Religious Faith and John Rawls

In December 1942, a philosophy major at Princeton, who was due to begin serving in the army upon graduation, submitted his senior thesis. It was a substantial piece of work. Entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community,” it explored the connection between moral life and man’s relationship with the divine, a philosophical theme at least as old as Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro. The thesis found its roots not in the classical tradition, however, but in contemporary Protestant theology. Its leading idea—one deeply grounded in Christian thought—was that the central task of human life was to develop proper relationships with other persons, including, finally, with God. So the essay gave a Christian answer to the core question of ethics, how each of us is to live well. But it touched, too, as ethics eventually must, on questions in social philosophy, proclaiming: “The world in its essence, is a community, a community of creator and created, and has as its source, God.”

The thesis is clearly the work of a young person of remarkable intellectual gifts and a deep moral and religious seriousness, struggling to find some guiding principles as he sets off to risk his life in a great war. But in itself it would be merely a curiosity had its author, John Bordley Rawls, not gone on to write the most influential work of liberal political philosophy of the twentieth century. A defining presupposition of his mature work is that, in modern multireligious societies, there are bound to be distinct and competing conceptions of what it is to live well. As a result, if our political system is to attract the reflective support of all reasonable citizens, it cannot depend on one such overall conception.

When Eric Gregory, a professor of religion at Princeton, rediscovered the thesis just after Rawls’s death in 2002, and revealed that it was a work of Christian ethics that drew some consequences for political philosophy, there was bound, at the very least, to be some curiosity about its claims. We should be grateful, therefore, to Rawls’s heirs for agreeing to its publication, along with a short essay, “On My Religion,” that was found among his papers; and grateful, as well, to Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, who contributed a fine introductory essay to the volume, connecting Rawls’s thesis with his later political philosophy, and to Robert Merrihew Adams, whose commentary places it securely in its midcentury theological context.

Like many ambitious undergraduate essays, the Brief Inquiry has too many ideas, not all of them fully digested. But—unlike too many undergraduate theses, alas—its central philosophical thrust is clear. This is a polemic against any view in which human life is directed at some impersonal end. Both Plato and Aristotle, for example, are criticized for holding that we should aim at the Good. Because Saint Augustine borrows some elements of this tradition, we are urged to reject his view also. Views of this sort the author calls “naturalistic” (in a usage that was, he warned, at variance with philosophical custom), by which he meant that they reduced spiritual life “to the level of desire and appetition.”¹

According to the view that the young Rawls aimed to defend, by contrast, the central aim of human life is to inhabit a nexus of personal relationships, in which we encounter other people in ways that involve mutual judgment and mutual self-revelation. On Rawls’s account, naturalism turns out to be the mainstream tradition of philosophical ethics, a Greek-derived tradition he does not think “mixes very well with Christianity.” As he writes in the preface to his thesis, “An ounce of the Bible is worth a pound (possibly a ton) of Aristotle.” The thesis, therefore, proposes “more or less of a ‘revolution.'”

To read this not-so-brief inquiry is to be reminded of a moment, in the middle of the twentieth century, when Christian and Jewish thinkers in Europe and North America were trying to find a philosophically satisfying account of their religious traditions in response to the crisis of Western civilization produced by the carnage of World War I, a disaster that had stopped dead in its tracks the confidence in moral progress of the Victorian era. The language of the thesis echoes the intellectual spirit of those times.

Sometimes you can hear the voice of the great German theologian Karl Barth, the central intellectual figure of neoorthodoxy, who famously advised theologians to read their newspapers and the New Testament together. (“But interpret newspapers from your Bible,” he added, to make clear the priority of God’s word.²) The aim of Barth’s neoorthodoxy was to resist both liberalism (hence orthodoxy) and biblical literalism (whence the neo– spin). He wanted to find a middle way. When Rawls’s thesis speaks of personal relations as a meeting of “I” and “thou,” and contrasts this with the encounter with objects as “I” and “it,” there’s an obvious echo of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose 1923 I and Thou continues to find readers.

But there is no direct quotation from either of these seminal thinkers and no evidence that Rawls had read them (although he does cite Reinhold Niebuhr, another prominent neoorthodox theologian of the period). His connection to neoorthodoxy came through his reading of the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner, with whom Barth had a famous falling out; the thesis describes Brunner (who taught at Princeton) as the theologian from whom its author has “learned the most.” And, of course, Brunner had also read Buber. The other major European theologian Rawls discusses is Anders Nygren, the Lutheran bishop of Lund, in Sweden, whose two-volume treatise Agape and Eros may—as Adams suggests in his wonderfully acute introduction to Rawls’s theological ideas—have encouraged Rawls’s skepticism about the way Augustine describes love toward God.

