MATTHEW SCHERERliberalism therefore requires no interference between, or conversion of, interests. Yet any-
one who looks at the experience of Rawlsianism over the past fifty years will find that it
belies these claims. One need only notice that Rawls’s work is shrouded in the myth of
having originated a new departure for political philosophy and having resurrected politi-
cal philosophy from a ‘‘moribund state.’’^2 In short, a central feature of the reception of
Rawls’s work, accepted by critics and adherents alike, is that it marks an unanticipated and
seemingly inexplicable point of discontinuity in the recent tradition of political thought. It
is a modest claim to call this a miracle. Just as Rawls has been elected for sainthood,A
Theory of Justicehas been elected for canonization among the ranks of great books. This
has contributed to a studiously dispassionate text’s being received with genuine passion—
gratitude and affirmation in some places, indignation and denunciation in others—on
either side of what Sheldon Wolin has referred to as the ‘‘Liberal/Democratic Divide’’
pressed open by Rawls.^3 It is another modest claim to associate this divide with the divi-
sion between rival faiths.
Doctrines of political liberalism, from their earliest articulations to their most recent
variations, seek to exclude theology, both when it underwrites political authority and
when it makes claims upon the deep currents of faith that flow beneath individual con-
science. This exclusion may, in fact, be the most economical way of stating liberalism’s
intellectual stakes: continuing a gesture exemplified by Spinoza and Hobbes, liberalism
prohibits talk of miracles and closes the pathways to the domain of individual belief that
would support such talk. So, while its miraculous appearance is agreed to be a central
characteristic of Rawlsianism, this finding should sound scandalous. Indeed, one could
write a history of liberalism by tracing subtle and unavowed reincorporations of the theo-
logical, despite its formal exclusion. Here I will ask how, if there has in fact been a Rawl-
sian miracle, theological modes have been reinscribed in political liberalism.
If Rawls’s political liberalism, rather than simply excluding religious motifs, articu-
lates a new relation between theological and political experience, one route into this prob-
lematic runs throughconversion, which is to say that grasping this relation may follow
from asking how this particular doctrine takes root and what particular dimensions of
human experience it appeals to and depends upon. Whether Rawlsian liberalism is seen
as something that needs to be extended, refined, tempered, combatted, overcome, given
therapy, or otherwise treated, any of these aims will be better aided by examining the
discourse’s mechanisms and mapping its sense than by clarifying or refuting the project
on the level of formal argumentation or, worse, by avoiding it on the pretense that it
consists in shallow, innocent, or impertinent nonsense, illusion, or error. In short, ade-
quately addressing Rawlsian liberalism requires taking seriously the nature of the claims
it makes on its audience.
Critical responses to Rawls can be divided into two general categories. On the one
hand, there is an internal criticism that scrutinizes the order of liberties, the enumeration
of basic goods, the propriety of assuming a greater or lesser risk aversion on the part of
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