Talking about God in public

The second tempter of the martyr Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral offers him a collaborative arrangement under the power of the king. When he rejects this, asserting instead his episcopal authority, he is accused of being merely interested in power.

The same temptation is offered under very different historical conditions by the late-modern liberal segregation of the sacred (private) from the secular. Religious people are indeed invited to take their place in the business of public reasoning, but on the condition that they jettison those components of their thinking that held by others to be ‘religious’. The most prominent contemporary exponent of political liberalism – indeed, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the last forty years – is John Rawls. Rawls began in A Theory of Justice (1971) to concur with Kant and to try to earth justice solely in a universal and abstract notion of ‘Reason’. However, in Political Liberalism (1993) he suggests the notion of ‘reasonableness’. He distinguishes this from ‘Reason’ by noting that a person acts reasonably when they are willing ‘to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will do so’. From behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, Rawls proposes that people will choose reasonably for fair terms that will receive acknowledgement by ‘overlapping’ consensus. It would be quite possible for people to hold the same political values for quite disparate reasons: but these reasons are in the end quite irrelevant. Rawls writes provocatively, ‘[F]or the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.’ Rawls claims that this conception of justice is ‘freestanding’: it moves entirely in the practical and political world and leaves philosophy (and presumably theology) untouched. Rawls’ attempt to justify political liberalism at least has the virtue of accommodating the fact of pluralism: it (supposedly) allows for peaceful disagreements, and finds considerable space for positive agreement. Rawls wants to establish more than a modus vivendi: if groups in society are merely tolerant of one another, there is always the possibility of instability if the balance of power shifts and one group gains more power than others. His theory appears also to avoid the difficulty of appeal to some form of ‘comprehensive doctrine’ (the term he uses for ‘the contents of persons’ determinate conceptions of the good’). This modus vivendi forestalls the entry into the public space of the religious in such a way as to protect society from facing discussions about matters which may prevent the productive and safe conduct of its business. However, it also forces religious groups to speak in public only in terms of outcomes and utility, and perhaps about (their own) rights. The business of the actual concrete determination and management of justice must be carried out without reference to the ‘shadowy’ discourse of theology. Any Christian address of a controversial matter of public interest must prove itself in a measurable way, aside from its own logic. Economics is the new queen of the sciences to whom all other forms of knowledge must pay tribute. There is an option, however, delivered by postmodernity and present in the later Rawls. This is the ‘territorial’ option, whereby the religious group asserts and protects its own interests within the public sphere, usually on the basis of ‘rights’. Its speech having been excluded from the public forum, it can now only speak in the language that succeeds in that space, occupy as much of it as possible, and engage in talking mostly in an inner-directed way to its own constituency. The group may even succeed in gaining representatives of its interests elected into government office. The result is that it creates a new public space for itself, which it seeks to enlarge at the expense of other groups. To put it another way: the exclusion from the public forum of religious types of speech means that religious people feel a great difficutly at feeling their point of view is really heard in public. This situation may be accepted by some, who then have to live with the Paul/Saul bifurcation of their identities; but, for others, it is an invitation to occupy as much of the public sphere as possible without feeling the need to talk persuasively in the public sphere at all.