TOM BAILEY AND VALENTINA GENTILE
Religions pose special challenges to liberal ways of justifying political authority. For while liberals generally wish to allow the utmost freedom to religions, they often also wish to justify political authority by the (at least hypothetical) consent of those subject to it, and thus to uphold certain more distinctive ideas of freedom and equality. But religions need neither share this peculiar liberal concern nor provide justifications that agree with liberal ones—they may prioritize doctrine over reason or illiberal hierarchies over equality, say. Indeed, the wealth of different religious sensibilities, voices, and demands present in contemporary liberal societies makes these challenges particularly urgent. In the United States, for instance, while strong Christian forces have persisted, neo-Protestant movements and an unprecedented array of other new religious groups and sensibilities have also emerged. In Europe, while the traditional Christian churches have declined, they have been replaced not only by more “secular” cultures, but also by new forms of Christian and other religious influences, including the oft-emphasized Islamic ones.1 While liberals may wish to embrace these religious phenomena, they are often also wary of their potential for destabilizing liberal structures of political authority, whether by disturbing these structures directly or by upsetting consensus over them.
This book explores these challenges by reexamining perhaps the most sophisticated, influential, and controversial liberal response to them, that of John Rawls. Particularly in his second book, Political Liberalism, Rawls recognizes that citizens of liberal societies inevitably hold a plurality of religious and other moral worldviews. But he argues that citizens can nonetheless reach a consensus over a shared conception of political authority by means of a particular kind of “mutual respect” independent of these moral worldviews. And he claims that this shared conception ought not only to inform the constitution and political institutions that citizens share, but also to guide citizens’ public deliberations and decision-making. This appeal to an independent “respect” is standardly read as reflecting liberals’ wariness of religions by excluding them from political or public life, and it has thus been much criticized, both by those who think that liberal concerns imply a more extensive accommodation or restriction of religions and by those who question these liberal concerns themselves.
Yet it is our contention, and that of most of the contributors to this book, that this standard critical reading of Rawls is mistaken, and that he rather offers rich, neglected resources for accommodating religions in liberal political life. In particular, he envisions consensus over political authority as emerging internally and dynamically from citizens’ various religious and other moral worldviews, such that religions and engagement with them are crucial to his conception of liberal political life.
In this introduction, we briefly present Rawls’s treatment of religions, the criticisms that are standardly made of it, and the various alternative approaches that have been proposed. We then set out a defense of Rawls against these criticisms and alternatives. We conclude by situating the chapters in light of this defense and in terms of their contributions to the three main themes around which the book is organized, namely, the reinterpretation of the “respect” and “consensus” involved in Rawls’s treatment of religions (the first part of the book), the exploration of the means he proposes for accommodating nonliberal religions in liberal political life (the second part), and the reevaluation of his liberalism from the “transcendent” perspectives of religions themselves (the third part).
Rawls admits that the freedoms characteristic of liberal societies inevitably produce a plurality of “comprehensive doctrines,” or general moral and ontological frameworks of convictions about what makes lives worth living. He also admits that these doctrines strongly influence how citizens live and relate to one another, whether they be religious, such as Christian, Islamic, or Buddhist, or nonreligious, such as socialist, perfectionist, or utilitarian. But he insists that citizens have no overarching way of judging between them. In societies in which citizens inevitably hold different comprehensive doctrines, therefore, to justify political authority in terms of any particular doctrine(s) would be to impose political authority on at least some citizens without their consent—something that Rawls considers unacceptable, given liberal commitments to freedom and equality. Thus, while admitting that comprehensive doctrines such as religions proliferate in contemporary liberal societies, he denies that political authority can be justified exclusively in terms of any such doctrines.2
Rawls nonetheless considers political authority to be necessary, since it represents the stable rules that are essential for social cooperation. He therefore argues that, rather than of comprehensive doctrines, citizens may consent to political authority on the basis of a further notion of “mutual respect,” insofar as this is reflected in the rules of their social cooperation.3 He also refers to this mutual respect in terms of “fairness,” “reasonableness,” “reciprocity,” “civic friendship,” and a “duty of civility” among citizens, and he regards it as implicit in the political culture of liberal societies.4 From it, he considers it possible to derive a conception of political authority that citizens may share independently of their different comprehensive doctrines—a conception that he therefore considers to be distinctively “freestanding,” or “political.” In his first book, A Theory of Justice, he argues particularly for a conception of “justice as fairness,” which emphasizes two basic principles, one regarding citizens’ equal basic liberties and the other the fair equality of opportunity and the equality of resources and responsibilities among them.5 In Political Liberalism, he argues that citizens’ shared conception of political authority, rather than their different comprehensive doctrines, ought to guide not only their constitution and political institutions—what he calls the “basic structure” of a society—but also their public deliberations and decision-making, at least in contexts of special political significance, such as when considering constitutional issues as officials, candidates, or voters. In his terms, in these contexts “public,” or “political,” reasons ought to take priority over reasons reflecting citizens’ comprehensive doctrines.6
Crucially, however, in Political Liberalism Rawls also argues that reasonings based on comprehensive doctrines may be admitted into the “freestanding” framework of political authority in two ways. First, he argues that each citizen may consent to the shared conception of political authority for different reasons, based on his or her own particular comprehensive doctrine. In his terms, there may be an “overlapping consensus” on the political conception among citizens’ different comprehensive doctrines.7 Second, he argues that reasons which reflect citizens’ comprehensive doctrines may be employed in public deliberations and decision-making, as long as supporting reasons which reflect citizens’ shared conception of political authority can be provided “in due course.” He thus endorses what he calls a “wide” view of the admissibility of reasonings based on comprehensive doctrines in public life.8 While insisting on a shared conception of political authority based on a shared notion of respect, then, he also holds that reasoning according to citizens’ other, different comprehensive doctrines may be consistent with respectfully sharing this conception.
