Writing in his 2004 book Democracy and Tradition the Princeton scholar of religion Jeffrey Stout observed that if you wanted traditional Christian believers to feel marginalized from liberal democracy, one way likely to succeed would be pairing up Rawlsian political theory with a bunch of Christian thinkers who basically agree with him.
It didn't even necessarily matter if the Christians in question thought Rawlsian social order was good or bad; it simply mattered that they said "yes, that's how liberal democracy works."
This is the key passage from Stout:
We are about to reap the social consequences of a traditionalist backlash against contractarian liberalism. The more thoroughly Rawlsian our law schools and ethic centers become, the more radically Hauerwasian the theological schools become…. One message being preached nowadays in many of the institutions where future preachers are being trained is that liberal democracy is essentially hypocritical when it purports to value free religious expression. Liberalism, according to Hauerwas, is a secularist ideology that masks a discriminatory program for policing what religious people can say in public. The appropriate response, he sometimes implies, is to condemn freedom and the democratic struggle for justice as ‘bad ideas for the church.
Here is how that process Stout anticipated actually works in practice.
First, Rawls and his disciples (often less careful than Rawls himself seems to have been) say something like this: "Participating in liberal democracy requires you to only make arguments based on values or presuppositions that everyone in the liberal democracy shares. Anything other than that is anti-democratic." This rendering of liberal democracy obviously means that religious people cannot bring their religious beliefs to bear in discussions about public life, but must become political atheists as a condition for participating in liberal democracy.
Stout himself, who is an atheist and man of the left, disagrees with this account of liberal democracy. He argues in his book that holding religious people to this standard as a condition of their participation in public life is itself illiberal, for it denies to religious people both freedom of religion and freedom of expression, two pillars of American liberalism. Unfortunately, the conversation to this point has been defined largely by the Rawlsian and Hauerwasian schools (and the other illiberal Christian schools we will mention later) and less by any sort of Stoutian movement. So here we are.
Once the Rawlsian definition of liberalism is established, religious people tend to go one of two ways. Some go the way of Hauerwas and say, "Very well, then to hell with liberal democracy." When Hauerwas does this the results, ironically, are not necessarily corrosive of liberal democracy or if they are it's a kind of uneven effect. What Hauerwas wants are non-violent communities of virtue living out the Sermon on the Mount—and even if those people don't participate in formal political processes or work in government, they're still a net good for the public square overall.
That said, when people who aren't radical Anabaptists adopt the Hauerwasian line things go quite differently—the 2024 version of Stout's paragraph isn't going to be about Hauerwas, but instead would be about Integralism or Christian Nationalism, two new movements that are basically accepting the Rawlsian definition of "liberal democracy" and responding in the same way: "Then to hell with liberal democracy." But their replacement is something much more menacing than Hauerwas's.
The other response from religious believers is to say, "Yes, my fellow believers, this is how liberal democracy works. And since liberal democracy is better than any alternative governing vision, these are the rules we all have to play by when participating in public life." Thus you create a class of civic libertarian Christians whose libertarianism leaves no room for explicitly Christian political engagement—and who end up even claiming that the First Amendment wasn't really followed until after the Everson ruling in 1947.
The upshot of this view is that when the state is leveraging its power to advance a specific progressive vision of the good, the best they can do in response is argue that the state should be neutral on questions of meaning and transcendence, and that Christians should support whichever candidate is most likely to support such a neutrality.
The difficulty this creates, then, is that it leaves many Christian leaders as well as ordinary Christian believers feeling torn between two not at all satisfactory positions: They see, correctly, that progressive political movements are quite content to use hard political power to advance their vision. If that means destroying families via laws that give the state power to take minors out of their non-affirming home, they're perfectly comfortable doing that. Indeed, they feel justified in it because in their understanding the rights of the child to self-identify trump the rights of parents to raise their children as they believe is best.
If you respond to that sort of law by saying that we ourselves cannot use political power to advance our vision of the good because that violates the neutrality of the state, you look clueless and impotent in the face of a genuine political threat. If you won't even grant that such laws qualify as "persecution", you simply add to the sense that you are out of touch with the actual political problems facing many Christian families and communities. As a result, you will understandably leave many Christians feeling deeply unsatisfied. Even those who agree with you will end up in an uncertain place because they won't really know what next steps to take save trying to elect someone who shares their civic libertarian politics, a politics for which there is no plausible electoral vehicle at the moment anyway.
This, then, is at least part of the story of how you get a radicalized Christian right: Pastors and Christian leaders face significant challenges in the ordinary course of ministry—they have to spend time cleaning up after their churches were vandalized, they have to talk confused congregants after their church was slandered in local media, they pray with and attempt to counsel families being torn apart by the sexual revolution, and worrying about how to advise families in their church concerned about laws like those now in the books in several American states. Many legacy institutions and leaders seem to have nothing to offer in response or even suggest they should vote for the party responsible for those policies. So they go looking for other ideas and visions and in some cases they end up finding some really dark and awful stuff. They are responsible, of course, for their own minds, and they are responsible for the beliefs and policies they platform and promote. But do you understand how they end up there?
