1. What is the problem?

Let us very broadly define here a liberal democracy as a political system governed by the principles of classical liberalism, that is, a political system that guarantees equal rights of social, economic and political participation irrelevant of class, gender, ethnicity, belief or wealth; the separation of powers into an executive, legislative and judiciary branch; the separation of church and state. Within a liberal state, there might be wild disagreements on how to implement these foundational principles properly, and how to govern accordingly, but these principles themselves are not – neither for those on the right, nor for those on the left of the political aisle – open to debate. Usually, this means that these principles are codified in national (a constitution) and international (a declaration of universal rights) fundamental laws. For our current discussion, the most important principle of liberalism is the equal freedom of the members of the state.

Liberal democracy has lost some of its flair in recent decades, as evidenced, for one, by the large-scale protest movements against the neoliberal course taken by Western liberal democracies.Footnote ³ More pertinent for current purposes, however, is the surge of ideologies at both extremes of the political spectrum that promote a form of identitarian politics that destabilizes the foundations of liberal politics. I think this is a potent ideological challenge to political liberalism. Identitarian politics works by privileging group identity over personal accomplishments, which tends to move the state into privileging or hurting certain groups with a shared identity (and so it becomes illiberal). This can happen on the right or the left. On the right, there has been the remarkable rise of right-wing populism in the Western world that tends to scapegoat the identitarian ‘outsider’ for the social and economic difficulties experienced by nations. In this way of thinking, outsiders are not valued on the basis of their personal achievements, but rather on the basis of negative characteristics associated to the group to which they are perceived to belong. On the left, something similar can happen that is less frequently recognized. In extreme forms of left-wing ideology, there can emerge a tendency to scapegoat the identitarian ‘insider’ for the social and economic difficulties that are experienced by disenfranchised groups. While the explicit focus is on providing true equality to disenfranchised groups, this can occur by politics that disenfranchise individuals who are perceived to belong to the ruling class, even if they have experienced no particular privilege.

These movements privilege group rights and justice over individual rights and justice. If such politics are implemented on a wide scale (even with the best of intentions), they threaten to mitigate or even destroy some of the foundational principles of liberal democracy, such as free participation and free speech. Much of such politics is veiled by rationalizations that attempt to justify group-based policy as directed towards promoting real equality. This point could be developed in further detail, but it is not the central focus of this article.

What is more important, and particularly worrisome from a classical liberal point of view, is that many people seem to accept or even celebrate the erosion of the foundational principle of equal participation in a liberal society. I am not excluding the possibility that there could be good reasons to oppose liberal democracy. I am merely noticing here that such anti-liberal political views are a sign that enthusiasm for the project of liberal democracy has waned.Footnote ⁴ For someone still wedded to its foundational principles, it seems vital to consider ways in which to promote the idea of liberal democracy, and avoid identitarian politics, without infringing on the equal freedom of the citizenry. The following discussion of Kant’s ethical community shows that affinity for liberal principles ought to be non-conditional rather than prudential.Footnote ⁵ This would result, for instance, in being personally committed to the outcomes of liberal proceedings, even if one is opposed to the currently elected policy or official. Such affinity can be created by means of soft paternalism or nudging, which could take the form of citizenship tests for newcomers, citizenship classes in public schools, public campaigns in favour of gender and racial equality, etc.Footnote ⁶ Whether such soft paternalism is ultimately effective is debatable: it is one thing to ‘tick a box’, it is another to be intimately convinced of the value of certain ideals.Footnote ⁷

