God, Taxes, and "Public Reason"

...By definition, private reason is not persuasive to everyone, and it cannot be imposed on the public without grave injury to the right of conscience...

...To demand that conscientious religious believers such as Riley suppress their true motives in order to fit their public statements to the requirements of public reason is grossly unfair as well as unnecessary...

...However participants in the fairness debate might rank the relative merits of a progressive income tax, no one can deny that it makes a legitimate candidate...

...Had his plan succeeded on this basis, it would have identified the state with a particular religion by making Christian ethics the foundation of the state's tax policy...

...It seems intuitive that justice requires taxes to be apportioned fairly across the entire population...

...The political art of building winning coalitions may perforce require conscientious believers to state their case in terms acceptable to those who do not subscribe to their faith...

...On this logic, Riley's overt appeal to Christian ethics in support of his tax plan is illegitimate...

...See Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 175...

...This can only breed cynicism and hypocrisy, neither of which is healthy for a democracy...

...This sociological fact would seem to bolster the case for liberal public reason...

...1. According to Rawls, a comprehensive doctrine "includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, as well as ideals of personal virtue and character, that are to inform much of our nonpolitical conduct (in the limit our life as a whole...

...Reasonable persons may of course dispute what constitutes a fair scheme of taxation...

...Implicit in this argument is certain hostility toward politics as it is normally understood and practiced...

...Now, all sorts of reasons may be adduced in favor of progressivity, and Riley's argument from the standpoint of Christian ethics is on its face no less compelling than a secular argument relying on Rawls's "difference principle...

...Inevitably, there will be acceptable policies that have a differential impact on different constituencies...

...It might be thought that liberals would look kindly on Riley's ill-fated Campaign for Tax Justice...

...For example, environmental regulations applied to air quality will have a greater and more immediate economic impact on automobile manufacturers and hog farmers than they will on, say, university professors...

...They must disguise if not disown their true motives in order to gain a respectful audience from their fellow citizens...

...Opponents of the plan—notable among them the leaders of the state's Christian Coalition— seized on a provision to extend the sales tax to repairs of items such as cars and lawn mowers 64 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 to depict the reforms as a tax increase on working people...

...Church establishments could hardly be said to have contributed to the legitimacy of the state through their persecution of religious dissenters...

...That's because the plurality of religious beliefs, together with their incommensurability, makes agreement on what constitutes spiritual benefit impossible...

...It is unusual these days for a Republican politician to raise taxes on the privileged...

...In its original context, the argument is undeniably powerful...

...Locke's argument suggests that what is truly key is that public policies serve a legitimate civil interest and do not aim at securing a spiritual benefit...

...Indeed, before the fact, it seemed highly possible that the religious rationale for tax reform would provide the necessary margin of victory for Riley's plan when it went before the voters in September...

...In fact, intra-group communication may frequently prove more important to achieving political success than intergroup communication...

...but the mere fact that a public official and ordinary citizens choose to interpret a legitimate governmental objective in light of their private religious convictions has no bearing on its political status...

...There are many people in the United States today who, like Riley, believe that in order to be good citizens they must also be good Christians (or good Jews, or good Muslims, or for that matter, good liberals...

...It is telling that Rawls struggles mightily (and in vain) to read Martin Luther King, Jr.'s passionate appeals for racial justice in a manner consistent with his own theologically neutral conception of liberal public reason...

...On the contrary, his political track record, including his stint as a Republican representative from rural central Alabama, marks him as a member of the newly powerful religious right...

...Nor did Riley's religious motives in introducing the tax plan undercut its legitimacy...

...It would be a different story if Riley's plan gave preferential treatment to Christians...

...A person's religious beliefs may be "private" in the sense that they are shared at most with a subset of the political community...

...Were nominally "public" policies allowed to serve purely private ends it would subvert the egalitarian foundation of the liberal state...

...Although in whole or in part it may enjoy support from an "overlapping consensus" of the reasonable (that is, mutually tolerant) religious and moral doctrines represented among the citizenry, its title to legitimacy does not rest on any one of them...

...2. Locke and Rawls agree that in a hypothetical contract situation all rational persons will demand civic equality for themselves and that all who are reasonable as well as rational will concede the same status to others that they demand for themselves...

...3. The difference principle requires that the less advantaged members of society derive significant benefit from public measures that enhance the prospects of those who are more advantaged...

