Secularism as a Common Good

Secularism as a Common Good1 Ronald Beiner

Among contemporary political philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre is surely the theorist who has put the most emphasis on the idea of a common good as a privileged term of political discourse. By the same token, the version of liberalism developed by John Rawls would seem quite far-removed from the kind of theorizing one would normally associate with appeals to common good. In the reflections that follow, I want to suggest, first, that it’s a bad idea to leave MacIntyre and his followers with a monopoly on employment of the discourse of common good; and second, that it’s equally mistaken for contemporary liberals to deny themselves the thicker intellectual resources that might otherwise be available for the articulation of themes (notably, themes relating to liberal secularism) that figure prominently in Rawlsian liberalism. Then, having developed these two opposing lines of argument – challenging MacIntyre’s version of appealing to common good; challenging the absence of such an appeal in Rawls – I’ll proceed to offer a brief sketch of my own views about liberal secularism as a possible conception of the common good relevant beyond the Thomist horizon privileged by MacIntyre. If my argument succeeds, I think that we’ll arrive at a better understanding of why an account of secularism in the vocabulary of common goods has a fair bit more bite to it than the defense of secularism that we get in, say, Rawlsian liberalism. 1

This essay is a revised version of a lecture originally presented at a conference held at

London Metropolitan University in June of 2012. I’m especially grateful to Kelvin Knight for having invited me to participate in the conference, and also grateful to other conference participants for helpful and stimulating critical responses.

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I Let’s start with MacIntyre. In particular, my purpose here is to disassociate myself from the notion of common goods as it figures in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Thomist version of the idea. One should be clear: we’re not going back to the world of the Lancashire loomweaver. We’re not going back to that world, and in the meantime we have some real political problems to sort out in the political world that we do inhabit – not the least of which is the difficult and potentially lethal problem of how to negotiate the relation between religion and politics. MacIntyre doesn’t himself believe that the world of the Lancashire loom-weaver is coming back, but that doesn’t stop him from using it as a normative mallet with which to beat the moral and political world that we’re actually stuck with, and that doesn’t seem the most helpful way of appealing to the vocabulary of common goods. What we need is a conception of civic common goods, where “civic” refers to the community of citizens associated with states as they are currently constituted. I allow that MacIntyre’s critique of the modern state has considerable force to it. To be sure, it’s very difficult to have meaningful collective deliberation about the provision for shared needs, given both the scale of modern political communities and the oligarchical power relations that dominate life in liberal democracies (two issues very effectively highlighted by MacIntyre), and, one could add, also given the staggering technological complexities of problems with which contemporary societies must wrestle. These are not trivial impediments to a meaningful political existence. But on the other hand, it’s not clear to me that MacIntyre’s “politics of local community” is fully or

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appropriately “political.” Politics as theorized from Aristotle onwards has to mean taking responsibility in an encompassing way for the collective problems that a given society must confront: making the decisions that have to be made and exercising the authority that has to be exercised adequate for addressing the fundamental problems of shared civic life. In the case of contemporary society, that must include things such as structuring economic life in a way that provides decent employment and protects citizens against widespread poverty; that guarantees the civil rights and liberties of all citizens; that deals with issues of war and peace, including protecting the security of its citizens against terrorist threats; and that tries to ensure our very survival in the face of the perils of climate change. As I say, it’s not at all clear that a politics of local community has the appropriate scope or authority even to address these issues, let alone solve them. Modern states may or may not be doing a good job in tackling such problems. But in principle I think they do have the appropriate scope and authority, whereas local communities – especially those founded on solidaristic ways of life that no longer exist! – fall short of the appropriate scope and authority. If in fact the notion of common good as a theoretical vocabulary is limited in its validity to fishing villages and farming communities, then we’re surely wasting our time participating in debates concerning ideas of the common good.2 The vocabulary of common goods is an attractive one, and I think that our

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The London Met conference in 2012 featured an interesting lecture by Maurice

Glasman on “Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of the Common Good.” Lord Glasman’s account of civic empowerment certainly shares much in common with MacIntyre’s core ideas – minus MacIntyre’s characteristic emphasis on farmers and fishermen. One of the things that struck me in listening to Glasman’s lecture is how much a basically MacIntyrean conception of political engagement gains in force as soon as one drops

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appreciation of what’s at stake in civic life would be enhanced if we embraced that vocabulary, but I also think that it has to extend to ideas of the common good beyond those highlighted by MacIntyre. As the title of this essay makes clear, I want to argue that secularism should be on our list of civic common goods. MacIntyre comprehensively rejects the institutions of the capitalist market; fair enough! And a large part of his critique of the modern state – not the whole of that critique but a large part of it – is that the state is fatally implicated in the market at its worse, so that any claim to shared common goods on the part of the state is morally compromised by the injustice of the market.3 But what is the alternative? We can’t go back to a pre-modern craft economy, and MacIntyre knows that we can’t go back to that. My question is this: if the idea of common goods yields a normatively more attractive account of social and political life than the categories that define the currently dominant political philosophies, shouldn’t it be applicable to the social and political world we do

MacIntyre’s own relentless insistence on communities founded on pre-modern ways of life. 3

MacIntyre seems to assume that questions of economic power and economic justice are

the only ones relevant to judging the modern state as a (just or unjust) form of political community. Those issues are undoubtedly of huge importance, but it’s not clear that they exhaust the relevant political judgments. I remember as a child driving with my parents through certain southern states of the U.S., and seeing racially segregated toilet facilities. Today the U.S. has a black president. That means that during my lifetime that particular modern state has gone through at least one defining political transformation of immense proportions. That is certainly not an instance of political change that could have occurred local community to local community. It seems obvious that a politics of local community will not be adequate to other questions of large consequence, such as whether the earth will remain livable much beyond the present generation.

