This is a good thread, and Jonathan Brown is certainly right that continental Europe isn't a good place for Muslims compared to some other states.

But I think he partially misidentifies why this is the case. There's a projection of Anglo liberalism onto the continent https://twitter.com/JonathanACBrown/status/1337991324826537984

when he says "Muslims are just minding their own business and protecting their rights, so the European opposition to them must be to things like dress".

Continental liberalism has always been about using the state to aggressively assimilate people into specific modes of life.

Whereas Anglo liberalism, whilst having tendencies towards that, also has the tendency that we're familiar with and which you wrongly project onto continental liberalism: namely "the state should leave people alone to pursue their plural modes of life".

Accordingly, what he's attacking is not the continent's failure to live up to liberalism, but the continent's living up to continental liberalism rather than to Anglo liberalism.

Our critique should be towards continental liberalism per se, not hypocrisy.

(Of course there is hypocrisy too: there is in any system).

Just to clarify what I mean about these two strains of "liberalism":

Liberalism per se = a valuing of "freedom" and "equality".

There are then two major strains of this, both present in all "liberal" societies –

but one the larger tendency in the Anglosphere and the other the larger tendency in continental Europe.

Crudely put:

"Anglo liberalism" = equality of all individuals and modes of life under the law, and freedom from the state to pursue the mode of life you want.

"Continental liberalism" = the state should "rationally" design and redesign society so as to promote freedom and equality – ie the most "free" and "equal" mode of life. State power needs to be used against individuals and groups irrationally committed to unfreedom and inequality

One example of this in practice has been "secularism" in the Anglosphere means that there should be close to a free market in religion, and that people should be free to bring whatever religion into their public lives as they want.

Whereas laïcité - as pursued explicitly by France and explicitly and implicitly by a number of European states - means the state ridding the public sphere of religion (and even the private sphere to some extent), so that people are "freed" from this "irrational" constraint.

My country, Britain, has both of these two tendencies of liberalism (as do all liberal societies), but the "Anglo" strain is stronger.

My hope is that Brexit will shield us from policies (and perhaps even cultural influences) shaped by the "continental" strain.

Understandably, there was a lot of outrage over Boris Johnson's newspaper article on the burqa.

However, the argument he was making was:

"Yes we dislike the burqa, but what makes us different from the countries which have banned it is that we give people the freedom to do religious things we dislike. And those countries will eventually adopt the true way of liberty too."

Given how the world is changing, the fact he understands this crucial distinction and sees identifying with the right side of it as a mark of patriotism and love of liberty is heartening.

(Whether that justifies the way he phrased this argument is another question.)

This incidence shows that even our more overtly "bigoted" senior politicians are better than centrists in several European countries when it comes to religious liberty and minority rights.

For those interested in these ideas, what the political philosopher @jtlevy calls "pluralist" vs "rationalist" liberalism I am (less accurately) labelling "Anglo" vs "continental" liberalism.

See this excellent lecture for an overview:

I'm primarily following Hayek in loosely identifying these two strains with the Anglosphere and continentalism.

But for a quick illustration, contrast SCOTUS jurisprudence on the 1st Am and religious liberty more generally, with French and Québécois laws and rhetoric on laïcité.

Canada is a good illustration. Anglo Canada is perhaps the best place in the world to be Muslim, French Canada is perhaps the worst in the west.

Though this isn't just France or Québec.

Many, perhaps most or even all, continental European countries *evidently* contrast unfavourably with the Anglosphere.

Austria, Denmark, Italy, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, etc – the list goes on.