Liberal Politics and Public Faith

Beyond Separation

Kevin Vallier

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415737135
• eBook ISBN: 9781317815747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the eyes of many, liberalism requires the aggressive secularization of social institutions, especially public media and public schools. The unfortunate result is that many Americans have become alienated from the liberal tradition because they believe it threatens their most sacred forms of life. This was not always the case: in American history, the relation between liberalism and religion has often been one of mutual respect and support. In Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation, Kevin Vallier attempts to reestablish mutual respect by developing a liberal political theory that avoids the standard liberal hostility to religious voices in public life. He claims that the dominant form of academic liberalism, public reason liberalism, is far friendlier to religious influences in public life than either its proponents or detractors suppose. The best interpretation of public reason, convergence liberalism, rejects the much-derided "privatization" of religious belief, instead viewing religious contributions to politics as a resource for liberal political institutions. Many books reject privatization, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation is unique in doing so on liberal grounds.

Chapter 1
Public Reason Liberalism

Religion’s Child and King

Freedom is the primary concern of the liberal tradition. Liberals assume that persons are naturally free and equal, such that the coercive restriction of freedom by equals requires justification. Public reason liberals holds that the required justification be public, in terms that all can accept.

Despite their emphasis on freedom, liberals, and public reason liberals specifically, are accused of trying to restrict religious influences in political life. This work declares liberalism innocent by answering the challenges that religious critics have raised against it, and does so by defending public reason liberalism against its religious critics. Yet public reason liberalism is a new branch of liberalism, barely thirty years old. So how could analyzing its approach to religion in politics enlighten us about liberalism’s approach? The answer is that public reason liberalism’s treatment of religion represents, in microcosm, the treatment offered by liberalism itself. If public reason liberalism is friendly to religion in public life, then perhaps liberalism is too.

To understand why liberalism is seen as hostile to religion in public life, we must appreciate the point of liberal political theory. Liberalism holds that persons are free and equal and recognizes that they inevitably disagree about what is right and good. The point of liberalism, then, is to develop institutions that allow these persons to live together despite their disagreements. Consequently, liberals want political institutions to be impartial among competing conceptions of the right and the good. Liberalism seeks what Thomas Nagel calls “higher-order impartiality,” because it transcends disagreements among moral and religious views, hoping to resolve them in ways all regard as fair.¹

In light of this aim, liberals have always faced the criticism that their ascent to transcendence fails. Liberals, say the critics, are as sectarian as anyone else. Admittedly, liberals have not always handled themselves with grace in response. Many insist that their critics are simply chafing under the restraints liberalism imposes on their authoritarian and unreasonable impulses. Moral and religious sectarians must “[g]row up!”² In the name of fairness, anti-liberals must restrain themselves from using religious reasons to support or oppose laws. Citizens of faith must privatize their religious commitments.

So while public reason liberals, as liberals, want to protect religious liberty, they also want to restrain the power of religion in the public square. Accordingly, they approach religion with a divided heart. A political order must be publicly justified to religious citizens while preventing them from imposing religiously based coercion on others.

Public reason liberalism’s approach to religion in political life therefore displays a deep tension, as it claims to both serve and master religious forces in public life. Chapter 1 explains the source, ground and structure of public reason liberalism and outlines how its schizophrenic attitude toward religion derives from liberalism’s theoretical structure. Restraint is not necessarily motivated by anti-religious bias, but rather by the attempt to balance a series of theoretical concerns. This is important: if we are to exonerate public reason, we must first explain how religious restraint is not rooted in secularist bias.

I. Religious War and Social Contract

John Rawls, the dean of modern liberal political theory, introduces his Political Liberalism by arguing that liberal political theory developed under distinctively modern circumstances, specifically within political bodies that were historically characterized by a pervasive pluralism of religious belief and practice. Rawls illustrates this pluralism with a familiar narrative about the role religion played in the inception of Western liberal democracies:

What the ancient world did not know was the clash between Salvationist, creedal, and expansionist religions. That is a phenomenon new to historical experience, a possibility realized by the Reformation. Of course, Christianity already made possible the conquest of people, not simply… to exercise power and dominion over them, but to save their souls. The Reformation turned this possibility inward upon itself.

What is new about this clash is that it introduces into people’s conceptions of the good a transcendent element not admitting of compromise. This element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought.… Political liberalism starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict.³

Rawls here appeals to a conventional liberal story about the origins of liberal democracy. Several centuries ago there existed a religio-political unity called “Christendom.” Citizens of Christendom practiced some version of Christianity and took its basic tenets for granted. But once Christians were free to argue amongst themselves about which sect had the correct theology, they produced a century and a half of devastating military conflicts between Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists and Catholics that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War. This “holy cataclysm” consumed many lives until the Peace of Westphalia terminated the bloodletting, enshrining in Western culture and politics the core principle that religious difference never constitutes a just case for war.⁴