The question I want to address is whether an intimate allegiance to political liberalism can be achieved politically or whether something else must come into play. We can find an interesting answer to that question in the third part of Kant’s Religion. His argument is that politics cannot function without a properly circumspect historical faith as an ethical community that cultivates affinity for ethics. This means that to sustain the real possibility of achieving the political ends of a liberal democracy (or, in Kant’s terms, to ground the political duties of the Doctrine of Right) political community must itself be sustained by a more foundational ethical community. That ethical community serves its own purpose, which is to ground the possibility of the highest good, but it additionally grounds the pursuit of political duties. For it to achieve this end, the ethical community must take the form of a transnational church. Some Kant scholars recognize that a legally good political state is conducive to morally good people.Footnote ⁸ I make the reverse and what I take to be stronger argument (without objecting to the former) that a morally good community is vital for a legally good political state. In this article, I analyse and engage with Kant’s argument for the inclusion of an invisible church to sustain a successful political system. Towards the close, I will show some of the tensions in this argument, bearing on liberalism’s commitment to pluralism and the separation of church and state.

2. The Antinomy of Religion III: politics leads to religion

Kant’s ethics and political views are traditionally read from the perspective of Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). From this perspective, most readers assume that Kant draws a strict line between legality and morality: the primary purpose, on the one hand, of a political state is to disincentivize the execution of illegal behaviour and, on the other hand, the primary purpose of morality is to augment and cultivate our pursuit of a moral disposition (Gesinnung).Footnote ⁹ If religion is to play a role at all, this seems to take place in ethics only, not politics. This seems to be in line with the general policies of most liberal democracies that prefer to put religion on the sidelines of politics or ban religion altogether from the public sphere. Kant somewhat unexpectedly then puts forward the vital need for religion to cooperate with politics and ethics in Religion III. As I will argue, Kant could be read as making the argument that religion must cooperate with liberal democracy. A citizen of a liberal democracy must be committed to liberal principles in the same way that religious believers are committed to their fundamental religious beliefs.Footnote ¹⁰ Commitment then means to align your own identity with these principles. Kant never made this point overtly, but it can be gathered from a careful reading of Religion.

Kant opens that book with his thesis that human nature is radically evil. This means, very generally, that human beings have a freely acquired and ineradicable propensity in their very nature to overturn the proper and moral hierarchy between our sensuous and our moral interests (Rel, 6: 29–39). Human beings are of such a kind that they naturally prefer their happiness over their moral duty.Footnote ¹¹ If we translate this point to the sphere of politics – which is not to say that it can be reduced to the social sphereFootnote ¹² – then this means that human beings are easily tempted in the public sphere to privilege their private ends to the more general ends of the state. An analogy: while most citizens recognize that taxation is good, most citizens equally aim to pay the least amount possible. This is a trait of human nature. Kant discusses the challenges that humanity’s evil nature offers to individuals (Religion II) and community (Religion III). In order to counteract the former, he comes close to a philosophical appreciation of religious grace (6: 44–53) and Christology (6: 57–66). In order to counteract the latter, Kant explicitly states that the moral betterment of individuals will not suffice: even well-disposed moral agents ‘will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition’ (Rel, 6: 94). The problem of the communal betterment of humanity is a problem that should be tackled on a level between a personal ethics and a broader politics. By itself, an ethical system might incline individuals to moral virtue but it cannot counteract interpersonal corrupting effects; by itself, a political system might achieve a civil or legal peace, but it cannot cultivate the much-needed intrinsic affinity for its own principles. To overcome these difficulties, Kant introduces the notion of an ethical community.

In order to combat the potentially debilitating effects one can have on one’s fellow moral agents, Kant argues that we need one thing in particular: ‘The setting up and the diffusion of a society in accordance with, and for the sake of, the laws of virtue’ (Rel, 6: 94). When it is discussed in the literature, there is a tendency to consider the ethical community in merely socio-political rather than religious terms. Andrews Reath in his famous ‘Two Conceptions of the Highest Good’ argues in favour of a secular rather than a theological conception of Kant’s notion of the highest good (Reath Reference Reath1988). More recently, Christopher Insole made the point that ‘in the [political] state of the highest created good [or ethical community], we are not centrally referred or oriented to the transcendence of God’ (Insole Reference Insole2016: 24).Footnote ¹³ A secularized reading of Kant’s philosophy of religion has its merits, but such a reading risks missing Kant’s important argument that politics and ethics require the assistance of religion in order to make good on their ends, namely, legal peace and moral betterment respectively.

