Why did I decide to devote a good part to my life to study religious minorities and religious liberty issues? A secular American philosopher had a role on this choice.
by Massimo Introvigne*
*A paper presented at the webinar “Justice for Tai Ji Men Is Justice for All,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on February 20, 2024, World Day of Social Justice.
![Massimo Introvigne’s defense of his thesis in 1979 and his 1983 book on Rawls.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Massimo-Introvigne-1.jpeg)
![Massimo Introvigne’s defense of his thesis in 1979 and his 1983 book on Rawls.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Massimo-Introvigne-1.jpeg)
I am often asked why I spent a good part of my life studying minority religions and issues of religious liberty. My first answer is that I was always interested in religions other than my own, probably because of novels about India and China I read as a child. At age nine, I used part of the weekly money my parents gave to me to spend as I wanted, a typical Italian practice, to buy a publication called “The Great Religions.” Its installments made six volumes that are still in CESNUR’s research library, the first books on religions I ever purchased.
The second reason has to do with converting the study of religions into one of my professions (I also have a second one as an attorney). One of my main interests in college was the United States and what kind of philosophy supported its politics. While there were valuable studies on the conservative thinkers who influenced the Republicans, there was almost nothing on what kind of philosophy was influential among Democrats. Traveling repeatedly to the United States as a college student, and reading American publications, I understood before others the importance of a philosopher called John Rawls for the worldview of the U.S. politicians who were not conservative and not Republican. This is now obvious, but my 1979 dissertation on John Rawls, later published as a book, won awards as the first discussion of this influential philosopher in a language other than English.
Rawls’ main interest was certainly not religion. It was social justice. He formulated two principles: first, that a just society should guarantee the basic liberties to all, including freedom of conscience; second, that social and economic inequalities are justified only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. For him, the first principle prevailed over the second: it was not admissible to deny the basic liberties to promote social justice. The second principle embodied his criticism of both unregulated capitalism and Marxism. Economic inequalities, he believed, are natural and unavoidable, but they are not against social justice only if they are part of a system where they are made to work to also benefit those at the lower level of the social scale. Actually, the poor may and do benefit from the presence of the rich, who support social welfare with their taxes, create workplaces, and may spend their money to create institutions, including cultural and educational, that benefit everybody. The rich would not do so spontaneously only, Rawls believed, and may need some compulsion by the state. This is why he was after all a philosopher of the left, although calling him a socialist may be an exaggeration.
![John Rawls (1921–2002). From X.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/John-Rawls-.jpeg)
![John Rawls (1921–2002). From X.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/John-Rawls-.jpeg)
But what about religion? If at age 24 I included something original in my approach to Rawls, it was because I noticed what was hidden in plain sight, yet denied by some American followers of the philosopher who only quoted his comment that social justice should be formulated in a secular way. The question is why we should pursue social justice in the first place. The answer was included in Rawls’ senior thesis at Princeton University, which remained unpublished but was available at Princeton library, which I duly visited. Rawls was once a devout Christian, who had considered becoming a pastor but had abandoned Christianity because he could not reconcile the idea of a just and caring God with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. Yet, with all his doubts about God, his thesis was on faith and the notion of social sins. He acknowledged that we believe that social justice is mandatory because we are the heirs of centuries of moral philosophy rooted in Christian theology. And while he did not want any religion to inspire politics, a main reason he did not accept Marxism was its denial of religious liberty. Rawls’ idea that his first principle should prevail over the second included the firm affirmation that freedom of religion cannot be sacrificed for the sake of social justice.
I was not myself a follower of Rawls and my own political and philosophical ideas were closer to the American conservatives he opposed. Yet, I found it interesting that even in the Democrat and liberal camp the most elegant theorist acknowledged the religious roots of the very idea of social justice and agreed that the American experiment, in all its possible versions, should affirm freedom of religion as fundamental.
My next question was what made religion more openly acknowledged and influential in the politics of the U.S. with respect to other Western countries. This led me to study the influence on American politics of two minority religions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nicknamed the “Mormons,” and the Unification Church founded by Korean preacher Sun Myung Moon. I realized that to understand their politics I needed to understand their theology. My next two books included a broader approach to both the Latter-day Saints and the Unification movement, which started me into the business of reconstructing the history and ideas of religions not very much studied in Europe.
![Tai Ji Men protests in Taiwan.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tai-Ji-Men-protests-3.jpeg)
![Tai Ji Men protests in Taiwan.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Tai-Ji-Men-protests-3.jpeg)
When decades later I discovered the Tai Ji Men case, I realized it had very much to do with these questions I studied as a young scholar. Tai Ji Men’s very existence offers to Taiwan a way of affirming its modern and democratic values by rooting them in an ancient Chinese spirituality—and one that affirms the primacy of conscience. Those who started the persecution of Tai Ji Men did it on the basis of a misguided ideology that would crush freedom of religion or belief in the name of a political project. Rawls would have told them that they had forgotten that the first principle of justice, protecting basic human rights including freedom of belief, should always prevail over the second, which allows us to pursue our favorite political and social projects.
But in fact this is just a scheme. Social justice without human rights is ideological and false. And in Taiwan there will be no justice of any kind without a solution of the Tai Ji Men case.