John Rawls, one of the most formidable defenders of liberalism in the 20th Century, was a religious young man. A very interesting article illuminates what could have been had he chosen a theological path. Consider this passage, written in his early twenties:
We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted. The Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body shows considerable profundity on this point. The doctrine means that we shall be resurrected in our full personality and particularity, and that salvation is the full restoration of the whole person, not the wiping away of particularity. Salvation integrates personality into community, it does not destroy personality to dissolve it into some mysterious and meaningless “One.”
His book Political Liberalism, as elsewhere, argued that it is necessary and vital to “work out a political conception of political justice” for a constitutional democratic regime with a plurality of doctrines, both religious and nonreligious, liberal and nonliberal; yet a fundamental difficulty is that with “reasonable pluralism,” a religious good of salvation cannot be the common good of all and political conceptions must employ not a concept of the good but rather liberty and equality together with a guarantee of effective use for freedom. (It is rather odd that some libertarians have tried to adopt him). Rawls is fascinating, difficult, and worthwhile, and its hard not to lament he abandoned theology.
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