Richard John Neuhaus, a conservative Christian, explained the nature of public and private truths when he wrote:
- The religious new right . . . wants to enter the political arena making claims on the basis of private truths. The integrity of politics itself requires that such a proposal be resisted. Public decisions must be made by arguments that are public in character. ... Fundamentalist morality, which is derived from beliefs that cannot be submitted to examination by public reason, is essentially a private morality. If enough people who share that morality are mobilized, it can score victories in the public arena. But every such victory is a setback in the search for a public ethic. ... A public argument is transubjective. It is not derived from sources of revelation or dispositions that are essentially private and arbitrary.
An example of a private truth would be the idea that murder is wrong because God commands it. This may be a true statement — but it has no normative force in terms of public policy because even those who believe it cannot reasonably expect the public assent of their fellow citizens who have not experienced this revelation, who do not share a religion which teaches it, and who are unwilling or unable to accept such religious teachings on faith.
An example of a public truth would be the idea that murder is wrong because it causes suffering in other human beings. Even if such an argument were wrong, it would be “public” because no one has to experience a personal revelation from a god in order to understand or believe it. It is “publicly accessible” in that regardless of one’s religious beliefs, the terms, inferences, and conclusions can be comprehended, critiqued, and accepted by anyone at all.
Of particular importance is the fact that the idea that murder causes suffering can actually be demonstrated (or, at least in theory, refuted) empirically. This is a major difference from either the existence of a god or the idea that a god actually wants us to do anything.
Does this mean that people shouldn’t personally believe that murder is wrong because God commands it? No, this isn’t an argument about what individuals should themselves believe. Rather, this is an argument about what grounds may be legitimately used to coerce other citizens to avoid certain behaviors and engage in other behaviors.
In a theocracy, it would be expected to base public policy and public laws on religious doctrines and divine revelation — that is, after all, what makes a political system theocratic. If a theocracy is what someone wants a nation to be, then they should by all means advocate that position openly and be forthright with their goals.
In a liberal democracy, however, where freedom generally and freedom of conscience in particular are valued, neither religious doctrines nor divine revelation are legitimate sources of public policy. It is, after all, public policy that we are talking about — and in such a context, only public arguments are legitimate.
Whatever private reasons a person might have for following a certain course of action, they cannot expect others to necessarily share those reasons unless they are publicly accessible. Most of the time, this means that the arguments will be secular rather than religious — pure appeals to religious tradition or divine laws must be rejected.
Sometimes religious arguments may be employed, but in such a case “religious” will be descriptive more of the origin of the position rather than the structure of the argument itself. Thus, a person might believe for religious reasons that every human being has an essential dignity and, from that, argue that abortion or capital punishment is wrong.
Such an argument could be legitimate because it doesn’t necessarily matter (for the terms of public discourse) why each human has an essential dignity or even why a particular person believes it — what matter is how well the premise can be sustained and what conclusions might be derived from it outside of purely private revelation. We might then be able to make a case for the idea that insofar as a religious position can serve as a basis for public policy, that may only happen if the position does not require a particular theological support structure.
Believers may not personally choose to disentangle their theological beliefs from their arguments — and there is nothing wrong with that when it comes to what they believe privately. Yet if such disentanglement is possible for the purpose of public policy debates, then their arguments may be legitimate.