Rawls thus develops a sophisticated liberal response to the proliferation of religious and nonreligious worldviews in contemporary societies. This response acknowledges the pluralism and force of these worldviews, while nonetheless insisting that political authority can be justified by citizens’ consent in terms of a particular sense of mutual respect among them.
CONTESTING RAWLS
Rawls’s treatment of religions has been extremely influential, both within the academy and beyond. But it has also been much criticized. The criticisms made of it can be divided into two broad kinds. Criticisms of the first kind allege that the restrictions which Rawls places on citizens’ reasonings over political authority or issues are overly demanding of religious citizens, while criticisms of the second kind allege that these restrictions are insufficiently democratic and thus inappropriate for contemporary liberal societies.
Criticisms of the first kind generally allege that Rawls’s restrictions are overly demanding of religious citizens in one or more of three broad ways. First, to exclude religious reasons from the justification of political authority and from public deliberations would appear to be simply alienating for religious citizens. For this exclusion may be so strict as to infringe on their moral integrity or so controversial that they could not accept it, even were their own religiously based conclusions to coincide with those made according to it.9 Second, and relatedly, the exclusion of religious reasons seems to involve an overly negative estimation of the contributions that religions make to society. For it seems to presuppose that religious reasonings necessarily cause political conflict, such that stability can be maintained only by restricting citizens to nonreligious reasonings, or at least to deny that religious reasonings make valuable contributions to political society—for instance, in terms of citizens’ participation in politics, their shared allegiances to the state, or their reaching consensus over issues.10 Rawls’s exclusion of religious reasons thus seems to place him in a long tradition of liberal philosophers overly wary of the dangers of admitting religion into politics. Third, the liberal ideas of freedom and equality inherent in Rawls’s basic notion of “respect” are often considered insufficient to justify his exclusion of religious reasonings. For these ideas might perhaps be upheld without accepting these restrictions—Rawls may overestimate the importance of consensus, say.11 It is even alleged that these ideas themselves constitute a particular moral perspective, such that they cannot provide for a genuinely shared conception of political authority and, in particular, that they will not be shared by some religious citizens.12
Criticisms of the second kind can also be subdivided into three distinct forms, since Rawls’s restrictions are generally alleged to be insufficiently democratic in one or more of three broad ways. First, his exclusion of comprehensive doctrines is alleged to make public reasonings too indeterminate and thus controversial. Debates regarding abortion or same-sex marriage, for instance, seem to be irresolvable without appeal to comprehensive doctrines, including religious ones.13 Second, it is often argued that genuine democratic deliberation ought to extend beyond basic constitutional issues among officials, candidates, and voters to other, equally “political” or “public” questions and functions. Again, legislation regarding issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage might be considered a legitimate object of democratic deliberation, particularly by citizens with religious convictions on these matters.14 Finally, rather than being too exclusive of religious reasonings to be democratic, it is also often claimed that Rawls’s restrictions are too inclusive of them. That is, it is often thought that religious reasonings should be excluded from democratic deliberation altogether, in order to ensure that both religious and nonreligious citizens can comprehend, deliberate over, and consent to the decisions made. Seen in this light, Rawls’s admission of religious reasonings into citizens’ “overlapping consensus” and their public deliberations and decision-making, however qualified, would seem to threaten the possible participation and consent of nonreligious citizens.15
Such criticisms of Rawls have motivated a wide range of alternative proposals, from attempts to accommodate religions more extensively in liberal politics to claims that liberal politics must exclude religions entirely. Among the “accommodationists,” some argue that liberal citizens need not share the same reasonings in order to agree sufficiently on political life, and therefore that no special restrictions on religious reasonings are required. It is claimed, for instance, that through deliberative processes citizens may converge on political rights and policies for different personal reasons, that liberal ideas of freedom and equality require all reasonings to be equally admitted in citizens’ pursuit of just policies and agreement over them, within a framework of basic liberal rights, and even that liberal politics ought to actively promote a diversity of values and thus a diversity of reasonings.16 Other “accommodationists” argue that cultural contexts are necessary for the exercise of liberal freedoms and therefore that, when it is necessary to protect such contexts, members of religious and other cultural groups may be given special rights—special educational, economic, or decision-making privileges, say.17 Still others emphasize citizens’ democratic responsibility to engage with the variety of religious and nonreligious views now present in contemporary societies, at least in deliberations outside institutional contexts. By doing so, it is supposed, citizens learn to consider issues from one another’s perspectives and thus extend the justificatory scope of their deliberations.18 Thus liberal philosophers have proposed more open and dynamic attitudes toward religions in public life than Rawls appears to provide, echoing broader political calls for a distinctively “multicultural” politics and society and for the special recognition of religious identities and groups.