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inhabit: a world of states and markets and a scale of economic and political interaction that far exceeds the local? What is a common good? And what determines the scope of the community for which a common good is genuinely common? For the sake of convenience, let’s simply borrow MacIntyre’s definition of a common good (drawn in turn from Aristotle): “the good of the political society [is that which] is prior to and not reducible to the goods in individuals”; “individuals can only function well as human beings through membership of and participation in” the relevant political society. The individual goods of these individuals are available “only through having lived the life of and achieved the good of a citizen.”4 There is nothing in this definition that rules out the possibility of common goods in political communities on the scale of the modern state. The paradigmatic virtue in a society conceived according to a conception of common goods is justice defined as the common advantage. In particular, I think secularism fulfils MacIntyre’s definition of a common good. It refers to a collective good that is larger and more encompassing than our individual goods. We’re better equipped to realize the human good – or put conversely, our capacity to realize the human good is less in jeopardy – if we’re not subject to the overbearing authority of priests; if we don’t find ourselves being policed by religiously-driven guardians; and if the state is not leashed to sectarian purposes. Not least, political justice is violated if the citizenship of religious minorities, dissenters, or simple nonbelievers is impugned; if the state starts enforcing religious orthodoxy; or if citizenship gets judged according to a standard of sectarian theology. 4

These formulations are all drawn from a paper entitled “Common Goods, Modern

States, Rights and – Maritain” presented by MacIntyre at a seminar in London that I attended on October 18, 2011.

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What is secularism? Secularism is best defined negatively: a secular society is one where politics and political power are not put in the service of theocratic ends. The common good associated with secular political existence is the good of acknowledging each other as common citizens beyond the divisions erected by sect and theology. Put otherwise, secularism is a common good because citizenship is a common good.5

II Next, I’d like to sketch an account of why Rawls’s secularizing strategy in Political Liberalism miscarries, and how we might go about designing more successful strategies to attain the same purpose. There’s no question that Rawls wants a political domestication of religion. But he doesn’t want to present it as a domestication of religion, or that suggests any kind of singling-out of religion for special treatment. So he hits on

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Having a normative commitment to citizenship is inseparable from having a normative

commitment to the state, and MacIntyre manifestly repudiates the latter: he sees the state and its secularism as losses rather than gains. At the seminar at London Metropolitan University referred to in the last note, he cited and endorsed Pierre Manent’s view that the purpose of the modern state was to exclude the authority of the Catholic Church, which is portrayed as an illegitimate centralization of power and authority on the part of the state. (One gets similar views in Stanley Hauerwas and his followers.) Contrast the spirit in which Michael Walzer writes the following in The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 76-77: “it is only the state that provides the necessary space within which lines can be drawn between religion and politics. In a deep sense, it is only states that can be secular. Wherever political authority takes statelike forms, its protagonists work hard to achieve independence from religious authority.” Walzer clearly sees this as a legitimate and attractive project, as do I; MacIntyre clearly doesn’t.

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the idea of a proscription of all “comprehensive doctrines,” whether secular or religious. But you only have to ask yourself which “comprehensive-doctrine” Kantians or utilitarians are threatening to subvert a liberal order to see through this ruse; whereas if one considers political life in the United States, for instance, there is no lack of theocratic political actors who do pose this threat -- who believe, as the Reverend Jerry Falwell memorably put it in his Independence Day sermon of 1976, that “the idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”6 (One of the reviewers of my book on Civil Religion wrote that he couldn’t understand why I opposed secularism to theocracy rather than opposing secularism to religion. The answer is simple. Theocracy is the politicization of religion. There’s no necessary contradiction between religion and secularism, but there is a necessary contradiction between theocracy and secularism.) An important part of what’s driving Rawls’s way of formulating his liberalism is the thought that all comprehensive doctrines, whether religious or philosophical, are in principle “sectarian” and therefore cannot be appealed to in underwriting a properly liberal regime. Hence (despite the paradox), it is illegitimate to appeal to a liberal philosophy of life in founding a liberal polity. If Catholics can’t legitimately found the state on a Catholic view of life (because its laws and policies will also apply to Protestant

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For a powerful challenge to theocratic politics as it played out in the 2012 U.S.

presidential election, see Garry Will, “Contraception’s Con Men,” available at NYRblog (www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/). Andrew Sullivan (“My Problem with Christianism,” Time, May 15, 2006) has suggested a helpful distinction between Christianity and “Christianism” (i.e., theocratic Christianity), intended to parallel the already familiar distinction between Islam and Islamism.

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co-citizens), and if Protestants can’t found the state on a Protestant view of life (because its laws and policies will apply to Catholic co-citizens), then the conclusion might seem equally compelling that one also cannot found the state on a liberal-secular philosophy of life, because (again) those who don’t subscribe to this philosophy of life will be bound by its laws and policies. Political liberalism claims to solve this problem. Yet this raises the very large question of whether one can be, for civic purposes, agnostic about the ends of life while decidedly privileging the needs of citizenship over the demands of faith, at least in cases where faith is anti-civic (and there’s obviously no guarantee that some forms of faith will not turn out to be anti-civic). Rawls writes: “To maintain impartiality between comprehensive doctrines, [political liberalism] does not specifically address the moral topics on which those doctrines divide.”7 He also writes that “by avoiding comprehensive doctrines we try to bypass religion and philosophy’s profoundest controversies so as to have some hope of uncovering a basis of a stable overlapping consensus.”8 And he writes that “a zeal for the whole truth” represents a temptation to found liberal society on a more ambitious set of philosophical ideals than is appropriate for a constitutional regime, and political liberalism succeeds in resisting this temptation.”9 This simply won’t do. How can a view of society that is robustly egalitarian, “civicist” (committed to a strong doctrine of shared citizenship), and basically secular be “impartial between comprehensive doctrines” in the way that Rawls suggests? The fact is that there’s really no possibility of compromise between a secularist politics and a 7

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. xxx.

