Abstract
Does John Rawls’s political liberalism require the institutional separation between state and religion or does it allow space for moderate forms of religious establishment? In this paper I address this question by presenting and critically evaluating Cécile Laborde’s recent claim that political liberalism is ‘inconclusive about the public place of religion’ and ‘indeterminate about the symbolic dimensions of the public place of religion’. In response to Cécile Laborde, I argue that neither moderate separation nor moderate establishment, intended as regimes of religious governance that fix specific interpretations of principles of social and economic justice, are compatible with Rawls’s political liberalism. Furthermore, I claim that a state can ensure that both its religious and non-religious citizens enjoy a sense of self-respect and identification with their polity by leaving issues of symbolic establishment and separation open to democratic debate. I conclude that Rawls’s political liberalism transcends the standard distinction between moderate establishment and moderate separation and leaves the public place of religion open to the democratic contestation of ordinary legislative politics.
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Notes
This conclusion, it should be noted, may be open to the critique that multi-faith establishment still entails privileging religious views over non-religious ones, and therefore cannot be justified to non-religious citizens in public reason terms. To overcome this problem, Brudney (2005, p. 828) suggests that the state may support all comprehensive doctrines, both religious and non-religious. According to him, ‘if all doctrines are in fact treated (supported) equally, then state action will not create divisive background conditions’ (Brudney 2005, p. 828).
Indeed Rawls himself argues that separation ‘protects religion from the state and the state from religion; it protects citizens from their churches’ (Rawls 2005b, p. 476), e.g. by allowing them to abandon or change their religious faith, thus establishing that ‘[h]eresy and apostasy are not crimes’ (Rawls 2005b, p. 476 n.74).
Once again, it is necessary to highlight that real-world regimes protect these rights and liberties to different extents, thus displaying different degrees of approximation to this ideal type.
For an overview of religious freedom in Malaysia, see Saeed and Saeed (2004, pp. 123–166).
In this sense, such measures are similar to the use of postal voting in order to guarantee the exercise of the right to vote for those citizens (e.g. physically disabled citizens, military personnel on a mission abroad etc.) who cannot attend the polling station in person.
Rawls’s focus on ‘constitutional’ essentials, in this sense, is perhaps influenced by his US background.
For a discussion of these issues see Minow (2003).
For the rigidity of constitutional weak and plural establishment see also Bader (2003, p. 75, 78).
For a similar argument, also concerning the non-symbolic aspects of religious and non-religious doctrines, see Brudney (2005, p. 828).
As I explained earlier, ‘permanently’ should be intended as referring to an ideal ‘fixity’ that real-world institutions and polities can only approximate.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Stirling Political Philosophy Group Seminar, Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, 12 October 2011. I am especially grateful to Ben Saunders, who gave me the opportunity to present the paper, and to all those who attended the seminar and provided me with enlightening and constructive feedback. I am also very grateful to Cécile Laborde and Christopher Macleod for discussion and feedback about the issues explored here. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Sune Laegaard (Editor in Chief of Res Publica) and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and thought-provoking comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Bonotti, M. Beyond Establishment and Separation: Political Liberalism, Religion and Democracy. Res Publica 18, 333–349 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9194-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-012-9194-2