In contrast, others have taken the supposed failings of Rawls’s treatment of religions to reflect a fundamental incompatibility between religions and liberalism, the impossibility of accommodating religions in liberal politics. Among these “exclusivists,” some liberal philosophers argue that, since only “secular” reasonings can be shared by all citizens, liberal ideas of freedom and equality can be upheld only by excluding religious reasonings from the political sphere.19 Such concerns often also underlie broader political calls for the reassertion of the “secular” or “neutral” nature of modern societies and liberal politics, as well as fears of the inflammatory effects of new religious influences. But other “exclusivists” have taken issue with liberalism itself, arguing that liberal ideas of freedom and equality, and associated senses of consent, justification, pluralism, and respect, conflict with genuine religious practice and belief. For these philosophical critics and those who adopt similar positions in politics, political life ought instead to be based on other, openly religious grounds.20
RECONSIDERING RAWLS
However, it is our contention, and that of many of the contributors to this book, that these critical responses to Rawls’s treatment of religions ignore crucial and fruitful elements of it. Indeed, in our view, his “exclusion” of religions is extremely limited and qualified, such that he provides for an extensive accommodation of religions in political life, and the notions of “respect” and “consensus” on which his “exclusion” is based are much more subtle, open, and flexible than his critics suppose.
Regarding the extent of Rawls’s “exclusion” of religions from political life, there are six reasons for not considering this to be objectionable in the ways that his critics have claimed. First, his exclusion applies only to particularly significant institutions, issues, and contexts, such as the consideration of constitutional issues by political officials or voters. This leaves an extremely broad range of other deliberations entirely unrestricted—those conducted in what he calls the “nonpublic” and “background” culture of society.21 Second, as already mentioned, Rawls holds that religions and other comprehensive doctrines may be employed in the public, political realm as long as supporting reasons that reflect citizens’ shared political principles can be provided “in due course.” Although he does not explain precisely when and how supporting reasons are “due,” this need not be interpreted narrowly. Indeed, he remarks that it is to be “worked out in practice,” presumably according to the particular practices of a society. As examples, he refers to Abraham Lincoln’s arguments against slavery, which, he claims, rightly appealed to religious ideas with equivalents in other comprehensive doctrines, and to Martin Luther King’s arguments for civil rights, which, he claims, rightly employed religious arguments to support “political” reasonings and thus showed how an “inclusive,” rather than an “exclusive,” approach “best encourages citizens to honor the ideal of public reason.”22 Third, Rawls encourages reasoning from comprehensive doctrines that are not one’s own, with a view to showing how they might support the shared conception of political authority—what he calls reasoning by “conjecture”—and he even allows that reasonings based on religious and other comprehensive doctrines which cannot be supported “in due course” may nonetheless be heard in political spaces: he refers particularly to the “witnessing” of such excluded reasons.23 Fourth, his exclusion of religions from politics applies only to reasonings, and thus leaves undisturbed other ways of expressing and practicing religious and other comprehensive doctrines. Fifth, insofar as he excludes religions from political life, Rawls does not discriminate against them, since his exclusion applies equally to all comprehensive doctrines and does so on the same grounds. That is, he considers all comprehensive doctrines to be equally “metaphysical” and controversial, and thus equally problematic bases for deliberation over political authority and policies.24 And, finally, his exclusion of religious and other comprehensive doctrines from political life need not render political reasonings objectionably indeterminate or narrow in scope, insofar as citizens’ shared conception of political authority provides a framework of considerations for reasoning.25 In the light of these six considerations, then, it seems implausible to suppose that Rawls’s restrictions on citizens’ reasoning need be profoundly alienating for religious citizens or deny the contributions that religions can make to politics in his narrow sense, or, indeed, that they need affect in any way the range of other “political” activities in which religious citizens may engage.
