Religious Communitarianism, Covenants, and Liberal Theory: On the Political Thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Abstract

Lord Rabbi Sacks was a major religious Jewish figure. In this article, we examine his version of a covenant-based communitarianism. We begin with exploring Sacks’ social communitarian view, and his support of a covenant-based politics. We then turn to evaluate Sacks’ covenant-based view, and argue that while his social communitarian view is valuable and important, his covenant-based political view faces the same challenges that troubled communitarian views, namely the fact of religious, value, and ethnic plurality. One possible way forward is via a federalist system, in which covenants are localized.

Keywords:

• Rabbi Sacks
• covenant
• communitarianism
• Jewish
• majoritarianism
• federalism

Rabbi Prof. Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020) was a major theological and religious Jewish figure, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, and a well-known public intellectual who spoke with world leaders in influential venues such as the World Economic Forum in Davos (2009). His ideas, disseminated in his many books, have won the attention of scholars like C. Taylor (2012) and M. Walzer (2012). In the political sphere, his ideas have attracted the attention of numerous politicians, including former British prime minister Tony Blair, who called him a friend and a mentor.¹ Lord Sacks dedicated substantial parts of his writing to political issues and ideas, though these political ideas are seldom read in political theory contexts where they deserve examination.

Lord Sacks’ political thought is firmly communitarian—it emphasizes the need for a community, often established via the idea of a covenant—and is critical of the hyper-individualism found in some Western societies. This emphasis may suggest that his thought is incompatible with the norms of liberal democratic regimes, though we suggest that there is no “one size fits all” rule determining the relationship between communitarianism and liberal-democratic principles; rather, the relationship between these principles depends on the kind of communitarianism and the kind of liberal democratic principles being considered. Arguably, Sacks’ social communitarianism is not only compatible with liberal principles, it might be necessary for democracies to flourish. As such, Lord Sacks’ ideas are interesting not only as those of an influential intellectual figure, but also as a tool for rethinking the communitarian-liberal debate via a contemporary British prism.

The article will proceed as follows: section one describes Lord Sacks’ social communitarian view and his support of a covenant-based politics. Section two argues that Sacks’ covenant-based view, despite the value and importance of its social communitarian position, faces the same challenges that trouble similar communitarian views, namely the fact of plurality—religious, value, and ethnic—which means that assumptions of accord and common good that are fundamental for communitarian views do not exist in Western societies. The way out of this conundrum that is most suitable to the pluralist ideas of Lord Sacks is a federalist system, in which covenants are localized. This way has been suggested, mutatis mutandis, by Daniel Elazar, the contemporary scholar most identified with the conceptual development of the idea of a covenant. Section three explores Lord Sacks’ idea of a covenant-based polity as a “community of communities: a series of environments in which we learn local languages of identity alongside a public language of collective aspiration” (Sacks 1990), and compares it to Elazar’s covenant-sub units’ view. While both attempt to maintain the core idea of a covenant-based politics, Sacks’ view is more flexible while Elazar’s view is more suitable for cases in which the sub-units are territorially concentrated. In the conclusion, we argue that while Lord Sacks’ social communitarian thought is valuable and important, it is unclear that his political-covenant-based ideas can succeed where other communitarian scholarship has failed when confronted with the deep diversity of contemporary societies.

A preliminary comment is required before we can proceed. Lord Sacks has written numerous books, articles, and lectures which collectively exceed the scope of a single article. He also discussed some topics numerous times and, at times conversed with other scholars, sometimes directly as with Elazar’s covenant-based thought, and sometimes implicitly as with the British pluralists who also adopted a view of the state as a community of communities.² Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive overview, but rather to provide a commentary on his views grounded in his explicit writings about these topics and his most direct engagement with relevant scholars. Our second goal is to classify his explicit views in a clear-cut category that will be comparable to other kinds of communitarian views. As such, the focus here is clarity – and to start a conversation regarding the views of a central religious intellectual in British public discourse, rather than to provide any kind of exhaustiveness.