...DOES IT MATTER that the secular and religious proponents of the Alabama tax plan might not necessarily have recognized one another's reasons as persuasive...

...Rallying the disparate elements of a democratic coalition through parochial appeals to private reason may prove vital to generating majority support for a genuinely public policy...

...there must be shared justifications as well...

...But no one can reasonably deny that protecting the quality of the air everyone must breathe is a legitimate governmental objective...

...But it may sometimes happen (more often than not, I suspect) that a given political end is open to multiple descriptions...

...DISSENT / Winter 2004 n 67...

...The personal identities of democratic citizens run deeper than the common attributes of citizenship, and sometimes, at least, citizens need to understand how a particular measure connects to their deeper understanding of themselves in order to give it their support...

...To the extent that government actions are seen to advantage one particular social or economic group at the expense of others, the legitimacy of the state is called into question...

...Following the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, many liberal thinkers argue that political discourse generally, or at least the language of politics spoken by public officials in their official capacity, must not invoke reasons for state action derived from what Rawls called "more or less comprehensive" religious or moral doctrines.' Instead, political discourse should consist in appeals to "public reason," that is, arguments grounded in our shared commitment to constitutional fundamentals that are purely political in nature...

...Liberals have not always been so fearful of allowing religious language to be spoken in the public sphere...

...Otherwise, opponents will feel justified in condemning them as an abuse of public authority for private gain...

...This is why the efforts of "special" interests to influence government policy have always aroused popular indignation in American politics...

...In brief, shared ends are insufficient to anchor the liberal polity...

...While such subsidies might in fact be defensible, it is incumbent upon their advocates to provide a suitably public rationale...

...Rather, a liberal politics properly conceived and grounded is neutral with regard to competing conceptions of the good life or the good society and must be capable of being affirmed for its own sake, independent of its congruence with some wider religious or moral point of view...

...This would appear to rule out religious reasons for public policies, even when those policies serve a legitimate political purpose, as in the case of Governor Riley's tax plan...

...There are theorists of deliberative democracy who argue that honest encounters between social groups committed to rival understandings of the good life is the best way of bridging their differences...

...Private reason of this sort only becomes dangerous when it waxes tyrannical, that is, when it demands that everyone accept its precepts...

...And then any appeal to the wider community rooted in those beliefs will invariably fall on deaf ears...

...It is an essential component of Rawls's theory of justice...

...AMERICAN SOCIETY in the twenty-first century boasts far greater religious and moral pluralism than seventeenth-century England...

...Again, it's the public purpose of the proposed state action and not the private reasons politicians and voters may have for supporting it that counts...

...Rawls's notion of public reason hardly describes the horse-trading and deal-making that goes on at all levels of government...

...Riley's plan for a progressive income tax, for example, could be described in terms of a Christian duty toward the poor (as Riley himself described it) but also in terms of secular notions of justice and equality (as a Rawlsian liberal would describe it...

...Riley is hardly a disciple of the liberal social gospel movement that in the nineteenth century championed a variety of redistributive and welfarist measures...

...In the end there can be no assurance that honest dialogue will produce a rational consensus, and the earnest quest for shared understandings might instead founder on the rock of parochialism...

...however, there is an influential trend in contemporary liberal political theory that requires us to regard Riley's biblically inspired case for tax reform with suspicion...

...greater diversity implies an even greater need than before to avoid reliance on particularistic and inherently controversial religious or moral beliefs in the justification of state action...

...It must be grounded in the purely political purposes for which the state exists, because these limited (and limiting) principles of political life are the only ones that can reasonably be supposed to have the assent of all citizens...

...Honest dialogue, it is suggested, will create shared understandings that transcend parochial disagreements, creating the possibility of a rational consensus on matters of public importance...

...What is truly remarkable in this instance, however, are the reasons Riley gave for his tax plan...

...Thus, contrary to the liberal conception of public reason, committed democrats might do well to introduce their private reasons into political debate...

...The charms of public reason are often too remote...

...But perhaps this scheme expects too much of the deliberative process...

...Indeed, given the difficulty of Rawls's philosophical reasoning in contrast with the accessibility of popular religion, for the majority of Alabama's voters Riley's argument is very likely to be the more compelling of the two...

...Political legitimacy hinges on government's restricting itself to its proper sphere of action...

...The beauty of a liberal democratic politics is that we do not all have to understand ourselves the same way or subscribe to a single conception of the good life or the good society in order to work together toward common ends...