The reasons Rawls gives for this extremely limited “exclusion” of religions—his concerns for respect and consensus, and the senses of freedom, equality, and pluralism that they express—also need not be objectionable. As mentioned above, his concern is to justify political authority by the consent of citizens in contemporary liberal societies. Since such societies are marked by a plurality of comprehensive doctrines between which there is no overarching way to judge, he claims that consent to political authority can be based not on any particular comprehensive doctrine(s)—which need not be shared by all citizens—but rather only on a further notion of “respect” among citizens with different comprehensive doctrines, on the basis of which they can derive a shared conception of political authority. Insofar as Rawls places restrictions on citizens’ political reasoning at all, then, these restrictions are intended to be the least demanding necessary to ensure respectful consensus in contemporary contexts of moral pluralism. This respectful consensus, like the senses of freedom, equality, and pluralism that it expresses, does not discriminate against religions or presuppose negative evaluations of their contributions to society, since it applies equally to all comprehensive doctrines. It is also minimal enough that it need not be alienating to citizens with religious commitments, although it may be unacceptable to some.26 Indeed, Rawls’s treatment shows how liberal senses of freedom, equality, and pluralism can be upheld without requiring citizens to forgo religious reasonings for the sake of a substantial “secular” conception of political life. Instead, it is sufficient that both religious and nonreligious comprehensive doctrines be excluded from a narrow “political” realm, while being left entirely unrestricted in other political contexts.27 And, finally, Rawls’s minimal sense of respectful consensus also suggests that, insofar as his “exclusion” of comprehensive doctrines from this narrowly “political” realm renders reasonings in it indeterminate or narrow in scope, this ought to be accepted for the sake of the mutual respect, or the associated commitments to freedom, equality, and pluralism, that it expresses.28
Admittedly, this understanding of Rawls’s liberal approach to justifying political authority, and of the minimal senses of respect and consensus involved, differs substantially from those often attributed to him by his critics. For, in our view, Rawls’s argument appeals neither to substantial “liberal” moral values or cultural practices nor to a substantial “liberal” conception of political principles, one emphasizing, say, a strong notion of “autonomy,” the value of diversity, or the priority of the “right” over the “good.”29 Having excluded such “comprehensive” senses of liberalism, he is concerned simply with how shared principles for the narrow “political” realm can be elaborated from among the diverse moral values of a society in mutually respectful ways.30 Citizens’ “overlapping consensus” on political principles therefore need reflect no particular moral or political limits besides those of mutual respect, and will vary according to the particular moral context of a specific society and the particular ways in which citizens employ and interpret this context. Indeed, even the distinction between this context and the principles, or between the non-“political” and the “political,” will be determined by these principles. Rather than abstracting from moral worldviews in the name of a “social contract” applicable to all citizens and times or a theory of political “rightness” or “rationality,” then, Rawls envisions a much more contingent and dynamic consensus.31 He requires only that this consensus be mutually respectful in contexts of moral pluralism, and thus “reasonable” or “legitimate,” and that it be sufficiently “stable” to facilitate social cooperation, in the sense that citizens assure one another of their commitment to a shared conception of political authority whenever their inevitable moral differences call this commitment into doubt. In his terms, the consensus that he envisions thus neither reflects a “comprehensive” liberalism nor is a mere “modus vivendi” among citizens.32
In this light, it is unsurprising that Rawls insists that non-“political” reasonings—those of the “nonpublic,” “background” culture—be entirely unrestricted. For only in this way can citizens come to recognize the plurality of different comprehensive doctrines in their society and find and endorse shared political principles to guide their social life in respectful ways.33 Indeed, here his remarks about Martin Luther King are again telling, in emphasizing how when there are deep divisions over citizens’ shared political conception, religious reasonings may provide principles that subsequently become part of that shared conception.34 It is also unsurprising that Rawls encourages citizens to engage in “political” reasonings not so much from supposedly universal “liberal” values as from their own different comprehensive doctrines, by employing the opportunities offered by the “in due course” condition and such methods as “conjecture.” For only by reasoning in terms of an “overlapping” agreement among these doctrines can citizens express and renew their respectful consensus over a shared conception of political authority based on it. And it ought to be equally unsurprising that Rawls later presents the conception of “justice as fairness” that he had proposed in A Theory of Justice as just one of the possible conceptions of political authority that citizens might thus agree on.35 For the overlapping consensus present in any specific society will vary according to its particular moral resources and how they are elaborated by its citizens.
If such a reading of Rawls is right, he provides a novel liberal response to the proliferation of religious and other worldviews in contemporary societies, one that appeals to a minimal sense of mutual respect, rather than strong “liberal” presuppositions, and one that envisions a consensus which depends on and varies according to a society’s particular moral context, rather than abstracting from it. The contributions to this book critically explore the rich resources for accommodating religions in liberal political life—a sophisticated alternative to both “accommodationist” and “exclusivist” approaches—that this response offers, and that both Rawls’s sympathizers and his critics have neglected. In particular, the chapters consider three main themes, according to which the book is divided, namely, the reinterpretation of Rawls’s senses of respect and consensus and his associated argument for “excluding” religions from political life, the exploration of the particular means that he proposes for accommodating nonliberal religions in a liberal consensus, and the reevaluation of his liberalism from the “transcendent” perspectives of religions themselves.