There is no echo in the thesis, however, of what might seem the greatest challenge faced by modern faith, namely the rise (at least in the university) of a scientific worldview that offers to explain much that traditional believers had seen as the work of God without an appeal to the supernatural. Previously the divine had been invoked to explain what fell outside the domain of everyday understanding, filling the gaps with the miraculous; now, the gaps that remained were becoming ever smaller, leaving less and less space for God. Naturalism in this sense—metaphysical naturalism, which rejects the supernatural in the name of science—is not so much opposed in the Brief Inquiry as ignored. Indeed, Rawls’s thesis gives a confident description of the experience of conversion, the “perception of the majesty and glory of God, of His bounteous mercy, and perfect justice.”

The young Rawls shared this conviction with the contemporary philosopher his thesis engaged most seriously, the Christian ethicist Philip Leon. Leon was a leading member of the evangelical Oxford Group, which is probably best known today for its role in giving rise to Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step program. In the meetings of the Oxford Group, in the 1920s and 1930s, many upper-middle-class and upper-class English and American women and men found, as they thought, an experience of the Holy Spirit. Leon began The Philosophy of Courage (1939): “It is the ambition of every philosopher to start his discussion with some fact or facts which no one can deny. The facts with which I propose to start here as undeniable are God and myself.”³

It is perhaps characteristic of Rawls, who was famously self-effacing, that his own initial assumption is “that there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus.” No insistence on “myself” for him. (Rawls’s modesty remained undimmed by his later eminence. Indeed, when the political philosopher Michael Sandel arrived to teach in the Government Department at Harvard, having written a thesis at Oxford that launched a communitarian assault on Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), he received a phone call one day inviting him to lunch: “This is John Rawls, R-A-W-L-S,” the voice began. Sandel writes, “It was if God himself had called to invite me to lunch and spelled his name just in case I didn’t know who he was.”⁴)

The thesis borrows Leon’s idiosyncratic use of a distinction between “egoism,” which is a matter of desiring things, and “egotism,” which involves desiring superiority to other people. Though Rawls defines sin as the repudiation of others—a refusal of the central ethical task of encountering others in Christian love—he treats egotism as the main source of sin. It is not our desire for material things but our wish for superiority to other people that is the main threat to proper relationships with one another and so with God.

The discovery of Rawls’s senior thesis underlines one of the ironies in the reception of his mature work. Though the Brief Inquiry is not a work of political philosophy, Rawls did draw a few conclusions for politics. One was that social contract theories were false: “The person does not bring anything to society for the simple reason that he is nothing until he is in community.” So when communitarian critics of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice such as Sandel complained that it ignored the role of community in shaping the self, they were making an argument he had sketched three decades earlier himself. And Part III of A Theory of Justice, with its detailed discussions of the ways in which liberal society shapes liberal selves, shows, pace the critics, that this was an argument he never forgot.

Rawls’s later political philosophy took it for granted that the religious conscience should be respected and protected; but its most striking feature, for many devout people, was his concern to separate political argument from the distinctive claims of particular religions. Discovering that the author of these views had once been a devout young Christian (one who had even considered being called to the priesthood), you are bound to be tempted to revisit what he wrote about faith.

Rawls’s views about the nature of argument in political philosophy shifted significantly in the years between A Theory of Justice and the later view laid out in his Political Liberalism (1993). The core idea of what justice requires remains the same. First, we must have access to a system of equal basic rights and liberties. Second, where there are socioeconomic inequalities, they must be the consequence of a system access to which is governed by fair equality of opportunity, and they must be to the advantage of those who are worst off. (The physician and the banker, for example, may earn more if their work improves the situation of the poor.)

What changed substantially was Rawls’s view of the status of these claims. In A Theory of Justice, he had tried to show that these principles of justice were right because they were the principles that would be chosen by rational people reflecting on the basic structures of society behind a “veil of ignorance” that deprived them of most knowledge about their own situation. The thought experiment of a group of people reflecting on the rules of justice in what he called an “original position,” behind that veil, guided by reason, proved surprisingly powerful. Rawls aimed to make it plausible that his two principles would be chosen in such an imaginary conclave, and that the fact that they would be chosen showed that they were the right principles. The basic thought here is an idea of fairness. Given a cake to share (the goods produced through social arrangements), you divide fairly if you divide it in a way that will leave people satisfied whichever piece they get. The easiest way to get someone to divide a cake fairly, then, is make sure they don’t know which piece will be theirs. And indeed, Rawls’s first sketch of his view came in a paper called “Justice as Fairness.”

Among the things that people behind the veil of ignorance didn’t know was what Rawls called their own “conception of the good.” Such a conception determines people’s aims and interests and what they value, including their loyalties to people and institutions. They were well informed, by contrast, about general social and historical questions, and so they would know, for example, that many people have religious faiths, and that their faiths would be connected with different ideals of life, different conceptions of the good. As a result, each of us would want to design a system that made it possible to live by whatever conception of the good we happened to turn out to have.

Notice that the Rawls of A Theory of Justice doesn’t assume that people in the original position know there is one correct conception of the good. On the contrary. If we did know the right account of the good, we should presumably want to design a society that gave people lives that were good according to that conception, just as, presumably, we should want to rely on the correct economic theory, rather than aiming to produce a society that would be satisfactory to people whatever economic theory they happened to have.