Lord Sack’s Social Communitarian Views and the Idea of a Covenant

In this section, we describe Lord Sacks’ political views. Though Lord Sacks dedicated much of his thought to political and social issues, his views are not usually concerned with immediate political disputes, nor usually aligned with the platform of a particular political party. Rather, his views commonly focus on two central issues: the importance of social communitarianism (examined in sub-section social communitarianism), and the importance of the idea of a covenant (examined in sub-section the idea of a covenant). We shall take each in turn.

Social Communitarianism

Lord Sacks argues, often and repeatedly, that a major problem of contemporary Western societies is the loss of communal belongings. As he writes:

Loneliness, the sensed lack of human connection, touches on our essence as social animals. We are not the only such animals, but it is our ability to form extensive networks that differentiates us from other species. Our sociability is our humanity and this is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. That is what morality represents: our commitment to others, our capacity to form bonds of belonging and care. Our sense of wellness depends on being part of one or several networks of relationships in which we are prepared to act for the benefit of others, knowing that they are prepared to do likewise for us. So individualism comes at a high cost: the breakdown of marriage, the fragility of families, the strength of communities, the sense of identity that comes with both of these things, and the equally important sense that we are part of something that preceded us and will continue after we are no longer here. (Sacks 2020, 41)

Lord Sacks dedicated significant time and effort to demonstrating, via studies in various social science disciplines, the importance of human connection and the perils of loneliness. The danger that concerns him is the decline of human partnerships that require a long time investment and a measure of sacrifice, as such partnerships will cease to exist if an individual always prioritizes her/his immediate interests: “A marriage in which one or both partners act selfishly is unlikely to last. A parent indifferent to the needs of his or her child will damage the child. A community in which the members are not willing to bear their share of the burden of keeping it going—a group of free riders—will cease to exist. A nation without a sense of collective identity and responsibility will split apart” (Sacks 2020, 37).

The problem that Lord Sacks encounters, as many authors including Robert Putnam (2000) and Alasdair MacIntyre (2001) have remarked, is that the social background which created these social structures is not available anymore. Indeed, Lord Sacks is aware of this point: “Sociologists describe it as the move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from the face-to-face relationships that predominate in small communities to the anonymous encounters of strangers that make up much of city life” (Sacks 2020, 42). Lord Sacks does not look back with unnecessary sentimentalism to this lost social background, but rather he asks in what shape and manner such social structures can be maintained. Here, in a brief and pointed comment, he rules out the society-wide imposition of religious values through the force of law in Western societies: “A Catholic may believe that abortion is murder, a Jew or Muslim that sex outside marriage is forbidden, and these convictions are given life within our respective communities of faith. But we cannot seek to have them imposed by force of law on those who are not members of our community if there are other groups who seriously disagree and make a compelling case for the right to construct a life along different lines” (Sacks 2002, 83).

This quote entails three important points. First, Lord Sacks recognizes that, in an era of diverse and large populations, no modern state in the West should impose religious values and conduct on its population. This would violate core constitutional and legal principles in almost any Western nation, and it would violate core liberal values such as freedom of conscience and religion. Second, while Lord Sacks rules out an imposition of religious values and conduct, he does not rule out other policies of collective identity including the use of religious sources and connotations (see below). Third, given that a viable communality is a highly valuable human interest, the maintenance and funding of communities (religious, but not only) has become—by default—a mission of individuals and civil society as a whole, not of the state.

The Idea of a Covenant

At this point, Lord Sacks introduces the concept of a covenant as a solution to these social ills. As Lord Sacks defines it, “a covenant  …  is neither an alliance of interests, nor, strictly speaking, an emotional state. Instead it is a bond of identity, as if to say: this is a part of who I am” (Sacks 1997, 61); he continues: “A covenant binds … in difficult times. This is because a covenant is not predicated on interest, but instead on loyalty, fidelity, holding together even when things seem to be driving you apart”³ (1997, 63); and finally: “A covenant  …  is maintained by an internalized sense of solidarity, kinship, loyalty, obligation, responsibility, and reciprocity” (1997, 64). A covenant cannot be taken for granted and must be nurtured by ritual and collective ceremony (1997, 64). Lord Sacks is careful to distinguish a covenant from a contract which he describes as when “two or more individuals, each pursuing their own interest, come together to make an exchange for mutual benefit. So there are commercial contracts that create the market, and the social contract that creates the state” (2020, 70).

