11 Why We Can Talk to Each Other: A Response to Robin Lovin

Those guided by the exemplar of the witness, he tells us, regard the quest for such public reasons as both impossible and as inherently kowtowing. I agree with Lovin that the witness approach has much to teach us both about the inescapable temptations to tacit or craven accommodation that Christians face as they engage in liberal democratic politics, and about the extent to which even liberal political systems—for Hauerwas, perhaps especially liberal systems—deviate from what we believe are the claims of Christ. I also agree with Lovin’s implied critique of the pessimistic, even paralyzing, conclusions which this approach too often draw regarding the scope for constructive, authentic Christian political participation in a liberal democracy.

By contrast, Lovin contends, realists of various stripes have demonstrably succeeded in employing public reasons, in large measure because they recognize how religious discourse in the past has actually shaped the terms of public discourse in the liberal democracies we now inherit. Our public language is, even today, still laden with meanings originating from religion, so, the realist tells us, let’s make the best possible use of such meanings. Realism makes few specific demands on liberal democracy beyond the requirement of formal openness to all, and readily finds public reasons through which to express its religiously motivated concerns.

In clear contrast, Christians following the example of the prophet work to stretch the current boundaries of formal liberal toleration by insisting on full inclusiveness, both as a mandate of justice and also as a condition of long-term political stability. “Making the best use” of existing public language, for this approach, means “eliciting its sharpest prophetic edge.” The prophet will also go beyond realism in requiring openness to the use of explicitly religious reasons, especially for those moments where these alone will bring society to a needed moment of “conversion.”

Lovin here ventures a claim which is decisive for his argument: openness to prophetic challenge (or indeed to realist “leavening”) will only be possible if the political community holds a certain view of itself, that is, as an amalgam of divergent historical forces and moral motivations not held together by a single unifying, hegemonic narrative. Since “in politics we are dealing with history and not theology,” we need an open space for political dialogue not closed off by religious unity.[1] Both “realistic” and “prophetic” religious citizens will try to appeal to public reasons in public discourse where they can, but may at certain pivotal junctures need to invoke religious reasons which may not be public, but which should be allowed nonetheless by a political community mindful of its ambiguous, pluriform character. So, the possibility of religious citizens being able to identify and deploy public reasons depends on political communities eschewing any monistic imposition of a particular comprehensive doctrine and accepting that pluralism is the necessary corollary of acknowledging their limits.

While I essentially agree with Lovin’s conclusion, I think there is something else to be said about the nature of political communities which may complement his analysis but which tends to be elided in many discussions of the role of religious (or other “comprehensive”) reasons in political discourse, both among political theologians and political philosophers. Lovin approaches the question of whether religion can and should provide public reasons by asking whether various religious advocates regard themselves as advancing reasons which are publicly accessible. We might say that he enters the question from the side of the subjective intentions of religious citizens. Publicness is then defined as intersubjectivity: a reason which counts as “public” is one which successfully secures reciprocal intelligibility across the “religious-secular” divide (or, by implication, across the divides between any comprehensive doctrines). And Lovin reminds us, first, that many religious citizens—especially realists and prophets, but perhaps even witnesses [2] —are, as a matter of fact, not content simply to retell their tribal narratives within their own religious communities, but intend to address themselves to the public at large; and, second, that for reasons of history they often succeed in actually being heard by the public at large.