CONTRIBUTIONS
The first part of the book, which focuses on Rawls’s senses of respect and consensus and their role in his “exclusion” of religions from political life, begins with a bold restatement of the criticism that Rawls’s exclusion cannot be justified by liberal “respect.” In “Respect and War: Against the Standard View of Religion in Politics,” Christopher Eberle considers Rawls to exemplify what he calls liberalism’s “standard view” of religions, namely, the view that officials and other citizens may not appeal to religious reasons in advocating coercive policies because such reasons cannot be sufficient to justify such policies. On the standard liberal argument that Eberle sets out for this view, this is because citizens are treated with respect only if they can share the justification for coercive policies and because, in the morally pluralist contexts of contemporary societies, only nonreligious justifications can be so shared. Eberle objects to both premises of this argument, using the advocacy of war as a representative case. First, he argues that citizens may support the same policy without having the same reasons for doing so. And second, he argues that religious reasons are no more or less shareable than nonreligious ones, insofar as the justification for them may satisfy or fail to satisfy the same epistemological, moral, or sociological criteria. Eberle concludes that liberalism ought therefore to abandon the Rawlsian claim that if citizens are to be respected, then the justification of any coercive policy must be shareable by those subject to it. For Eberle, then, the admittance of religious reasonings into political debate is not disrespectful toward other citizens. However, in specifying this accommodationist position, he also rejects an alternative such position, according to which citizens may “converge” on policies for different reasons. In his view, not only would this still preclude religious reasons from justifying policies; it would also preclude justification to some basic liberal rights that, on his own accommodationist position, constitute the only legitimate limit to liberal democratic politics.
Robert Talisse’s chapter, “Religion and Liberalism: Was Rawls Right After All?,” takes up Eberle’s challenge to defend the Rawlsian claim about respect and the shareable nature of justification. Indeed, Talisse also defends the Rawlsian claim against the broader worry that, by excluding appeals to strictly religious reasons as disrespectful toward other citizens, the claim itself disrespectfully violates a basic liberal right that Eberle rightly insists on, namely, the freedom of conscience. Talisse focuses on Eberle’s accommodationist claim that liberal respect need require only that citizens conscientiously pursue shareable reasons and not that they refrain from advocating policies for which they fail to discover such reasons. To this, Talisse replies first by arguing that if this were so, then in some cases some citizens would be required to accept the advocacy and implementation of policies whose justification they could not accept—a disrespectful, illiberal requirement of them, and one more demanding of religious citizens than the “standard” one that Eberle rejects. Talisse then argues that Eberle’s position conflicts with a crucial sense of shared liberal citizenship, according to which requirements can be made of citizens only for reasons that they can accept, reasons regarding such things as freedom, equality, and civil peace, and not such things as religious faith or doctrine. Talisse thus defends Rawls’s vision of an overlapping consensus that excludes unshareable reasons from the justification of coercive policies. Crucially, however, he does not equate this exclusion of religious reasons with the “standard view” that Eberle rejects. For he defends Rawls’s limitation of the exclusion to “basic” and “constitutional” issues, by arguing that, since laws vary in the severity of their coercion and the “irretrievability” of their effects, finding shared reasons is more urgent the more severe or irretrievable the policy concerned. He also defends the potential indeterminacy of shareable reasons, on the grounds that justificatory liberalism requires only that debate in terms of them be exhausted before other considerations are introduced. By reading Rawls’s “exclusion” of religious reasonings as limited and as based on a minimal sense of respect implicit in liberal citizenship, then, Talisse presents Rawls’s vision of overlapping consensus in the inclusive and thin manner that we have proposed.
The third chapter, Paul Weithman’s “Inclusivism, Stability, and Assurance,” further explores the grounds of such a reading of Rawls’s treatment of religion. Weithman has criticized Rawls in the past for overly excluding religious reasons from political life, arguing in particular that Rawls overvalues mutual respect among citizens and underestimates the contributions that religions make to liberal political life.36 But in his chapter here he argues that Rawls instead gives novel reasons for adopting what Weithman calls a “qualified inclusivist” attitude toward religious reasonings in political life. Weithman proposes that this derives from Rawls’s concern with the rationality of obedience to political authority, understood in game-theoretic terms. In particular, he claims, Rawls is concerned with each citizen’s assurance that others will obey political authority, an assurance that is necessary if his or her own obedience is to be rational. Simply excluding religious reasons from political reasoning will not provide citizens with such an assurance, Weithman argues, because differences over especially controversial political issues will tend to raise doubts about citizens’ commitments to obey their shared conception of political authority. For Weithman, the necessary assurance can be provided only by allowing citizens to employ religious reasons in political deliberations and decision-making, while requiring them to explain them in terms of shared “political” reasons if doubts arise. This conditional embracing of religious reasonings, or “qualified inclusivism,” is what Weithman takes Rawls to mean when he claims that citizens may employ “comprehensive” reasons only if “in due course” they can also give “political,” or “public,” reasons to support them. Weithman thus shows that Rawls does not exclude religious reasonings from liberal political life by appeal to alienating or discriminatory claims about the “uncivil” character of religions or their bad consequences for institutional stability. Rather, on Weithman’s reading, Rawls appeals merely to the need for consensus over political authority in morally pluralist contexts, a need that leads him both to embrace religious reasonings in political debates and to require that they be supported by shareable reasons when dissensus arises.