Three points regarding Sack’s use of the term covenant are crucial here.

First, Sacks’ use of the term “covenant” belongs to a category that numerous scholars and thinkers have developed with various meanings in various historical periods. Sacks is explicit about his intellectual debt to Daniel Elazar,⁴ who held a more contractual view of a covenant, though there are many other scholarly uses of the idea of a covenant, including: that of contemporary Jewish scholars and rabbis;⁵ contemporary views of “covenantal pluralism” (Stewart, Seiple, and Hoover 2020; Joustra 2020) and further contemporary attempts to adopt covenantal thinking to manage societal diversity;⁶ early modern use of the term among Christian-Calvinist scholars such as Althusius;⁷ and of course variations of this term used throughout classical Jewish sources.⁸ Though this intellectual lineage cannot be discussed here, it is important in our context to note that Sacks’ adoption of covenantal thinking belongs to a specific and long standing intellectual lineage; while his contribution to this lineage is noteworthy and important, he did not invent a new concept but rather adopted and adjusted an established concept for contemporary needs.

Second, Lord Sacks attempts to create a sharp distinction between a covenant and a contract. He views a covenant as the outcome of a “bond of identity” that arises out of loyalty to a partnership or a community, while he considers a contract to be a formal advancement of interests. Third, the existence of a covenant is presented as a solution to the problem of hyper-individualism that typifies modern societies that have moved from a status to contract based society. As such, an identity-based loyalty (a “bond of identity” in Sacks’ words) means a willingness to contribute to a set of relationships (marriage, family, community, country) without a constant calculation of narrowly tailored self-interest.

With this clarification of how Sacks’ understands a covenant, we can distinguish between two very different kinds of covenants. The first is a social covenant, the second is a political covenant; while Lord Sacks discusses both, it is important to distinguish between them.

The social covenant is easier to understand as a social phenomenon. It is very similar, if not identical, to regular structures of any Western society: there are families, communities, religious associations, and so on. What is different, in Lord Sacks’ covenant idea, is that the motivation for each individual participating in these spheres of conduct is a “bond of identity”. This motivational factor, according to Lord Sacks, strengthens the stability and vitality of such partnerships and associations, which has the effect of curing the social ills that currently trouble Western societies.

Lord Sacks frames the importance of covenant-based partnerships and organizations through the well-known argument made by scholars of civil society, chief among them de Tocqueville ([1835/40] 2000), that such associations and organizations are necessary for the functioning of a stable democracy. Specifically, they create “habits of the heart” in which individuals learn how to govern themselves in establishing, managing, and funding such associations; additionally, in creating important associations in-between the government and individuals, they prevent situations in which individuals face a government with no intermediate organizations. As he writes: “a free society … requires virtues, or what Tocqueville himself termed “habits of the heart.” Nor do these exist in a vacuum. They are born and sustained in particular institutions, the family, the congregation, the neighborhood, the voluntary association, which give shape to our individuality and moral substance to our sociability” (Sacks 1997, 169). Interestingly, Lord Sacks seems to classify religion in this category of partnerships standing separate from the government: “Religion in America was regarded as one of the main guardians of freedom  …  Far from being weakened by the separation of church and state, religion was strengthened by it” (Sacks 1997, 168).

