America's culture wars: Ronald Dworkin and Marilynne Robinson on politics and religion

For the next issue of Prospect, which is out next week, I’ve reviewed the last book by the political and legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who died in February at the age of 81. Religion Without God is a short but profound book based on the Einstein Lectures that Dworkin delivered in Bern in December 2011. It’s only a short review (for the “Books in brief” section of the magazine) and there are aspects of Dworkin’s argument that I didn’t have room to consider, so I thought I’d do so here.

As Jeremy Waldron points out in his review in the Guardian, Religion Without God demonstrates both the range and the unity of Dworkin’s thinking: it is an essay in what philosophers would call the “metaphysics of value” and an examination of some of the difficult legal, moral and political problems posed by the idea of religious freedom.

What connects these two aspects of the book is a definition of religion that Dworkin lodges at the very beginning. Let’s accept as “religious”, he says, any worldview which holds that “inherent objective value permeates everything”. The book’s most provocative claim follows from this—namely, that a belief in God is only “one possible manifestation” of the view that moral value is objective and all-pervasive. In other words, there is such a thing as “religious atheism” (“religious” in that it treats human life as meaningful and purposive, and nature as intrinsically valuable, and thus an appropriate object of wonder and awe).

All sorts of questions follow from this, of course. But I’d like to concentrate on the way Dworkin handles the legal and political implications. Consider legal instruments such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the First Amendment of the US Constitution. For the purposes of such provisions, he says, “it makes a difference what counts as a religion”. Now, what if the freedom of religion that is enshrined in them were to embrace “all deep convictions about the purpose and responsibilities of life” and not just a belief in some form of god?

This is a way of asking why we accord religious belief special protection, over and above the protection that we give to other kinds of moral commitment under what Dworkin calls the “general right to ethical independence”. What is at stake in the case of religion, in the commonsense understanding of the term (ie belief in a supernatural being or “personal God”), that isn’t at stake in the case of the commitments of the adherents of a “religion without God”?

It’s a good question, and raises the possibility that, as Dworkin puts it, the kinds of conviction which we want to protect with a special right to religious freedom are in fact “sufficiently protected by the general right to ethical independence”. If that’s right, then do we need the special right, with the problems of definition that go along with it (deciding which beliefs do and do not merit special legal protection, and so on), at all?

At the end of the book, it becomes clear that all along Dworkin has had one eye on the “culture wars” in the US between atheists and “zealous believers”. If he is right that “people share a fundamental religious impulse” that manifests itself in various ways (and not exclusively in the form of beliefs in an intelligent supernatural being), then atheists and theists ought to accept that they are engaged in the same ethical enterprise. “Both parties may come to accept,” he writes, “that what they now take to be a wholly unbridgeable gap is only an esoteric kind of scientific disagreement with no moral or political implications. Or at least many more of them can. Is that too much to hope? Probably.”

I was reminded of Dworkin’s rather melancholy expression of chastened hope this morning when listening to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s 2013 Theos Annual Lecture, which she delivered in London last week. (You can listen to it here until 2^nd January.) It struck me that Robinson’s lecture, entitled “Religion in Contemporary America”, offers an explanation of why Dworkin was right to be pessimistic about the prospect of peace breaking out between atheists and believers.

When she says that the “bonds between politics and religion have begun to chafe in the last few decades,” she’s referring to the same phenomena as Dworkin, though she describes them rather differently. Robinson borrows from the sociologist Robert Bellah the idea of an American “civil religion”, embodied in her youth, she says, by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. This has been replaced, she goes on, by something much harsher and more divisive. The word “Christian” has, in the US at least, stopped referring to an “ethic” and now refers to a “demographic” or an “identity”—an identity, moreover, that “appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses”.

And unfortunately, it is inconceivable, for the time being at least, that identitarian Christians of this kind could ever acknowledge, as Dworkin puts it, unbelievers as “full partners in their deepest religious ambitions”.