Paul Sigmund: Godless? Liberalism and Religion
Yesterday Washington University in Saint Louis hosted Dr. Paul Sigmund, of Princeton University, speaking on the history of liberalism and religious thought. He opened with some quotes out of Ann Coulter’s Godless?, which I admit I’ve never read. After hearing her take on academia, I’m ready to pick up a used copy just for laughs.
Coulter charges that although liberals aren’t religious, the closest thing they have to priests are college professors, in their “cushy, comfortable jobs” that are “high-paying”, in which they work only fifteen hours a week and obtain enviable health care benefits and tenure. Had I known I was aiming for such a lucrative and easy career, I wouldn’t have worried about the decrease in tenured jobs, difficulty in getting an appointment, the low salary I’ll be earning, etc. Anyway, her basic point is that these liberal priests engage in Darwiniac-environmentalist “groupthink.” Peter Singer is the liberal priest par excellance, in her view.
Despite her voluminous book sales, Coulter is not (to my knowledge) considered a heavy-hitter or pre-eminent thinker by conservatives. Sigmund moves from Coulter to his Princeton colleague, Robert George, who has argued that the split between liberalism and conservatism in the United States today equates to conflict between secular versus religious values.
The focus of Sigmund’s talk is to dispel this myth, unravel its recent rhetorical origins, and point ways forward to regain the connection between liberalism and religion.
Speaking in the Hurst Lounge, Sigmund was flanked on either side by two cherubs who peered down from the ceiling, with books in their hands. He ran through the history of liberalism from John Locke’s Letter on Toleration to Leo Strauss’ criticisms to Jacques Maritan and Jeremy Waldron’s religious liberalism, to John Rawls’ Principles of Justice. His main contention is that we must be careful to always ask, “Which liberalism?” and to recognize that just because liberalism focuses upon materialistic freedoms in terms of government, that does not mean it argues that materialism is the goal of human life.
In the United States, the shift away from framing liberalism as a protection for the individual’s (religious) conscience began during the Supreme Court decisions of the 1940’s and 50’s. Many people felt that by taking Bible readings and prayers out of public schools, we were removing morality from the public sphere–rather than recognizing this was part of the liberal concern for freedom of conscience. The final straw was Roe v. Wade, when what might have been an emerging pluralism was short-circuited by a top-down decision about privacy as a Constitutional right. After this decision, the “culture wars” began in full force, and liberalism became associated with abortion (and eventually homosexuality).
Sigmund argues that there is a liberalism which emphasizes the government as a conduit for social change, attempting to instill equality through policy. However, a Lockean liberalism based upon the Harm Principle and aiming towards non-interference is not the same. Further, there is a religiously grounded liberalism, even liberalism which is Christian in origin. He reminded us of Martin Luther King, Jr., the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, and the long history of Catholic and liberation theology liberalism.
One of the infamous criticisms of liberalism, associating it with hedonism, individualism and materialism, came from Leo Strauss and the Chicago School. Sigmund contends that Strauss’ interpretation of Locke is flawed and, further, that a government which focuses on property rights does not require that liberalism limit human human concern with property rights only.
Jacques Maritan, a neo-Thomist leader of the Christian Democratic Party, shared Strauss’ critique of liberalism, but thought the answer was to be found in attaching theism to the theory. He believed that unless someone has a religious reason to value equality and the freedom of others, they would not maintain the tenets of liberalism. A religious believer, in contrast, would have a further motivation. Later, New Zealander Jeremy Waldron took up Maritan’s views, but explicitly stated that the theism involved did not require special revelation–it could be a theism acquired by philosophical insight and natural reasoning. (This, to me, seems like it brings us right back to Maritan’s critique–what difference is there from arriving at your liberal views philosophically and arriving at them by way of a philosophical view of god?)
Sigmund disagrees with Maritan and Waldron, although he himself is a theist and a Christian. He thinks that liberalism doesn’t have to reduce to individualism, and that philosophical motivations can be a grounding for robutst liberalism.
John Rawls’ formulation of society is the best approach, in Sigmund’s understanding–Rawls was a Christian (his senior thesis at Princeton argued along the lines of Maritan and Waldron) but lost his faith during World War II. Looking for a better way to construct a free and equitable society, without requiring a Christian grounding, Rawls argued for his now-famous Veil of Ignorance and the Difference Principle. Society could be built by overlapping consensus between vastly different groups, so long as those groups refrain from arguments appealing to theological reason. We must reason in a public rationality.
Despite the attractiveness of Rawls’ overall argument, the “gag rule” as it came to be called by religious conservatives, eclipsed his emphasis on consensus. Sigmund concludes that liberalism has a long history of grounding in religious thought, and that it is not intrinsically hostile to religion–and it is the best way forward for a pluralistic society.