How does liberalism respond to the presence of religion in contemporary political arenas? Rawls and Religion, published by Columbia University Press, edited by John Cabot University Professor Tom Bailey and Valentina Gentile, lecturer of Political Philosophy and Co-Director of the LUISS Center for Ethics and Global Politics attempts to respond.
The book is a collection of important works from the international academic debates that document recent developments in the discussion surrounding American philosopher John Rawls’ Political Liberalism (1993), deemed “the most significant and sophisticated liberal response to the problem of moral and religious pluralism that characterizes contemporary democracies,” according to Gentile. “The relationship between religion and politics has been a central point of liberal thought since its birth,” explains Gentile. “In recent decades, this debate has been given new content and theoretic forces. One of the most debated questions regards the relationship between liberal democracy and new religious voices and religious sensitivity emerging in the Western world, starting with the relationship between Islam and liberal democracy.”
The book responds to criticisms that underestimate the importance of religion in Rawls’ political liberalism. “If modern liberalism was born as an antidote to religious intolerance and responded to the need to guarantee political stability by excluding religion from the public sphere; then the evolution of liberal thought, and John Rawls' work contributed to the formation of the ideal of tolerance to accommodate and include moral and religious visions in the public sphere.”
In what way has the contemporary understanding of liberal political authority expressed the ideal of tolerance? “According to Rawls, the concept of political authority in a liberal democracy must be the fruit of intersectional consent between different moral and religious thoughts in order to be stable throughout time. Rawls’ liberal tolerance is one in which an ideal citizenry recognizes moral disagreement as a natural outcome of the exercise of reason within a shared political authority based on political values of liberty and equality.”
According to these criticisms, the contemporary idea of tolerance assumes a typical liberal means of understanding political authority. “First and foremost,” clarifies Professor Gentile, “Rawls distinguishes the meta-philosophical level of a purely political conception of liberal state authority from a liberalism understood as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Liberalism as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine, on the same level of other religious or ‘rational’ philosophical visions, represents one of the possible comprehensive visions that sustains the shared concept of liberal political authority. In this regard, the idea of intersectional consent implies that adhesion to this shared conception is based on deep personal convictions.”
A different way to interpret criticisms of political liberalism comes from a religious perspective. How does political liberalism respond to the challenges raised by citizens of faith, and in particular, by conscientious objectors? “Rawls tries to respect the integrity of religious citizens,” claims Gentile “by reuniting political values affirmed by the conception of justice with the moral values recognized within the doctrine of every reasonable religious doctrine.”
This objective is pursued in different ways: the first is the inclusive interpretation of the concept of public reason. “The ideal of a ‘public reason’ is a goal that reasonable citizens in a liberal-democratic society must aspire to in public debate. Nevertheless, Rawls prefers an inclusive interpretation of the public debate on (non-public) religious and moral rights. It is important to Rawls to understand the importance that certain religious arguments have had in decisive historical moments that until this day support the development and affirmation of political values. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. and his battle for civil rights involved a great deal of religious reasoning. In this case, evoking religious reasoning was necessary to support political values that would then become a part of the shared understanding of justice.”