8 October 2013
Religion: A Challenge to Liberalism
Professor The Lord Plant
The aim of these lectures is to discuss in contemporary terms the complex dialectic between political liberalism and Christian belief. I say Christian belief since that is the faith community which I know and to which I subscribe but most, if not all of the issues described and analysed in these lectures, will apply to other religions too.
The fundamental issue can in fact be stated simply enough although it has many complex ramifications. Given that in the West the constitutional order of political liberalism or of liberal democracy creates the environment within which those with religious beliefs operate, what is it that privileges political liberalism when its effect may indeed be to refashion the nature of the religious beliefs held by many citizens of such an order and may well constrain the ways in which those beliefs are expressed and acted upon? In order to provide a focus for this issue let me quote from the important work of Stephen Macedo who argues in Liberal Virtues that:
“To accept the liberal settlement is to accept institutions, ideas and practices whose influence over our lives and our children’s lives will be broad, deep and relentless: family life, religious life and paradigmatically private associations take on the colour of liberal values.”
And
“Liberalism will succeed and become stable and robust where persons, their largest moral views, institutions and society as a whole become liberalised” (74)
Assuming for the moment that such a judgement is correct then this clearly raises deep questions about the legitimacy of a liberal order which has this effect and this will be the predominant theme of these lectures with a focus on how these issues impact on the nature of religious belief and religious life in a liberal society.
In order to answer the question of what it is that privileges political liberalism we need first of all to have some understanding of what is meant by the term “liberalism”. This is not at all an easy a question to answer and as we proceed with the lectures we shall see how complex and multifaceted liberal ideas are. However, as a starting position, we might say that political liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom understood primarily as the absence of interference and coercion; political and civil equality; the view that individual freedom and equality can be best protected by a set of rights which will define an area of private life within which the individual should be free from the control of the state or for that matter from the potential coercion civil institutions including faith communities; a commitment to toleration of thought and action at least in so far as action does not coerce others so that individuals are free to pursue their own conception of the good free from coercion so long as that pursuit does not harmfully or coercively affect others; a view that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between the public and the private or put another way between the state and society so that freedom, equality and rights provide a framework for the protection of private and voluntary practises against the encroachments of the state; and finally the view that it is not the function of the state to articulate or follow any specific conception of the good whether religious or ideological but rather that it exists to provide a neutral framework within which individuals pursue their own good in their own way. Citizenship in such a state is defined in terms of these principles and rights, it is not to be defined in terms of the pursuit of some collective good or goal whether religious, moral or ideological and one’s citizenship is not changed or modified by the comprehensive sets of beliefs including religious beliefs that one might hold and stays the same between individual citizens who may hold mutually incompatible sets of beliefs. The state, on the political liberal understanding of it, is broadly nomocratic rather than teleocratic. In these various ways, to quote Rawls’ formulation, liberalism puts the “right before the good”.
On the face of it such a form of liberalism might look attractive to the religious believer not least because of what it secures - namely religious toleration; the right to freedom of belief and the right to the expression of religious faith except when it harms or coerces others. The distinction between state and society and the parallel distinction between public and private gives the faith groups freedom within civil society to hold and, subject to the condition mentioned, express their beliefs. So it would seem that religious people gain a number of private and civil goods from membership of a liberal political order. It might therefore seem that, given these benefits, they have strong reasons to endorse the basic structure of a liberal order.
However, matters are by no means as straightforward as this. Perhaps the fundamental reason is that the role of religion in such a state is privatised and as such is changed and part of our subsequent discussions will be about the assessment of this claim. For the moment, however, the religious critic of political liberalism will argue that the definition of the political or the public realm in terms of rights, freedom and equality together with the view that comprehensive doctrines such as religious ones can have no direct place in the public sphere effectively dismisses religion from the public realm and consigns it to purely private belief. However, from a religious point of view this is entirely unsatisfactory because for most religious believers those beliefs are essential to their sense of their personal identity and worth and indeed may be the most important features of their lives, making their lives worth living and endowing those who hold such beliefs with a sense of their significance and worth. Religious commitments are “ground projects” to use Bernard Williams’ words. Such projects nourish a sense of personal identity and worth and give one a reason for living. Ground projects do not have to be of a religious character but certainly religious beliefs would be instances of such projects. At the same time the very same people are citizens of a liberal democratic order the policy outcomes of which, against the background of a liberal constitutional order, may well be incompatible with their own understanding of the identity constituting beliefs which they hold. How are we to understand the nature of citizenship in a liberal democratic order and how the demands of such a form of citizenship mesh with religious and identity constituting beliefs? The claim might well be that in fact liberalism assumes that the religious believer can be virtually schizophrenic – holding to the truth of certain beliefs - for example about sexuality or war- while at the same time having to leave in abeyance those beliefs when, as a citizen, the religious believer enters debates about policy in the public realm. An apt description of this sense of dissonance which is appropriate to the political context under discussion is in W.E. Connolly’s phrase the “bicameral self.” How can a politically liberal account of citizenship understood as independent of comprehensive doctrines be justified to someone who holds a set of these doctrines to be true and for whom these are central to his/her motivation and identity. What would make him or her agree to accept the outcomes of debates in the public realm from which their own doctrinal beliefs are excluded?
