Circular Arguments

Religion Banned From the Public Square

One of the "hot" topics in recent decades has been the issue of whether religion and religious belief should be allowed in the public square. The number of arguments that fall within the dispute are legion. They range from whether an employee can wish customers "Merry Christmas" to banning prayers in Parliament.

Matt at MandM has recently published two posts on the attempt by the late John Rawls to exclude religion or any particular metaphysical view from the public or political sphere. The idea is that the government must adopt no particular world-view, nor religion at all, in any of its property, parts, or functions. In order to achieve this, the government must have a basis of being strictly neutral towards all philosophies and all religions, which is to say that it must draw upon none nor make reference to any.

Rawls's argument would end up provide some philosophical meat to the US Supreme Court's relatively recent dictum of a "Wall of Separation" between church and state: thus it was eagerly welcomed in many quarters.

Rawls achieved prominence several decades ago when he published a work on the theory of justice. In it he sought to provide philosophical justification for political liberalism and its policies--where the state would have a justice-right to redistribute income, taking wealth from some and distributing it to others. He called this "justice as fairness." The attempt was a signal failure--unless you already believed in redistributionism--in which case you likely found his argument compelling.

So, Rawls had a penchant for providing philosophical defences for favoured liberal social and economic policies. First was a defence of income redistribution. Second ended up being a defence of the "Wall of Separation" which excludes religion from the public sphere.

There is a great danger, however, in doing this. The risk is that the cause will seem psychologically so compelling that one will get sloppy in developing an argument for it. One ends up putting forth feeble and self-contradictory arguments which appear compelling only to those who want the case to be true--that is, to those who are already "converted" to the position, who share the same assumptions, and who want your arguments to be true and valid. As Bertrandt Russell once observed assumptions cloud about a man as butterflies on a summer's day. If you are not self-critically aware of them, you end up thinking them to be non-ephemeral and substantially solid.

Rawls, of course, had his positions subjected to both examination and criticism. He ended up modifying his "justice as fairness" doctrine, relegating the idea of redistributive justice to a lower order, and less important category of justice.

Matt's posts present Rawl's arguments for the "Wall of Separation" and then, drawing on Nicholas Wolterstorff, refutes them with ease. The wisdom of this world is made foolishness. Ah, well back to the drawing board. Well worth a read.