religious revolution now 259Th eir subversive and transformative potential is far from exhausted.
Among these religions, Christianity is the one that retains the most
intimate and developed ties to the modern secular projects of emanci-
pation, both personal and po liti cal.
However, the same question, albeit with diff erent answers, might
also be asked of Judaism and Islam. If the changes of vision and experi-
ence that I call the religion of the future were indeed to engage large
numbers of people in the world, speaking in a profane voice, Jews and
Muslims would also be led to reconsider the promises of salvation made
to them by their own faiths. I explore them now for Christianity.
I begin by considering once again an inhibition and a confusion dis-
cussed earlier in this chapter. Th e inhibition is the taboo against the
religious criticism of religion. Th e confusion is the attempt to escape the
diffi culties of faith by settling into a supposedly intermediate position— a
halfway house— between belief and unbelief. Once we have freed our-
selves from the inhibition and struggled against the confusion, we can
address directly the question of the grounds of faith and thus the rea-
son to hear the message of religious revolution in a sacred as well as in
a profane voice.
Th ere has long existed, in all liberal democracies, a strong presump-
tion against the criticism of a religion on religious grounds, that is to
say: from the standpoint of another religion. Such criticism is distin-
guished from contest over the defi nition of orthodoxy within a par tic-
u lar religion. It is widely regarded as being at best a sign of intolerance,
verging on an attack on the foundations of individual freedom. Th is
presumption has its origin in the early modern wars of religion. As re-
ligious diff erence helped excite or justify violence, it began to seem vital
to privatize religion and to build a wall separating religious conviction
from po liti cal life.
A liberal democracy was to be one in which people of contrasting
religious convictions could live together, and speak to the use of gov-
ernmental power, without introducing their religious beliefs into the
public discourse. Th e institutions and the laws were to be neutral
among these views of ultimate reality. A corollary of this teaching is
that the criticism of a religion, for its conception of ultimate reality and
for its orientation to life, should form no legitimate part of the public