Secularism and Pluralism

I greeted the recent publication of Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor's essay, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience,[1] with considerable enthusiasm, because we need the best and most serious minds of our time wrestling with the most crucial issue of our time: how to manage moral and religious diversity. We must marshal the elements of understanding and persuasion to bring along those who disagree with one another, and build or reinforce the institutional and social structures that represent a morally sustainable social compact—one that allows us to differ with respect while holding responsible those who underscore their contempt for difference with violence.

These tasks will require our best thoughts and our best efforts.

I find much to applaud in Maclure and Taylor's essay, including their contention that "respect for the moral equality of individuals and the protection of freedom of conscience and of religion constitute the two major aims of secularism today." I agree that these are indeed the goals we ought to pursue, because if we do not manage to protect these freedoms of individual conviction and expression, society will disintegrate. But I must critique Maclure and Taylor for their account of “the ethos or ethic of citizenship” most likely to support social cooperation in diverse societies—an account that is so atomizing and so focused on the individual that it undercuts the solution it offers.

They begin with John Rawls’ idea that pluralism is necessitated by "the limits of reason" (in other words, it is necessary because in our finitude we are prevented from knowing the “ultimate meaning of existence”). They next assume that we come individually to choose our structures of meaning and purpose from a kind of smorgasbord of possibilities. But two of these assumptions can set us on a path to treating one another's differences of conviction and conscience as mere matters of individual taste and preference. If we get to that place, then we will be unable to make the intuitive leap of empathy that says, "While I do not see the world as you do, I can understand how one can be fully human and faithful and see the world in that way."

I believe that there is a more constructive starting point. First, it may be that the reason we are confronted with so many ways of accounting for ultimate meaning is not because of our finitude or ignorance, but because there really are a variety of ways to be faithfully and fully human.

By way of illustration, we might note the variety of theological ends and ways of being faithful embraced in the Old and New Testaments—variety that it actually takes effort to ignore. Consider the four Gospels: the compilers of the New Testament titled each of them "According to…,” reflecting the evangelists’ distinct perspectives on the church’s story of Jesus. It must have taken a Herculean effort on the part of Tatian, a second century theologian, to produce the first harmony of those Gospels: so many details had to be suppressed or ignored! The pluralism that is at the very heart of our biblical faith reflects the breath-taking variety in God’s world.

The second issue of my critique is that the authors of this important essay somehow do not notice that as humans we do not disinterestedly choose from among a range of axiological options, but are formed in and through communities that that believe certain things in certain ways and value particular things and ideas in particular ways. It is from within that formation and in relationship with the persons among whom we are formed that we make all our choices regarding beliefs and values. For example, I was "converted" to Christianity as a child because I was formed in a Christian community that conceptualized the basic problems of existence and meaning in a way that required sin and forgiveness to take center stage.

If we construe our differences as merely matters of individual taste and preference, we trivialize the religious and moral questions that unite and separate us. We also cut ourselves off from the basic social unit of understanding and persuasion, which is not the individual exercising choice among isolated reasoned options in a graduate seminar on moral topics, but the person in community, where moral choices are made in several dimensions at once, all of which are fraught with social, personal, familial, political, cultural, and religious significance.

The difference is crucial.

We must learn to speak from within our different cultural and religious communities—the very communities that divide us— if we are to learn and to be heard. The great challenge of our time is to live and flourish together though we are different in important respects, but similar in ways that are just as important. To succeed at this critical endeavor, we must acknowledge how the groups and communities that shape us value certain ends and not others. We will not convince one another of our mutual rights to live and practice our faith (or our right to claim no faith at all) as long as we regard one another merely as atomistic ideological or religious consumers.

By respecting the human necessity to seek meaning in and through communities, including communities of faith (diverse as they are) we have the opportunity to make real progress at living together in peace. By knowing one another through our communities of faith and other complex meaning-shaping groups we will come to see that which we have most truly in common: our human existence as ones created in the image of the God whose very being is in Communion.

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[1] Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Translated from French by Jane Marie Todd.