Abstract
In recent years, public reason in the United States has narrowed to a focus on national security and economic stability. This marks the loss of an aspirational element that has been historically important in American public life, and it tends toward the privatization of all moral arguments, not just those that depend on theological claims. To maintain theological integrity, Christian public reasoning will have to become more distinctively Christian, simply because there will be less shared ground to occupy with others. But the future of theological ethics also requires attention to the scope and quality of the public discussion itself.
In a democracy, reasoned discussion must be open to public participation. If democratic decisions are to be more than a record of the will of the majority, they must be arrived at after deliberations in which the participants address themselves to broadly shared purposes, appeal to authorities and principles that are generally recognized and offer reasons that are open to general understanding. This intuition has shaped modern democracy from the beginning, especially in the United States, where a diverse population spread over a wide territory required common purposes to hold them together and fear of religious conflict excluded sectarian appeals from public discussion.
From these conditions of pluralism which had shaped the facts of American democracy, John Rawls devised a normative account of what he called ‘public reason’, which he took to be ‘part of the idea of democracy itself’. 1 Normatively, public reason imposes conditions that are at once necessary if there is to be a general discussion of political questions and sufficient to permit the resolution of those questions. Public reason is thus usually assumed to rule out discussions that require the participants to give theological reasons for their choices, though the question of whether they are permitted to do so is the subject of an extended meta-debate about the rules that govern public argument. At the same time, because political arguments are a subspecies of practical reason, they must come to some conclusion about action. The normative rules of public reason thus presumably include whatever presuppositions are necessary for people in a political community to come to agreement. The question of just how ‘thin’ these presuppositions can be is the subject of another extended meta-debate.
A purely theoretical account of the requirements of public reason might settle these normative questions, but it would not necessarily have much relationship to the terms in which people actually think about their lives and their politics. To make the normative account of public reason recognizable and useful to participants in a deliberative democracy, it must be supplemented by a descriptive account. It is not so much that everyone in a democratic society must accept the same neutral political principles; rather, their different religious, ideological, and moral convictions must overlap sufficiently to give each citizen his or her own reasons for accepting the terms of public discourse. Rawls recognized in his later work that what supports the requirements of public reason in a pluralistic liberal democracy is this ‘overlapping consensus’. 2
Attention to the overlapping consensus, however, introduces an element of ambiguity into the requirements of public reason. Since the overlapping consensus involves shared beliefs, rather than carefully defined theoretical principles, it is sometimes difficult to say whether or not a particular argument falls within the boundaries of public reason. Rawls specifically considers the arguments made by Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement during the 1960s. King argued for racial equality on the basis of a human dignity which all people share as children of God. The religious foundation of his message was so clear that in the early years, his critics rejected it precisely on the grounds that he was introducing religion into politics. Rawls concludes that at least in retrospect, King’s general, non-sectarian appeal to a foundation for equality that transcends human law was a public argument. 3
Others might view the case differently, or take a different view of other cases. The fact that the question arises at all makes the important point for our purposes: The scope of public reason may be fixed in theory, but in descriptive terms the overlapping consensus changes over time, expanding and contracting with changing conditions. What counts as public argument in descriptive terms is determined by observing what people in a pluralistic society accept as an intelligible reason for a political choice and what they reject as a reason that has authority only for a limited group. Is the argument that government policies should provide basic economic security because all people bear a common dignity as children of God a public argument? Probably so. Is the argument that a certain person should be nominated for public office because he is a Christian a public argument? Probably not.
Political theory will be primarily concerned with the normative account of public reason, requiring no more description of the overlapping consensus than is needed to ensure that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the resolution of political questions in public discourse have been met. Other parts of the consensus, if there are any, are of no particular interest to the normative theorist. In point of fact, however, the overlapping consensus in a society usually includes a good deal more than what is minimally necessary for public reason. It is within that area of ‘surplus’ in the overlapping consensus that theological ethics finds what is most interesting in public discourse.
