When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of The Fountainhead. Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.

In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Rep. Barney Frank, Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.

Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.

But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians dont always like to acknowledge. When government expands, its often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. 

Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we do together as a government, in many cases, the fewer things were allowed to do together in other spheres.

Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that cant go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.

But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.

This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions hospitals, schools and charities in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. 

A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they dont want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is OK, but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying no Protestants need apply.

The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicisms emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their governments communitarianism leaves no room for their churchs communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence.

Critics of the administrations policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But whats at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White Houses decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesnt share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Churchs position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White Houses decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholic hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.

The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reforms critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But its also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

Ross Douthat is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com.