For the next issue of Prospect, which is out next week, I’ve reviewed the last book by the political and legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who died in February at the age of 81. Religion Without God is a short but profound book based on the Einstein Lectures that Dworkin delivered in Bern in December 2011. It’s only a short review (for the “Books in brief” section of the magazine) and there are aspects of Dworkin’s argument that I didn’t have room to consider, so I thought I’d do so here.

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I was reminded of Dworkin’s rather melancholy expression of chastened hope this morning when listening to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s 2013 Theos Annual Lecture, which she delivered in London last week. (You can listen to it here until 2nd January.) It struck me that Robinson’s lecture, entitled “Religion in Contemporary America”, offers an explanation of why Dworkin was right to be pessimistic about the prospect of peace breaking out between atheists and believers.

When she says that the “bonds between politics and religion have begun to chafe in the last few decades,” she’s referring to the same phenomena as Dworkin, though she describes them rather differently. Robinson borrows from the sociologist Robert Bellah the idea of an American “civil religion”, embodied in her youth, she says, by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. This has been replaced, she goes on, by something much harsher and more divisive. The word “Christian” has, in the US at least, stopped referring to an “ethic” and now refers to a “demographic” or an “identity”—an identity, moreover, that “appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses”.

And unfortunately, it is inconceivable, for the time being at least, that identitarian Christians of this kind could ever acknowledge, as Dworkin puts it, unbelievers as “full partners in their deepest religious ambitions”.

Jonathan Derbyshire

Read the full piece at prospectmagazine.co.uk