8

Ibid., p. 152.

9

Ibid., pp. 42-43.

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theocratic politics. One either has a basically secularist regime or one has a basically theocratic regime. The Rawlsian attempt to present the former as “neutral” between grand philosophical commitments is bogus. And between these two alternatives, the secularist way of doing politics is infinitely preferable to theocratic alternatives. Rawls’s project to exclude comprehensive doctrines from the political sphere also leads him (misguidedly) to attempt to place constraints on how citizens talk or phrase their political arguments (although it has to be said that Rawls’s doctrine here sometimes reaches levels of complexity where it seems that one has to be a trained lawyer in order to interpret what the principle permits and what it proscribes10). Rawls writes: [P]ublic reason sees the office of citizen with its duty of civility as analogous to that of judge with its duty of deciding cases. Just as judges are to decide cases by legal grounds of precedent, recognized canons of statutory interpretation, and other relevant grounds, so citizens are to reason by public reason [rather than by invoking their privately-held comprehensive doctrines] and to be guided by the criterion of reciprocity, whenever constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are at stake.11 By the standard here articulated by Rawls, Barack Obama was probably betraying his office as citizen when he told religious leaders in Iowa, early in his first presidential campaign, that “his commitment to protecting the environment was shaped by his

10

See John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Rawls, Collected Papers,

ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 11

Rawls, Collected Papers, p. 605.

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relationship with Jesus Christ.”12 This Rawlsian notion seems to me, as it has seemed to many other critics of Rawls, an unrealistic basis for liberal citizenship. One has to take fellow citizens as one finds them, and allow them to articulate themselves politically in a way that actually expresses who they conceive themselves to be. Rawls’s ban, or partial ban, on comprehensive doctrines in the political sphere is misguided, not just because it will be applied in ways that are necessarily non-neutral (hence defeating what Rawls intended with his idea of public reason), but also because no one can properly be expected to leave their existential commitments at the doorstep (or “in the vestibule,” as Charles Taylor has put the same point13) when they enter the sphere of civic life. How

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An online source is cited in Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011), p. 283, n. 2. As regards the violation of Rawlsian strictures concerning public reason by Obama in his remarks to the clerics in Iowa: to be sure, there’s a difference between a view of this sort being uttered by an ordinary citizen in dialogue with other citizens, and the same statement being uttered by a political officeholder, or even a candidate for political office (i.e., avowing sectarian commitments is far more problematical for politicians than for citizens). In the context in which Obama expressed this view, he wasn’t just expressing his opinion as a citizen; he was trying to give fellow citizens a reason to be confident that he could be trusted to hold office. Hence one might indeed object to that statement in the context in which it was uttered even if one doesn’t think that the “office” of the citizen as citizen should be subject to such Rawlsian constraints. That is, the worry here is that there’s something implicitly theocratic in a presidential candidate foregrounding the sectarian basis of his political positions, and hence in this particular context, a Rawlsian doctrine of public reason indeed seems called for. 13

Charles Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” in The Power

of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 49

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can we not find rather odd a political philosophy that demands that we drive a wedge between our identity as human beings and our identity as citizens? I want to suggest that there is a repressed conception of the good in Rawls – namely the good of ecumenicalist citizenship. The idea here is that what we share as citizens has more force than what divides us as adherents of other more parochial comprehensive doctrines. But this idea of shared citizenship as a trumping consideration is itself a comprehensive doctrine (and a firm commitment to secularism is part and parcel of this comprehensive doctrine), though Rawls steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that this is the case. And in fact acknowledging citizenship to be a comprehensive doctrine would strengthen Rawlsian liberalism. In Civil Religion, I pose the question: “why would an adherent of a nonliberal comprehensive doctrine defer to an understanding of shared citizenship that did not even claim for itself the moral and philosophical authority of a comprehensive doctrine?”14 That is, why would a noncomprehensive doctrine politically trump a comprehensive doctrine (an aspect of one’s life-identity that “aspires to cover all of life,” as Rawls puts it15) in the eyes of those existentially committed to the latter? Affirming citizenship as itself a comprehensive doctrine (that is, as an existential commitment in its own right) and as an essential aspect of the human good would answer this question. 14

Civil Religion, p. 298. Brian Barry puts the point nicely in “How Not to Defend

Liberal Institutions,” in Liberalism and the Good, ed. R.B. Douglass, G.M. Mara, and H.S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 57: “given the choice between trying to persuade nonliberals to accept the principle of neutrality and trying to discredit their beliefs, I think that the second is clearly the better strategy.” (He refers to neutralism as “unilateral disarmament” on the part of liberals.) I agree! 15

Rawls, Collected Papers, p. 617.

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Here’s an example of how my proposed revision, or beefing-up, of Rawlsian liberalism would add power (both philosophical power and political power) to what is, as Rawls formulates it, (deliberately) an existentially weak and diluted version of liberalism. If a liberal civic community takes its stand on the principle of full civic equality, it’s hard to see how it can permanently resist the claim to equality instantiated in gay marriage. Abiding by Rawlsian strictures, we declare that this change in civic norms is “philosophically neutral,” related neither to a religious vision of life nor to a nonreligious vision of life. It is, so to speak, metaphysically and existentially agnostic. It’s simply the playing-out of the free-standing political commitments of citizens of a liberal polity. But how would, say, an evangelical Christian (or a hard-core Catholic like Rick Santorum) react to this claim of neutrality? And wouldn’t the evangelical Christian be right to react with incredulity? Surely there’s some vision of life at play in affirming a robust conception of gays as citizens among citizens. Again, we can’t expect a comprehensive doctrine to be trumped by something that’s less than a comprehensive doctrine. I’m not convinced that appeal to a mere “overlapping consensus” will ever get us to an acknowledgment of the justice of gay marriage. 16 But I am convinced that such