Those who are sympathetic to religious convictions, in fact, often resist the idea that there are rules of public reason by which religion ought to behave itself in public. 4 Instead of asking whether the particularities of Christian faith can conform themselves to a universal idea of public reason, they ask whether and how Christian faith can retain its integrity—its connection with the faith of the universal church—in the kind of public discourse that is available in any particular place and time. As Nigel Biggar suggests, that depends ‘crucially on a certain view of the church and its relationship to the wider world’. 5 But the answer also depends on a description of where in the world the church finds itself, an answer to the question with which H. Richard Niebuhr began Christian ethics: ‘What is going on?’ 6
The question implies careful attention to contexts. A description of public reason at a Town Council meeting in rural Minnesota where everyone is either a Presbyterian or a Lutheran is different from a description of public reason at a national political convention and different again from a description of public reason at a G8 economic summit meeting. There are challenges to theological integrity in each of these settings, but they are not all the same challenge. There may be significant differences between public reasoning in the US and in the UK, despite the history, law, and political systems that they share. Theological ethics will face different questions in Russia, where democracy has a very different history, and different questions again in Indonesia, a democracy where Christians are a distinct minority. More important for a discussion of the future of theological ethics, it is possible that a descriptive account of public reason may change rather rapidly even within large and enduring publics. An attempt to describe such developments always risks mistaking momentary aberrations for significant long-term transformations. But if current changes in public reasoning in the United States are lasting ones, theological ethics will have to think differently about Christian participation in American public life, precisely because the changes in public reason make a difference for the possibilities for theological integrity. 7
The Narrowing of Public Reason
Two events have substantially changed the character of public life in the United States in the past decade: the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008. Each of these was a national trauma on a scale that had not been experienced in more than half a century, and the anxiety and uncertainty about the future they produced have had pervasive effects on politics and public discourse. With public concerns over security and economic stability heightened, there has been a narrowing of public reason. Policy questions must increasingly be argued in consequentialist terms, directed toward increased national security or economic efficiency. Thus, the debate about immigration turns increasingly on questions about border security and the potential threat posed by large numbers of undocumented residents. Security issues push aside questions about justice in the treatment of individuals and even economic questions about the importance of immigrant labor. On other questions, medium-term economic stability dominates the debate. Present budgets for social programs and entitlements are rejected as unsustainable. Longer range policies related to energy and the environment are rejected as unaffordable, and legislative debate is largely restricted to finding combinations of revenue enhancements and spending cuts that will have measureable effects on the national debt in a foreseeable, but not immediate future, and that will not require any fundamental restructuring of the economy.
All this contrasts sharply with what we may call an aspirational element that was an important part of public debate through most of American history. In the past, policies were argued in terms of economic feasibility and national interest, but it was also recognized that there is a national interest in certain values, and these values had place in public argument. Fairness and equal opportunity were likewise important considerations, so much so that they became constitutive elements of the liberal understanding of justice toward which normative public reason was supposedly directed. To be sure, aspirational arguments have been viewed critically, and those that seemed too particularistic might be excluded from public discourse or translated into ‘secular purposes’. But this historic conviction that some aspirations are central to national identity and thus essential considerations in public debate seems to be giving way to a sense that security and affordability are the primary questions to be answered about any public measures. Issues of social justice have been largely absent from the recent debates about health care reform and immigration policy, as criteria of just war and standards of international law have largely disappeared from debates about national security. 8 The aspirational argument which President Obama regularly invokes– summarized in his statement, ‘That’s not who we are as a country. We’re better than that’ – has gained little political traction. 9
These are significant developments in the understanding of public reason, and they affect more than the public role of religion. Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw, historians of American welfare policy during the twentieth century, summarize the change and its implications for political life generally:
In the face of nothing but bad economic news, Americans often take heart in remembering that we have been here before — during the Great Depression, when conditions were far worse than they are today — and we survived. But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting. This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.
10
When theologians discuss public reason, they often worry about the privatization of religion, about religious ideas being reduced to feelings or motives that cannot count in objective public assessments of policy. 11 But recent developments in the United States point toward the privatization of all moral arguments, not just those that depend on theological claims or religious traditions. If security and stability are the criteria of public reason, then who we want to be is our own private concern. We are free to aspire to whatever we wish, but we should not expect that to make a difference in the public discussion.
This narrowing of the range of public reason does not mean that people will stop making choices based on their aspirations. It means that they will only discuss those choices with people who already agree with them. Narrowing the grounds for public argument increases political polarization. It encourages people to believe that their values are unimportant, or even incomprehensible, to their neighbors. Moral ideas need to be cultivated among groups of like-minded people, rather than debated in the public square. The like-minded then encourage each other to vote and hope that those who think otherwise will not bother to do so. The long election campaigns and low rates of political participation in the United States encourage candidates to build their strategies on ‘mobilizing the base’. Those who aspire to leadership must define the extremes, not the center.
Debates about the public role of religion have often focused on whether religion restricts public reason, enforcing an artificially narrow consensus on matters of faith and morals. Critics of religion in public life fear that it will be, in Richard Rorty’s words, a ‘conversation-stopper’. 12 While theological ethics continues to debate this venerable question, recent developments in the real world of American politics raise the very different possibility that the current scope of public reason may not be broad enough to encompass questions of fairness and equal opportunity that a normative theory of deliberative democracy requires.
Theological Integrity and Temporal Public Goods
Of course, there are Christians who believe on theological grounds that ideas need to be cultivated among groups of like-minded people, or, as they would put it, that Christian faith is sustained by the shared narrative of the Christian community. They are not surprised by normative theories of public reason which seem to have been devised to exclude theological claims. They see that as the price of theological integrity. Perhaps, however, a more realistic view of recent developments is that a narrowing of the scope of public reason has contributed to a general decline of public moral discourse in which religious reasons are swept up indiscriminately along with the rest of the aspirational arguments, rather than specifically targeted for exclusion. It may even be that certain ways of maintaining theological integrity have inadvertently contributed to the general decline.