In the final chapter of this first part of the book, “Rethinking the Public Use of Religious Reasons,” Andrew March argues that a more fine-grained conception of the possible forms and functions of religious reasoning than Rawls and others employ can also help to explain when such reasoning should be admitted in political debate. March first argues that a piece of religious reasoning need not assert or imply that coercive laws be justified by religious authorities; rather, it may simply express a moral doctrine, commitment, or insight associated with a religious tradition. For Rawls to classify all religious reasoning as the expression of a “comprehensive doctrine” of moral justification is therefore misleading. March then argues that religious reasoning relates very differently to different kinds and objects of political debate, in ways that Rawls’s distinction between “constitutional,” “basic,” or “public,” matters, on the one hand, and the “background culture,” on the other, does not adequately grasp. In particular, March distinguishes between debates over individual freedoms, debates over the interests of those who are not or cannot be represented by the state or in the public sphere, debates over the value of collective institutions and undertakings, and debates over the character of society itself. He also insists that the acceptability of religious reasoning is not limited to Rawls’s concerns with mutual respect and consensus, since it depends also on whether the relevant reasoning advocates appropriate interests of appropriate agents or entities in appropriate ways, where the relevant sense of “appropriate” is a democratic one. March proceeds to bring out the implications of these various extra-Rawlsian considerations by considering some specific examples of religious reasonings. In particular, he argues that religious reasoning should not be admitted in debates over homosexual marriage because marriage is an institution that bears on basic individual freedoms and equality. In contrast, he argues, even appeals to religious authority may be admitted in debates over social welfare, since welfare is a collective institution and religious views of it tend to be other-regarding and not demeaning or paternalistic. Religious reasonings may also be admitted in debates over the status of “noncitizens” such as enemy combatants and the environment, he argues, since such issues concern the expansion of moral consideration beyond existing terms of political debate. However accommodating Rawls may be to religious reasoning, then, March claims that a better understanding of when and why to admit religious reasoning into political debate can be achieved by discriminating more carefully among kinds of religious reasoning and kinds and objects of political debate.
Both March and Weithman refer to the possibility that citizens lack a shared conception of political authority: March by proposing that religious contributions might reform existing terms of political debate, and Weithman by suggesting that dissensus over these terms will be especially widespread in societies that fail to fully endorse and realize justice as Rawls conceives it, such as contemporary liberal democratic ones. The challenges posed by the religious rejection of liberal principles in such non-“well-ordered” contexts, and the resources that Rawls offers for accommodating such nonliberal religions within liberalism, are the focus of the chapters in the second part of the book.
The first of these chapters, Patrick Neal’s “The Liberal State and the Religious Citizen: Justificatory Perspectives in Political Liberalism,” argues that these challenges lead Rawls to adopt a significantly different justificatory perspective. Notably, by claiming that the sense of respect which Rawls requires of a conception of political authority is a demanding one, Neal reads Rawls in precisely the “exclusivist” manner that Eberle, Talisse, Weithman, and we have criticized. Indeed, for Neal, when Rawls takes the respectful perspective of a liberal state or public official in arguing for his own conception of political authority and its exclusion of comprehensive reasonings, he considers citizens who reject it to be unjustified, or “unreasonable,” simply by definition, since they simply lack the required sense of respect. But Neal’s innovative claim is that Rawls does not consider his sense of respect to provide an overarching justification for his or any other conception of political authority, such that it must always take priority over religious and other comprehensive doctrines. For when considering the possibility of citizens endorsing his conception, Neal claims, Rawls adopts not the perspective of a liberal state or public official, but that of a citizen deciding whether to affirm or reject such a conception for his or her own comprehensive reasons and relative to competing conceptions of political authority, or the perspective of an observer contemplating how citizens thus reason over political authority. From these alternative perspectives, Neal argues, Rawls does not take the justification of his conception for granted, as if the respect that it expresses possessed an intrinsic, independent value. The possibilities for consensus rather depend on how citizens’ comprehensive doctrines themselves might be elaborated so as to affirm respect, and thus the conception of political authority that Rawls bases on it. On Neal’s account, then, while appreciating that some common conception of political authority is required for political life and that any such conception will impinge on some comprehensive doctrine, Rawls sees his particular conception’s success in winning religious citizens’ endorsement as depending entirely on the content and interpretation of the religious beliefs that they hold. This makes the achievement of an overlapping consensus a highly contingent, dynamic, and, indeed, daunting task. Neal nonetheless concludes optimistically, by briefly imagining a Christian theology that might support Rawls’s sense of respect by emphasizing our epistemological limits.
The following two chapters pursue Rawls’s concern with the elaboration of religious citizens’ own “perspectives” on liberal principles by developing the notion of “reasoning from conjecture” that Rawls briefly mentions in his late essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” As reasoning that aims to show how an apparently conflicting comprehensive doctrine may in fact justify, or at least not reject, giving priority to a shared conception of political authority, reasoning from conjecture offers a possible, albeit partial, contribution to resolving conflicts between religious and liberal reasonings in morally pluralist contexts. It thus provides a crucial means of elaborating an “overlapping consensus” among religious and other moral worldviews in the respectful, contingent, and dynamic manner which we have suggested that Rawls envisions.
