In response to all these possibilities, as well as to the very real temptations of
power itself, it is entirely possible that religious citizens might indeed come to embrace
the combustible position Fish offers them in the last part of the paragraph: The religious
person should not seek an accommodation with liberalism; he should seek to rout it from
the field, to extirpate it, root and branch. In doing so, they would be following out the
logic dictated by the metaphoric language of “competition” used by Carter and Fish alike,
but they would at the same time fall victim to the same serious misunderstanding that
plagues Fish’s argument, namely (and ironically) his “foundational secularism.” In broad
terms what I mean by this is that Fish starts from the concrete and the finite limits of the
world as it is. As a result of this, everything appears to be a scarce resource and all
contests gravitate toward a zero-sum conclusions. In that world, what Christianity gains,
liberalism loses and vice-versa. But, what if it is the “contest” itself that matters rather
than the outcome? For the Christian, earthly or secular “victory” is simply not possible.
Wounded by sin and with few exceptions drawn to it on a regular basis, the honest
Christian knows that the final “victory” is determined by God’s grace and human
“effort.” The Christian does not “win” the game because he or she triumphs in the
political arena on any given day, the Christian wins the moment he or she enters the arena
as a Christian with the intentions, means and ends of a Christian always before him or
her.
While there is a sliver of truth to Fish’s rather harsh critique of the work of people
like Stephen Carter, Michael McConnell and George Marsden, when he claims that
“What they desire is the full enfranchisement of religious conviction. What they fear is
the full enfranchisement of religious conviction. . ., and that they “set out to restore the
priority of the good over the right but find the protocols of the right—of liberal
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Convention