PATRICK NEAL
Does Rawls’s conception of political liberalism ask too much of religious citizens? Many discussions of this question focus on what the demands of Rawls’s political theory are, and how they relate to the point of view of the conscientious religious citizen. But this cannot be the whole of the story. Whether Rawls’s theory asks “too much” depends not only on what it demands, but also on how these demands compare with some alternative set proposed as candidates for governing the public sphere of a pluralistic democracy. When assessed by that standard, my claim is that Rawls’s political liberalism is attractive from the point of view of many—although certainly not all—religious citizens, despite the fact that it does indeed make considerable demands upon the religious citizen. However, in my view, it does not follow from this that the citizen should, all things considered, accede to those demands. That is a question that rests upon the conscientious judgment of particular citizens in light of both their comprehensive moral or religious views and their understanding of the good of political life. And, perhaps surprisingly, I maintain that this was Rawls’s view as well. That is, contrary to many readings, I maintain that Rawls does not hold that the demands of political liberalism must take priority over one’s most fundamental religious or moral commitments, let alone require that they—and thus, by implication, one’s personal integrity—be sacrificed to the demands of political liberalism. In light of these claims, I maintain that Rawls’s concept of political liberalism is far more accommodating, and indeed inviting, to conscientious religious commitment than is ordinarily thought to be the case.
In developing this argument, I place considerable emphasis upon the different justificatory perspectives that are involved in Rawls’s theory of political liberalism. Distinguishing these perspectives is, I claim, essential to a clear and fair understanding of the way that he conceives the relation between religion and political liberalism. The dominant perspective is that of a liberal democratic state trying to articulate, explain, and justify to its citizens the political conception of justice underlying the basic constitutional principles that comprise the state or constitute citizens as a polity. This “official” perspective is decidedly not the perspective of an individual person trying to assess his or her duties as both a religious and a political agent, although of course it bears upon this second perspective. Rawls rarely assumes this second perspective in presenting his theory of political liberalism. In particular, he does not discuss his own comprehensive moral or religious views, and so he does not specify how they lead to an affirmation of political liberalism. Although this might lead one to think that he considers the perspective of the conscientious individual to be unimportant for his theory, I will show below that this is not the case. I will also show that a third perspective is involved in Rawls’s theory, namely, that of a detached observer considering the possible tensions between the other two perspectives, those of the liberal democratic state and the individual. In organizing the following analysis around these three perspectives, I aim both to clarify aspects of Rawls’s theory of political liberalism and to show that it is far more “religion-friendly” than is often thought. I count the latter claim as a virtue. Some supporters of political liberalism may not, for the idea that political liberalism is hostile to religious commitment and integrity is a view held not only by many religious critics of the theory, but also by many secular liberal supporters of it. What follows is intended to show that both are mistaken.
In the first part of the chapter, I briefly discuss two important preliminary matters, one being the nature of Rawls’s own understanding of political liberalism’s relation to religion and the other concerning the meaning of the controversial concept of “reasonableness.” I then employ the notion of Rawls’s three justificatory perspectives to discuss two fundamental issues regarding the relation between religion and political liberalism. Thus, in the second part of the chapter, I consider whether political liberalism requires the religious citizen to subordinate her religious commitments to the demands of political liberalism, and in the third and final part I consider Rawls’s moral grounds for presenting political liberalism as the right kind of political conception for us, and how alternative political conceptions might compare.
Before proceeding, it is important to state two constraints within which my analysis is carried out. First, I do not attempt to provide a foundational defense of political liberalism as the right way to understand the political relation in a democratic society. I am concerned rather with the issue of how political liberalism relates to religious conscience and commitment, and so I assume for the sake of argument that political liberalism is at least a plausible candidate from the point of view of a foundational defense. Second, I am concerned with what might be called the “core structure” of political liberalism as an account of the political relationship, rather than with the particular components of that structure. I will not, for example, consider the details of the particular demands of public reason as they relate to religious citizens. Rather, I will focus upon the core issue of whether and in what sense political liberalism involves the subordination of religious commitment.