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At the London Met conference in 2012, Jeffrey Nicholas made an interesting point. He

suggested that until religious leaders put themselves at the forefront of the struggle for gay rights (e.g., gay marriage), such rights will never prevail. That may well be true. Catalysts of civic engagement are not in great abundance in contemporary liberal societies; therefore, if one believes, as I do, that shared citizenship is an essential normative ideal, then one should be prepared to welcome civic resources (ways of nourishing or replenishing citizenship), or sources of civic commitment, wherever one is lucky enough to find them – including in religious precincts. But one also has to wonder whether welcoming clerical leadership insofar as it contributes to good civic causes (as it

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an acknowledgment is required by a robust conception of shared citizenship. This suggests to me that we’re not likely to do full justice to the relationship between citizenship and secularism within Rawlsian parameters.

III Thus far, I have provided brief sketches of what it is reasonable to conceive as two polar opposites within contemporary political philosophy. Rawls is a leading liberal; MacIntyre is a leading anti-liberal. Rawls’s project is to vindicate liberal citizenship; MacIntyre’s project is to show why liberal citizenship is a hopeless mirage. In the discussion that follows, I want to see if I can appropriate a key notion of MacIntyre’s philosophy (the idea of common good) with the purpose of detaching it from his bleakly pessimistic political thought and putting it in the service of a view of civic life much closer to the liberalism of Rawls. Reflecting seriously on citizenship as a common good implicates us in reflection on secularism as an indispensable civic good. To begin working through what is at issue here, think back for a moment to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. We wouldn’t want to bar Mitt Romney (a former bishop of the Mormon Church) from seeking the U.S. presidency on account of his religious beliefs, but neither would we want those religious beliefs to have assumed any special authority had he been elected president.17 Why? First

certainly sometimes will) will inevitably have the effect of instrumentalizing religion. Is there a kind of devaluation of religion implicit in treating it strictly with respect to its provision of resources for citizenship? 17

For a report on Romney’s role as a Mormon bishop, see Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “For

Romney, a Role of Faith and Authority,” New York Times, October 15, 2011.

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of all, because political association is a community of citizens, not a community of believers. To borrow a formulation of Will Kymlicka’s, which for me articulates a foundational principle: “The boundaries of state and nation rarely if ever coincide perfectly, and so viewing the state as the possession of a particular national group can only alienate minority groups. The state must be seen as belonging equally to all people who are governed by it, regardless of their nationality.”18 The principle is just the same (and just as valid) if we substitute “religion” and “religious” for “nation” and “national” (and the principle obviously has no less force in cases where a minority religion rather than the majority religion holds the seat of power). For the Church of Latter-day Saints to have any special authority vis-à-vis other denominations or other religions would mean that the state would be “owned” by Mormons, or owned by them to a greater extent than it is owned by other citizens.19 This would be, to put it fairly mildly, normatively problematical.

18

Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.

252. 19

Garry Wills, in another online contribution to NYRblog entitled “The Mormon

Constitution,” raises interesting worries about how theocratic aspects of Mormonism might complicate the relationship to the American Constitution of an American president who was also a committed Mormon. Let me add that I appreciate the force of Martin Amis’s observation (The Guardian, 13 June, 2012, p. 13) that Romney’s Mormonism was politically relevant whether or not Romney, had he been elected as president, would have been tempted “to legislate from a Mormon perspective.” This is because, given the character of Mormonism as a religion – characterized by Amis, not implausibly, as “the most contemptible, fraudulent religion in America,” having its origins “in hucksterism and hogwash” – “it matters to one’s opinion of [Romney’s] IQ.”

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One’s views concerning a proper and desirable negotiation of the relationship between politics and religion inevitably draw upon one’s general views about religion, and about whether introducing religion into political, social, and moral matters tends to make things better or worse; so let me sketch my views as briefly as I can. I think Christopher Hitchens went much too far with his notion that all religion is poison. Hitchens developed a harshly cynical reading of what Mother Theresa was really up to. But whether one buys that interpretation or not, there is certainly no question that there are believers, motivated by their belief, who do notable good works in godforsaken and often extremely dangerous places in desperate need of their help. And before dismissing all religion as poison, we also need to weigh up the role of the black churches – and the solidarities fostered by those churches – in having made the Civil Rights Movement possible. The politics of the Civil Rights Movement was clearly a kind of theocratic politics, since much of it was cleric-led. So, even if one is highly critical of theocratic politics, as I am, one is at the very least duty-bound to acknowledge that there must be certain instances of good theocracy as well as bad theocracy. That is, one can’t say that theocratic politics is by definition bad politics, even if one continues to believe that on balance, bad theocracy far outweighs good theocracy. Shared religion clearly provides a focus of communal loyalty and identity; and as people participate in these deeper identities, they can become willing to sacrifice their own comfort or security in ways that may be more difficult to elicit from us secularist types. So we sometimes see religion provide a foundation for forms of moral and civic

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heroism that are indeed worthy of admiration.20 I don’t think it’s reasonable for anyone to argue that religion is solely a source of good or solely a source of harm. Clearly, it’s a very complicated balance-sheet, and determining exactly where the balance lies between the good that religion fosters and the harm that it does is anything but easy. Yes, the deeper identities and deeper solidarities elicited by religion sometimes make possible saintly good. But the very same deeper identities and deeper solidarities can also sometimes be mobilized on behalf of political evil. This issue of the extent to which religions are or aren’t morally and socially beneficial reminds us of the civil religion tradition within the Western theory canon, with its powerful emphasis on the utility of religion, quite apart from religion’s truth or lack of truth. The civil religion view is that it would be foolhardy not to avail oneself of the benefits of religious beliefs in the political domain, even if those beliefs happen to be false.21 But of course this presumption of religion’s utility has not gone without very

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Let me propose, at least semi-seriously, the theory that there’s a kind of “amplifier

effect” associated with religion, exaggerating so to speak the moral tendencies that are already present. What I’m suggesting, roughly, is that religion makes good people better and bad people worse. The notion here is that believing one knows what God expects of us tends to intensify human behavior, whether generous or wicked, reinforcing our determination to care for the needy or persecute the unfaithful. And if, human nature being what it is, there tends to be a preponderance of human vice over human virtue, that would then offer an easy explanation of why, in the overall balance-sheet of human life, the harm associated with religion is at least equal to its benefits. 21

As a mode of theorizing, civil religion is, one might say, a self-undermining enterprise.