Sacks’ view of a social covenant fits within a liberal view of society as it does not introduce formal or legal changes to social structures. Individuals remain free to create and maintain associations and groups. While the motivation that Sacks indicates is communitarian, it does not rely on acts of the government: rather it depends on the approach, motivation, and decision of each individual. This is similar, if not identical, to discussions of voluntary associations that can be found in well-known works of liberal scholars such as Dworkin (2000, ch. 5) and Barry (2001, ch. 5); or to democratic theory scholars’ discussions of the importance of a vibrant civil society for a well-functioning democracy such as Robert Putnam (2000). As such, Lord Sacks’ argument in favor of social covenants offering an important cure for social and political ills—such as loneliness, the crumbling of marriage and voluntary associations, and the renovation of a vibrant civil society—functions as good advice by a diagnostic expert in the field of political science. From the perspective of a pedantic political theorist, they are within the realm of the permissible: that is, such acts are permissible, even desirable behavior, but they do not create positive obligations or duties either for the government or for individual citizens to fulfill.⁹

A political covenant is different as it refers to a bond of identity that is shared by all citizens of a country and nurtured by the government (Sacks 1997, 63–64). This kind of a political covenant encounters an immediate challenge in the breakdown of religious, ethical, ideological, and ethnic homogeneity in any Western society (and other societies of sufficient size). We live in an era characterized by political polarization and strong ideological differences, not in an era of social cohesiveness. Lord Sacks understands this empirical reality: “We can no longer build national identity on religion or ethnicity or culture” (Sacks 2020, 302–303), but he still insists that a covenant-based politics is possible: “Covenantal politics  …  is about “We, the people,” bound by a sense of shared belonging and collective responsibility” (2020, 303). Lord Sacks’ view on this point is nuanced, and deserves to be quoted at length:

Nations are enriched by diversity, and integrated diversity coexists with a shared national identity … By being what we uniquely are, we contribute to society what only we can give. That is a way of being Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Jewish while being proud to be English. … We … recall George Orwell’s fundamental distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Nationalism, which he opposed, is “inseparable from the will to power.” Its abiding purpose is to secure ever more prestige for the nation: “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” Patriotism, by contrast, he defined as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.” Without patriotism, a cohesive sense of belonging and identity is impossible. But patriotism belongs to civil society—that is, to the moral community whose shared values we live by as citizens. If there is no such thing as a national moral community, if civil society atrophies and dies while all that is left are the competitive arenas of the market and the state, then liberal democracy is in danger. (Sacks 2020, 143)

This means, arguably, that the content of the political covenant should include diverse ways of life within a given country, and it should also reflect the local way of life and include pride in diverse localities to create a national moral community. Perhaps a good example is England: the Church of England is the established church, yet the government funds faith schools of various denominations; the King, the head of the church, demonstrates his acceptance of the leaders of minority faiths not only via the noted educational policy, but also via “recognition” style policies and meetings with the leaders of minority faiths. Such an approach to minority faiths expresses a positive attitude towards members of such faiths and contributes towards the ability of their members to feel at home in a country in which they are a minority (Taylor 1992).

Indeed, in an essay published in the London Times, Lord Sacks (2012) concurred with Queen Elizabeth’s remarks at an interfaith event at Lambeth Palace, where she argued that the Church of England cooperates with all faiths for the common good, and that faith in general, not only the Christian faith, reminds us of “the responsibilities we have beyond ourselves.” This suggests that, while a culture based on a religion shared by all citizens of a given country is no longer relevant as a carrier of a collective identity, religions can still contribute to a sense of collective identity within a covenant-based politics. While some citizens will inevitably feel that they are on the losing side of such agreements, as long as their voices are heard and given respect, Lord Sacks’ covenant-based politics deems this to be acceptable. As he writes: “yes, we have differences of opinion and interest, and sometimes that means favoring one side over another. But we will never do so without giving every side a voice and a respectful hearing” (Sacks 2020, 302). This view attempts to create a middle way between purely civil options for national symbols and “civil religion”—as suggested by liberal theorists such as Brian Barry (1983)—and a blending of the national and the religious in civil culture, as suggested by the Lautsi decision of the ECtHR that affirmed the connection between Catholicism and Italy.¹⁰ However, even in the mild form of this middle path, the religious element of national culture might encounter difficulties due to the growing diversity and polarization of modern democracies. We hence turn to a fuller discussion of a covenant-based politics in order to better understand Lord Sacks’ view.

When Homogeneity Dissolves: From Political Covenant to Decentralization?