In “Reasoning from Conjecture: A Reply to Three Objections,” Micah Schwartzman defends reasoning from conjecture against the suspicion that it may be disrespectful to holders of religious doctrines and explores its limits as a means of cultivating consensus. He first argues that conjecture is not insincere or manipulative, and thus not disrespectful, insofar as conjecturers make clear that they do not endorse the comprehensive doctrine from which they argue and whether they believe that their conclusions really follow from it. Nor must the attempt to convince others with reasons that conjecturers are not convinced of themselves display a lack of respect, since it is only in this way that a shared conception of political authority can be established in morally pluralist contexts. Schwartzman then argues that conjecture also does not represent an external, “imperialist” imposition on holders of the comprehensive doctrine in question, since it is based on reasons internal to that doctrine. It is therefore no more precluded by holders’ internal resistance to criticism or by conjecturers’ external status than internal criticism is precluded to holders of the doctrine themselves. Finally, Schwartzman considers the epistemic authority that a conjecture might achieve, admitting that this presents daunting epistemological challenges. But he argues that in some cases the failure to demonstrate the epistemological authority of a conjecture will be attributable to the “unreasonable” unintelligibility of the doctrine in question and that reasoning from conjecture will thus always be limited by the moral resources of the comprehensive doctrine concerned. Undertaking such reasoning may also be politically inadvisable if the moral resources available are sufficiently opposed to those of a respectful consensus. While showing how reasoning from conjecture can be respectful, then, Schwartzman also makes evident the dependence of the consensus which conjecture aims to cultivate on both the moral resources of a specific society and citizens’ ability to elaborate them.
If Schwartzman’s chapter considers how conjecture might be employed to reason from an ostensibly nonliberal religious doctrine to a given liberal consensus, the final chapter in this second part of the book, Johannes van der Ven’s “The Religious Hermeneutics of Public Reasoning: From Paul to Rawls,” demonstrates how conjecture might also operate in the opposite direction. That is, holders of a religious doctrine that is excluded from a given consensus might respectfully reelaborate that consensus by conjecturally reinterpreting not only their doctrine’s own moral resources, but also those of the consensus itself. Van der Ven proposes this by means of a close examination of Paul’s address to the Athenians as reconstructed by Luke in the New Testament. There Paul is presented as convincing his Athenian accusers of Christianity’s acceptability by reinterpreting Christianity in terms of their own Hellenistic religious commitments. He thus develops a “common ground”—an understanding of God that both Christians and Hellenistic Athenians can share. Crucially, this reinterpretation does not only elaborate the resources for consensus offered by Christian doctrine, providing Christians with a new self-understanding in shared, Hellenistic terms. It also reelaborates the resources of the Hellenistic consensus itself, leading to an “overlapping” agreement among Athenians and Christians that had previously been lacking. For van der Ven, Rawls requires religious and nonreligious citizens to adopt analogous strategies in contemporary societies. Since these societies are marked by a functional differentiation that precludes a Pauline appeal to a shared moral worldview, religious or otherwise, the “common ground” that Rawls invites citizens to pursue is rather a shared conception of political authority. Yet van der Ven argues that, in this distinctively pluralist context, Rawls nonetheless calls on religious and nonreligious citizens to pursue strategies analogous to those of their Christian and Hellenistic counterparts—that is, to reinterpret their own and each other’s moral worldviews so as to develop shared terms of understanding. Van der Ven’s hermeneutic reading of Rawls thus demonstrates how religious doctrines excluded from a given consensus might themselves contribute to respectfully reelaborating that consensus in more inclusive terms, and again emphasizes that a respectful consensus must depend on the particular range of moral resources available in a society and on how citizens elaborate them.
Following van der Ven’s lead, the chapters in the third and final part of the book consider Rawls’s treatment of religions, and particularly his senses of respect and consensus, from the extra-Rawlsian, “transcendent” perspectives of religions themselves. In so doing, the first two of these chapters raise novel questions about the “religious” character of Rawls’s own liberal project. In the first, “E Pluribus Unum: Justification and Redemption in Rawls, Cohen, and Habermas,” James Gledhill claims that, rather than proposing simply to convince religious citizens to accept his liberal framework, Rawls ought to reflexively recognize this framework’s own religious form. In particular, Gledhill argues that Rawls is ultimately concerned with the moral redemption of the human individual, and that the differences between his conception of justification and those of his major critics, G. A. Cohen and Jürgen Habermas, ultimately lie in their different senses of such redemption. Beginning with Cohen’s analogy between a just society and a free jazz band, Gledhill emphasizes how by treating citizens’ ends as antecedent to their social cooperation and as realizable independently of it, this analogy implies a transcendent, “God’s eye” perspective on principles of justice. Gledhill argues that, in contrast, Rawls’s own analogy with an orchestra treats principles as ends that citizens can have and realize only as participants in the relevant cooperative activity. Gledhill traces this sense of redemption to Rawls’s undergraduate senior thesis, A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community, but he finds it to be particularly evident in Rawls’s later account of the overlapping consensus by which citizens “sublimate,” and thus “redeem,” their particular religious and other comprehensive doctrines in shared terms of political deliberation. Yet Gledhill argues that the analogy with an orchestra also reveals how Rawls’s justificatory framework implies a further, transcendent source for political principles, a “conductor” for the social “orchestra.” To illuminate this, he employs another of Rawls’s analogies, that of a game. This, he argues, reveals how Rawls treats principles of justice not as merely regulative of the social “game,” but as constitutive of it, just as rules are constitutive of a game such as baseball. Rawls consequently insists that citizens can and must agree to principles of justice simply as participants in social cooperation, without “regrets” or “reproach,” and thus implies a transcendent source of these principles which he cannot explain. For Gledhill, only Habermas’s treatment of principles of justice as ideal yet immanent presuppositions of citizens’ communicative practices—as revealing a “transcendence from within”—could save Rawls’s account of political redemption. Gledhill thus suggests that, even on the minimal, flexible account that we have proposed, Rawls’s vision of “mutual respect” among citizens may unjustifiably “transcend” the religious and comprehensive doctrines that it is intended to accommodate.