It can’t avoid what in Civil Religion I called “the civil religion paradox.” That is, the moment that one declares that the polity needs a civil religion, one immediately begins to subvert precisely what one has declared to be needful. The reason that it subverts its own

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important challenges within the tradition of political philosophy. Without question, the assumption that morality is helpless if it is denied the support of religion was a nearuniversal view prior to the 18th century, to the extent that it required heroic efforts by certain Enlightenment thinkers even to begin to challenge it. But challenge it they did: let me just mention Bayle and Hume. As Hume articulates very powerfully, the presumption that moral conduct hangs on certain theological beliefs is an insult to our moral nature. And as Pierre Bayle expresses equally powerfully, to assume that professed beliefs naturally get reflected in moral conduct betrays a colossal underestimation of the unlimited scope of human hypocrisy, for most human beings have no problem at all in professing high-minded principles while making zero effort to instantiate those principles in how they actually behave towards other human beings.22 So: Hume teaches that the quality of moral conduct is shaped by the inner compellingness of morality itself, not by supposed ideas of religious reward and punishment; and Bayle teaches that the “official” view of life that gets professed is a very poor guide to how people actually conduct themselves morally. Both of these strike me as persuasive arguments, and both serve to weaken the presumed connection between morality and religion.23 Obviously, far more could be said on these issues. But even apart from the question of whether civil religionists were right to affirm the utility of religion, or Hume and Bayle were right to be desideratum is that people embrace a religion not because it’s useful but because they take it to be true. Hence the very act of theorizing civil religion (of declaring it to be theoretically desirable on account of its utility) simultaneously undercuts the object of the theory. 22

Cf. the Spinoza epigraph on p. 147 of Civil Religion.

23

The Baylean and Humean arguments concerning how morality relates to religion are

examined in detail in Chapters 14 and 18 of Civil Religion.

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skeptical of it, one can question whether utility is the key issue. Indeed, this is probably where the civil-religion tradition lets us down the most: namely, by putting all of the emphasis on the issue of the possible utility of religion, and not on the issue of its truth.24 Religion builds solidarities that often help people cope with the challenges of life, and sometimes even makes them better citizens. But the question of whether religion contributes to useful solidarities is different from the question of the truth of what believers believe.25 My own fundamental problem with religion is more on the intellectual side than on the moral side.26 For me, the fundamental issue is what it does to 24

See the two James Fitzjames Stephen epigraphs on p. 268 of Civil Religion. Consider

also Bertrand Russell’s powerful articulation of his stance on this question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqyVrJtM7Ik. 25

Note that the same good effects pointed to by defenders of religion (schools, clinics,

food banks, and so on, maintained by people with religious commitments) can in principle flow from a belief system that is cognitively worthless. Suppose that a group of believers in astrology organize themselves into a church. This astrological church would no doubt build a solidarity network serving charitable and other good purposes, as churches generally do. It can’t be denied that this would be a socially attractive outcome, but it would say nothing about the cognitive worthiness of the constitutive beliefs. As Leo Strauss rightly says: “Utility and truth are two entirely different things” (Natural Right and History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], p. 6). 26

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that what often elicits religious commitments is not

the beliefs (about creation, salvation, the nature of the divinity, and so) but simply the longing for moral direction. That is, one seeks a larger framework that instructs one in fairly clear terms about how to conduct oneself towards sexual issues, family norms, and one’s social obligations more generally. If this thesis is true (or true in significant measure) then it would go a long way towards explaining the important fact noted elsewhere in this essay – namely, that these days, illiberal religions tend to fare much better than liberal religions.

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human dignity to believe things that are unworthy of belief. We’ve known for several centuries, and certainly since Darwin, that human beings – with their hopes for salvation and their fears of a death that is death and nothing else – are not the centre of some cosmic drama; and that God, if there is one, has no reason to take a special interest in the animal species that happens to have prevailed on this obscure planet. Don’t we simply embarrass ourselves by inflating our own importance to the level of objects of divine care and attention? Doesn’t this look like a kind of “species-narcissism”? I can’t help thinking in this context of Nietzsche’s unforgettable image of the mosquito that imagines itself to be “the flying center of the world.”27 Of course, I concede that there are many more sophisticated theologies that minimize the tension between religion and the present state of scientific knowledge; but here I endorse Hume’s line that it will be precisely the more visceral, less sophisticated forms of religion that will tend to be socially and politically the more salient ones.28

27

The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 42.