PRELIMINARIES: RAWLS’S AIMS AND THE CONCEPT OF “REASONABLENESS”
An important resource for understanding Rawls’s thinking about the relationship between political liberalism and religion is a fascinating interview he gave to Bernard Prusak for Commonweal magazine in 1998, one of his last public presentations before his death in 2002. Admittedly, an interview is not an essay, article, or book containing the considered views that an author knowingly commits to the forum of scholarly debate. But I will not appeal to this interview to try to show something novel and arresting, like an important change Rawls made in his ideas or some inconsistency between his “official” ideas and the ideas expressed in the interview. Indeed, there is nothing fundamentally new or inconsistent with his previous published work in the Commonweal interview. Rather, the interview is important because it brings out so vividly and clearly the meaning of some of Rawls’s earlier work from his own point of view, and especially some aspects that had been ambiguous.
The single idea that animates Rawls most throughout the interview is the thought that political liberalism might be hostile to religion. Rawls does not simply deny this; he denies it passionately and repeatedly and he strains to make clear to Prusak and his audience that political liberalism is misunderstood if taken to embody such a hostile attitude. At one point Prusak puts to Rawls the fact that many take him to be making a “veiled argument for secularism” through his defense of the idea of public reason. Rawls responds, “I emphatically deny it.” He explains that he is attempting to articulate the terms of common political ground between adherents of both religious and secular comprehensive views, although he acknowledges the difficulty of the task, given that “those of religious faith will say I give a veiled argument for secularism, and the latter [that is, secularists] will say I give a veiled argument for religion.”1 Later, Prusak puts to Rawls the common criticism that insofar as public reason requires religious citizens to make political arguments in nonreligious terms, it threatens the integrity of the believer. Prusak says, “Take the argument for the sacredness of life. A believer might say this has been revealed. But by having to make arguments in terms everybody recognizes, I’m being asked to renounce the truth as I know it.” Rawls interrupts Prusak at this point and exclaims, “No, you’re not being asked to renounce it! Of course not.”2 He then develops his response as follows:
See, what I should do is turn around and say, what’s the better suggestion, what’s your solution to it? And I can’t see any other solution. This solution has been followed in the United States since the First Amendment. … People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to. Again, what’s the alternative? How are you going to get along in a constitutional regime with all these other comprehensive doctrines?3
Admittedly, the fact that Rawls himself thought that his critics had misunderstood his theory does not necessarily mean that he was correct in so thinking. Doubtless all of us are more fond of our own views than we should be. Still, Rawls’s comments here counsel us to try to understand his theory of political liberalism on the interpretive assumption that it is intended to treat religious citizens with respect. We may decide on reflection that it fails in that endeavor, but I think that it is clear that this was Rawls’s endeavor. Moreover, many aspects of his theory take on a different hue than is commonly given them when it is examined from this angle.
Let us turn now to the other preliminary matter, namely, the notorious concept of the “reasonable” in political liberalism. A person who rejects the basic tenets of political liberalism is, in the terms of political liberalism, “unreasonable.” In my view, this term was a particularly unfortunate one for Rawls to use. It could not but be understood in a wider and more pejorative sense than it really has in his theory, and thus give rise to the view that, for Rawls, if you are not a political liberal in his sense, you are not a reasonable person in a general sense. But he is clear enough in stating that he uses “reasonableness” as a moral, rather than an epistemic, category, and, on my understanding of it, all that it means is “one who refuses to affirm the principles of political liberalism as terms of political order,” or, more specifically, “one who rejects Rawls’s understanding of the principle of political reciprocity.”4 Some such persons (like some persons who affirm political liberalism) are “unreasonable” in many other senses, some of them highly pejorative, just as some such persons (again, like some persons who affirm political liberalism) are highly reasonable in many other senses, some of them highly laudatory. I will use the category of unreasonableness in the limited, nonpejorative, and essentially circular sense I have defined above, since it is awkward to “translate” it each time it occurs into versions of “not committed to the principles of political liberalism,” but I implore the reader to recall that, in my view, it means nothing more than that. A crucial implication of this is that knowing whether a person is “reasonable” in Rawls’s sense cannot tell us whether political liberalism is worth affirming or rejecting, because it is already defined in terms of affirming it.
