamic hate groups as Muslims who refuse to participate in their hate; the reasons for this are obvious. Standing up to these oppressors is not only the right thing to do for its own sake, it is the only way to create space for the emergence of high-profile institutions representing an Islam that preaches and practices love of neighbor. The emergence of such institutions is, in turn, the only social condition within which most of us will be able to make common cause with that sort of Islam.

Moreover, this course of action does not require us to get involved in complex theological disputes. We need not resolve the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God (on which the divines of the Second Vatican
Council, as quoted by George, seem to be in some tension with passages like I John 2:23), or to what extent love for neighbor is at home with or at odds with “authentic” Islam, to know that the jackboot of the bloodthirsty oppressor ought to be removed, posthaste, by force if necessary, from the neck of the innocent.

Finally, it has the merit of being something that we have some idea how to do. Islam that preaches and practices love for neighbor is something that most of us do not have much opportunity to come into direct contact with. But we know, more or less, who the oppressors are, and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of ways we could be more effectively opposing them – if we decided that were something we have some responsibility to be doing.

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At the website ThinkProgress, whose politics are exactly what you’d expect, Alyssa Rosenberg says the marriage of Beyoncé and Jay-Z makes “the case for marriage that conservatives can’t make”:

Rather than posing choices between these various elements of her life, or acting as if the math that leads up to having it all is impossibly complicated, Beyoncé is an argument that a great, mutually supportive marriage can be a context that makes all of these things easier to pull off.

And that’s what makes Jay-Z’s appearance on stage with Beyoncé at the Grammys so lovely. Mrs. Knowles-Carter doesn’t need her husband with her to dominate a performance space. But she chose their duet. And what we got was a performance that’s explicitly about what a good time they’re having together. Everyone else might get to look at her curves–a reminder that dressing up and showing off doesn’t have to end after marriage, either–but  Jay-Z’s the one who gets to look a little goofy checking her out in wonderment that she’s his, the one who actually gets to touch. She gets to own the stage by herself, first, and Jay-Z shows up when the song requires his presence, at which point Bey cedes the stage to him before taking it back. There’s time for them both to shine. And at the end, Jay-Z throws his arm around his wife and squeezes her, and her head inclines towards his shoulder: there’s room for mutual pride and tenderness  here, too.

This may not be the vision of marriage conservatives intended to try to promote. And it’s absolutely a more aspirational, exciting good than the idea that marriage will discipline wayward men or provide support for women who can’t manage economically on their own. But if conservatives want to sell Americans on marriage, maybe they have to talk more about the bliss half of wedded bliss, to think about the desire part of making marriage desirable. And maybe the entertainment industry that Douthat’s singled out as the enemy of  marriage has something to add to the case for marital happiness. If marriage is a product that conservatives desperately want to sell, the smartest thing they could do right now is to hire Beyoncé and Jay-Z as a product spokescouple.

In his daily email (subscribe!) Jim Geraghty zeros in on “This may not be the vision of marriage conservatives intended to try to promote” and demands to know:

Why not? Is there some conservative argument against “mutual pride and tenderness”? Quotes like this make me wonder if the writer knows any conservatives, or at least any married conservatives.

But I’m afraid Rosenberg is more or less right, at least for the moment. The problem is this part:

Everyone else might get to look at her curves–a reminder that dressing up and showing off doesn’t have to end after marriage, either–but  Jay-Z’s the one who gets to look a little goofy checking her out in wonderment that she’s his, the one who actually gets to touch.

That is the part “conservatives” cannot advocate, at least for the moment. This is because, historically, almost all forms of “conservatism” have included a broad commitment to civilized standards of sexual modesty. Many of them have risen even higher than “civilized” to something roughly approximating a Christian standard.

There are three things to note here. One is that Rosenberg’s progressive vision can accommodate all of the most basic structures of marriage. She refuses other restraints that are needed for humane sexuality, but at least she accepts the restraints that constitute marriage itself (that is, the formation of the household unit). There is great hope for a cultural outcome other than all-out war between advocates of marriage in its natural form and advocates of complete individual license. There is a lot of ground to build compromise upon.

The second thing is that, right now, the possibility of compromise is precluded because Rosenberg is convinced that the disagreements we really do have must necessarily drive us absolutely apart. She can’t see the common ground because for her, anyone who believes in the higher standard of behavior that “conservatives” and Christians have upheld (in their different ways) must be an enemy.

