Abstract

Critics across the political spectrum have recently expressed concerns about the marginalization of religious values in political discourse, arguing that the decline in public adherence to religion has caused moral decline and social deterioration. Though worries about disorder resulting from religious diversity, and especially unbelief, are centuries old, English liberals in the early to middle years of the Victorian period posed specific solutions to these concerns, centered around a new focus on the separation of religion and morality in the public arena, and a model of the individual that tried to find a middle ground between free will and determinism--philosophical and theological ideas, I argue, which were themselves linked to attitudes about the capabilities of the average individual to participate intelligently in politics. I examine John Stuart Mill's ideal of autonomy and self-creation, both as an attempt to create a liberal citizenry and as a key argument for developing a non-exclusive public morality. Mill's approach to free will and determinism is, I argue, related directly to his specific political program of preparing the mass of English citizens for full participation in politics. The very triumph of liberal ideals, however, in light of the concerns of those who opposed these ideals for various reasons, illustrates why conflicts between religious believers and the liberal state continue today. Liberal neutrality and Millian liberalism's commitment to individual self-creation have created lasting fissures between religion and politics at least partly because of liberalism's notions of the origins of power, but also because the separation of religion from morality shifted ideas about the origins of morality from the divine to the norms of social interaction. The result has been an assertion on the part of the state and the public sphere that public morality can exist without divine sanction. While this allows for religious diversity, it excludes the possibility of religious belief unifying a society, and thereby rules out the center of believers' moral character from attaining public expression. Nonetheless, Mill and other liberals developed alternative models for the construction of moral community that can answer religious and communitarian critiques which see liberalism as atomistic and demoralizing.