Cf. the suggestion by Salman Rushdie that “it’s only our vanity” that causes us to think that our caring about the stars is requited by the stars caring about us (The Moor’s Last Sigh, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in The Missionary Position [Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012], p. 37. For further reflections on this theme, see Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chap. 4. 28

See Civil Religion, Chap. 18. Cf. Freud’s contrast between sophisticated versions of

religious sentiment and the “infantile” religion of “the common man”: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 12. As Freud strikingly puts it, the common man’s religion is “the only one that deserves the name.” See also, in the same vein, Freud’s letter to Marie Bonaparte dated

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It seems to me that, for instance in the case of the three Abrahamic faiths, taking these religions seriously requires actually believing that (to take them in chronological order) there will be a Jewish Messiah, that Christ is the Redeemer of mankind’s sins, that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah. But believing these articles of faith requires in turn the belief that this small planet of ours figures fairly importantly within a larger divine scheme. Is it intellectually credible, or intellectually respectable, to believe that in the post-Copernican, post-Darwinian world we now inhabit? Even if everything connected with religion increased the stock of good in the world (which again is far from being a plausible view), wouldn’t there still be something humanly demeaning in needing to inject more meaning into the world than is really there in order to sustain a meaningful life? I don’t think these are rhetorical questions. They are real questions that one is obliged to reflect on in pondering the proper role of religion in human life. No one disputes that life is full of mystery, and that there seems to be an ineliminable yearning to share in an apprehension of a meaning – with respect to the mysteries of birth, existence, and death – deeper than science will ever be able to supply. But there’s no getting around the fact that as moral beings, we can see quite clearly the historical reality that the world religions have caused at least as much havoc and destruction as they have moral good; and as rational or cognitive beings, we understand, better than the purveyors of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran were able to understand, that we live on a minute planet (an infinitesimal speck, really) in an unfathomably large universe, and it’s just not terribly plausible that human doings have the cosmic importance that these

March 19, 1928: Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 447.

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scriptures say they do.29 As for God, it’s hard to see how it helps at all to abate the mysteries of existence that are apparent to all of us by simply invoking another mystery. I can’t say I fully understand why so many people feel such a strong gravitational pull towards religion. But let’s face it, there are a thousand things I don’t understand about human nature. Here are a few examples, chosen more or less at random. I don’t understand why people watch golf on television. I don’t understand why people vote for political parties representing the view that minimization of taxation is the highest purpose in political life. I don’t understand why people are interested in buying Rolex watches for $43,000. I don’t understand why people drive somewhere within walking distance when they can just as easily walk. I don’t understand why people live in the suburbs when they could live in real cities. And so on. Yet the reality is that these things are a part of how people define their lives, whether it makes sense to me or not. Nor is it particularly clear that I need to come to an understanding of these aspects of (to me) the inscrutable nature of human beings; that’s just how things are. But what matters politically speaking is not the judgment of the reasonableness of what believers believe, but rather, how those beliefs affect our civic relationships – how we stand towards each other as citizens. For religion doesn’t just mean private belief. Religion often involves structures of churchly or priestly power and authority, and often asserts substantial political claims. Sometimes structures of clerical power are exercised for positive civic purposes -- again, the shining

29

Simon Blackburn has put the point well: “Homo sapiens has existed for the blink of an

eye as a small fraction of the biomass in one small planet on the edge of a galaxy with over 100 billion stars, itself one of some 500 billion other galaxies. It would be very wasteful if that were all just for us.” See: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/Simon_Blackburn

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example of clerical authority during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s is the one absolutely unchallengeable case of religion being mobilized for noble and worthy civic purposes (and another good example is provided by the civic heroism of Buddhist monks who marched in protest against the military dictatorship in Burma). But quite often, that same power is exercised for purposes that are hardly benign. It suffices to glance around the world today. Think of the oppression of homosexuals in Africa; think of the influence of Serbian Orthodox priests during the Yugoslav civil wars of the 90s; think of religious extremism in Israel and Palestine; think of Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan; think of the religious right in the U.S.; think of a hundred other places where clerical political power is being abused -- that is, helping to mobilize fear, hatred, and cruelty.30 It is a common story, to the extent that it would be absurd to assert that the norm is for churches and priests to deploy their power and authority for worthy or even merely benign purposes. (Reinhold Niebuhr, in a 1958 interview with Mike Wallace,

30

Examples that could be cited are limitless, but for one that is particularly startling

because it’s a case of violent, monk-instigated Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, consider “Massacre fuels fears of ethnic cleansing,” The Globe and Mail, April 11, 2013, p. A21; see also Lysiane Gagnon, “Saffron revelation,” Globe and Mail, March 4, 2015, p. A11. For a few telling discussions of the ways in which Christian Orthodoxy is currently getting mobilized for political-ideological purposes, see for instance Davor Džalto, “Nationalism, Statism, and Orthodoxy,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Vol. 57, nos. 3-4 (2013), pp. 503-523; Marlene Laruelle, “The three colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian nationalist mythmaking of the Ukrainian crisis,” Post-Soviet Affairs (2015); and M.D. Suslov, “’Holy Rus’: The Geopolitical Imagination in the Contemporary Russian Orthodox Church,” Russian Politics and Law, Vol. 52, no. 3 (2014): 67-86.

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packed a lot of wisdom into a short observation when he said to Wallace: “It is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.”31) What’s our common good in relation to all this? We inhabit a society where women won’t be arrested or perhaps lashed for wearing the wrong clothes or listening to the wrong music; where no one will be accused of blasphemy or heresy; where one group of religionists won’t suffer pogroms at the hands of, or have their villages razed by, some other group of religionists (as apparently happens on a regular basis, for instance, in Nigeria); where gender equality won’t be put out of reach by people appealing to sacred scriptures; and so on. In short: we live in a society where religion is largely privatized, where liberty of individual judgment is vastly expanded, and where religion’s power of policing sexuality – historically, one of the chief sources, surely, of religion’s social and political power – is dramatically curtailed. These are just familiar secularist pieties; I don’t want to pretend that they’re anything other than that. But to the extent that we live in a world where theocracy still is (and will be for the foreseeable future) a political force to reckon with, we could do worse than remind ourselves of these trite secularist pieties, and remind ourselves of why we began to cherish them in the first place. It’s crucial that we avoid the kind of complacency where we fail to recognize the attainment of principled secularist norms as the political achievement of very large proportions that it really is. Another version of such complacency would be to assume that theocracy is a problem limited to the Islamic world, whereas in fact theocratic politics has shown itself to be a possibility even in the modern West. I’ve lived in two 31