Peter Jonkers also argues that there is a transcendent moment in Rawls’s treatment of religions in his chapter, “A Reasonable Faith? Pope Benedict’s Response to Rawls.” Jonkers does so by exploring Pope Benedict’s engagement with Rawls, and particularly their differing positions on the role that “truth” or “reason” may play in resolving political conflicts in a morally pluralist society. Jonkers notes that Pope Benedict insists on a divine truth for politics and Rawls on a deliberative one, and that in this respect each misrepresents the other—Rawls in identifying divine truth with authoritarianism, and Pope Benedict in reducing deliberation to an agreement based on citizens’ particular interests. But Jonkers argues that, from these different perspectives, both Pope Benedict and Rawls ultimately arrive at a Kantian sense of “faith.” This “faith” consists in affirming what cannot be theoretically verified but must be postulated as the regulative referent for human reason in a pluralist politics. According to Jonkers, Rawls expresses this with his “reasonable faith” in the possibility of a just constitutional politics, while Pope Benedict expresses it with his proposal that nonbelievers in pluralist societies act “as if God exists.” By comparing these different “faiths,” Jonkers concludes that, while Rawls’s “faith” reveals Pope Benedict’s to be overly demanding of a pluralist society, Pope Benedict’s “faith” reveals Rawls’s to be insufficiently demanding, leaving political conflicts inadequately regulated. Like Gledhill, then, Jonkers presents Rawls’s treatment of religions as inevitably “transcendent.” But rather than proposing that this transcendence be explained, as Gledhill does in turning to Habermas, Jonkers suggests that it must be inflated if Rawls’s framework is to resolve political conflicts in morally pluralist contexts.
A different religious perspective on Rawls’s liberal treatment of religions is taken in the concluding chapter of the book, Abdullahi An-Na‘im’s “Islamic Politics and the Neutral State: A Friendly Amendment to Rawls?” There An-Na‘im develops a liberal distinction between the state and politics on Muslim grounds, and argues that this distinction is preferable to Rawls’s own liberal distinction between the “public,” or “political,” on the one hand, and the religious, on the other. By emphasizing the inherently human and fallible nature of the interpretation of Sharia, An-Na‘im raises both the problem of identifying a singular “Islamic” perspective in political thought and that of the unlikely fit between a state’s general policies and Muslim citizens’ interpretations of their obligations under Sharia. If a state is to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim and other citizens, he proceeds to argue, Muslims therefore must accept the modern separation between the state and religions, while being allowed to employ Sharia-based reasonings in political debate, with a view to contributing to a broader “civic” consensus acceptable to all citizens, whether Muslim or not. An-Na‘im considers this distinction between a religiously neutral state and an inclusive politics to be preferable to Rawls’s exclusion of religions from public reasoning because, unlike Rawls’s treatment, it avoids discriminating against religions and recognizes the potential for critical reasoning within and among religious and other comprehensive doctrines and thus Islam’s possible contributions to a broader consensus. Furthermore, although these claims might seem to correspond with our own, more accommodating understanding of the consensus that Rawls envisions, An-Na‘im objects that even this understanding excludes religious reasonings from some political debate and treats religious and other comprehensive doctrines as if they were sealed against criticism. His conclusion is that a liberalism acceptable to Muslims can be developed only by transcending Rawls’s framework entirely and engaging with Islam itself.
The chapters in this last part of the book thus open Rawls’s liberal treatment of religions to extra-Rawlsian, religious considerations. Perhaps Rawls himself would have welcomed this, just as, on our reading, his vision of a political consensus welcomes the respectful revision of both those included in and those excluded from it.
Notes
For their valuable comments on a draft of this introduction, we would like to thank James Gledhill, Peter Jonkers, Sebastiano Maffettone, Aakash Singh Rathore, Johannes van der Ven, and Paul Weithman.
