18. Church, State, and Higher Education — Vincent Phillip Muñoz

What does it mean to have a right—and who decides its limits?

In this episode of Tocqueville Talks, Brent Nelsen and Beth L’Arrivée sit down with Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville Chair in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, for a wide-ranging conversation on religious liberty, natural rights, and the American constitutional tradition.

Drawing on the principles of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the political thought of the American founding, Muñoz challenges modern assumptions about rights as absolute “trumps.” Instead, he explores an earlier understanding in which rights are grounded in moral reasoning, shaped by communities, and limited by questions of justice.

The conversation traces Muñoz’s intellectual journey—from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to the American founding—and examines how debates about virtue, freedom, and authority continue to shape contemporary disputes over speech, religion, and education.

Key themes include:

The meaning and limits of natural rights
Competing interpretations of religious liberty in American law
The shift from local to judicial authority in church–state questions
Whether the United States can be meaningfully called a “Christian nation”
The relationship between morality, law, and political authority
The crisis of higher education and the politicization of the classroom

Throughout, the discussion returns to a central question: If rights are the language of justice, how should we understand their proper use—and their limits—in a free society?

Recorded during a Tocqueville Center event at Furman University, this episode brings philosophical depth to some of the most contested questions in American public life.

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