Let us then here review Kant’s argument for the ethical community as a religious community. Kant mirrors the transition from an ethical state of nature towards an ethical community in the transition from a political state of nature towards a political community. In his Rechtslehre, he argues that human beings are propelled into a political community so as to regulate the distribution of property (MM, 6: 258ff.). The transition from an individual to a communitarian ethical state, which is an ‘association (Gesellschaft) of human beings merely under the laws of virtue’ (Rel, 6: 94), is required also to regulate human behaviour, but now on the level of morality. The immediate problem with Kant’s argument is that moral agency is based upon autonomous self-determination through universal, rational principles, and this cannot be regulated through coercive laws. This puts him in a bind, and the matter is best phrased in the form of an antinomy:

The thesis should be clear from the above: human beings are prone to corrupting one another morally and therefore there is a need for a society that promotes ethical virtue. These inter-individual corrupting effects not only impact others, but also the individual. The lack of a just ethical community might, namely, impede an individual’s resolve to act virtuously. More importantly, however, these corrupting effects influence the social structure of a society, by which Kant points out that society as a whole, or indeed mankind as a whole, will lack the means to progress morally without an ethical community. This is why he calls the establishment of an ethical community a duty ‘of the human race to itself’ (Rel, 6: 97). This means that all individual human beings are morally obligated to enter an ethical community so as to promote the moral progress of humanity, even if they themselves believe that they can fare perfectly well without such a community.

An ethical community morally benefits individuals and humanity as a whole, and therefore it becomes a general duty for humanity to be united in an ethical community. However, as the antithesis above claims, human beings cannot erect or even regulate such an ethical community. There are two reasons for this, which relate to humanity’s finitude. First, any community that is manmade will have external laws that are enforced through coercion. However, an ethical community must be constructed upon internal, rational principles that are endorsed autonomously.Footnote ¹⁴ Any political project that is geared towards the moral betterment of the people will have adverse effects: ‘Woe to the legislator who would want to bring about through coercion a polity directed to ethical ends! For he would thereby not only achieve the very opposite of ethical ends, but also undermine his political ends and render them insecure’ (6: 96). At best, public legislation can encourage the outward execution of productive behaviour, but it is likely to adversely affect the moral disposition of the individual if it aims for moral betterment. The individual might come to believe that his compliance with the moral law is conditional upon the reward or punishment that is associated with public legislation. Adherence to moral rules should be unconditional. This is not to exclude that a well-structured political state might indirectly facilitate moral agency. The second concern is that, in order to regulate an ethical community, one is in need of some sort of adjudicator who is capable of scrutinizing the morality of its members’ agency. Since morality is based upon invisible incentives, no human legislator is capable of doing so. However one may investigate the behaviour and mindset of another individual, one can never tell without a shadow of a doubt whether they were moved by moral or non-moral concerns. Kant emphasizes that such knowledge is not even available regarding our own motivation (see esp. MM, 6: 447; Rel, 6: 51, 63).

Readers familiar with Kant’s antinomy of practical reason in the second Critique (CPrR, 5: 110–14) will find the above antinomy familiar. The respective theses and antitheses are very similar. That antinomy can be summarized as follows:

In both antinomies, there is a reasonable and moral demand that is impinged by the conditions of sensibility. One could be tempted then to believe that both antinomies offer a different solution to a similar problem. I think it is paramount to show how they have different ends in mind. The dominant view of the relationship between these antinomies is that they are concerned with securing the possibility of the two senses of the highest good (perfect virtue and the consummation of happiness and virtue).Footnote ¹⁵ This is obvious for the antinomy of practical reason, which Kant famously resolves by postulating the immortality of the soul and the existence of God so as to allow for respectively infinite progress towards conforming one’s will to the moral law and the proportioned consummation of merit (virtue) with reward (happiness). According then to the dominant reading, Kant’s ethical community is a non-theological version of the postulation of the existence of God where the transcendent dimension of the second Critique is traded in for a more immanent ethical community in Religion and On Perpetual Peace.