If we want to preserve America's experiment in democratic liberalism, we need better liberal answers than the dominant ones on offer. What might those answers be? Well, I think Jeff Stout has some good ones and we would all be well-served if more of our leaders spent some time reading Democracy and Tradition and really reflecting on his arguments there. The fact that most evangelical commentators on politics seem to not even know who Stout is is a terrible commentary on the state of evangelical political thought.
Stoutian democracy means that all the members of a political community get to have a voice in the public discourse and get to genuinely argue from their sincere, deeply held convictions. Religious people can bring their religious convictions into public discourse without being shouted down by a bunch of hyped-up Rawlsians and civic libertarians. Such a project requires that progressives agree to not be triggered by the existence of religious conservatives or to legislate them into oblivion, but it also means that religious conservatives agree that they can't attempt to dominate progressives through some sort of legislative fiat.
The nub of Stout's civic republican project is a politics of anti-domination—which is actually a highly minimal politics. That is by design. For Stout "liberal democracy" is less a political ideology and more a political method by which radically unlike groups of people living in close community can govern their lives. And unless you have a plan that isn't monstrous that will somehow magically remove our radical differences, I don't think we have a better alternative.
Is such a thing sufficient? As we haven't really made an honest attempt at it in some time, I don't know that we can answer that. Six years ago, though, I'd have said that it isn't. We need a broadly shared and substantive account of the good to anchor our politics, I once believed. But now I think not.
In the first place, I expect that our technological moment makes it enormously unlikely that we'll ever actually obtain such a thing. It is simply too easy for each of us to tap into online networks that will facilitate our own process of self-creation. Indeed, this problem is central to Stout's project and particularly his account of "the secular."
For Stout, "secularism" is not about the percentage of people in a society who lack religious belief or about a system of public life and laws that excludes religious belief. Secularism, for Stout, is simply about the forms of public argument that are actually effective in a pluralistic society. Indeed, Stout locates the beginnings of this pluralism not in the free thinking 19th century or the frequently materialistic 20th, but rather in 17th century England, a deeply Christian nation at that time.
Yet even then, Stout says, there was a kind of secularism because even if virtually every Englishman agreed that the Bible was authoritative, they did not agree about what the authoritative Bible taught regarding economics or forms of government. Rather, you had a number of people all appealing to the same authority while believing that that authority taught sometimes wildly different things. The outcome of such a society was a "secularism" in which members of the political society had to think pragmatically about their public argumentation and their policy goals not because they were irreligious, but because they simply desired to have a functioning public life together. Thus you can argue both that 17th century England genuinely shared some sort of substantive idea of the good—certainly they shared more than we do today—and yet even then that shared good wasn't enough to anchor a shared life because it fell apart when you began probing specific issues and questions.
We might put it this way. The problem as it exists now is something like this: First, our definition of "liberal democracy" defines it as a political ideology marked by certain positive beliefs and commitments, including a belief that religious claims are inadmissible in the public square. Second, religious believers respond to this ideology by either affirming it and adopting a thin and narrow political theology that is inadequate to the challenges of our moment or they respond to this ideology by renouncing it and, in their own minds, renouncing all forms of liberalism.
The solution to this, if "solution" is even the right word which it might not be, is to reject the notion of liberal democracy as an ideology and rather to replace it with an approach that sees it as a method. Once you take this step, a second move opens up, I think: You get to talk about the ideas and beliefs that help to legitimize the political method that you and your neighbors all recognize and value and wish to preserve, even amidst all your differences. This is precisely the move that has brought about a fascinating mini-revival of sorts in the UK where Christians like Glen Scrivener and non-Christian liberals like Tom Holland are both finding themselves arriving at a similar conclusion, which is that the political method they value makes the most sense if understood as a child of Christianity. Put more provocatively, it is an argument that says that if you believe in the equal dignity of all peoples or in liberal rights like free speech, you really don't have any reason not to believe in the Resurrection of Christ because the former set of beliefs are at least as historically contingent and unusual as the latter. It is this insight which also played a large role in the conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
That we aren't having such conversations in the US, save when figures from the UK come over and start such conversations, is perhaps a vindication of Stout's critique of Rawls and Hauerwas. For in the US context where "liberalism" is treated mostly as ideology rather than method it is too easy to pit liberalism against Christianity, whereas in other contexts it seems easier for people to recognize the former as the offspring of the latter.
In short, the problem facing us is not actually liberalism itself. Rather, we have contrived a bastardized form of liberalism in recent decades which has made the actual preservation of pluralistic America seem impossible. That is not actually true, but if we are to preserve liberalism it will require us to become far better liberals. Failing that, we are likely to continue the same discourse that we have seen over the past three to five years, with ever diminishing returns.