The young Rawls, by contrast, had not just a personal conception of the good but a conviction that he had the correct such conception. On that conception, each human personality depends on a community for its moral development. But that dependence on community does not mean that we are dissolved into society. Rather, “true community…makes…personality possible.” As a result, the young Rawls argued, “the chief problem of politics is to work out some scheme of social arrangements which can so harness human sin as to make the natural correlates of community and personality possible.” Granted that sin, for the young Rawls, derives largely from our desire for superiority to others, political institutions will have the task of shaping people to treat each other as equals.

In denying the occupants of the original position access to a personal conception of the good, Professor Rawls claimed to be starting from assumptions that were “widely shared and yet weak.” But his own Brief Inquiry shows that there are some—intelligent, well-educated, morally serious—people who do not share the assumption that we can get the right account of politics from an argument that rules out appeal to a substantive conception of the good. The purportedly methodological abstinence from appeals to conceptions of the good in the original position looks like it simply begs a question against views like the one he had once held himself.

In Political Liberalism, however, the story has changed. Now, the ideals to which Rawls appeals are supposed to be derived from the shared consensus of democratic citizens with differing conceptions of the good as they are held in their own time and place. In this respect, both A Theory of Justice and the Brief Inquiry—one appealing to the universal truths of reason, the other to the eternal claims of Christianity—stand apart from Political Liberalism.

In Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition, James Kloppenberg, one of America’s foremost intellectual historians, persuasively argues that this transition in Rawls’s work reflects a broader shift in American philosophy away from appeal to general principles, valid at all times and in all places, toward a reliance on local, historically particular values and ideals. Kloppenberg’s own endeavor, in surveying the work in political and legal theory that seems to have shaped President Obama’s thinking, is to argue for the coherence, the Americanness, and the plausibility of Obama’s approach to politics and to the Constitution.

I am not sure that the words of a politician who has never written a work of political theory should be invested with quite the resonance that this book finds in them, however intellectually gifted the forty-fourth president may be. But you do come away from the book reminded of the centrality of Rawls’s work, and with further reason, therefore, to be interested in his intellectual development, not least the intellectual vectors that culminated in his late theories about political legitimacy and public reason.

In Political Liberalism Rawls argued that, in discussing constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, citizens, qua citizens, ought to avoid appeals to controversial religious and philosophical claims. Before, a conception of the good played no part in thinking behind the veil of ignorance; now, elements of our private conceptions of the good are to be kept at bay even in real life. So legislators, judges, presidents, and mayors ought to rely only on public reasons, reasons that appeal to the shared stock of public values and shared methods of arriving at truth. Voters, too, in deciding what people or policies to support, ought to ask themselves whether there are adequate public reasons for their choices. And we all should do this not because the law requires it—Rawls was in favor of very broad freedom of political speech—but out of a sense of respect and “civic friendship” toward our fellow citizens.

As a result, in these basic matters, there would be no reliance on what Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines,” which cover “the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner” and draw on “a tradition of thought and doctrine.”⁵ For, given the difficulty of finding our way to the right answers on these questions (which Rawls called the “burdens of judgment”), reasonable people would recognize that other reasonable people would not share their views. Rawls truly thought that, when it came to thinking about matters of fundamental justice, a liberal was, as Robert Frost used to say, someone “too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

Much happened between the Brief Inquiry and the mature work: Rawls got a graduate education in modern analytic philosophy and spent a good deal of time thinking about questions of method in moral argument, which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. But he also lost his religious faith. In this country, many people seem to believe that religious faith is a prerequisite for moral seriousness. (In a 2002 Pew Research Center poll, 47 percent of subjects said that you had to believe in God to be moral.) Americans are inclined to share Ivan Karamazov’s belief that if God is dead, everything is permitted. What John Rawls exemplifies in a particularly dramatic way is how moral seriousness survives the loss of faith. I mentioned earlier that Rawls’s religion was not troubled by the skeptical doubts of metaphysical naturalism. And perhaps it is not so surprising, as a result, that when he left his Christian convictions, it was a moral argument that moved him.

In “On My Religion,” an essay that Rawls wrote at age seventy-six and that is printed along with the Brief Inquiry, he reports three moments in his loss of faith, all of them connected with his experience during the war. In the first, he was appalled by a Lutheran chaplain who preached that God was aiming “bullets at the Japanese” while protecting Americans from Japanese fire. Private Rawls courageously upbraided the padre, a first lieutenant, for these “falsehoods about divine providence.” The second was an episode in which, as a result of an arbitrary contingency, a friend (“a splendid man”) with whom he had shared a tent was chosen over him for a mission that proved fatal. And the third was hearing about the Holocaust. “How could I pray and ask God to help me, or my family, or my country, or any other cherished thing I cared about, when God would not save millions of Jews from Hitler?” And he went on:

To interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be? Thus, I soon came to reject the idea of the supremacy of the divine will as…hideous and evil.

I know there are paths around this conclusion. But I confess I find something bracing in Rawls’s straightforward refusal to take them.