COMPREHENSIVE COMMITMENTS AND POLITICAL VALUES
These preliminaries taken care of, consider now the question of what it means for religion to be “subordinated” to the demands of public reason and political liberalism. I take it as obvious that there is a sense in which political liberalism does entail the subordination of religious reasons in the practice of public justification, and that this subordination is the primary stumbling block for any attempt to demonstrate that there is greater room for agreement between political liberalism and religious views than is often thought to be the case. On the face of things, there does not seem to be much room for agreement here: religious demands are often, and normally, understood to be fundamental and overriding by conscientious religious believers, and so the apparent demand that they be subordinated to some other standard of behavior seems like a simple nonstarter. Many of the most strident criticisms of Rawls from the point of view of religious concerns proceed from just this point.
Let us distinguish, though, between two models of how this subordination might be understood to work, which I will label “direct” and “indirect.” Direct subordination is the view that the terms of political order are fundamental and basic in the order of demands made upon persons, and that any and all alternative sources of self-understood obligation—be they religious, ethnic, familial, or of any other kind—must therefore be limited and defined by the sovereign terms of political order, whatever they are. This would itself constitute a “comprehensive” view in Rawls’s sense, and so would necessarily conflict with the conscientious moral or religious commitments of those who rejected it. I grant that if Rawls’s theory invokes this model of direct subordination, it fails as an account of the political relation.
Indirect subordination is different. Here, the terms of political order are understood as placing themselves before the tribunal of the individual citizen’s judgment, a judgment to be made in full light of his or her religious (or moral or philosophical comprehensive) views. The Rawlsian terms of political order, considered in this way, will ask of the conscientious religious citizen that she affirm the terms of order, and the consequent demands of public reason, in full light of her religious duties and understandings. At this “moment,” the demands of political order are “subordinate” to the conscientious demands of the citizen’s comprehensive view, whether this is religious or not. Now the citizen either will or will not make this affirmation. In essence, what she will be deciding is whether the politically liberal terms of order are, considered in relation to the available alternative terms of political order, the best way to understand and practice her life as a citizen in light of her more fundamental conscientious duties, religious or otherwise. If she does judge that it is best to affirm the politically liberal principles of order in light of these considerations, then the practice of those terms of order will, it is true, “subordinate” her use of religious reasons in the practice of public political justification. However, this subordination is “indirect” in the sense that it is the consequence of her own conscientious decision to impose the subordination upon herself as a civic actor, made with full understanding of her own religious commitments and how they relate to political life, and therefore made at least partly because of, not in spite of, her religious views. For example, in a given setting a Christian citizen might come to judge political liberalism as a means of expressing religious duties of charity and humility, and so affirm it as an act of political friendship toward one’s equals, whether they be Christian or not.
Let us now consider Rawls’s own view of what I am calling indirect subordination. Without going so far as to claim that indirect subordination entirely overcomes the tension between political liberalism and the religious citizen, I take it that it is at least not as objectionable as direct subordination from the point of view of religious conscience. And I think that Rawls intended political liberalism to be understood as enacting the process of indirect subordination, rather than as an expression of a political ethic of direct subordination, even though it is often described and vilified as the latter.
Certain key passages are particularly telling in this respect. They show not only that Rawls conceived the relationship of political liberalism to religion on the model of indirect subordination, but also how this involves the three justificatory perspectives that I introduced at the beginning.