Kant is not primarily concerned – pace this reading – with the consummation of the highest good when discussing the ethical community in Religion III. The ethical community is often mistakenly identified with ‘the kingdom of ends’ in Kant’s philosophy. Kant is very explicit that the ethical community is itself not the ‘Kingdom of God … but what preparations must [be made] in order [for this to come about]” (Rel, 6: 101). In other words, his main concern in Religion III is to lay a ground for a sort of special community that encourages moral cooperation and harmony between different individuals so as to put humanity in the best possible position for the Kingdom of God/ends to come. This means that Kant aims with the ethical community neither at perfect virtue nor at the proportionate consummation of virtue with happiness. Human beings have a duty to establish an ethical community, not the kingdom of God. This point is apparent even in the second Critique. There, Kant emphasizes that humanity’s duty is to promote (befördern) the highest good, which means that they ought to put themselves in the very best possibility so that this may come about. Lewis White Beck was right when he made the point that it is not the job of ‘a laborer in the vineyard to apportion happiness to the virtuous’ (Beck Reference Beck1960: 245). In the second Critique, Kant writes that ‘the promotion (Beförderung) of the highest good … is an a priori necessary object of our will and inseparably bound up with the moral law” (CPrR, 5: 114). Kant’s term Beförderung has occasionally been read as pursuit, which misses the point.Footnote ¹⁶ He means that we are to create the circumstances in which the highest good can come about, not pursue the highest good directly.Footnote ¹⁷

3. The foundation of an ethico-religious community

The antinomy in Religion III bears out that humanity both needs an ethical community and cannot establish such a community by itself. This ethical community assists and enables moral behaviour. Since whatever is necessary is equally possible (ultra posse nemo obligatur), the grounds of possibility of an ethical community are a legitimate aspect of practical faith. This means that we are warranted in postulating whatever is the ground and adjudicator of an ethical community.

Kant does not mince words when he simply states that an ethical community requires ‘the concept of God as a moral ruler of the world’ and so ‘an ethical community is conceivable only as a people under divine commands, i.e. as a people of God’ (Rel, 6: 99). This is the case because we need a legislator whose commands are moral duties and who can function as an adjudicator who is capable of scrutinizing the heart:

The postulation of God as legislator and adjudicator cannot invite human beings to a sort of moral passivity or even laziness. If human beings cannot bring about an ethical community and if they cannot judge the morality of others, this might lead towards a sort of defeatism or at least passivism. Human beings could just hope that God will sort things out in the end. However, Kant argues that such a passivity in awaiting grace is not the right attitude.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite being in need of some assistance, Kant argues that ‘each [individual] must so conduct himself as if everything depended on him’ (Rel, 6: 101). This point is repeated in The Conflict of the Faculties, where Kant states that all human agency must be represented as ‘issuing from the human being’s own use of his moral powers’ (CF, 7: 42) and that grace is to be read as the ‘hope that the good will develop in us’ (7: 43). If human beings adopt an idea of justifying grace, according to this text, it must be in order to supplement their own limitations after having exhausted their own capacities.

Reading the ethical community in terms of such cooperative grace – as a supplement to the limitations of human agency – does not exhort individuals to moral passivity but, to the contrary, forces them to pursue morality to the utmost of their capacities. This might invite a secularizing (or even instrumentalizing) reading of Kant’s ethical communitarianism. For it might seem as if Kant is arguing only that if human beings would despair of their moral capacities when considering their inability to erect and regulate an ethical community, then they are rationally allowed to postulate the existence of God. The postulation of God would then be dependent upon a potential need that arises from recognizing human limitations – not on actual belief in God. What if human beings, despite their limitations, could instead work cheerfully towards progressing morally without the looming shadow of despair that the highest good might never be attained? However, it seems to me that some of the more potent force of Kant’s argument, that is, that political communities need an ethical community that is religious in nature, must lie beyond this point.