Third, the conservative Geraghty doesn’t see what about Rosenberg’s account would set her crosswise with “conservatives.” This may be a sign of a larger movement on the right away from civilized standards of sexuality on such matters as modesty and (you’ve already seen where this is going, no doubt) other issues like homosexuality. I don’t want to say it definitely is, but we should consider the possibility. As Christians increasingly flee political engagement and (concurrently) “conservatism” redefines its identity in a manner more conducive to political victory in the new cultural landscape, it may be that “conservatism” will stop placing a high priority on the broader scope of sexual mores. A pro forma gesture in the direction of these mores might survive such a change, but it wouldn’t matter.

There is no possibility that “conservatism” will cease to champion the family unit as essential to the future of our civilization, and there is much hope that an alliance with progressives can built that would re-establish the core structures of marriage and household as pillars of a shared culture. But this may come at the cost of the culture (left and right) permanently accepting the lowering of broader sexual mores.

Christians should help cultivate common ground on marriage, but they should also watch out that they don’t become captive to “conservatism,” which may not be able to embrace such a compromise without simultaneously moving in the wrong direction on broader sexual mores. I don’t know if it’s possible to simultaneously work to promote common ground on marriage and work to prevent “conservatives” from lowering their sexual standards. I hope it is. But either way, Christians need to be entrepreneurial about finding other avenues besides politics to infuse the highest kinds of sexual life into the culture.

Not depicted: Satanism

Jonah Goldberg writes today about a case that was already on my radar. Oklahoma has a monument to the Ten Commandments near its statehouse, and a Satanist group has petitioned the state to add a statue of Baphomet:

“The statue will serve as a beacon calling for compassion and empathy among all living creatures,” Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the Satanic Temple, said in a prepared statement.

And unlike the Ten Commandments, Baphomet would serve a public function:

“The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.”

The press release includes an artist’s rendering in which smiling children sit on Satan’s lap and gaze up at his grim, more or less blank-faced visage.

This is clearly a stunt, intended to expose the hypocrisy of current constitutional law on public displays of religion. In this, it succeeds brilliantly. The current state of the law really is ridiculous; the only way to conclude that it is not rampantly hypocritical would be to argue that it is now so incoherent and irrational that it really could not rise to the level of something as coherent as hypocrisy. Say what you want about total chaos, it’s not hypocritical.

What we need is a policy that simultaneously recognizes three truths:

1) Religion is one of the fundamental components of human life, and in particular it is one that cannot be walled off into a separate compartment. The structures of civilization (political, economic, familial, etc.) cannot be legitimate if they are not moral, and they cannot be moral without being intimately tied to religion.

2) Unity in religion is neither expected nor necessary for society. We can agree on the basic moral premises of society, which are necessary for a shared life and shared institutions, without agreeing about everything metaphysical.

3) Nonetheless, not everything that is called a “religion” is equally consistent with the moral agreement we need to share a life, a civilization and its institutions.

It is the third point that is the most uncomfortable for us now, but we cannot escape it, as the Satanists are reminding us in Oklahoma. (Actually the Satanist group is headquartered in New York, and I wonder if that will not have some bearing on the outcome of the case.)

Satanism is nothing if it is not a rejection of the moral assumptions that underlie the shared institutions of our society. Believe in one God or twenty gods or a vast divine force, but you can’t affirm the foundations of American civilization if you think the purpose of life is to please yourself.

The fact that the Satanists dare to invoke “compassion” shows how the freedom to make up the meaning of words for yourself is right at the heart of this problem. Our institutions urgently need to recover the moral courage to have a point of view about what concepts like compassion do and don’t mean.

Eisenhower said in 1952 that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” That does point to how this failure to find a way of distinguishing religions without giving up on religious freedom has been an unsolved problem in American history. On the other hand, read the full statement and you’ll see that the problem was never as bad as all that:

And this is how [the Founding Fathers in 1776] explained those: ‘we hold that all men are endowed by their Creator…’ not by the accident of their birth, not by the color of their skins or by anything else, but ‘all men are endowed by their Creator.’ In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with ‘all men are created equal.’

Read that last sentence again: It must be a religion with “all men are created equal.”

This does not mean we must conclude, as Locke did, that those who deny the moral foundations of a free and virtuous society have no right to advocate their view. However, at the very least, religions and viewpoints that are at war with the moral foundations of our culture should not enjoy equal rights to public recognition.

We cannot make the public square neutral by stripping it of all religious symbols; neither can we make it neutral by welcoming them all indiscriminately. We cannot make the public square neutral at all. What we can do is make it welcoming of all who affirm our moral foundations.