232 religious revolution nowContrary to the assumptions of classical liberal doctrine, no set of
institutional arrangements can be neutral among visions of the good
for man. Every institutional order encourages some forms of experi-
ence and discourages others. Th e illusory goal of neutrality gets in the
way of the pursuit of the realistic ideal of the corrigibility of a form of
life: of its susceptibility to challenge and correction and of its openness
to a broad range of experience. Th e claim that a par tic u lar institu-
tional regime is neutral among clashing visions of the good will in-
variably be found to favor the entrenchment of a frozen understand-
ing of our interests and ideals. It amounts to a species of the Hegelian
heresy.
Th e impossibility of drawing a bright line between religion and poli-
tics when either of them raises its level of transformative ambition
rightly troubles the friends of individual freedom. However, the protec-
tion of individual liberty should not be made to depend on the false
idea of an absolute separation of religion from politics or on the unreal-
izable conception of an institutional order that is neutral among con-
ceptions of the good. It must rely instead on institutional arrangements,
established in law, that restrain governmental or private oppression even
as they secure a universal minimum of endowments to everyone. Th e
justifi cation of such arrangements cannot rest safely on an illusion such
as the illusion of the neutrality of an order of right among confl icting
visions of the good.
Th e eff ort to envisage and to establish a greater life for the common
man and to do so on the basis of unwavering recognition of our mor-
tality, groundlessness, and instability delivers a challenge to the estab-
lished institutional settlement in even the freest, most equal, and most
prosperous contemporary societies. It also requires from us that we
criticize and change our enacted beliefs about the possible and desir-
able forms of human association. By the very nature of its concerns, it
must bridge the gap between the personal and the po liti cal.
However, the religions of salvation, as they have developed in history
and as they now exist, either fail to combine the personal and the po-
liti cal or combine them in ways contradicting the parts of their faiths
that are of greatest and most lasting value to humanity. Th e resulting
inhibition to their reform helps create a circumstance hospitable to re-
ligious revolution.