Theology’s loss, philosophy’s gain

John Rawls and war

“My mother was an Episcopalian, my father a Southern Methodist, but my two parents went to the same Episcopal Church in Baltimore,” wrote John Rawls. “I never had any sense that either had other than a conventional religion. I too was only conventionally religious until my last two years at Princeton.”

Rawls had been born in 1921. He entered college as Europe was going to war. Before he finished, the United States had joined World War II.

Rawls felt things changing. “I became deeply concerned about theology and its doctrines,” he recalled afterward. “I even thought about going to the seminary but decided to wait until the war was over. I could not convince myself that my motives were sincere, and anyway I felt I should serve in the armed services as so many of my friends and classmates were doing.”

The war transformed Rawls’s belief system and altered his career path. “I started as a believing Orthodox Episcopalian Christian, and abandoned it entirely by June of 1945. I don't profess to understand at all why my beliefs changed, or believe it is possible fully to comprehend such changes. We can record what happened, tell stories and make guesses, but they must be taken as such. There may be something in them, but probably not.”

His transformation seemed clearer in retrospect than it did at the time. “Three incidents stand out in my memory: Kilei Ridge; Deacon's death; hearing and thinking about the Holocaust.”

The first reference was to an operation of Rawls's infantry company in the Philippines. "One day a Lutheran pastor came up and during his service gave a brief sermon in which he said that God aimed our bullets at the Japanese while God protected us from theirs. I don't know why this made me so angry, but it certainly did. I upbraided the pastor (who was a first lieutenant) for saying what I assumed he knew perfectly well—Lutheran that he was—were simply falsehoods about divine providence. What reason could he possibly have had but his trying to comfort the troops? Christian doctrine ought not to be used for that, though I knew perfectly well it was." 

Deacon was a friend and comrade. The company commander needed two volunteers, one to scout Japanese positions, the other to give blood for a wounded soldier. Rawls had the matching blood type. Deacon didn't. So Deacon went on the scouting mission and was killed. "I don't know why this incident so affected me, other than my fondness for Deacon, as death was a common occurrence. But I think it did.”

The third incident unfolded over time. "It started, as I recall, at Asingan in April, where the regiment was taking a rest from the line and getting replacements. We went to the Army movies shown in the evening, and they also had news reports of the Army information service. It was, I believe, here that I first heard about the Holocaust, as the very first reports of American troops coming upon the concentration camps were made known." 

All the troops were deeply affected. Rawls felt the impact distinctively. "This took the form of questioning whether prayer was possible. How could I pray and ask God to help me, or my family, or my country, or any other cherished thing I cared about, when God would not save millions of Jews from Hitler? When Lincoln interprets the Civil War as God's punishment for the sin of slavery, deserved equally by North and South, God is seen as acting justly. But the Holocaust can't be interpreted in that way, and all attempts to do so that I have read of are hideous and evil. To interpret history as expressing God's will, God's will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be?"

Rawls spent the rest of his life considering this question. It was more work than he had thought. Before the war, religion had served as his starting point in considering the core questions of life. The war deprived him of that foundation. He turned from theology to philosophy and became the most influential philosopher of his generation.

His 1971 A Theory of Justice was profound and insightful. In any generation it would have been taken seriously. But the reason it resonated with Rawls’s generation was that most of his readers had experiences similar to his. They too had learned with horror of the Holocaust. Many had lost friends and loved ones to the capriciousness of war. Some had heard theology turned to the purpose of war. They didn’t all give up on God the way Rawls did. But they understood why he did.