Can covenant-based communitarian structures, survive the loss of social homogeneity? Daniel Elazar argues, in the context of American early history, that they do not: “As the original Christian and communitarian solidarity associated with the idea of covenant (i.e. both kinship and consent) became more elusive in the face of growing populations, new generations, and rising manufacturing, the old Puritan communities dissolved into more commercial and contractual ones” (Elazar 1998, 63). This means that Lord Sacks’ “bond of identity” and “collective identity” are vulnerable to the same type of social development that brought about Henry Maine’s famous “status to contract” dictum (1880) and, in various formulations, they are exposed to liberal critiques of the communitarian writings of the 1980s such as Walzer’s (1983) “shared understandings”¹¹ and Sandel’s (1984) encumbered self.¹² These communitarian arguments have encountered the same challenge when confronted with contemporary Western societies that are heterogeneous and defined by deep diversity in terms of religious belief or lack thereof, ideological approaches, ethnic composition, and disagreement about divisive topics (Avineri and de-Shalit 1992). Disagreement is notable in every corner of the collective life of large Western societies such as the U.S. and Britain: from abortion, to economic policies, to vaccinations, to affirmative action, to the place of religion in public life, to the desirability of immigration, consensus is nowhere to be found.¹³

In this context, Ronald Dworkin argued: “People of every race, faith, and ambition may be born into the same political community, and it is deeply implausible that the characterization of communal life that best fits such a community could be one that assumes that it must choose one faith or set of personal ambitions or ethnic allegiance, or one set of standards of sexual responsibility, as a healthy individual person must. That characterization not only does not fit the criteria of citizenship; it makes them close to nonsensical” (Dworkin 2000, 229). Dworkin does not object to, and even supports, appeals to communal life in a range of communities within the state; in this way, his views are similar to Sacks’ social communitarianism. Nevertheless, he stops short of extending these appeals to statist communitarianism:

People belong to a variety of communities, and most people can belong to many more if they choose. They belong—or may belong—to families, neighborhoods, alumni groups, fraternal associations, factories, colleges, teams, orchestras, ethnic groups, expatriate communities, and so forth. So these would provide ample opportunities for people to have whatever degree of the experience of integration they might think valuable without having to seek that experience in the political community, where it is inevitably harder to secure. (Dworkin 2000, 230).

Dworkin’s approach relies on the qualification “whatever degree of the experience of integration they might think valuable”; that is, the choice whether to belong to a given community and the level of commitment to that community depend on the individual and are not premeditated by a given government. Once a modern state has grown to include millions of citizens and adopted fast-paced capitalist “creative destruction,”¹⁴ the idea that all citizens might share a unified collective identity is a sociological vestige and bygone possibility.

Is the idea of a political covenant, therefore, also a sociological relic once it is applied to large, heterogeneous countries? One institutional-political answer could be to suggest some sort of decentralization in which recognition of small units is emphasized in place of the entire citizenry. Indeed, Daniel Elazar appealed to a covenant in this way: “Federalism—the idea that different political entities can be united into a common whole without losing their own integrity, by covenant” (Elazar 1998, 285). That is, if the idea of a political covenant will have a meaningful hold as a descriptive or prescriptive element in contemporary societies, it must be found both within smaller units on one hand, and between those units and the overarching decentralized system on the other hand.

This model of a decentralized system (federalist or otherwise) attempts to combine Lord Sacks’ view of a covenant as a bond of identity within the sub-unit with Elazar's more formalized, contract-oriented view of a covenant between the sub-units. Elazar, remember, writes about a covenant that it is a: “morally-informed agreement or pact between parties having an independent and sufficiently equal status, based on voluntary consent” (Elazar 1980, 6). This would leave the more substantial work of the covenant to the sub-units, while the agreement between the sub-unites would be a thinner version of a covenant.

Elazar describes this option also in terms of religious pluralism: “Religious diversity thus takes two forms. One is the equal protection of different religious groups within the same polity; the other is the linking of polities with different dominant religions, using federalism as a means to do so” (Elazar 2001, 64–65).