One of the most interesting passages in Rawls’s writings on political liberalism is in his essay “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.” There, in the context of explaining how political liberalism can achieve stability by generating its own support, Rawls writes, “Of course, there can be no guarantee of stability. Political good, no matter how important, can never in general outweigh the transcendent values—certain religious, philosophical, and moral values—that may possibly come into conflict with it. That idea is not being suggested.”5 This is one of Rawls’s clearest indications of his awareness of the possibility that citizen’s “comprehensive views” may leave them in a position where they cannot in good conscience affirm the principles of political liberalism. Moreover, this possibility is not criticized, but rather recognized as an existential possibility that cannot be avoided. The stance taken by Rawls in this passage therefore sits uneasily with the “direct subordination” understanding of the principles of political liberalism, and the attendant requirements of public reason, as intended to always take rightful priority over the conscientious demands of one’s comprehensive view or conception of the good.6
Considering this passage in terms of the perspectives of the liberal state, the citizen, and the observer also helps to illuminate Rawls’s understanding of political liberalism. The principles of political liberalism present themselves as terms of political order that can enable adherents of different comprehensive views to live together politically in a manner that embodies and respects their status as free and equal persons. The principles present themselves as an interpretation of what a constitutional democracy is—that is, not of any particular constitutional democracy, but of the type. Thus, from the perspective of the principles themselves—that is, from the specifically public perspective of the regime embodying them—their “priority” over individual conscience is simply a matter of course. They have “priority” over citizens’ various conceptions of the good for the mundane reason that that is precisely what they are designed to do. They are, or they are presented to citizens by the state seeking citizens’ assent as, principles for authoritatively governing the political relations among citizens. For an analogy, consider the sense in which constitutional principles have “priority” over ordinary legislation; having priority in this sense is just part of what it means to be constitutional and not ordinary.
But the regime’s perspective is not the only one in play here. There is also the perspective of the citizen, who is (or at least may be) also a person with a comprehensive view. Each citizen must examine and assess the relationship between her comprehensive view and the political principles presenting themselves for her assent. The political principles request assent, but the assent must be given by the citizen in light of her comprehensive view. This is, loosely, the state’s attempt to elicit an “overlapping consensus” of support for the political principles. From this perspective, the “priority” of the political conception is not assumed at all, but is rather being evaluated as a possible commitment to be made by the individual in light of, rather than in spite of, her comprehensive moral or religious views.
Moreover, in the passage of “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good” quoted above Rawls adopts a third perspective on this activity, namely, that of an observer of it. It is from this perspective that he remarks that “there can be no guarantee” of such an overlapping consensus developing.
Confusion can arise because Rawls does not commonly adopt the latter two perspectives in his accounts of political liberalism. The most common perspective he takes is that of the state, of the public view of the principles of political order, as he develops, articulates, and explains the fundamental terms of “political liberalism.” When adopting that perspective, I think of Rawls the writer as, in a sense, occupying a kind of hypothetical public office. The “type” of constitutional democracy needs to announce and explain its constituent parts, its duties and purposes, to its audience of potential consenters. Rawls writes, as it were, as the public official charged with the duty of doing this, and so much of his account of “political liberalism” can be understood as him articulating this public perspective. By contrast, Rawls the writer almost never inhabits or speaks from the perspective of the citizen with a comprehensive moral or religious conception looking at the political principles and judging whether to affirm them or not. So, for example, he does not speak to us about his own comprehensive conception, nor does he assess the principles of political liberalism from that particular perspective. That is not to say that he as a person did not ever take such a perspective. Of course he did. But it is largely absent, at least overtly, from his writings about political liberalism. The third perspective, what I have here called that of the “observer” of all this, also appears in his writing, and I suggest that it is especially evident in the passage quoted above. Rawls the public official of political liberalism certainly hopes that political liberalism will attract and also reproduce a broad and deep base of support by winning the consent of most comprehensive views likely to grow and flourish in a constitutional regime. And we may reasonably assume that Rawls the individual person shared this hope because he was able to affirm those political principles on the basis of the comprehensive view with which he identified. But Rawls the observer of all this takes a perspective different from those two perspectives. From that observer’s view, it is an interesting and open question as to whether political liberalism can or will succeed at generating an overlapping consensus of comprehensive views in support of itself. The question is open precisely because that support must be won. It must be won because it is taken as normal and appropriate that our comprehensive view is going to be ultimately decisive for us as we wrestle with conscientious decisions about political allegiance.
