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.