I am not sure whether this story is true. But liberals often tacitly accept it and have formulated their theories in response to this rather crude historical narrative. Many liberals see themselves as the first advocates of religious toleration as a political solution to war and disagreement.⁵ Religious groups for centuries maintained that a stable social order was impossible when citizens were permitted to openly disagree about fundamental matters, especially theological ones. Liberal political theory responds by demonstrating that political order can be achieved despite wide differences in beliefs, even on matters as significant as religion. While Thomas Hobbes and John Locke supported attempts to stamp out (some forms of) Catholicism in England, they rank among the first figures to argue that social cooperation could be achieved by appealing to the common reason of all instead of the truth of a particular religious tradition.⁶ Though a number of religious and political thinkers before them believed that political justification could be achieved through natural reason, these earlier figures did not grasp that natural reason leads to disagreement as often as it leads to agreement. Not until the seventeenth century did political theorists grapple with the problem of persistent disagreement over religious matters.⁷

The great social contract theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant) attempt to provide a nonsectarian justification of political order. They are concerned, first and foremost, with the conflict of private judgments. Private judgments inevitably conflict, and so we need some public method of resolving the ensuing disputes. As Hobbes famously wrote, “No one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie” and concludes that “when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand.”⁸ Hobbes knew personally the threat posed by those fanatical individuals who would co-opt coercive power to impose their views on others.⁹ The core problem of Leviathan is to provide a justification for a political order in light of the challenges posed by such persons. As Gerald Gaus has noted, many think that Hobbes is most concerned with the “foole” or the man who claims there is no such thing as justice.¹⁰ But in reality, the large majority of Leviathan is devoted to showing how those who believe in justice and follow their interpretation of it still cannot resolve their disagreements without the steady, awesome hand of the state. Hobbes tried to show that practical rationality requires transcending one’s religious view and accepting a public social arrangement where disputes would be decisively resolved, even with respect to religious practices and beliefs.

Locke identified a similar problem, though he believed state power should be substantially more limited. Nonetheless, Locke was just as concerned as Hobbes about moral and religious disagreement. Even though natural law is generally clear to all “rational Creatures,” they will still be “biased by their Interest, as well as ignorant for want of studying it, [and] not apt to allow of it as a Law binding to them in application of it to their particular Cases.”¹¹ We have reason to leave the state of nature because of the conflict among private judgments, for in civil society “all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties,” with the result that those empowered by the community decide “all the differences that may happen between any members of the society concerning any matter of right.”¹² Note the strength of Locke’s claim: all private judgment about political matters requires substituting public for private judgment. Both Locke and Hobbes sought to show that the practical rationality of each person, their private reason, requires submission to public reason. Private conviction is both the source of conflict and the source of resolution. It is because we disagree that we must transcend private judgment, and thus it is individually rational to take a public point of view.

Locke and Hobbes were so concerned about religious war and disagreement that they sought to modify Christian theology to neutralize its threat to stable political order. Hobbes’s long excursus into Christian theology and Biblical exegesis in Parts III and IV of Leviathan were arguably meant to show that Christianity was compatible with giving the Sovereign authority over private judgments about theological matters. Locke tried to transform Christians’ understanding of the social implications of Christianity. His Reasonableness of Christianity sought to inoculate Christian society against Christianity’s more “virulent” forms. The Letters were impassioned pleas for toleration, but included controversial claims that churches were mere voluntary associations and that doctrinal differences amongst Protestant Christians were unimportant. Locke even denies that religious knowledge is possible. On matters of religion, there is only mere belief. Locke advances this view in his famous Essay but repeats it in the Letter.¹³ Liberals must tame religion before unleashing it within the social order.

Much could be said about Rousseau and Kant, but for now it is enough to recognize that the social contract theorists saw themselves as responding to religious war and disagreement.¹⁴ These liberal political theorists sought to both respect and sustain religious diversity by limiting the reach of religiously motivated politics. But let us follow history onward.

II. The Liberal Approach to Religion in Public Life—Rawls as Exemplar

Despite intellectual successes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the nineteenth century social contract theory was replaced by utilitarianism, Hegelianism and Marxism. Social contract theory was not revived until after the Second World War, first in the United States. The most prominent figure in this revival is John Rawls. Rawls’s engagement with social contract theory led him to develop the intellectual foundation for the contemporary liberal treatment of religion and politics, though the standard treatment preceded him in both culture and legal practice. His treatment of religion in public life is best illustrated by the factors that led him to transition from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. We shall see that his political theory (the first version of public reason liberalism) displays the tensions characteristic of liberalism’s treatment of religion in public life. Fair warning: what follows contains new and controversial Rawls exegesis. I offer it because I believe that focusing on Rawls’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Public Reason Liberalism—Religion’s Child and King
• 2 The Religious Objections—The Faithful Revolt
• 3 Reconciliation in Theory—A Strategy
• 4 Convergence—One Problem, Many Solutions
• 5 Moderate Idealization—Preserving Diversity
• 6 Reconciliation in Law—Deliberation and Accommodation
• 7 Reconciliation in Policy—Public Education
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index