It is important to note also that in this passage in “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Rawls the observer is not simply acknowledging the empirical fact that some people might reject the principles of political liberalism. That fact is obviously true, but it would not follow from it that such a rejection is normatively defensible. From the state perspective of political liberalism itself, such a rejection is normatively wrong. Citizens who reject the terms of political liberalism are, by definition, wrong to do so—in Rawls’s language, they are “unreasonable.” This is the perspective informing the well-known and controversial passage where Rawls speaks of a society containing “unreasonable and irrational and even mad, comprehensive doctrines. In their case the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity and justice of society.”7 But in the passage under consideration here, Rawls is not speaking from this perspective, and he is not assuming that the rejection of political liberalism is normatively wrong. Rather, he takes the observer perspective. The “of course” clause of the passage overtly recognizes that “political good” is subordinate to the transcendent values embodied in our comprehensive views, and that this subordination is not itself normatively wrong.
Consider, in line with what I have just said, other comments that Rawls makes in the course of his “Reply to Habermas.” The context is his explanation of how the public justification of the political conception itself can be carried out. It might seem at first that this could not be done, because the terms of the political conception are already presupposed when they are applied as the ground rules of political debate on constitutional questions. This is the way the matter appears from the state perspective of the principles composing the political conception. Again, however, this is not the whole story. For Rawls acknowledges that each citizen must also engage in the process of judging whether the political conception itself is to be affirmed, in light of his or her comprehensive moral or religious view. He writes:
Full justification is carried out by an individual citizen as a member of civil society. (We assume that each citizen affirms both a political conception and a comprehensive doctrine.) In this case, the citizen accepts a political conception and fills out its justification by embedding it in some way into the citizen’s comprehensive doctrine as either true or reasonable, depending on what the doctrine allows. … Thus it is left to each citizen, individually or in association with others, to say how the claims of political justice are to be ordered, or weighed, against nonpolitical values. The political conception gives no guidance in such questions.8
So again we see that Rawls clearly recognizes that the political conception is itself dependent for its support and affirmation upon the judgment of citizens, and that these judgments proceed directly from their comprehensive moral or religious views. The “priority” of the political conception becomes operative only when it is authorized to do so by the judgment of the citizen him- or herself, reasoning about the matter with full awareness of his or her own comprehensive view. The “overlapping consensus” of support for the political conception (or, as Rawls later says, the family of political conceptions) is constituted by these multiple affirmations from various comprehensive points of view. As Rawls puts it later in his “Reply to Habermas,” “we hope that citizens will judge (by their comprehensive view) that political values either outweigh or are normally (though not always) ordered prior to whatever nonpolitical values may conflict with them.”9 I do not take Rawls to be speaking here as the official voice of the political conception, because from that perspective the “outweighing” referred to here would simply be required, and so would not need to be “hoped” for. Rather, the “we” who “hope” for this outweighing would be those citizens who have reached the judgment that political liberalism is worthy of affirmation as a political conception by evaluating it in light of our comprehensive views, whatever they are. Such citizens would naturally “hope” that others would join the overlapping consensus of support for political liberalism so that the regime they affirm might be strong and stable. But they have to “hope” this precisely because it is not taken for granted. Again, this is not merely an empirical matter. Political liberalism can descriptively distinguish between those who affirm it (the “reasonable”) and those who do not (the “unreasonable”), but it cannot therefore say that the unreasonable have invoked comprehensive views that are wrong or false. Ultimately, the political conception itself simply distinguishes as a matter of fact between those who affirm it and those who do not, in exactly the same sense in which we might say in ordinary political discourse that some people accept and abide by the principles of the constitution and others do not.
