deep freedom 303vergence is dissolved, the overriding task of the po liti cal life of a people
changes in content. It becomes to fulfi ll the distinctively po liti cal con-
ditions for the development of a greater life: not just for an elite of the
advantaged or the gift ed but for the mass of ordinary men and women.
Democracy ceases to be solely the government of the many qualifi ed by
the rights of the few and becomes the master practice by which we cre-
ate the new and loosen the grip of the established institutional and
ideological settlement on how we can live and what we can do.
Th e four principles stated and defended in the following pages mark
out the ground of a free society under the light of the religion of the
future. In so doing, they describe, for men and women who have un-
derstood that politics is ultimately religious and that the better religion
is also po liti cal, how politics and religion are to be connected.
Th e principle of apostasy
Th e fi rst principle of po liti cal life, viewed from the perspective of the
religion of the future, is the safeguarding of apostasy: that it is to say,
not only of dissent from the religion of the future but also of vehement
opposition to it.
Once we abandon the unrealizable and self- defeating goal of the
neutrality of a po liti cal order among conceptions of the good and ideals
of humanity, we must ask ourselves how we can avoid turning the vi-
sions and ideals informing the regime into an established religion. It is
not enough that the citizens be free to defy these enacted assumptions.
Th ey must be free actively to oppose them, by collective as well as indi-
vidual action. Th e sole acceptable restraint on the exercise of this pre-
rogative is the exclusion of violence and civil war. Th ere are three reasons
to safeguard the privilege of apostasy.
Th e fi rst reason is to recognize and honor, in the or ga ni za tion of po-
liti cal life, the dialectic of transcendence and engagement that helps
defi ne our humanity. We cannot become more human by becoming
more godlike if we fi nd entrenched in the arrangements of society a
social ideal that we cannot attack. We would have to be able to distin-
guish institutional arrangements, susceptible to criticism and change,
from an idea held above criticism. We can make no such distinction.