Mathewes on Dworkin and Wiman

Anything by UVA's Charles Mathewes is presumptively worth reading, but Chuck's review at the American Interest combining his reflections on Ronald Dworkin's posthumous Religion Without God and Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss (which I praised last summer here) is especially thoughtful on the place of religious discourse in contemporary public life. (Though I must resist Chuck's characterization of law and philosophy as "deeply unreflective academic fields.") A bit from the first section that frames his essay:

If any of these religion[s] try to “appear” in public (the metaphor itself is telling), they must politely cram themselves into the whalebone corset that is the etiquette of the modern Western public sphere. Religion in the contemporary West has become socially and politically denominationalized and existentially privatized. Many religions can accept such terms only at the cost of self-mutilation. Pretty obviously, this is a situation that doesn’t encourage coherent conversation about belief—more the opposite.

This is a special problem in a liberal society. If the genius of political liberalism is to recognize an inviolable wall around the privacy of the individual, the problem that liberalism faces is that that wall, once established, blocks passage in both directions. If we deem it abhorrent to violate another’s conscience, and so construct the public sphere in such a way as to forbid the public from invading the conscience, it is hard to see how so private a conscience can break out, to interact at all with public affairs. This risks turning the individual’s fortress into a prison; we have secured ourselves from violation only by forbidding ourselves real encounter. Liberalism’s admirable recognition of the unique value of each individual has had the effect of creating a society composed of gilded birds trapped in iron cages.