MATTHEW SCHERERrefrain from certain conversations—serve the function of assuaging persistent modes of
suffering. What this suggests, in turn, is that modes of suffering that often find their calls
for relief answered in religious modes of experience may also be central to the appeal of
secular liberalism. This, in turn, may begin to cast light on the nature of our persistent
attachment both to the promises of religion and to the promises of secular liberalism.
While Honig’s and Cavell’s critiques can help us recognize the need to supplement the
central juridical forms of liberal politics, the scenes from Rawls’s life, insofar as they find
resonance with scenes from one’s own life, can help us recognize the sources of resistance
to enacting these supplements.
I began this essay by noticing that John Rawls has been called a saint and have at-
tempted to give this claim a serious basis by demonstrating that where, in Rousseau’s
classical articulation, a persistent political-theological paradox of founding through re-
course to gods has been dispensed with, the same paradox has been eased in Rawls’s work
by way of nuanced rhetorical appeals to the sensibilities it assumes to be installed in its
readers and attempts both to mobilize and to inflect in new directions. The measure of
Rawls’s saintliness, I assert, lay in his skill at deploying these rhetorical means to the
miraculous end of inspiring convictions that would otherwise remain unavailable. Insofar
as political life contains a moral dimension—that is, insofar as a concept of justice is
somehow applicable to political life—the dimension of morality, justice, or social spirit
that this further dimension represents stands in need of something like a miracle for its
inception. Failing this, the arguments for morality lack sense, just as, in the absence of a
sense of justice, the principles of justice lack lived significance. I would suggest, however,
that admirable appeals to justice may find their root in the ineliminable experiences of
personal suffering that they tend to obscure. And that the faith Rawls seeks to inspire in
his conception of liberalism is much more closely analogous, in the needs it serves, to
modalities of religious faith, which Rawls has been taken to have escaped. In the end,
then, it would appear that even an avowedly secular, liberal, democratic politics stands in
deep need of its saints, and that this very need can serve as a vital source of moral and
political instruction.
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