The interview can be accessed at:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/niebuhr_reinhold_t.html

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societies (pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, and Ireland) where, within living memory, politics was a priest-infested business (neither of them happy experiences). As Theodor Herzl said in trying to imagine what a Jewish state ought to look like, priests should be confined to their temples in the same way that soldiers should be confined to their barracks. (And the parallel drawn by Herzl impresses itself upon us all the more vividly when we ponder present-day Egypt, where a military-dominated regime was replaced for one year by a theocratic regime, only to be deposed once again by the military.) In short: as citizens we share a substantial common good in sparing ourselves the distortion of political life associated with theocracy, whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian, or Jewish (contemporary political life has given us samples of all four). There’s one further set of important considerations that in my view tells decisively in favor of a resolutely secularist approach to political life. If we are trying to decide whether to build expressways or build public transit, or decide between sending troops to the Middle East and not sending troops to the Middle East, there are in principle tangible worldly outcomes that will eventually tend to vindicate one side or the other. The quality of these outcomes will always be contested by people with opposing political convictions, but there is at least something in the world to which one can appeal in pursuing these debates. It strikes me that the case is quite otherwise when we attempt to guide political life according to appeals to the realm of divinity (appeals to God’s preferences, in effect). Consider for instance the issues at play in the West’s ongoing struggle to contain the self-avowed caliphate in Iraq and Syria. In his address to the American people of September 10th, 2014, justifying the decision to get involved militarily in the war against this aggressive theocratic entity, President Obama pointedly

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declared: “ISIL is not ‘Islamic’… And ISIL is certainly not a state.” One might ask: on what basis is Obama equipped to offer the confident assurance that these theocratic militants are not Islamic? For, really, this would require settling the theological question of which is more authentically Islamic, the Islam of contemporary liberal Muslims or the Islam of the conquering caliphs of early Islamic history.32 God or Allah doesn’t speak directly to any of us, so it’s an intrinsically open question whether He prefers the liberal Muslims of today or the illiberal Muslims of the 7th century. That in itself gives us further insight into why it’s problematic to base political claims on theological claims, whether one’s religion is a theocratic religion or a non-theocratic religion. (I.e., the idea that God demands that we desist from all wars is problematic for the very same reason. It’s politically problematic because it’s epistemologically problematic, basing its politics on something that’s intrinsically unknowable.) Naturally, we all cheer on the Muslim liberals, and are repelled and disgusted by the barbaric crimes of the jihadi Muslims. But the idea of an Islamic caliphate spread by the sword is not an ideological fiction; the fact that this history stretches back many centuries does not annul it as history, or turn it into something ideologically invented. Yet even if the jihadists could somehow vindicate their lunacy as authentically Islamic – whatever that might mean – that would not carry us a millimeter closer to conceding to them on the entirely different question of whether their vision of human life is normatively desirable.

32

For essential reading with respect to the issues raised here, see Graeme Wood, “What

ISIS Really Wants” (March 2015): http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

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Interpretations of the world religions that are consonant with liberal and democratic citizenship do not pose a problem for political life; in fact, as civil-religiously-inclined liberals have always emphasized, such religions are often beneficial for civic life. The problem is illiberal religion, especially versions of illiberal religion with political ambitions. And religions that ground non-liberal or anti-liberal views of life cannot be simply legislated away; they need to be submitted to a process of reciprocal democratic engagement.33 The history of modern political philosophy tried out a series of intellectual strategies for liberalizing and domesticating religion – Erastianizing strategies, in the case of civil religion; rationalizing strategies, in the case of philosophically-articulated forms of deism.34 Have any of these strategies actually “solved” this problem? This, to be sure, remains an open question. However, the exercise of comparing the present-day state of liberalized religion (e.g., Anglicanism in England) and that of illiberal religion (e.g.,

33

An argument to this effect is the main thrust of Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation.

The story told in Walzer’s book is also relevant to my concerns here because he shows, in multiple contexts, how seemingly well-established secularist regimes eventually face strong religious backlash. The secularism is legislated by political elites; the backlash comes from traditionalist cultures which the elites tried and failed to liberalize. 34

I have explored these two sets of strategies in Civil Religion. As regards the second

domesticating strategy – that is, the rationalizing strategy (namely those forms of deism that seek to reconceive Biblical religion in ways that are radically liberalized and rationalized) – it is examined in Chapters 9-10, 13, and 17 of Civil Religion (as well as in a forthcoming essay of mine entitled “Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and the Problem of Priestcraft”). A number of the thinkers who pursued the Erastian strategy (e.g., Hobbes, Spinoza, John Toland, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau) pursued the deist strategy as well; there’s no necessary reason why one must pursue only one strategy or the other.

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Anglicanism in Africa), and asking which is vibrant and which is declining, certainly gives one pause. Relevant here is the story that Mark Lilla tells in his book The Stillborn God: rather than liberal theologies having permanently succeeded in removing the sting from the problem of religion and politics, the early twentieth century saw a substantial backlash against liberal or rationalized versions of Judeo-Christian religion, generating neo-messianic theologies (e.g., those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch) that then fed into the darkest currents in 20th-century politics.35 The moral of the story that Lilla tells, which is an intensely sobering one, is that whatever it is in human nature that draws human beings towards religion appears to be less than fully satisfied with thoroughly liberalized versions of religion.36 This, one suspects, is why illiberal religions (e.g., Pentecostalism, Mormonism, and the more reactionary versions of Islam) are the ones that seem today to be capturing ever-larger “market share” among the religions on offer.37

