 In Political Liberalism, Rawls yokes the question of the persistence of a liberal society to the question of its emergence. Rawls draws on familiar historical events to illustrate how his ideal society could emerge.  He notes that freedom of religion started as a “modus vivendi” (1996, xli), or practical solution, to the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants.  Both groups agreed to the solution because they were exhausted by the fighting, not because they endorsed freedom of religion for its own sake.  Yet over time Europeans came to endorse freedom of religion on deeper grounds than their immediate self-interest (xxv-xxvii). 