untitled

deep freedom 293

of estrangement and belittlement. It is only a part. However, it is a part
that changes, for better or worse, all the other parts.
Th e topic of this chapter is the meeting of politics and religion, viewed
from the perspective of religion rather than from the vantage point of
politics, which is the standpoint from which it generally has been viewed
in the history of Western po liti cal thought since Machiavelli and Hobbes.
Instead of asking what politics should do with religion, as they and most
of their successors did, I ask what religion, the religion of the future,
should do to politics. Such a po liti cal theology, or anti- theology, begins
in a religious conception: the conception of a free society. Th e religious
revolution for which I argue includes a po liti cal revolution.

Conception of a free society

A free society is a society whose arrangements express and honor the

truth of personality as embodied spirit, situated and transcendent: the

truth upheld in one mea sure or another by all versions of the struggle

with the world and developed more radically by the religion of the fu-

ture. No conception of a free society is defi nitive or all- inclusive. Any

one conception refl ects the limit reached, at any given moment in his-

tory, by the dialectic between our self- understanding and our actual or

imagined institutional experiments.

By the light of the conception of a free society that our place in the

history of thought and of institutional practice makes possible, our in-

herited views of freedom are fragmentary and incomplete. Th ey express

both a limited view of what society can become and a limited insight

into ourselves. As always, the limits of the institutional imagination and

the limits of our self- understanding reinforce each other.

For example, the classical liberal idea of freedom, developed in the

course of the nineteenth century and inspiring even now many of the

secular projects of social and personal liberation, combined an ideal of

individual empowerment with a program for the institutional reconstruc-

tion of society. Both the program and the ideal are defective. Th e program

put unwarranted trust in a par tic u lar system of private and public

rights— a way of or ga niz ing the economy and the state— that has proved

to be an insuffi cient safeguard against oppression and an inadequate basis