Rawls is so concerned not to be misunderstood on this point that he makes an interesting comment in a note attached to his remark about his “hope.” He writes:
If one fails to note the background condition of a reasonable overlapping consensus, the assertion in the text taken alone appears to express a comprehensive moral point of view that ranks the duties owed to just basic institutions ahead of all other human commitments. … A troubling assertion, however, occurs only when one forgets that a reasonable overlapping consensus is assumed to obtain and that the text is commenting on the public justification of the political conception carried out by members of society.10
Again, then, Rawls’s claim is that statements regarding the superiority of political values are to be understood as presupposing that citizens have already decided, for their own different conscientious reasons, to proceed with the use of political values in public justification. He does not offer a general argument to the effect that, all things considered, political values ought always to take priority over comprehensive moral or religious values. That judgment is to be made by citizens themselves, and Rawls the “observing” expositor of political liberalism accepts the rightness, the normative appropriateness, of that state of affairs.
Rawls makes an even more striking affirmation of the priority of the individual’s conscientious (religious or moral) judgment in relation to the principles of political liberalism in a later passage of his “Reply to Habermas.” There he writes:
These statements [that a sovereign democratic people may legitimately, though not justly, pass laws that violate the moral rights of citizens] simply express the risk for justice of all government, democratic or otherwise; for there is no human institution—political or social, judicial or ecclesiastical—that can guarantee that legitimate (or just) laws are always enacted and just rights always respected. To this add: certainly, and never to be questioned, a single person may stand alone and be right in saying that law and government are wrong and unjust.11
The fact that the lone dissenting individual can be right is another way of saying that the political conception itself cannot ultimately be the measure of moral or religious truth. Affirming and following the political conception is a judgment we make on the basis of our own understanding of moral or religious truth. Whether we are right or wrong in our understanding of that truth is not something that the political conception can tell us, and while being a part of a widespread overlapping consensus in support of a political conception is proof of our “reasonableness,” it is not proof of our moral or religious rightness.
This crucial point is reiterated in the remarks that Rawls makes about the idea of overlapping consensus in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. There he writes, “political liberalism does not say that the values articulated by a political conception of justice, though of basic significance, outweigh the transcendent values (as people may interpret them)—religious, philosophical, or moral—with which the political conception may possibly conflict. To say that would go beyond the political.”12 Given the point being made in the passage, it might have been better not to refer here to the political values as “basic.” In other places, Rawls refers instead to the “very great value” of the political values, which of course leaves open the issue of whether others might not be of even greater value.13 Nevertheless, the meaning is clear: political liberalism does not mandate the direct subordination of the religious to the political, from the perspective of an individual citizen’s conscientious judgment.
Consideration of these various passages shows, I think, that Rawls’s theory of political liberalism is best understood as embodying the indirect model of the subordination of religious to political claims. It is thus decidedly less hostile to the claims of religious conscience than is supposed by those who take political liberalism to embody the direct subordination model. Of course, the road to hell may be paved with reasonable intentions, and some will count this as a mark against political liberalism, which after all cannot and does not attempt to deny it. But those with less confidence in their own, or other human beings’, ability to chart the geography of ultimate things will not count it as a fault of political liberalism that it eschews the attempt.
THE PROBLEM OF ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL CONCEPTIONS
In the passage quoted from the Commonweal interview, Rawls twice stresses, with a note of exasperation, that if political liberalism is rejected, we still need an account of the political relation for a pluralistic constitutional democracy. He says, “See, what I should do is turn around and say, what’s the better suggestion, what’s your solution to it?”; and, then, “Again, what’s the alternative? How are you going to get along in a constitutional regime with all these other comprehensive doctrines?” One reading of these passages is that Rawls is simply displaying the elitist liberal’s incredulity that others do not see the evident validity of liberalism as he does. A more charitable view is that he is pointing out that the perspective of the liberal democratic state and the perspective of the individual are not the same, and that the question to which the political conception is proposed as an answer is a question about the terms of the political relation between citizens, and not a question about the conscience of the individual citizen. To put it more bluntly, any citizen who rejects the political conception on grounds of conscience may have answered an important question to herself as an individual, but she has not thereby answered the question posed from the political perspective, namely, “What’s the alternative? What alternative account of the political relation is superior to the one given by political liberalism?” Some such account is needed because the normal plurality of conscientious moral and religious consciences means that, although one’s conscience is determinative for oneself as an individual, it alone cannot provide an adequate account of the political relation. Thus Rawls is asking the individual to assume the hypothetical public office that he has assumed and, from that perspective, to offer an account of the political relation.