Put in the language of institutional design, Elazar identifies two options of managing religious diversity within a covenant system. First, different religious groups are granted equal treatment within a given polity via separation or even-handed systems; second, a system of territorial units, within which different religions are dominant, co-exist through a federalist arrangement. With this further understanding of the idea of a political covenant at our disposal, we can explore Lord Sacks’ “community of communities” idea as presented in his 1990 Reith Lectures.

Community of Communities: Two Kinds of Covenants?

Lord Sacks suggests that individuals within a society have two kinds of identities. The first is local and infused with values, tradition, religious content, and principles (explicitly or implicitly, under the guise of ‘culture’); the second is an overarching identity through which each different, localized group participates in a shared conversation regarding the common good. Lord Sacks presents these as complementary needs: “It needs communities where individuals can feel that their values are protected and can be handed on to their children. And it needs an overarching sense of national community in which different groups are participants in a shared pursuit of the common good” (Sacks 1990). This view seems to sit well with what we described above as two different kinds of covenants: a localized one which is dependent on thick shared values, and a second one that is rooted in acknowledging the importance of a shared framework. However, Sacks’ version differs from that of Elazar in that it is not necessarily federalist in its political structure, and that the two types of communities both have a religious connotation. As he writes: “Locally, our many faiths and denominations are often our first source of belonging. It is in our congregations and ethnic communities, intermediate between the individual and the state, that we find our sense of enduring value, of continuity through change. It is here that the individual is rescued from isolation, that identities are forged and traditions handed on” (Sacks 1990). Religion also has a role to play in the national community:

Religion has a larger role to play as well, in charting our shared moral landscape, that sense of a common good that we need if our communities are to cohere as a society. In Britain, as in America, it was the biblical tradition in dialogue with secular voices that throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries tempered competition with compassion, individualism with responsibility, and gave the search for social justice its prophetic voice. (Sacks 1990)

And he concludes: “A community of communities needs two kinds of religious strength: one to preserve our own distinct traditions, the other to bring them to an enlarged sense of the common good” (Sacks 1990).

What kind of political arrangement or constitutional design can serve this vision? For the local community bounded by a social covenant, there are two options. The first is to leave the building, maintaining, and funding of such communities to the initiative of each individual. The government, in this option, should not involve itself in these efforts as it does not understand local traditions and does not know how to build religious institutions. The government should not intervene in the local affairs of religions and denominations since each local community best knows its own tradition, the building of its communal activities, provision of its services, and its solutions for problems of loneliness and neglect. This vision reflects the well-known Lockean and Madisonian view of the separation of religion and state (Nussbaum 2008); Lord Sacks follows this vision closely as he indicated that, in the modern era, the government should not use the law to coerce religious values and conduct. Furthermore, this localized and voluntary vision also fits Lord Sacks’ view that religious associations are a part of a thriving civil society in which these various associations are keepers of liberty that act as intermediaries between the individual and the government.

A second option is for the government to take an active part in establishing, maintaining, and funding such associations. This option is quite similar to the arrangement of public education in the UK, in which the government funds faith schools of various denominations; these schools are mainly run by the Anglican and Catholic churches, but minority faiths in the UK are also represented through Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu faith schools (among others). Such a system is generally known as even-handed or nonpreferentialist, or as part of various establishment arrangements.¹⁵ Evenhanded systems aim to allocate governmental resources to various religious denominations and groups without showing preference to any one faction or group (Jobani and Perez 2020, ch. 4). This, of course, raises complicated issues of how the government is to identify such groups, consider divisions and disagreements within such groups, collect information relevant to resource allocation, determine the manner of allocation (which can take many forms ranging from following the requests dictated by each group to a “one size fits all” allocation given to each religious group), and many more.

Evenhandedness, as a concrete framework for church and state policy, has attracted the attention of legal scholars in the U.S. as such arrangements have been suggested throughout U.S. history. This type of approach was initially rejected in favor of Madison’s separation framework (Levy 2017), but an even-handed approach to cultural and religious groups recently has attracted the attention of theorists such as Carens (2000), Modood and Thompson (2022), and others. Here it is worth noting that enacting even-handed policies is not simple as they must apply to a significant number of distinct communities. Non-preferentialism in the U.S. context refers exclusively to religious groups, while Lord Sacks’ writings include cultural groups as well (similar to J. Carens’ view, 2000). This means that a given government would have to identify, classify, and provide resources to a large number of groups, a complex task that many observers argue a liberal government is ill-suited to complete.

