Abstract
This collection of essays contests the deleterious influence that it supposes John Rawls’s political theory to have on the articulation of Christian views in U.S. public life. It upholds a sense of “love” for God’s creation against Rawlsian principles of equality, focusing on defending market freedoms, based on God-given natural rights, against policies of economic redistribution. And it claims that the Rawlsian concern with consensus unjustly excludes Christian ideas, reducing public debate to secular individualist and technical terms. These are provocative claims. However, they are not novel and the collection does little to substantiate them. In particular, the contributions engage little with Rawls’s arguments or the extensive literature that has developed on them; Rawls generally appears as a stand-in for militant secularism, or what Greg Forster in his concluding polemic calls a “relativistic, materialistic, irresponsible, and (above all) selfish view of human life and the meaning of the universe” (p. 179). Indeed, the idea that such views dominate U.S. public life and that Rawls’s theory supports and promoted them is generally assumed, rather than argued for. The collection thus reads more as a stimulating document of conservative Christian reactions to broadly liberal and secular views than as a genuine argument for the failings of Rawls’s theory or the evils of its influence.
Matthew Parks’s chapter, “Can Human Beings Have Intrinsic Dignity or Equality without God?,” provides the most developed argument for the claim about Rawlsian principles of equality. Parks’s premise is that Rawls limits the scope of his principles to citizens who possess minimal capacities of reason, morality, and “reasonableness.” For Parks, this limit has objectionable implications for Christians, such as excluding unborn fetuses and “unreasonable” religious claims from political consideration. He also argues that it is not reflected in U.S. public culture, despite Rawls’s claims to the contrary. In particular, Parks reads the Declaration of Independence and the claims of James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. as embracing a universalist conception of equality that reflects the Christian sense of humanity as God’s creation and sets fundamental limits on political authority. Other chapters—most provocatively, Daniel Kelly’s “Rawls and Civil Society”—elaborate this position into arguments against same-sex marriage and economic redistribution.
The claim that Rawls’s theory unjustly excludes Christian ideas from public debate is most fully explained by Joseph M. Knippenberg in his chapter “Does ‘Pluralism’ Require Religion to Be Either Rationalized or Cast Out of Society?” While appreciating Rawls’s concern with finding political consensus in conditions of moral pluralism, Knippenberg argues that the scope of the proposed consensus is broader than Rawls suggests. In particular, Knippenberg claims that questions about “constitutional essentials and basic justice” are raised by many more concrete political issues, that to ask citizens and legislators to vote without reference to their religious and other “comprehensive” views is a significant burden, and that to restrict “public” reasoning also impoverishes reasoning in society’s “background culture.” Knippenberg concludes that excluding Christian ideas from public debate is too high a price to pay for consensus, and that in a constitutional democratic system it is sufficient that political pluralism forces actors to compromise their interests and values. Bryan McGraw’s chapter, “Rawls and the Culture Wars,” makes a similar case for accepting what Rawls would consider a non-ideal “constitutional consensus,” and other contributors further object to the Rawlsian exclusion of Christian ideas, with particular reference to debates over same-sex marriage.
It is arguments like Parks’s and Knippenberg’s that one wishes were developed in light of more charitable readings of Rawls’s theory and the decades of scholarly work that it has stimulated. In particular, Parks’s crucial premise about the scope of Rawlsian principles of equality is debatable, and many commentators have proposed to limit the scope of Rawlsian consensus in response to concerns like Knippenberg’s. Other contributors’ lack of charity verges on misrepresentation: most notably, John Addison Teevan defends free market economics on the assumption that Rawls’s difference principle would limit benefits to the poor, and only McGraw’s chapter addresses Rawls’s crucial “proviso” about religious arguments in public debate. More generally, little attention is given to Rawls’s own concern with how citizens of different moral and religious persuasions might live together, without appeal to an authoritative “truth.” However controversial and burdensome his principles of equality and public reason may ultimately be, it is this liberal concern that guides them and that has occupied so much subsequent theory. By failing to engage it, the collection is left addressing only those Christians who may have—wittingly or unwittingly—accepted Rawlsian principles, rather than other citizens or scholars.
Beyond these questionable claims about equality and public debate, one other chapter stands out. In “What Does Justice Mean without God?,” Jerome C. Foss makes the challenging claim that Rawls’s political theory echoes the “theodicy” expressed in his undergraduate thesis, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. In particular, Foss argues that the consensus envisioned by Rawls reflects not only the ideas of moral “personality” and “community” which his thesis had affirmed in explicitly Christian terms, but also the “faith” in the possibility and duty to make the world better. Furthermore, Foss alleges that this theodicy is theologically defective. For by entrusting human beings with the task of making the world better—independently of God, and in this world, rather than the next—it denies that God is the source of goodness. Foss suggests that this defect led Rawls to abandon his own faith, by making his faith impossible to reconcile with the undeserved suffering he experienced in the Second World War. And for Foss, this defect is what Christians should ultimately find unacceptable in Rawls’s political theory: they should resist its dangerous, “prideful” utopianism, or “technodicy,” with a genuine theodical acceptance that, whatever might be achieved in politics, only God can make the world good. With this, Foss provides perhaps the most telling theoretical challenge to the guiding Rawlsian concern with consensus found in the collection.