My good friend David Blankenhorn is one of the most admirable people I know, a man who has worked to strengthen the American polity and nurture social peace and progress. I have eagerly followed his work and participated in some of his projects. But there is one subject upon which we disagree sharply: religious liberty.

David looks at the furor over the Red Hen denying service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and compares it to Jack Phillips’s decision not to make a cake for a gay wedding. As a social media participant, I saw many folks make the same comparison going in both directions: Those who favored Jack Phillips complained about the hypocrisy of secular liberals cheering on the Red Hen; those who favored the Red Hen castigated the lack of consistency they saw in the views of those who supported Jack Phillips.

In my view, being in business doesn’t mean that we throw out all of our convictions to become soulless creatures of commerce. If freedom means anything, it means freedom to choose the way we meld our deepest beliefs with the lives we lead among many others of diverse views. But to say that is, of course, to be forced to deal with the problem of Southern segregation—and indeed, facing that problem is key here because civil rights and gay rights are generally construed as being in the same category of rights unjustly denied.

But we need to carefully distinguish Southern segregation from controversies such as the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop. Segregation wasn’t something that individual merchants dreamed up as a system. It was public policy. Given the power of that system and its ruthless implementation, one should not be surprised that it required the sweeping action of a larger entity, the Federal government, to take it down. Social bias against homosexuality of course has existed for a very long time, and there were legal ramifications to the bias; but homosexuals did not face anything comparable legally to the vast, diabolical system of segregation. It should be clear, then, that such a plan of reform to end segregation is not a suitable template for application to our many social disagreements. It would be one thing if we lived in a nation of government-backed Republican or Democratic restaurants and hotels, or if Christians were attempting to impose some kind of gay apartheid. But neither of those things is even remotely true. Just as some Jews have recently complained that comparing Donald Trump’s policies to the Holocaust mocks and cheapens the tragedies their people suffered, we could say the same of generalizing the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop in any way to compare them with Southern segregation.

But let me try to be scrupulously fair. David is probably not arguing in that vein so much as he is trying to illustrate a specific point. I’m not sure David is really trying to curtail freedom through a national policy of serving all comers at every commercial entity. It seems to me that he is really talking instead about the general theme of virtue. So perhaps the claim is really that the operators of the Red Hen and Masterpiece Cakeshop lacked virtue. Even in that case, it is important to understand something about religious liberty that makes it different from an excise of virtue.

Not everyone is religious, but many are. Of that group, a subset practices their faith with sufficient seriousness as to see major life decisions influenced by their beliefs about God. So note that Jack Phillips and Barronnelle Stutzman (of Arlene’s Flowers) both had a history of serving gay clients. They saw nothing about their Christian faith that required them to refuse service. Indeed, they probably concluded the opposite in terms of the Christian virtues of loving one’s neighbor, being glad in service, and so forth. In each case, the controversy only arose because of their unwillingness to participate (by making a cake or arranging flowers) in a same-sex wedding. They did not refuse out of animus for gays or lesbians; they refused because of their scripture-based beliefs about marriage. The objection was highly specific, and neither Phillips nor Stutzman felt at liberty to do otherwise. It wasn’t a matter of doing what felt right or wrong; it involved committing an act in defiance of God’s law, as they understood it. They would have mocked their own beliefs had they acted differently.

They are therefore very different from the Southern segregationists of old. When the law changed, so did (most of) the segregationists. The restaurants opened up, and so did the hotels, stores, busses, swimming pools, and so on. But Phillips and Stutzman acted as they did even though the law provided painful penalties. Both could have lost their businesses and been ruined financially. It wasn’t a matter of good character or virtue; as it was a matter of faith and of obedience to a larger system of moral reasoning to which they were committed. (By the way, the operator of the Red Hen could throw Sarah Sanders out without any of the threat of the legally enforced ruin that Phillips and Stutzman faced.)

Now, we can live in a society that views such faith commitments as inherently dangerous, and refuse to accommodate them. But up until recently we have tended to want to make it possible for people of many faiths to live in our country, and to do so with respect for the differences in a free society. That is why John Courtney Murray called the religion clauses of the First Amendment “articles of peace.” David doesn’t seem to understand how Phillips and Stutzman could choose as they did without being somehow hostile or unvirtuous, but that likely was not at all the case. I’m confident that both Phillips and Stutzman would rather have just made the cake or provided the flowers and avoided the power of the state being directed against them. But they were faithful to their beliefs, which in the political form that the Founders raised to the highest level of civic virtue means they followed their conscience. There is integrity in that decision that deserves respect.

Some will object that if we protect religious dissenters we will have chaos. Some have believed that about conscientious objectors (often religious) to military service, too. But the general evidence from American life indicates that we have more peace and order rather than less from our accommodation of religious liberty.

The disagreement I have with David Blankenhorn indicates to me just how important the mission of Better Angels is, and really all efforts that aim to get Americans talking with one another civilly over their differences. We can trade barbs and slogans about bigotry on Facebook and Twitter and stir up a lot of self-satisfaction and hostility. The better course is to listen to people and think about their real situations. Phillips and Stutzman deserve a lot better than they receive from many folks. Better Angels could help.