Rawls on religion

Though John Rawls wrote much that is of relevance to religion – and in particular, to the question of what influence it can properly have on politics (basically none, in Rawls’s view) – he wrote little on religion itself.  After his death, his undergraduate senior thesis, titled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, was published.  Naturally, it is of limited relevance to his mature thought.  However, published in the same volume was a short 1997 personal essay titled “On My Religion,” which is not uninteresting as an account of the development of his religious beliefs.  I think it does shed some light on his political philosophy.  From Rawls’s best-known works, the conservative religious believer is bound to judge Rawls’s knowledge and understanding of religion to be shallow.  And indeed, I think his views on these matters were shallow.  But as the essay reveals, that is not because he didn’t give much thought to them.

In his early life, Rawls was an Episcopalian, and he was religious enough to have considered going to the seminary.  He lost faith in traditional Christianity while serving as a soldier during World War II, and he admits that he does not know for certain what the reasons were.  But they seem to have had primarily to do with the problem of evil, and in particular with the way the significance of that problem was impressed on him by experiences he had during the war, such as the death of a friend and learning of the Holocaust.  Not unrelatedly, he later came to find Christian doctrines such as predestination and damnation morally objectionable.  In general, he says, his difficulties with Christianity had to do with moral matters, rather than evidential ones such as the question of whether there are any good arguments for God’s existence.

What he has to say about all this is pretty commonplace and doesn’t add anything new to skeptical arguments already familiar (not that it was meant by Rawls to add anything – he’s just summarizing the considerations that he personally found most significant).  Rawls also expresses the view – totally wrong in my opinion, but common in the late twentieth century especially – that arguments for God’s existence like Aquinas’s lack any religious significance.  For reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, I don’t think someone could properly understand those arguments and still say that.  But Rawls merely makes a passing remark to this effect, so there’s no actual worked-out position there to comment on.

This much is pretty pedestrian and wouldn’t make the article of much interest (though in fairness to Rawls, it was not written for publication, and starts out explicitly saying that his personal religious development was not especially unusual or likely to be of interest to anyone else).  However, there are several other remarks he makes that are of interest for the light they shed on how Rawls’s views about religion influenced his political philosophy.

First, Rawls is fairly frank about his hostility to Catholicism in particular.  He says that the history of the Inquisition was of special interest to him in the years immediately after the war, and he is critical of the Church’s “use of political power to establish its hegemony and to oppress other religions” (p. 264).  He indicates that it is natural that it would do so, given that it is “a religion of eternal salvation requiring true belief,” so that “the Church saw itself as having justification for its repression of heresy” (pp. 264-5).  He says that he has “come to think of the denial of religious freedom and liberty of conscience as a very great evil, and for me it makes the claims of the Popes to infallibility impossible to accept” (p. 265).  These freedoms and liberties, he goes on to tell us, would become “fixed points of my moral and political opinions” and “basic political elements of my view of constitutional democracy” (Ibid.). It is significant that his judgment on papal infallibility remains harsh despite his acknowledgement of the qualifications Catholicism puts on it.  It is also significant that he does not mention the teaching of Vatican II on religious liberty, which seems to have been irrelevant to him in evaluating Catholicism.  That the popes are said to be infallible under certain circumstances, yet the Church once claimed and used temporal power in the way she did, is for him enough to falsify the doctrine.

It is noteworthy that some of Rawls’s basic political convictions traced precisely to a hostility to the medieval Church and its doctrinal inflexibility and claims to divine authority, since that was, of course, true also of progenitors of the liberal tradition like Hobbes and Locke.  Rawls, widely considered the most influential modern theorist of liberalism, is in this way very much in line with the early liberal tradition and its primary concerns.

A second noteworthy set of remarks made by Rawls evinces hostility to Christianity more generally.  He says that “to the extent that Christianity is taken seriously, I came to think it could have deleterious effects on one’s character” (p. 265).  That’s a pretty strong statement.  What is his basis for it?  The problem, as he sees it, is that the Christian’s concern for his personal salvation in the afterlife tends to make him insufficiently attentive to his social obligations in this world.  He spells this out in the following curious passage:

Christianity is a solitary religion: each is saved or damned individually, and we naturally focus on our own salvation to the point where nothing else might seem to matter.  Whereas actually, while it is impossible not to be concerned with ourselves, at least to some degree – and we should – our own individual soul and its salvation are hardly important for the larger picture of civilized life, and often we have to recognize this.  Thus, how important is it that I be saved compared to risking my life to assassinate Hitler, had I the chance?  It’s not important at all. (p. 265)

Note first that the example is very odd.  We can agree that it would be extremely important for someone to stop Hitler, including by way of an assassination that might risk one’s own life, if one was in a position to do so.  But though perhaps a few Christians would disagree with that (pacifists, say), why on earth would Rawls think Christians in general would?  Yet maybe he doesn’t mean to imply that they would, but instead intends only to say that while Christians would agree that stopping Hitler is important, they would regard salvation as even more important.

