The fine Catholic thinker and ethicist Joseph Shaw identifies the problems of the liberal state as the problem of liberalism itself and urges conservatives to cease appealing to the very principles that must ultimately destroy them.

To summarize, Shaw argues that the fundamental idea of the liberal state is to make no choice between the various ends its citizens pursue. It guarantees them their life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, without telling them in what that happiness should consist.

The problem, which liberals hotly deny, is that some ends, such as libertinism and addiction, must inevitably clash with other ends, such as the raising of children.

Thus, while seeking to protect some minorities (such as Muslims) from the encroachment of the state  under the rubric of religious tolerance,  liberalism also encourages the narcissistic hedonism that must inevitably collide with all conservative faiths.

Shaw points out the short-sightedness of conservatives in siding with liberals in attacking Islam, even though Islam actually has far more in common with conservative Christianity than with liberalism.

“The principles of public justice have become increasingly demanding. Government agencies have increasingly seen it as their remit to change minds and behaviour: to give a couple of examples, they have been concerned about the upbringing of children (for example, the campaign against corporal punishment), about the rules governing private clubs and associations (for example, on the equal treatment of women, or on smoking). We have seen an increasing impatience on the part of government agencies with churches which do not admit women or homosexual activists to the various forms of ministry.

There has been an increasingly evident policy of allowing certain groups to run themselves by their own rules. The two best examples of such groups are Muslims and homosexuals. So the laws on actual bodily harm cannot be applied to those engaged in masochistic sexual acts; the laws on public decency cannot be applied against homosexuals in public parks. Prosecutors are reluctant to look into the public, let alone the intramural or private, acts of Muslim activists who use threats or incite others to hatred or violence. And most famously, Sharia courts have been recognised as forums for arbitration, and as such their decisions have status in English law……..

(To the question Why has the Left promoted two developments in such clear opposition to each other?, the answer is to be found in the books of the ‘New Left’ and their predecessors. Basically, (1) is their essential agenda; (2) is tactical: it is simply a way of weakening the strongest institutions in society which oppose the essential agenda. Since those institutions are often Christian, they can be weakened by insisting on privileges for other religions, and on groups such as militant homosexuals who are irreconcilably opposed to Christianity. It is actually no surprise that as the tactical value of these other groups decline, and the possibility that non-Christian institutions, including Islamic ones, will start to assert themselves against the liberal agenda on social attitudes, the Left will turn on them without mercy.)…….

For this reason my sympathy has to some extent always been with the Muslims. They are attempting to live according to the principles of their religion in the midst of a culture highly hostile to those principles. It is not their fault that concessions have been made to them which has created an anomaly in the law. When I see secularists turning their sights on Muslims, I know that attacks on the Catholic Church will follow, if only to demonstrate that the secularists are even handed.

Allowing a community to live according to its own rules, within some limits, is actually quite a widespread historical phenomenon. Jews are the prime example of people who both wanted to have their own rules, and were permitted to have them by the state, as a community within a community, from the Temple tax enforced on the diaspora in the time of Our Lord to the original ‘geto’ of Renaissance Venice. There is nothing wrong with a group living by its own rules, if these rules conform to correct public principles of justice. What we are faced with today is a unreasonable set of public principles, on the one hand, and a set of group rules which include (or tolerate) cultural practices which are contrary to perfectly reasonable public principles…….

A principled response would be this: the primary focus of Catholic political engagement must be with arguing for a better set of public principles of justice. Only in this way will we be able to defend our own institutions, and only in this way will the political problem of Islam become tractable: the process of polarisation between heavy-handed liberal public principles and radicalising Islam can be put into reverse.

What this amounts to is the persistent attempt to make public principles Catholic. That is to say, we should work for the conversion of England.”