SEBASTIANO MAFFETTONE
John Rawls played a pivotal role in the development of contemporary liberal political philosophy—indeed, it might even be said that political philosophers live in “the era of Rawls.” But his sensitivity to religion is often neglected and his own treatment of it often misunderstood. His recently published undergraduate thesis, A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, and his later autobiographical remarks, “On My Religion,” speak to his personal sensitivities. And his idea of a well-ordered society inspired by liberal democratic principles and bringing together religious and nonreligious citizens represents a sort of “reconciliation” between the moral realm and that of politics.
Importantly, the “reconciliation” that Rawls proposes differs from the liberal “standard view.” For traditional liberals, religion is an obstacle to peace and stability, and this suspicious attitude leads them to confine religion to the private sphere. Rawls’s attitude is different. For him, religion is a constituent part of the liberal democratic res publica—his examples are such religious liberals as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. So, rather than privatizing religion, Rawls proposes a way to make it fruitful for the whole population.
If religion and politics are reconciled in Rawls’s work, their most important encounter is provided by his theory of public reason. This inclusive theory considers religious people as active participants in the life of the liberal democratic republic. In only a few matters of extraordinary political importance—Supreme Court decisions, parliamentary voting, and so on—religious citizens are asked to reformulate their religious arguments in terms that all other citizens can understand. This “proviso” does not apply unfairly to religious citizens, as some have alleged, since it applies equally to all “comprehensive” doctrines, including Marxism, utilitarianism, Kantianism, and even Rawls’s own account of justice as fairness. And its appeal to a kind of mutual respect among citizens of different value orientations is notably less demanding of religious citizens than many competing liberal theories.
Rawls’s theory of public reason nonetheless implies a form of priority of the political over the religious. When matters of basic justice are at stake, it asks that religious or “comprehensive” arguments be reformulated in terms that all citizens can reasonably accept, but it does not ask the opposite, namely, that shared matters of justice be reformulable in religious terms. The reason for this reflects the liberal problem of justifying political coercion: nobody should be coerced for reasons dependent on “comprehensive” views. Even we Italians would not want Catholic doctrine to be enforced by the carabinieri! One might therefore object to this priority of the political over the “comprehensive” as an unjustifiable imposition of liberal democracy on religious citizens and communities, as some critics of liberalism have. Some radicals might even maintain that in Rawls’s liberalism not all communities are treated in the same way: the justification for a political community is taken for granted, whereas other communities, and particularly religious ones, have to justify their very existence.
It is the merit of Rawls and Religion that it finally reveals and explores a new and persuasive understanding of the place of religion in Rawls’s liberal framework. Tom Bailey and Valentina Gentile’s introduction offers a clear and insightful account of the background debates, showing that Rawls’s liberalism offers rich, and sometimes neglected, resources for accommodating religions in the political life of liberal citizens. The contributors then explore a range of crucial philosophical, practical, and theological issues regarding Rawls’s idea of public reason and its implications for the role of religion in public life. The volume thus makes important contributions to the academic and intellectual debates that have emerged in recent years over Rawls’s treatment of religion. I have rarely read a book that combines so well the clarity of the subjects treated with the philosophical acuity of its arguments, and I am sure that readers from various fields and at various levels will learn much from it.