Saint John
The Miracle of Secular ReasonMatthew Schererjohnrawlsisasaint. In the words of Amy Gutmann, who remarked,
when delivering his eulogy, that she felt ‘‘privileged to have lived in his
time,’’ Rawls was ‘‘saintly as well as wise.’’^1 Within certain communities
of political theorists, such sentiment appears to be widespread, as is
evident from expressions of personal admiration in the wake of Rawls’s
death. The general fact of this sentiment presents a number of prob-
lems, not only for a highly private man who by all accounts went to
great lengths to avoid celebrity, let alone sainthood, but also for secular
liberals who share in these feelings of reverence, as well as for those
engaged in contemporary political thought more generally. How is it
that, after all these centuries, and in the face of all its protestations to
the contrary, even an avowedly secular, liberal, democratic politics still
needs a saint?
This is a serious question about the persistence of political theology
within a discourse that disavows it. There is also a hint of scandal if it
can be maintained that what is commonly taken to be the paradigmatic
postfoundational secular liberal-democratic discourse is intimately
bound up with and permeated by religious modes of thought and ac-
tion. The wager in pursuing this point is that a continued acquiescence
in secular discourse’s attempts to sever itself cleanly from the domain
of the religious, consigning certain dimensions of human experience to
one or the other domain and defining each domain against the other,
can only serve to obscure vital dynamics of both secular and religious
conduct. Rawls, for example, argues that the variant of political liberal-
ism he articulates is the natural fruit of European historical experience,
that it therefore represents no cultural innovation, and that it therefore
requires no moment of political founding. More specifically, he argues
that it emerges from the detachment of politics from religion through
a largely realized process of secularization and that adopting his political
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