This point may seem rather obvious, but I think that its implications for assessing the relation between political liberalism and religion are often not appreciated. It is easy to think that if one demonstrates a sense in which political liberalism conflicts with the view of a particular comprehensive view, religious or otherwise, then one has demonstrated a flaw in political liberalism as an account of the political relation. However, it takes an account of the political relation to beat an account of the political relation. And any such account will conflict with the comprehensive views of some, if we take the plurality of reasonable comprehensive views as given. So before we reject political liberalism as an account of the political relation, we need an alternative with which to compare it. For example, it is often said that Rawls’s view of political liberalism is objectionable because while it can accommodate religious comprehensive views that are themselves somewhat modern, self-critical, and liberal, it cannot accommodate religious comprehensive views that are committed to the idea of having access to divine truths that are directly politically relevant. This is true. However, I disagree with those defenders of Rawls who respond to this criticism by first acknowledging that such believers cannot be accommodated within the terms of political liberalism and then arguing that such an “exclusion” is justified because those religious views fail some independent standard of judgment, such as “reasonableness” is often taken to be. On my reading of Rawls, there is no such independent standard to be appealed to as a “neutral” justification for exclusion. Rather, I think that the political liberal should respond by acknowledging the nonneutral moral judgment that underwrites the criteria of political liberalism—that is, what Rawls labels the “principle of reciprocity”—and then asking of the excluded religious believer exactly the question that Rawls asked in his interview, namely, “what’s the alternative?”14
Now, I do not deny that an answer may be, and sometimes is, forthcoming from critics of Rawls. Rawls is not the only one answering the question. Rather, my claim is that, in the absence of an alternative political proposal to compare it with, the fact that political liberalism pinches the conscience of some citizens is not enough to tell us anything significant about it. The exclusions and limits of political liberalism have to be measured not against the utopian standard of an account of the political relation that “includes” each and every conscientious comprehensive view and commitment, but against the standard of other political accounts that will also inevitably limit and exclude some claims of conscience.
Considered in this way, I think that political liberalism would do well in terms of the support it could attract from various religious comprehensive views.15 The reason is simple. Since the evaluation of various accounts of the political relation cannot be carried out by judging whether or not they exclude religious and other comprehensive doctrines, we will have to look at which they exclude and, most fundamentally, why. That means that we will have to compare political liberalism with alternative accounts in light of the substantive value positions that define our own comprehensive views. Rawls articulates an account of the political relation that tries to work itself up from a view about what it means to live with others politically in a way that respects them as free and equal to oneself. That foundation is fortunately of fairly wide appeal to citizens in modern, pluralistic constitutional democracies. Admittedly, there are other ways of working it up into a political conception than that followed by Rawls. Still, there are lots of ways of developing an account of the political relation that will fare poorly when compared to political liberalism. In particular, I have in mind accounts that might be developed out of comprehensive views that cannot join the overlapping consensus in support of political liberalism. So, for example, the non-“modern” religious believer described above might argue that the political relation should instantiate the divine truth of which she claims to have knowledge, and that the freedom and political status of all should be defined in terms of this truth, a truth that might or might not allow freedom of religious conscience to individuals. Or, someone might argue that the political relation should aim at the instantiation of the true good for human beings, and that the freedom and political status of all should be defined in terms of that good, a good that might or might not involve treating individuals as free and equal. Adherents of these views will, of course, prefer them to political liberalism, and consequently may refuse to join the overlapping consensus of support for it. But I think of Rawls as designing political liberalism to appeal not so much to those dissenters—who, after all, disagree with him at a fundamental level—but rather to those who we might call the “undecideds,” that is, those who affirm a comprehensive conception as true and right, but who nevertheless think that the fact that others do not affirm that conception does not at all impugn their standing as civic peers deserving of equal treatment and their freedom to follow their own consciences in affirming whatever comprehensive views they endorse. Political liberalism is an account of the political relation that amounts to treating a plurality of comprehensive views as perfectly acceptable choices of individuals. To affirm political liberalism is just this: to see civic equals who disagree about the question of the good as persons who have reached different, but respectable, judgments about fundamental matters, and to see these differences as never constituting a reason for unequal civic treatment.