4. The politics of religious commitment

The general reading of Kant’s argument for an ethical community, as discussed in the preceding section, is that the ethical community allows for an end for moral agency in the same way that God provides that end as a resolution to the antinomy of practical reason. This is not wrong, only incomplete. I will here add another reading of Kant’s ethical community as buoying the conditions for the highest good to come about. On my reading, the ethical community is a community that creates affinity for the moral law and does not primarily seek to secure the apportioning of virtue with happiness.Footnote ¹⁹ It is for that reason, as I will discuss in the next section, that Kant’s argument for the inclusion of religion in liberal politics is a possible counterweight to some of the contemporary troubles of liberal politics.

Kant establishes that an ethical community should take the form of a religious community or a church. Many Kant scholars lament his use of religious language and believe that Kant would have been better off describing the ethical community in more secular terms. I think Laura Papish makes a good point in explaining Kant’s language:

In Papish’s view, religion is one potential tool to ‘anchor’ human beings in a social community (Papish Reference Papish2018: 220–7). While I am for the most part in agreement with Papish’s point, I would put forward the stronger claim that only religion can achieve the end that Kant has in mind.

Kant turns to the topic of a church when he asks what ‘preparations’ must be made for ‘the kingdom of God [to] come’ (Rel, 6: 101). The visible church is the temporary institution on earth that prepares for the kingdom of God, a kingdom wherein morality and virtue are aligned. This is the sort of eschatology usually associated with early Christian communities: the church is a temporary institution necessary for the time during which believers await the second coming of Christ. To clarify this further, Kant differentiates between the church invisible and the church visible: the former is ‘the mere idea of the union of all upright human beings under direct yet moral divine world-governance’ and the latter is ‘the actual union of human beings into a whole that accords with this ideal’ (Rel, 6: 101). In other words, the visible church is the actual instantiation of the ideal invisible church and it falls to human beings to make the visible church accord with the invisible one. To this purpose, Kant proposes four regulative ideals that are the necessary conditions for a true visible church.

The status of these principles is paramount to understanding Kant’s point. These principles are the underlying features of an ethical community. They are, in other words, not codified in a foundational text, but they are the very structuring elements of that community. In a visible church, these principles do not need to be put into text (although this could be helpful) and they may be accompanied by more particular features (as long as they do not conflict with these most foundational principles). I will focus on the first and third principles of a true church, namely, its universality and the freedom of its members, because these two principles return in a liberal democracy.

The first principle is ‘universality’. This means that the foundational principles of the church are so constituted that they ‘necessarily lead it to universal union in a single church (hence, no sectarian schisms)’ (Rel, 6: 101). Any community that includes besides a principle of inclusion also one of exclusion is not a universal community. Since the purpose of the ethical community is to unite human beings into cooperation, it stands to reason that this community cannot include principles that could hamper or even counteract such universal cooperation. This means that, while an ethical community can be anchored nationally or regionally, its focus must be international, even universal.

The third principle is ‘freedom’. Freedom is approached from two perspectives by Kant, namely, as ‘the internal relation of its members among themselves’ and in ‘the external relation of the church to the political power’ (Rel, 6: 102). This means two things. First, the ethical community, or ‘church’, must retain its independence from political power. Political states tend to work by principles of exclusion, which can undercut the moral fabric of the ethical community if it becomes a nationally oriented church. A church should be an international agent within a national state. Second, the church must be constituted so that no one can be forced into joining that church. This would make their allegiance to the church disingenuous and is counter to morality. Yet, every individual has a moral duty to join a universal community so as to incarnate the moral law.

