The "religion and moral values" meme has taken hold very quickly in the liberal-left-ish blogosphere and in certain corners of the commentariat. I suggested in an earlier post that the discussion oughtn't just to be a psephological one, and that Bush's re-election should make liberals think some more about the nature of religious commitments and their place in the moral fabric of believers' lives. A post by Mark Schmitt makes me think that maybe this wasn't quite the right way to present the issue.
When I wrote that the problem was of "more than merely psephological interest", what I meant was that it ought to make liberals revisit some fundamental questions in recent political philosophy concerning the place of religious commitment in modern democracies. I was thinking in the first place of Michael Sandel's critique of what he calls 'The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism', in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) and Democracy's Discontent (1996). That philosophy, represented of course by Rawls and Dworkin, maintains that religious liberty is important for the same reasons that individual liberty is important. We promote religious liberty in order that, as Sandel glosses the point, "people may be free to live autonomously, to choose and pursue their values for themselves". In other words, the liberal does not so much value religious freedom as the freedom to make one's own life-choices - choices which may or may not lead one to adopt a religious way of life.
Sandel thinks that this way of defending religious liberty reflects what he calls the priority of the "right" over the "good". That is to say, the liberal approach seeks to justify religion while remaning neutral as to the contents of religious belief. On this view, religion is worthy of respect insofar as it is entered into freely; insofar as it flows from the right to "choose one's own values". Now Sandel thinks this account is mistaken. A religious belief, he argues, ought not to be judged worthy in terms of how it is acquired - through free choice or in some other way. Rather, what counts when judging a religious belief is "its place in a good life, or the qualities of character it promotes, or ... its tendency to cultivate the habits and dispositions that make good citizens". The liberal view, Sandel claims, loses sight of the role religion plays in the cultivation of civic virtue.
Now I was reminded of all that when I read this in Mark Schmitt's post:
The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.
If Schmitt is right in his characterization of what he calls, following Robert Fogel, the "Fourth Great Awakening" in American Protestantism, what implications does this have for Sandel's attempt to connect religious belief with a certain form of public life - with being a citizen with certain responsibilities?