Soul Freedom

Os Guinness is utterly convincing, and characteristically wise, on many points in his 2014 The Global Public Square.

He is right to emphasize that “many of the world’s traditional settlements of religion and public life are floundering” (56). He refers to a UK case in which a woman was forbidden to wear a cross at her government job – this in a country with an established Christian church. The then-archbishop of said established church refused to defend the woman’s right to wear the cross because the cross is only a “decoration” (58).

He is right to worry that the US, “the great pioneer and pacesetter of religious liberty” has “rapidly degenerated into becoming another example of the problem” (61). He is right to denounce “the general disdain for religion that leads to a discounting of religious freedom, sharpened by a newly aggressive atheism and a heavy-handed separationism that both call for the exclusion of religion from public life” and “the overzealous attempt of certain advocates of the sexual revolution to treat freedom of religion and belief as an obstruction to their own rights that must be dismantled forever” (17).

Guinness wants to discover a way to “maximized freedom and justice and learn to live with our deepest differences,” especially “how we are to negotiate those differences in public life, and so create a global public square that is worthy of our heritage as members of free and open societies” (19). 

I find Guinness’s proposed solution far less convincing. He argues for institutional arrangements that rooted in recognition of and devoted to the protection of “soul freedom” for everyone. Defending this fundamental freedom is the core of defending freedom more generally. Freedom of religion, he insists, must affirm “the dignity, worth and agency of every human person by freedom us to align ‘who we understand ourselves to be’ with ‘what we believe ultimately is,’ and then to think, live, speak and act in line with those convictions” (69).

The echo here of Justice Kennedy’s “notorious mystery passage” raises the question of how Guinness’s proposal differs from the status quo. The answer would seem to be in practice rather than in theory. Guinness and Kennedy both think everyone has the right to “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Kennedy, Casey, 1997). But Guinness wants that right to be put into practice for religious believers, so that religious people are allowed not only to believe but to practice their conception of who they understand themselves to be.

But that cannot be put into practice, not in any absolute way. Guinness not want ISIS to live, think, and act on their convictions about who they understand themselves to be and about what ultimately is. On the other hand, some atheists don’t want Christian fundamentalists educating children, filling their heads with nonsense about creation and Eden and Adam. In the end, no one wants everyone to act on his or her religious convictions. And that means that there has to be a way of sorting out legitimate and illegitimate religious expressions. That cannot be done in a religiously neutral fashion, because any standard or mechanism of sorting will assume some standard of “tolerable” and “intolerable” religious expression.

The problem of neutrality arises at another level too. The concept of soul freedom, as Guinness realizes, is Christian in origin (he traces is back to Roger Williams). Advocating a global public square whose boundaries are defined by this concept is, effectively, a Christianization of the global public square, a global square in which Christian concepts of freedom set the rules and lay the boundaries. Since I believe that Christian faith is true, I don’t have any problem allowing Christian faith to define the rules and lay the boundaries. 

Others, though, will have a problem. I: How can we define a global public square for everyone by appeal to one of the many traditions? Isn’t the Christian attempt to define the global public square in Christian terms just another example of Christian imperialism? 

This leaves us at an impasse. There is no religiously neutral way to build a global public square; but any theologically-specific blueprint is going to look like an act of hubris.

It is not clear to me that Guinness has reckoned sufficiently with the impasse, and so his impassioned, revealing book thus, in my judgment, falls short of its laudable aims.