I admit, it is difficult to imagine what sort of community this would be. It is easier to say what sort of community it is not. First, it cannot be a political community, even not an international or transnational one, since such communities are ultimately dependent upon external and coercive laws. Second, the community cannot be a civil, free-to-join community (such as a social club) either, since human beings are under a moral duty to enter an ethical community. The community must then be something between a coercive and a free-to-join community, one wherein the individual intimately recognizes a sense of belonging that is not enforced by external laws. Kant himself believes that the best analogy for such a community is not a monarchy, aristocracy or democracy, but ‘a household (a family) under a common though invisible moral father’ (Rel, 6: 102). It is apparent that Kant makes use of Christian imagery here, and the images are important. Kant is not thinking of a generic household, but an ideal household with, ironically, an absentee father. There is no visible authority, but everyone works cooperatively to achieve the father’s will. We will return to this point below in our discussion of priestcraft.

The invisible church cannot stay invisible. The ethical community requires the cooperation of the human and the divine. While the founding of the ethical community is, as we have shown, to be attributed to God, human beings are to be seen as if they were ‘the authors of the organization’ (Rel, 6: 152). Practically, this means that ethical community must somehow become visible and externalized. Kant emphasizes the importance of this step: ‘It is already a beginning of the dominion of the good principle and a sign “that the Kingdom of God is at hand”, even if only the principles of its constitution begin to become public’ (6: 151). This is peculiar. Kant had already emphasized that those elements that are historically connected to religion, such as its rites, tradition and particular dogmas, are ultimately morally irrelevant and can even become a distraction. Yet, Kant does emphasize that religion must become visible. The reason for this is that historical faith is the vehicle for universal religion. Without a church that incarnates, or attempts to incarnate, the universal message of religion, there is no visible anchor for that message. The universal religion might be the essence of religion (ratio essendi), the historical faith is the way human beings come to know the universal religion, even if imperfectly (ratio cognoscendi).

The visible church must be well-attuned to the invisible church. This means that the ideas, rituals and narratives of a certain historical faith are so constituted and developed that they ultimately support the cultivation of a good Gesinnung. For instance, a historical religion might have a sort of rite of initiation within a community, such as baptism, which is then thought of as not in itself a tool for moral justification, but as the recognition of the individual as an end in itself who freely and equally participates in social life. The inspirational force of religious practices can augment an individual’s commitment to the principles of morality. This can only happen, according to Kant, in an ethical community that manifests itself visibly and historically.

Kant expresses a dubious hope that after the pure religion of reason has made itself public in a historical faith, it can progress in such a way that it would be able to dispense with its historical clothing. A church is a true, moral church if ‘it contains within itself a principle of constantly coming closer to the pure faith of religion (which, when operative, is what truly constitutes religion in every faith) and of eventually being able to dispense with ecclesiastical faith’ (Rel, 6: 153). Kant’s own hesitations in this respect are borne out by the footnote he appended to a footnote in the third part of Religion (6: 135n.). In the main text, Kant discusses the providential idea of the Kingdom of God on earth where the moral principle is triumphant over its enemies. This Kingdom of God tends to be represented symbolically as bringing ‘heaven’ to ‘earth’ (or: heaven on earth), ‘the very form of a church is dissolved; the vicar on earth enters the same class as the human beings who are now elevated to him as citizens of Heaven, and so God is all in all’ (6: 135). This image is to be read, as the first footnote clarifies, as indicating that those elements of a historical faith (holy books, rituals, traditions, prophecy) that are not purely rational or moral (which might have been necessary to establish, preserve and spread a faith) must come to an end. It is the duty of the moral educator of society to ‘diligently work for this [that historical faith goes over into religious faith], through the continuous development of the pure religion of reason out of its present still indispensable shell’ (6: 135n.). However, Kant appends a footnote to this footnote, clarifying that he means that the visible church will not actually disappear. It only has to be of such a nature that it ‘can’ (6: 135n.).