I want to suggest, however, that the reasons why they succeed in being heard are not only historical. Suppose we ask the question, not what are the subjective intentions of religious citizens as they utilize the historically accumulated resources available to them in order to discourse publicly, or what are the subjective capacities of their secular fellow citizens to receive such offerings as public, but rather, what are the “objective” structural characteristics of the arena within which such public discourse occurs in the first place? Now that arena is the political community, which is an organized community, comprised of government and citizens, existing to realize a distinctive and common normative end, which I propose to define as the realization of just public relationships.[3] This community is not firstly to be understood as a realm of discourse—a “public square”—though, of course, it requires such discourse in order to realize that end. Rather it is, primarily and definitively, a set of institutions and of particular kinds of relationships among citizens established by such institutions. This organized, ordered cluster of institutions and relationships is indeed thoroughly historical in character—there is nothing about it which does not bear the imprint of a particular history—but it is not merely a contingent product of historical development. It is something like a kinship community, an educational community or a producer community: a perennially recurring structure answering to an inescapable need in all societies for the organized, common realization of a specific human need or capacity. In the case of the political community, that need is for the authoritative pursuit of just relationships among the various members and particular communities of which such societies are composed. And this, I suggest, is the case whatever the particular shape assumed by the political community in diverse historical and cultural contexts.

So, although I agree with Lovin that we need a discursive conception of the public square as an arena for negotiating our differing political commitments, I suggest we also need an institutional account of the nature of the political community which actually constitutes this discursive arena. It is not simply that the “complexity of that public discourse helps protect it from illusions of religious purity,” as Lovin rightly asserts (my emphasis), but also that the very publicity of the political community in which such discourse occurs disciplines its members to aspire to speak in ways that their fellow citizens can recognize as political, rather than confessional, speech.[4]

The implication is that when religious citizens, or any citizens for that matter, try to formulate publicly accessible reasons for the policies they favor, one explanation for why such reasons might actually be recognizable by other citizens as public is that these reasons make reference to the shared structural reality of the political community of which both speaker and listener are members and with which, perforce, both have to reckon, whatever their subjective viewpoints or aspirations. Such reasons are understandable as reasons for the sorts of things that members of the political community appropriately expect of that community: the correction of public injustices, the formulation of public laws, the prevention of public dangers, and so on.

The point can be further clarified with reference to Rawls’ little-noticed distinction between the three senses in which “public reason” is “public”: “as the reason of the citizens as such, it is the reason of the public; its subject is the good of the public and matters of fundamental justice; and its nature and content is public, being given by the ideals and principles expressed by society’s conception of political justice, and conducted open to view on that basis.”[5] It is the third of these senses of “public” that has attracted the greatest interest of commentators, especially those concerned with the restrictions it seems to impose upon citizens wishing to advance “religious reasons” in political debate. I agree with those critics who conclude that, notwithstanding Rawls’ apparent relaxations of such restrictions in later statements and his professed espousal of a “wide” rather than an “exclusive” view of public reason,[6] his stipulation that religious reasons in political discourse cannot be accorded parity with “public reasons” and his stipulation that religious reasons cannot stand alone but must, at least, be supplemented with reasons which are accessible in principle to “the public,” remains exclusive and discriminatory.[7] But Rawls’ noticing of the distinctive second sense of “public” points, I suggest, to an implicit recognition that public discourse occurs within—and, I am saying, is actually made possible by the existence of—a specific kind of community, one established to promote “the public good.” Rawls is alluding here to the longstanding recognition that the political community is a res publica, a commonwealth with a distinctive common good. We might observe, too, that it is the inherently public nature of this community which accounts for Rawls’ first sense of “public”: a res publica is made of members who constitute “the public,” the citizenry.

But the fact that public discourse is both the reason of the public and reasoning about the good of the public clearly does not imply, as Rawls seems to suppose, that citizens must be bound to the condition that the reasons they invoke for their political stances must be public in his third sense. So, religious citizens, for example, may not be accused of lacking civic virtue if their political discourse includes reasons which are not recognizable as public reasons by other citizens. Bluntly put, we are all today in the same discursive boat here: any citizen may find herself, at some point, having to proffer reasons which cannot (perhaps cannot in principle) be recognized as public by others.[8]

Now it may be, for example, that some non-religious citizens cannot recognise certain kinds of reason as genuinely public reasons just because they are religiously grounded. Suppose a Christian makes a case for a specific change in abortion law or environmental policy on grounds of her faith. A secular liberal might simply be incapable of regarding such a case as a bona fide public one because of its known origin in religious belief. But while secular liberalism exploits this incapacity on the part of some citizens as an argument for restricting religious reasons, we might with equal justification interpret it as a deficiency on the part of the non-religious citizen, a regrettable failure of civic imagination: as an argument not for restricting the discursive space of religious citizens but for expanding the constricted horizons of the secular citizen.

