Kevin Vallier

Liberalism was born in the throes of the Wars of Religion in the seventeenth century. In response to these conflicts, liberals developed a theory of religious toleration that they believed was friendly to people of faith, so long as the faithful would refrain from imposing their religious practices and values on others. However, late twentieth century liberalism often lost sight of this virtue of liberalisms past, tending to replace the value of faith-friendly tolerance with a more aggressive secularism. Consequently, many people of faith view liberal institutions and ideas with suspicion, believing them hostile to their interests and convictions. This is regrettable.

Defenders of the dominant Rawlsian orthodoxy in political philosophy, “public reason” or “justificatory” liberalism have mistakenly interpreted the ideal of public reason and public justification in ways that are unjustifiably hostile to religion and other non-public ideals and values. For instance, orthodox public reason liberals often emphasize the need for a fund of shared reasons on which everyone endorses principles of justice. However, what matters is that citizens have a shared commitment to the same principles of justice and institutional structures, not that these be endorsed for the same reasons. Many reasons are not shared, especially religious reasons; by barring unshared reasons from entering into public justification, public reason liberals prevent non-public ideals and values from grounding liberal institutions.

The suspicion of shared or publicly inaccessible reasons has led public reason liberals to advocate the “privatization” of religious belief (often following earlier liberals such as John Locke). Yet many thoughtful philosophers and political theorists have rejected privatizing religious beliefs and other deeply held personal values and ideas as incompatible with their fundamental integrity. These critics have advanced forceful arguments, but they err in rejecting public reason liberalism. Or rather, their reasonable rejection of some versions has led them to reject a wide family of views, some of which do not advance the claims they find deeply unacceptable. To be sure, more radical citizens of faith believe that the state can legitimately coerce others on the basis of religious reasons alone, a view that all liberals must resolutely resist.

In the course of my future research, I aim to publish several articles on the conflict between liberalism and faith. One of these articles is already in press at The Journal of Moral Philosophy (“Against Public Reason’s Accessibility Requirement”) and another is on review (“Liberalism, Religion and Integrity”). I have also co-authored a paper on these matters with Gerald Gaus that appeared in the January 2009 issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism (“The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity”). Finally, I am coauthoring a piece with Christopher Eberle (“Religion in Public Life”) in the Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. Eberle is one of the foremost critics of public reason liberalism’s approach to the role of religion in liberal democratic politics, whereas I am a defender of public reason liberalism, despite dissenting from the orthodox conception, so I expect our collaboration to prove fruitful.