When an ethical community makes itself public, it can work so as to undergird the political community. It can then not only provide the moral resolve for the political community and its coercive legislation, but it creates a sphere of moral purposiveness that allies members of that political community to moral principles. The ethical community, which Kant consistently calls a church, is the bedrock that ensures that members of a liberal democratic state are wedded to that state not merely on conditional grounds. Instead, their allegiance to liberal democracy is woven into the very values that they have come to identify as their bedrock principles.

5. Committing religiously to liberal politics

The ethical community provides certain tools that stimulate one’s commitment to moral duties. The ethical community (or church) is basically concerned with the moral education of the people, not so much to teach what duties are to be taken up, but to cultivate a frame of thought wherein one pursues these duties with ‘a frame of mind that is both valiant and cheerful’ (MM, 6: 484). This section will investigate how such religious commitment provides an antidote to partisan, populist and identitarian movements within liberal democracies.

Kant repeatedly stresses that religious faith ought to be universal. Moral duties bind each reasonable individual regardless of class, gender or race. A historical faith, subsequently, cultivates the idea of thorough equality, even for those who are not believers in that particular faith. In other words, there is no room for a sense of election in Kant’s view of religion. When a historical faith cultivates a sense of the unique historical significance of a certain people, they in some form or other make the claim that this people is specially favoured by God. The very idea of ‘election’ makes it necessary to ascribe certain characteristics to God, such as favouritism, that do not cohere with the rational idea of God as a perfect moral judge. Moral religion secures the moral equality of all human beings.

Ascribing erroneous characteristics to God and therefore diminishing the moral character of a historical faith is based upon what Kant calls the universal subjective ground of religious delusion, namely, anthropomorphism (Rel, 6: 168). This is the belief that God could be pleased, and so also that one could be a good faithful individual, by means that are non- or even amoral. However, as Kant does not tire from emphasizing, ‘apart from good life-conduct, anything which the human being supposes that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit service of God’ (6: 170–1; Kant’s emphasis). For our current purposes, this means that the religious principles underlying a liberal democratic state do not bestow a special rank (higher or lower) upon any individual or group except through their moral merit. The moral religion then cultivates a sense of communal struggle for moral betterment that is neither tribal nor partisan.

The moral religion, therefore, serves as counterweight to the all-too-human temptation to be taken in by traits that are ultimately irrelevant for liberal democracy. The moral religion does so by gearing its own practices to support and justify a strong sense of egalitarianism and personal freedom. With regard to personal freedom, Kant believes that a specific form of priestcraft (Pfaffentum) is an immoral form of religiosity, when it includes ‘fetish-service’ to God (Rel, 6: 179). Here, obedience to particular, venerated individuals leads one to believe that certain particular and ad hoc practices are a means towards moral justification (for instance, indulgences). Moral religion is counter to the fetish-service of priestcraft because it emphasizes that nothing is above the foundational principles of morality. There is no allowance for the free self-cultivation of individuals to be limited in their pursuit of moral excellence. There is no intermediary between the human being and the moral law and so the principle disincentivizes limitations of personal freedom. Equally, the principle has consequences for one’s relation to ‘others’. One may not require anything of an ‘other’, whether an individual or a group, that one does not ask from oneself. No individual or group of individuals has any special rights to claim or duties to fulfil towards a liberal democracy. Everyone is ultimately equal. The opposition to priestcraft cultivates a strong sense of personal freedom in moral and political life.

Taken together, these two norms of universality and freedom constitute a fairly sound ideological backdrop for liberal democracies. They cultivate a universal sense of moral cooperation that does not allow for partisanship or special rights. Through entertaining such foundational principles, liberal democracy can evade the traps of identitarian politics. In one way or another, any form of identitarian politics (leftist or right-wing) judges the worth of specific individuals not on the basis of their achievements, but on the basis of their particular identity. This can happen only if universality and freedom are not seen as the bedrock principles of that society, if the appeal of these liberal democratic principles has been overtaken by other concerns. The solution then is not necessarily to augment the way people generally value these principles (conditional obedience), but to create an ideological basis for their absoluteness (unconditional obedience).

