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300 deep freedom

path of deepening in our hopes is what the religion of the future seeks

and what it expects.

Four principles

Th e task now is to formulate and to justify the principles that should
govern the po liti cal commitments of the religion of the future and in-
form the or ga ni za tion of a free society. It is to understand the practical
implications for po liti cal life of the overlap between religion and poli-
tics, made manifest by the central role in politics as well as in the reli-
gion of a conception of human nature that is both descriptive and
prescriptive. It is to see how we can establish our freedom rather than
establishing our religion, but establish it in a manner that remains
faithful to the twofold truth of transcendence and of groundlessness.
It is to discover how we can best preserve and enhance the openness
of po liti cal life to the future once we have abandoned the mirage of an
institutional order that is neutral among clashing social ideals and
among conceptions of humanity.
I address this task by stating and defending four principles. Together,
they mark out the ground on which a freedom- preserving democracy
can be reconciled with the beliefs central to the religion of the future,
without reliance on the illusory attempt to establish institutional ar-
rangements neutral among conceptions of the good.
Th ese principles rest on two distinct types of justifi cation. Th e fi rst
order of justifi cation is the force of the ideas about who we are and what
we should become that have been developed, in diff erent ways, by the
religions of salvation and by the secular programs of romanticism and
democracy. Th ose ideas have demonstrated their force by their unex-
hausted fecundity: their power to penetrate and transform every aspect
of our experience, to overthrow the conceptions that were until then
ascendant in the high cultures of all the great civilizations, and to ex-
cite in every quadrant of the globe the impulse of revolution. Th is test
of experience, met across a broad range of societies over many genera-
tions, is a vindication of the ideas that has more weight than do specu-
lative arguments and attempts to mimic in philosophy the methods of
natural science and mathematics.