In any case, the question is what to do about it. What will be the future of theological ethics, if public reason takes the shape it is assuming in American politics today? On one point, those who are interested in the public role of religion may agree with those who are primarily concerned with contemporary threats to theological integrity: Christian public reasoning in the future will be more explicitly Christian. It will be less likely to confuse core Christian commitments with shared cultural values, simply because there will be fewer shared cultural values with which to confuse them. It will speak of peace and justice in biblical terms, because these aspirations evoke no concrete images in a political discourse that is confined to national security and economic efficiency. Christian public reasoning will have to recognize the formative power of scripture and tradition and, especially, to acknowledge that Christian faith orders goods differently from those who do not see all things in relation to God. But the fact that goods are ultimately ordered in different ways does not mean that they cannot be proximately shared. 13 It is on that possibility, in fact, that public discussion depends, as Nigel Biggar says in Behaving in Public: ‘It seems to me that any argument in a public forum is bound to articulate itself in terms of temporal public goods—such as national security or public health—since those are what public deliberation is by definition about.’ 14 We should not expect particularly Christian ideas about such matters to be incomprehensible in the public forum, though we should not expect them to be simply identical to other ways of thinking, either. There is no theological universal formula that tells us in advance what the similarities and differences will be. That has to be determined in context.
For a long time, theologians have been concerned with the differences between human goods understood in light of Christian faith and human goods understood in relation to a political community. The concern is appropriate, especially in the United States, which has been a nation with its own missional, even messianic, aspirations. Theological integrity requires vigilant attention to the temptation to confuse the two accounts of human good. Theologians as different as Reinhold Niebuhr and Stanley Hauerwas have made that point, and it is worth repeating again today.
But as the list of goods available for public discussion shrinks, theological integrity also requires attention to the ways in which these different accounts of human goods should resemble one another. In the political climate that now prevails, the sentiments of one Tea Party enthusiast sum up the subjects available for public discussion: ‘The government should do the military and the roads and just about nothing else.’ 15 Security and necessary infrastructure are the proper concerns of government. Other human goods are privatized, and so is the discussion of them. We are entering a period of austerity in public reason, as well as public expenditure. It is hardly surprising that many people, including many religious believers, conclude that politics is no concern of theirs. The public forum simply cannot accommodate the goods that are most important to them.
That is politically dangerous, but it is also theologically untenable. It implies that human goods are not part of an ordered reality to which we are all related, but are instead created by communities of like-minded people who define themselves and their goods in opposition to the others who cannot share our goods because they are not us. To lure such people back into arguments about a rich variety of temporal public goods that reflects the range of their real aspirations is in itself an act of witness to the unity of divine creation. It might be worth the risk of some Christian distinctiveness to preserve theological integrity on that point.
That is why it is important to remember that the scope of public reason can expand or contract, in different places and under different historical conditions. Precisely because the shared understandings of human goods that make up a descriptive account of the overlapping consensus are not strictly necessary to the normative theory, there is no guarantee that a liberal democracy will support a lively public discussion of the human goods to which its people aspire. Theological ethics must speak with integrity in that discussion. But the future of theological ethics and its integrity also require us to take an interest in the scope and quality of the discussion itself.
Footnotes
1
John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in Samuel Freeman (ed.), John Rawls: Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 573.
2
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 133–72.
3
Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 250–51.
4
See, for example, Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues’, in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), pp. 111-13.
5
Nigel Biggar, Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), p. 79.
6
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1963), p. 60.
7
At least participation in public life will change for those who hold a nuanced view of the possibilities for theological integrity. Those who hold the view that theological integrity is generally incompatible with modern ways of thinking about politics and society will find the degrees of difference with which I am concerned here irrelevant.
8
This contrasts sharply with the time just before the Second Gulf War (2003), when public debate was largely cast in just-war terms. See, for example, Jimmy Carter, ‘Just War – or a Just War?’ New York Times, 9 March 2003, sec. 4, p. 13.
10
Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw, ‘How Do You Say “Economic Security”?’, New York Times, 24 September 2011, A21.
11
Roger Trigg, Religion in Public Life: Must Faith Be Privatized? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 190-208.
12
Richard Rorty, ‘Religion as Conversation-Stopper’, Common Knowledge 3 (1994), pp. 1-6. See also Rorty’s reconsideration of this question in ‘Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration’, Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003), pp. 141-49.
13
Christian theologians have understood that since Augustine differentiated the two meanings of ‘commonwealth’ in Book 19 of his City of God.
14
Biggar, Behaving in Public, p. 59; original emphasis.
15
‘The System is Broken: More from a Poll of Tea Party Backers’, New York Times, 18 April 2010, A14.