Does this line of argument imply that “anything goes” with regard to the use of religious speech in public discourse? Not at all. On the contrary, it implies that “virtuous” religious citizens will acknowledge the nature of the political community as a body intended to (“ordered to” as Thomism has it) promote the public good and seek to equip themselves for constructive, informed, and critical participation in that community. They will seek to acquire the skills necessary for mastering the “practice” of citizenship. High on the list of these skills is the ability to engage in a process of shared reflection and deliberation on the content of just public laws. This, I take it, is part of what Hollenbach means when he refers (as cited by Lovin) to the “intellectual solidarity” that religious citizens should seek with those of their fellow citizens who hold very different views.[9] My point is that such communicative aspirations are attainable at least in part because citizens who hold radically opposed subjective political viewpoints nevertheless are holding viewpoints about the same structural reality—the political community—in which both are operating and in reference to which their political discourse necessarily proceeds. We can talk to each other politically because states exist.[10]

Accordingly, religious citizens—indeed any citizens—should be open to respecting a variety of specific restraints on the type of political speech they use, restraints following immediately from the public nature of the political community. These will not be restraints on religious reasons but restraints on non-political reasons, namely, reasons tangential to or incompatible with the very structural imperatives of the political community. An important conclusion emerges: the success or failure of the attempts by religious citizens to provide public reasons should not be made to depend primarily on the contingent subjective capacities of other citizens to recognize them as public, but rather on whether those reasons intentionally and conscientiously pertain to the structural telos of the political community. And a central implication of this conclusion is, as Wolterstorff puts it, that citizens are bound consistently to keep in mind that the goal of political debates is “political justice, not the achievements of one’s own interests.”[11] If any citizen, religious or otherwise, experiences such a restraint as an unwarranted or burdensome imposition, that would be an indication that he had not yet fully understood the very raison d’ être of the political community or the inherent obligations of citizenship deriving from it.

To conclude, let me return to the threefold typology of Christian political stances expounded by Lovin. I acknowledge that the argument I have developed places me closer to the stance of the realist or the prophet than to that of the witness. I want to suggest, however, that my position allows me to affirm key insights in each position (in a manner convergent, I think, with Lovin’s own intentions). I have stated that the definitive normative purpose of the political community is the promotion of the public good via the realization of justice. But by describing this purpose as “normative,” I am signaling that it requires responsible human implementation and thus (given human sinfulness) allows for the possibility of significant, indeed catastrophic, deviations from that purpose. My position does not commit me to holding that our modern states, for example, are, all things considered, basically just. Rather it implies the need to discern and articulate a rigorous set of evaluative criteria for assessing the justice or injustice of actual states in particular contexts. It may be that the states we inhabit are profoundly malformed, swerving violently from their normative telos. In such a case, a “witnessing” stance may be the only one practically available to the Christian community. Whether our contemporary Western liberal democracies are in such dire straits is a matter not for a priori theological declaration but for careful, empirical discernment and, where necessary, trenchant “idolatry-critique.” By contrast, where our states practice significant injustice yet still allow degrees of openness to radical, oppositional challenge, then the prophetic stance emerges as a live, even a necessary, option for faithful political discipleship. The substance of the prophetic challenge will then be to summon the state to take up its normative purpose to promote justice and the public good. A third possible context is where there is still substantial conformity on the part of our states to what we take to be that normative purpose and a substantial, historically accrued consensus on the basic political principles implied by it. There, Christian political action may seem to bend toward the “leavening” strategy of the realist. Whatever specific stance or combination of stances the times make necessary, they are best understood, I am suggesting, as stances toward the normative public institutional reality of public political community.