...As Stephen Carter and others have recently complained, liberal insistence that political discourse employ secular language effectively turns consci6 6 n DISSENT / Winter 2004 entious believers into second-class citizens...

...Happily, a rational consensus is not required in order to agree on political ends...

...Unfortunately, as the governor's supporters later admitted, they did an abysmally poor job of getting their message out...

...I don't mean that every legitimate public policy must provide equal benefit to all the citizens...

...He argued that the present tax system, which requires Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 to pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent, is un-Christian...

...His commitment to tax reform is a caution against treating religious scruples in politics—even those of a conservative Christian like Riley—as invariably weighted against progressive causes...

...But theists do not violate the functional separation of church and state merely by explaining their own political stance in terms of their conscientious beliefs...

...In contrast, it is relatively easy to achieve reasonable agreement on the ends of a secular liberal politics, which consist in peace and security of the person within a framework of entitlements (rights) that ensure everyone's civic equality.' And if it is conceded that the ends of a proposed policy are legitimate, what does it matter that the reasons given in support of the policy are private rather than public in Rawls's sense...

...Government exists not to save souls, Locke insisted, but merely to secure life, liberty, and property...

...Taxes are necessary to fund the provision of public benefits, including government itself...

...Appeals to private reason are sometimes necessary to mobilize groups of voters behind a public purpose...

...A sound rationale for public policy must be one that can be affirmed by all citizens, whatever their conception of the good...

...So long as the policy objective is within the scope of the state's authority, its sponsors' motives are irrelevant...

...DISSENT / Winter 2004 • 6 5 GOD AND TAXES Riley's application of Christian ethics to tax policy is hardly analogous to spending public monies on private projects...

...In the end, the Republican antitax gospel trumped Riley's faith-based appeal for tax reform...

...The Rawlsian argument is modeled on liberal arguments for religious toleration in the seventeenth century...

...IT IN NO WAY diminishes the public character of the state's fiscal policy that Riley and conceivably a significant portion of Alabama voters viewed his tax plan as a practical expression of the biblical injunction to succor the poor...

...STEPHEN L. NEWMAN is an associate professor of political science at York University in Toronto...

...So long as Christians and liberal secularists hold the end in common, and so long as what is proposed constitutes a legitimate governmental objective, it hardly matters that they defend it in GOD AND TAXES completely different ways...

...And secularists need not concur in the reasons offered by theists in order to join them in supporting policy outcomes that they (the secularists) have good and sufficient reasons of their own to champion...

...In essence, he gave a private reason—a GOD AND TAXES rationale available only to those who share his faith—in place of a public reason available to all citizens regardless of their faith commitments...

...But this wariness toward allowing religious and moral reasoning into political argument exaggerates its potential to undermine the legitimacy of public institutions...

...THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR of Alabama, Bob Riley, stunned conservatives last year by pushing through the state legislature a tax reform plan that offered tax relief to the poorest in his state while significantly increasing the burden borne by wealthy individuals and corporations...

...A genuine commitment to public reason and the (purely) political values it entails is required, in his view, to get beyond a mere modus vivendi that lasts only so long as each of the parties gets what it wants...

...That the ends of policy be truly public is of the greatest importance...

...On the other hand, the public benefit of a direct government subsidy to car makers or hog farmers or (even) university professors invites suspicion...

...Far from attempting to deny the significance of King's religious oratory, liberals should once again learn to embrace it...

...Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration forcefully argues for a functional separation of church and state in which the former concerns itself exclusively with spiritual affairs while the latter concentrates on safeguarding civil interests...

...The political conception of liberalism Rawls articulates is intended to be freestanding...

...Rawls appears to believe that discursive dissonance of this sort leads to political instability, even where there is (temporary) agreement on policy outcomes...

...No matter...

...Only in this manner, it is argued, can the liberal state enjoy the freely given allegiance of persons who subscribe to rival and incommensurate conceptions of the (theological or moral) good...

...On the contrary, throughout American history progressive causes have enjoyed support, often vital support, from religious constituencies that perceived the political stakes in light of their deep faith commitments...

...There is nothing to fear from private reason wedded to a truly public end...

...Public reason must be judged a failure if its strictures compel reasonable men and women of conscience to choose between keeping a scrupulous silence or speaking insincerely...

...On the contrary, as John Locke warned his compatriots in 1689, religious persecution risks making rebels of conscientious men who merely desire to be left alone by the state to worship God as they see fit...