God Save the Queen (or President?)
Politics, religion, and “public reason”
Writing for The Washington Post, Damon Linker proposes a norm of questioning politicians about their religious beliefs.
Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims — about the status of the religious community in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and political life, about the scope of human knowledge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such issues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics.
This is an interesting point I will not tackle directly. Instead, I want to examine a related question: if candidates are asked these questions, how should they respond? Or put another way, how can a religious candidate fail to pass this proposed religious test?
To answer this question I will turn again to John Rawls, who revolutionized the field of political philosophy for the second time in his career with his 1996 work Political Liberalism. In this book, Rawls attempts to formulate a conception of a pluralistic, liberal society that will allow for the coexistence of different and incompatible “comprehensive doctrines.”
By “comprehensive doctrine,” Rawls is referring to a complete theory of ethics – what is good, what is right, what is valuable, and how to adjudicate between these different considerations. These doctrines can be either religious or secular, or a combination of the two. The basic question is how can a society of free and equal citizens have such different conceptions of the good while remaining just and stable?
Rawl’s answer is based on the idea of public reason. Society is a joint enterprise of mutual cooperation. Laws must derive from a deliberative process in which each and every reasonable citizen can participate as equals, whereby people present justifications to which any reasonable person, regardless of their personal views, could accept. The basic worry is that if political power is justified by a particular “comprehensive doctrine” that isn’t shared by all reasonable citizens, then that law coerces those citizens unjustly.
One consequence of this conception of liberalism is that political justification cannot be based on any personal religious doctrine. It would be unreasonable for a Christian, for example, to expect a Muslim to accept a law based solely on Leviticus. Instead, the Christian must find some common ground of justification between herself and the Muslim.
This is not to say that personal convictions cannot be the primary motivators for political action – only that they can’t be the sole justification. For example, abolitionists might have opposed slavery for primarily religious reasons, but they also must be able to justify their opposition on other, non-religious, grounds.
Therefore, I think that Linker is correct that some religious beliefs can be out of bounds for a politician. If they dictate policies that cannot be justified to all reasonable citizens, regardless of their personal convictions (e.g. promoting one religion in particular, on religious grounds), or if they oppose the entire project of creating laws that all reasonable citizens could accept (e.g. by simply following a religious command without any sort of public justification), then at least on Rawls’ view, they are enemies of the liberal project. But, to be clear, it is possible for religious views to infuse their politics legitimately, so long as the reasons they offer for policies in the public realm are pitched to everyone generally.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user RSzepan used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Related posts:
- Douthat on religious dialogue
- The (im)possibility of secular judgment
- We must save the children!
- Homo Religiosus
- “Belief” in climate change
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