The example still seems odd, but put that aside.  For it is also very odd for Rawls to claim that salvation is “hardly important for the larger picture of civilized life,” and indeed “not important at all.”  For salvation concerns the eternal happiness of one’s immortal soul, and the avoidance of eternal damnation.  Not even the greatest blessings of this life can compare to salvation, and not even the greatest evils of this life can compare to damnation.  Hence, it is obvious that nothing could be more important than these things.  Why on earth, then, would Rawls suggest that in fact they are “hardly important” and even “not important at all”? 

No doubt Rawls believed that there is no such thing as salvation or damnation in the hereafter.  But that is beside the point.  For the fact remains that if salvation and damnation are real, then they would indeed be far more important than anything that occurs in this life.  What Rawls should say, then, is not that salvation is unimportant, but that it is unreal, if that’s indeed what he thinks.  It would be silly, and indeed mad, to say that salvation and damnation might indeed be real but still somehow hardly important or altogether unimportant.

Anyway, these remarks evince a very this-worldly moral and spiritual orientation, and a rejection of Christianity’s traditional emphasis on the hereafter.  And here too Rawls has much in common with the early modern liberals, who also wanted to reorient the West away from the otherworldly concerns of medieval Christianity and focus it on the here and now.

A final interesting set of remarks made by Rawls in the essay concerns the sixteenth-century French thinker Jean Bodin, an advocate of religious toleration who Rawls says was especially influential on his own views about religion.  Rawls says there are three things in particular that he finds striking in Bodin.  First, he says, Bodin advocated religious toleration on religious grounds, rather than for merely political reasons or because of any tendency toward skepticism.  Second, he says that Bodin thought of dialogue between religions as about seeking mutual understanding, rather than being a matter of giving criticisms and arguments intended to convince.  Third, he says that the sort of religious belief that Bodin regarded as inadmissible seems to have been the kind that did not advocate toleration, and was thus not “reasonable.”

Those familiar with Rawls’s Political Liberalism will no doubt notice the echoes of what he says in that book.  He claims there that his brand of liberalism is neutral between the diverse religious, moral, and philosophical “comprehensive doctrines” that exist in modern pluralistic societies.  Or at least, it is neutral between what Rawls calls “reasonable” comprehensive doctrines, which he thinks of as those that are willing to accept liberalism’s constraints about what sorts of views can be permitted to influence the political realm, including constraints of religious toleration.  He says that a commitment to liberalism can be grounded in what he calls an “overlapping consensus” between comprehensive doctrines, but that claims that derive from a particular comprehensive doctrine that are not shared by the others ought to play no role in “public reason,” i.e. the considerations that guide deliberation between citizens over matters of public policy.

In fact, the “neutrality” of Rawls’s political liberalism is bogus and the argument of the book is problematic in other ways too.  (See, for example, Michael Sandel’s devastating review of the book.)  What matters for present purposes, though, is that it entails a vision of religion as a purely private matter that believers ought to keep to themselves, rather than as something that is no less entitled to public voice and influence than are, say, the views of economists, medical doctors, or scientists.  Bodin’s conception of religion dovetails nicely with this, and perhaps influenced Rawls as he thought through the position of Political Liberalism.  But it is far from the traditional self-understanding of Christianity, and certainly of Catholicism.

Here once again, Rawls echoes his early modern liberal forebears, who tried to make Christianity safe for liberalism precisely by redefining it, neutering it of any doctrinal content that might conflict with the liberal conception of the proper scope and limits of government.  But he also evinces the parochialism evident throughout his work.  Rawls is often criticized for presenting as a universal and objective set of political principles what are really just the intuitions of the average mid twentieth-century liberal New England college professor.  His views about religion are no different, and lack the self-awareness of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and company, who knew they were proposing a radical reconceptualization of Christianity rather than something they could glibly expect their critics to go along with.