6. Liberal democracy and pluralism

In his Pluralism in the Ethical Community, Nicholas Tampio points out that Kant wrote the Religion in the context of the Thirty Years’ War (though it happened some 150 years earlier) and hoped to conceive of a view of an ethical community that could allow for a sense of pluralism that avoids such conflicts. What is true is that Kant wrote Religion while having in mind the ‘religious struggles which have so often shaken the world and spattered it with blood’ (Rel, 6: 108). Tampio goes on to argue that, according to Kant, some religious groups could, or could not, be part of this community (Tampio Reference Tampio and Michalson2014: 175–92).

This raises an important question. If my argument is that liberal democracy would do well to take Kant’s argument seriously, that liberalism generally needs a religion to function, what would this mean with regard to liberalism’s commitment to ideological pluralism and the separation of church and state? In its Rawlsian form, contemporary political liberalism is thought of as a theory of justice rather than a theory of ethics. This means that liberalism itself does not subscribe to any particular comprehensive doctrine of ‘the good life’ (religious or otherwise), but merely provides a framework that regulates the diversity of comprehensive doctrines (Rawls Reference Rawls1971). In order to achieve this end, it is vital that the liberal state remain neutral on such matters, and therefore separate almost all matters of state from matters of comprehensive ideologies.

Rawls was adamant that his understanding of ‘justice as fairness’ is Kantian. He thus believes that Kant held a merely procedural approach to ethics. However, my argument that Kant gives us good reasons for the inclusion of an ethical community as a church within the framework of political liberalism seemingly infringes upon this requirement of neutrality of the state. There are two distinct ways to respond to this objection. The first response looks closely at what Kant designates as religion. He states that ‘there is only one (true) religion; but there can be several kinds of faith’ (Rel, 6: 107–8). This means that Kant’s notion of religion is in itself pluralistic, as it can accommodate many different kinds of religious faith, even a diversity of comprehensive doctrines. For Kant, ‘religion’ is then a sort of universal, rational essence of any and all true faith; or religion is whatever is the common denominator of all true faith. That common denominator appears devoid of historical content, but suggests among other things that a true faith aims for a universal community of moral cooperation. Such a basic framework can be expressed through the historical contingencies of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism (though Kant clearly holds that Christianity, and only Christianity, is the best possible vehicle for moral faith).

That is the first way to respond: to underwrite political liberalism with a sense of religion that does not work to the benefit of any particular faith. It does exclude, however, those particular faiths that do not partake of the essence of a moral religion, such as faiths that preach exclusivism, intolerance and inequality. Kant would not tolerate intolerance. As such, Kant’s argument in favour of the ethical community would indeed draw close to the Rawlsian theory of justice that regulates religious diversity.

This leads towards the second way of responding to the above objection. A question that is often raised with regard to political liberalism is whether it amounts itself to a comprehensive doctrine. Instead of merely regulating diversity, political liberalism would itself propose a view of ‘the good life’.Footnote ²⁰ This would mean that political liberalism itself infringes upon its basic requirement of the neutrality of the state. There is then more ‘content’ to liberalism than is assumed by Rawlsian philosophy – the veil of ignorance is not as blind as is believed. I think this second response is actually borne out by Kant’s discussion of the relationship of religion to politics. Even liberal politics needs some sort of religious sanction, even liberalism requires our unconditional commitment to the values of equality and freedom. To use Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase, ‘everything to be true must become a religion’ (Wilde Reference Wilde1954: 154). Even if this is the case, liberalism does, more than most other comprehensive doctrines, remain a relatively low-content comprehensive doctrine with a viable chance for regulating diversity.