Another way of putting this point would be that for the religious believer the justification of liberalism is in terms of private goods such as religious freedom whereas both such a person and, indeed, the political liberal might well want to have a broader sense of justification for a liberal order which justifies it in public, impartial and universal terms and not just in terms of private benefits. The problem, however, is how far, if at all, the justification of such an order can engage with the beliefs of religious people as opposed to privatising them and in fact ignoring them in the public realm. No doubt, for example, the writings of Locke and many other who have contributed to the development of liberalism, religious faith and theological beliefs have played a significant role in the justification of a liberal order. This aspect of liberal justification has however been eclipsed in favour of a view that sees the liberal constitutional order as being free standing in respect of comprehensive beliefs and needing justification in a way that does not put those beliefs into the primary reasons for the legitimacy of such a free standing order. The problem with this is that if the justification of liberalism does not engage directly with the identity constituting beliefs of significant groups of the population in terms of how the beliefs are in fact entertained by those who hold them then it might well seem that central liberal principles such as general respect for persons and the requirement to justify the exercise of political authority by all who are subject to it (Waldron) would be compromised. This point has been well made although in a rather ambiguous manner by Thomas Nagel who accepts most of the precepts of political liberalism when he says:
“We should not impose arrangements, institutions or requirements on other people on grounds that they could reasonably reject (where reasonableness is not simply a function of the independent rightness or wrongness of the arrangements in question, but genuinely depends on the point of view of the individual in question to some extent.” (Nagel page 221)
This implies that in relation to a religious person political liberalism should be justified in such a way that engages with the beliefs of that individual – but the crucial qualification is “to some extent.” So the issue then becomes: “To what extent” and the answer to this is given in the earlier part of the passage with the appeal to reasonableness. So what will be crucial, as we shall see, is whether there is some kind of neutral account of reasonableness or does reasonableness turn out to mean those beliefs which are held in a liberal manner so that political liberalism can engage with the comprehensive beliefs of individuals - but only if they are held in a liberal way. In which case the process of justification seems to be circular. This idea of reasonableness in belief and its connection with broader conceptions of rationality will prove to be of central importance in our enquiry.
As we shall see, some have argued that because liberal states reflect a pluralistic society in which people have very different conceptions of the good, the basis of legitimacy of citizenship has to be seen as being based on a morally thin or shallow basis. That is to say that the justification of a liberal political order should not appeal to substantive moral values which are controversial in a pluralistic society. If liberalism invoked such values then it would become part of the problem of pluralism. It can only represent itself as the solution to the problem if in fact it is justified on thin and general grounds which are either universally acknowledged or at least very widely acknowledged in a pluralistic society whatever else people within such a society might disagree about. Assuming this to be true for the moment there is then a clear issue as to why a religious believer who holds to a thick or constitutive moral point of view should feel obliged to defer to the policy outcomes of a political order the basis of which is, of necessity, morally more shallow- needing as it does to be compatible with a wide range of pluralistic views. Again the same question arises: What is the basis of legitimacy of such a liberal order and what is it that privileges it? How does an account of the moral basis of such an order relate to the first order, thick moral beliefs of many of its citizens and particularly those of a religious persuasion? One way of putting the dilemma for the political legitimacy of a liberal order is how are we to understand the relationship between agent relative reasons –rooted in ones personal beliefs and ground projects on the one hand and what Nagel calls agent neutral reasons- those which are rooted in some generally accepted idea of reasonableness rather than being rooted in personal or community based forms of belief. The liberal order is one of universal rules impartially and equally applied so does the justification of this impersonal order have to be secured via general and shared forms of reason and rational justification, that is to say via what might and has been called public reason or can the justification of such an order be secured through engaging with people’s comprehensive beliefs including their fundamental religious convictions?
This dilemma is what Leo Strauss calls the theologico-political problem in that we seem to have two competing moral outlooks each claiming a basic hold on the loyalty of citizens and each having fundamentally different forms of authority and fundamentally different sources for those forms of authority. In the case of political liberalism in a pluralistic society it might seem that those sources of authority have to be non religious and based upon some kind of rational and public appeal; in the case of the religious believer the sources of authority may be based upon faith and upon taking some scripture and traditional interpretations of that scripture as fundamental. The basis of the authority of political liberalism has to be rooted in “public reason” to use Rawls’ term which does not directly include religious doctrines; the basis of the authority of a religious moral conception may well be an act of private faith and commitment and the taking of a set of scriptures and a set of traditions as authoritative. So, in the view of a thinker like Strauss modern liberalism poses a version of the conflict or tension between Athens and Jerusalem: between reason and belief; between publicly accessible claims for the exercise of legitimate authority and those that are based upon faith seen as a personal and a private commitment. In the view of Strauss there is a gap between these two forms of authority which cannot be bridged: Inter auctoritatem et philosophium nihil est medium.