Essay by Robin W. Lovin
In the modern west, religion has often appeared politically dangerous. At one point, religious divisions so threatened the social order that even those who were skeptical of claims to religious knowledge insisted on religious unanimity, enforced by coercion, if necessary. For Thomas Hobbes, church and state were necessarily one, and any attempt to distinguish between spiritual and temporal authority served only to confuse. “Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign.” A century later, however, the emphasis shifted to a recognition that religious coercion was itself a threat to civil peace. John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration made the distinction between civil and religious authority that Hobbes found unacceptable. According to Locke, when genuine matters of belief are concerned, civil coercion is useless. When coercion is appropriate, in the protection of life and property, religion is irrelevant. Locke wrote, “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the Business of Civil Government from that of Religion, and to settle the just Bounds that lie between the one and the other.”
The Lockean distinction has come to dominate liberal politics, dictating not only the institutional separation of church and state, but also a certain intellectual insulation between the language and ideas of religious belief and the deliberations of political communities. The underlying notion is that religious ideas undermine civic unity because they rest on unique, personal experiences or on systems of belief that are not generally shared, but are held with unusual tenacity. The same intensity of conviction that makes religious beliefs unsusceptible to coercion makes them unsuitable in public discussions. Religion does not provide reasons for choice that unbelievers are likely to understand or to accept, and it lends a rigidity to the opinions of the faithful that makes believers unresponsive to the arguments of others.
This isolation of religious belief from public discourse began as part of a larger liberal understanding of politics as a mechanism for compromise between competing civil interests, rather than a forum for the development and transformation of ideas. That liberalism has served American public life reasonably well; however, the increasing role of religious ideas in public controversies over abortion, school prayer, national defense, economic policy, and environmental concerns suggests that the traditional separations and the reasons for accepting them may both be eroding. Many people now find it impossible to articulate their civil interests without reference to their religious beliefs. As a result, we must rethink the liberal model of public discourse, if not completely reconstruct the relationships between faith, law, and morals.
Michael Perry's Morality, Politics, and Law leads us toward the latter course, a rejection of the prevailing forms of liberalism, and a new understanding of the place of moral beliefs in legislation and adjudication. Not coincidentally, Perry also gives unusual attention in his work to the public role of religion.
My purpose in this Essay is to highlight this aspect of Perry's argument, showing how the ethical naturalism that shapes his account of making, breaking, and interpreting the law also provides a relationship between religious beliefs and public choices that overcomes the old isolation. To achieve this purpose, I will first examine the way that liberal democratic theory typically regards religious ideas and their relationship to legal and political choices. Liberalism need not exclude religious influences on public decisions. However, even the most favorable presentation of liberalism seems curiously abstract and unrelated to the role that religious beliefs actually play in the thinking of many persons. Thus, I will then turn to a different statement of the relationship between religious beliefs and political choices, drawing not on theories of liberal democracy, but on theological reasons for introducing religious convictions into more general discussions. The result should be an account of the public role of religious beliefs that, while it differs somewhat from the standard accounts of liberal democracy, corresponds better to the way that many persons in liberal democratic societies actually hold and use their religious beliefs. Then, in Section III, I will discuss the compatibility of this treatment of religious convictions with Michael Perry's version of ethical naturalism. Perry's account of moral knowledge undercuts liberal theory's sharp distinction between religious beliefs and other forms of shared knowledge, and it permits the use of this religious-moral knowledge in public persuasion and social transformation. Section IV will describe the role of religious beliefs in what Perry calls “deliberative, transformative politics” and will suggest the importance of that kind of politics for the articulation and transformation of religious ideas. A brief conclusion will summarize the lessons and limitations of this discussion as a whole.
About the Author
Robin W. Lovin. Associate Professor of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, University of Chicago.
Citation
63 Tul. L. Rev. 1517 (1989)