There is no question that this is a “demanding” point of view. It is an exaggeration to say that it involves relativizing one’s religious commitments to the point of treating them as a preference—or “hobby,” as Stephen Carter once put it.16 But it does entail that one grapple with the difficulty of living faithfully in service to a religious view while nevertheless treating the different views of others as being every bit as normatively warranted as one’s own from a political point of view. The degree to which one accepts that tension as one to be lived with and negotiated, rather than resisted and avoided, will depend greatly upon the guidance that one receives in such matters from the substance of one’s comprehensive view, religious or moral. That is, religious citizens’ willingness to affirm political liberalism as an account of the political relation will depend upon the theology that informs their religious views.
Rawls did not attempt to write such a theology. Had he done so, he would have followed the estimable example of John Locke, who wrote not only a “political” defense of toleration, but also a Christian theology to accompany it, asserting, “I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church.”17 Occasionally, however, Rawls does hint at the religious sensibility that might yield such a theology. Speaking of how various comprehensive views might affirm political liberalism in Justice as Fairness, he remarks that “in endorsing a constitutional democratic regime, a religious doctrine may say that such are the limits God sets to our liberty; a nonreligious doctrine will express itself otherwise.”18 I take Rawls here to be imagining a theology that need not endorse political liberalism in any direct way, but that does teach individuals that God has set limits on their ability to know the truth about fundamental things, limits that require them to respect the consciences of their fellows who are, after all, subject to the same limits. Political liberalism could thus be an account of the political relation that works itself out plausibly from this theological sensibility. Of course, this is not a sensibility that all religious believers will endorse, but it is one that many have endorsed, with Locke and Immanuel Kant perhaps being its primary modern voices. Some view that tradition cynically, as the betrayal of “real” Christian religion in the name of a pseudo religion artfully constructed by modern political liberals to “tame” Christian religion and make it serviceable for modern politics. Perhaps. But I take it to be one—and certainly not the only—genuine expression of a religious instantiation of the principle of the equal dignity of all human beings.
What of those religious citizens who reject political liberalism? We will want to know what terms of political order they propose in its stead, and we will want to know how those terms bear upon our liberty of conscience. Rejecters may claim that their interest is in defending the right of everyone to speak and politically pursue the truth as they see it, in defiance of the limits upon this activity that political liberalism proposes with the idea of public reason. They may say that they are concerned with defending the integrity of conscientious citizens, and not with laying down the rules of political order that threaten it. But someone has to establish rules of political order, and all such rules threaten the integrity of conscience. This is why the issue of perspective is so important in understanding Rawls’s position on religion and political liberalism. The standards of political liberalism are proposals for fulfilling this necessary public task, and they are offered from that particular and limited perspective. They are an attempt to give an account of the political relation that places liberty of individual conscience at the heart of political order, while insisting that no individual’s conscience is more important than another’s and that every individual ought to recognize in all others a conscientious agent like himself. Those values of freedom and equality are certainly not universally shared. But those who affirm them, including those millions who affirm them for religious reasons, will think that any political account must be measured by its fidelity to the purpose of upholding them, and they will recognize political liberalism as an attempt to do just that.
Notes