35

Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007). For a commentary, see my

review essay, “Has the Great Separation Failed?”: Critical Review, Vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 45-63. 36

Hume, already cited, was very strongly of this view. So too was Tocqueville: see

Christopher Kelly, “Civil and Uncivil Religions: Tocqueville on Hinduism and Islam,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 20, Nos. 4-6 (1995), p. 848. Again, cf. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 12. 37

For a good account, see the following four articles by Ross Douthat: “Liberal

Christianity’s Decline,” International Herald Tribune, 16 July, 2012, p. 9; “The Ratzinger Legacy,” New York Times, March 3, 2013, p. SR 11; “The Promise and Peril of Pope Francis,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 2013, p. SR 12; and “Springtime for Liberal Christianity,” New York Times, Sept. 27, 2015, p. SR 11. Cf. Civil Religion, p. 244, n. 43; and Barry, “How Not to Defend Liberal Institutions,” p. 57.

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None of us knows where the universe comes from or why it exists. Theists don’t know. Atheists don’t know. Agnostics don’t know. None of us knows. So for any group of people to come forward and say, not only do they have privileged access to the source of the universe, but they know what rituals It wants performed and what moral codes It wants to see prevail – well, that’s both a colossal presumption, morally and intellectually speaking, and also a colossal (and potentially dangerous) claim to power and authority. Therefore it has to be resisted when asserted as a basis of civic privilege. On the other hand, we have a duty (a civic duty, not a moral duty) not to express contempt for the sincerely-held beliefs of our fellow citizens. We have no choice but to take our fellow citizens as we find them, and give them civic space to communicate their political opinions in a manner corresponding to their actual beliefs. I’m aware that there’s something of a tension between the two sides of the issue I’ve tried to articulate: letting people give expression to their actual beliefs, and not allowing those beliefs to be leveraged on behalf of indefensible power and authority. Bridging this tension is something we’re able to pull off politically through the kinds of compromises that we’re familiar with in liberal democracies. We don’t bar Mitt Romney from the political arena just because he’s a former bishop of the Mormon Church, and may have strange ideas of how God revealed himself and what He expects of us. But neither do we tolerate the idea of a Mormon bishop becoming U.S. president as a prelude to instituting a Mormon theocracy. That’s the liberal compromise, and very few of us would countenance rejecting either side of this compromise. A secular regime is one where members of the society are given sufficient breathing-space vis-à-vis religion that the political agenda is not subject to compulsory

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dictation on the part of religious authorities, and citizens can conduct their deliberations about political matters in a distinctively political (citizen-to-citizen) idiom. The liberal state doesn’t try to police the tendency of people to adopt a whole range of nonsensical beliefs. If people want to believe in astrology, let them believe in astrology. An important (albeit not unfamiliar) part of the story is the attempt within the liberal tradition to shift from pursuit of the good to avoidance of evil. This started with Hobbes’s insistence that philosophers shouldn’t go chasing after notions of a summum bonum, but instead limit themselves to the more modest task of reflecting on the summum malum (namely the breakdown in shared political order – or oppression, cruelty, violence in the case of what it’s appropriate to call more liberal versions of liberalism). Belief in astrology starts becoming a political problem if large numbers of people start organizing themselves politically on behalf of that belief in order to bully or arm-twist nonbelievers, and to attempt to make structures of authority within this group of believers binding on the whole society. Let me add: in practice, I don’t think it matters all that much whether our defense of secularism is cast as a (non-liberal) “theory of the good” or as a (liberal) theory of the avoidance of evil.38 If theocratic rule or theocratic moral guardianship

38

I should qualify this statement by saying that giving normative priority to avoidance of

such political ills is in my view itself a “conception of the good” (or implies such a conception of the good). Whether in its Hobbesian version or in its Rawlsian version, the idea that one could affirm a vision of politics without endorsing any particular conception of ultimate human flourishing is chimerical. (A society centered on liberal-egalitarian ideas of decency and mutual respect is obviously very different from societies fundamentally geared towards warrior honor, or Sparta-like republican virtue, or piety, or contemplative communing with nature.) In that sense, my view is that conceptions of the

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expands the prospects of human misery, then in providing for a kind of politics that is at the furthest possible remove from theocratic politics, we are simultaneously securing an important aspect of the human good. Politically speaking, a secular society is one where religious authorities have no special clout, and insofar as they participate in political debate (which is legitimate), it’s on the basis of citizen-to-citizen rather than minister-to-those-who-are-ministered-to, or pastor-to-recipients-of-pastoral-care (that is, shepherd-to-sheep). That’s become the norm in Western liberal societies, and we should not allow ourselves to become so fearful of appearing Eurocentric that we hesitate to affirm that norm as normatively justified.39

good are always privileged in relation to the Hobbesian doctrine that ideas of the summum bonum (or even aspects of it) are in principle out of reach. 39

Consider the following interesting observation by Owen Bennett-Jones: “much of the

Western commentary on the ascent of the Islamic State has been strikingly defensive…. Obama and Cameron have condemned the Islamic State’s barbarity but – in contrast to the rhetoric of Bush and Blair – they haven’t spoken passionately about the virtues of the West…. Surely the West should be able to articulate confidence in its precious values of tolerance and equality before the law” (“When Jihadis Win Power,” London Review of Books, 4 December 2014, p. 35). According to Bennett-Jones’s interpretation, this reticence is directly related to a global decline in Western power. But even if this thesis of shrinking control were correct, it’s far from clear why it would entail an inability or reluctance to articulate what the West stands for with respect to positive normative conceptions. For another powerful protest against reticence on the part of secularist liberals or leftists to state clearly what they stand for, see Michael Walzer’s essay “Islamism and the Left” in the Winter 2015 issue of Dissent. The online version of this piece (on the Dissent website) also features a spirited debate between Walzer and Andrew F. March.

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