SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES

                         JUSTICE AND THE COMMON GOOD 

Religion in politics. 

   In 1960, John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, feared his religion might be a hindrance in his campaign for the presidency. To allay this fear, he gave a speech in which he said his religion would play no role in his presidency. "I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, " Kennedy stated. " "Whatever issue may come before me as president --- on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling, or any other subject --- I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates." 
   Forty-six years later, Barack  Obama, soon to become a candidate for his party's presidential nomination, gave a very different speech on the role of religion in politics. He began by recalling the way he dealt with the religious issue in his U.S. Senate campaign two years earlier. Obama's opponent, a rather strident religious conservative, had attacked Obama's support for gay rights and abortion rights by claiming he was not a good Christian, and that Jesus Christ would not have voted for him. 
   "I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates," Obama said, looking back. "I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois. "
   Although Obama easily won the Senate race, he now thought his response had been inadequate, and "did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs."
   
   He proceeded to describe disown Christian faith and to argue for the relevance of religion to political argument. It was a mistake, he thought, for progressives to "abandon the field of religious discourse" in politics. "The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms." If liberals offered a political discourse emptied of religious content, they would they would "forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice." 
   Religion was not only a source of resonant political rhetoric. The source to certain social problems required moral transformation. "or fear of getting 'preachy' may . . . lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems,"Obama said. Addressing problems such as "poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed," would require "changes in hearts and a change in minds." So it was a mistake to insist that moral and religious convictions play no part in politics and law. 

     Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King---indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history --- were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

                     THE ASPIRATION TO NEUTRALITY

   Kennedy's view of religion as a private, not public, affair reflected more than the need to disarm anti-Catholic prejudice. It reflected a public philosophy that would come to full expression during the1960s and '70s---a philosophy that held that government should be neutral on moral and religious questions, so that each individual could be free to choose his or her own conception of the good life. 
   Both political parties appealed to the idea of neutrality, but in different ways. Generally speaking, Republicans invoked the idea in economic policy, while Democrats applied it to social and cultural issues.  Republicans argued against government intervention in free markets on the grounds that individuals should be free to make their own economic choices and spend their money as they pleased ; for government to spend taxpayers' money or regulate economic activity for public purposes was to impose a state-sanctioned vision of the common good that not everyone shared. Tax cuts were preferable to government spending,  because they left individuals free to decide for themselves what ends to pursue and how to spend their own money.
   Democrats rejected the notion that free markets are neutral among ends and defended a greater measure of government intervention in the economy. But when it came to social and cultural issues, they, too, invoked the language of neutrality. Government should not "legislate morality"in the areas of sexual behavior or reproductive decisions, they maintained, because to do so imposes on some the moral and religious convictions of others. Rather than restrict abortion or homosexual intimacies, government should be neutral on these morally charged questions and let individuals choose for themselves. 
   In 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of  Justice offered a philosophical defense of the liberal conception of neutrality that Kennedy's speech had intimated. In the 1980s, the communitarian critics of liberal neutrality questioned the vision of the freely choosing, unencumbered self that seemed to underlie Rawls's theory. They argued not only for stronger notions of community and solidarity but also for a more robust public engagement with moral and religious questions. 
   In 1993, Rawls published a book, Political Liberalism, that recast his theory in some respects. He acknowledged that, in their personal lives, people often have "affections, devotions, and loyalties that they believe they would not, indeed could and should not, stand apart from . . . They may regard it as simply unthinkable to view themselves apart from certain religious, philosophical, and moral convictions, or from certain enduring attachments and loyalties." To this extent, Rawls accepted the possibility of thickly constituted, morally encumbered selves. But he insisted that such loyalties and attachments should have no bearing on our identity as citizens. In debating justice and rights, we should set aside our personal moral and religious convictions and argue from the standpoint of a "political conception of the person," independent of any particular loyalties, attachments, or conceptions of the good life.