Interestingly, Lord Sacks himself participated in a heated debate—about the level of institutional autonomy granted to religious associations funded by the government—that is central to any application of an even handed-framework. He entered this debate with the case of the Jewish Free School, a publicly funded Jewish-Orthodox school in London, which was forced to change its admission policy when the Supreme Court of England deemed that they violated the British “1976 race relations act”: Lord Sacks fiercely opposed the forced change.¹⁶ This particular dispute can be seen, in an inductive way, to signal that Lord Sacks’ view regarding Church autonomy agrees with scholars such as M. McConnell (2010), who argues forcefully against legal and statist intrusion into the internal affairs of religions. In the framework of the current article, this signals Lord Sacks’ covenant-based support for social communitarianism over a one-size-fits-all regulation of the entire citizenry.

Turning to the national level, a political covenant that goes beyond pure civil principles—what Habermas once called “constitutional patriotism”¹⁷—will have to include symbols, expressions, artwork, monuments, and preambles to formal legal documents that are based on traditions which are likely to have religious connotations. Here we need to proceed cautiously: Lord Sacks seems to have changed his mind in the years between The 1990 Reith lectures and his 2020 Morality book. His early views emphasized the role of religion in the national culture, while his latter views seem to diminish the specific significance of religion to emphasize instead the diverse ways of life within a given country in order to create a more inclusive and representative national moral community.

Interestingly, even if we only consider this minimal and more inclusive view of national culture and its underlying covenant, substantial principles or values sourced in religion, heritage, or local traditions will be needed to establish Sacks’ “bonds of identity” substantive covenant. Otherwise, the content of the national culture and the covenant would be too thin and thus default into a mere contract. So even a minimal view of Sacks’ political covenant faces the well-known problems encountered by similar communitarian political views, specifically challenges arising from the deep diversity and heterogeneous nature of modern societies. Put plainly: even the minimal version of a covenant faces strong disagreement when presented to the citizenry of modern Western societies.

In response, Lord Sacks could certainly claim that emptying a national culture of any substantive content and replacing the language of a covenant with a mere contract and liberal constitutional principles would create a void. This void would likely be filled by religious fundamentalism on the one hand, and excessive commercialism on the other hand (Sacks 2020, 41). This expected response by Lord Sacks means, effectively, that a covenant-based politics—which inevitably poses a problem for citizens who hold beliefs far removed from the content of the covenant—should be evaluated by comparing the advantages of covenant politics with the disadvantages of a politics based purely on the contractual. This would raise the practical, “political science” question of which majoritarian mechanisms would be used to determine the content and then promote the “bonds of identity” of Sacks’ covenant; this question remains unresolved in Sacks’ works.¹⁸

A final, critical comment is that it is not clear whether Lord Sacks’ idea of a political covenant is compatible with his idea of “bonds of identity”: a political covenant requires consent of the participants, while “bonds of identity” require a common cultural background. If these two requirements do not cohere, what happens? Here it should be emphasized that current research regarding large democracies such as the U.S. reports a very high level of polarization among citizens (Iyengar et al. 2019). Given this empirical reality, Lord Sacks might have to introduce a priority rule that preferences a majoritarian based political covenant over the idea of “bonds of identity” based on a common cultural background. This would make clear that a political covenant applies to all citizens, even those who do not share the relevant identity. This prioritization, not explicitly discussed in Lord Sacks’ writings, should attract further attention.

Conclusion

Lord Rabbi Sacks advocates a covenant-based communitarian view for Western societies. He hopes, with this approach, to be able to avoid what he sees as a bad outcome of liberal democracies: contract-based politics and societies that are emptied of content. The impact of these outcomes is troubling both for societies and for polities. Socially, the outcomes foment social ills such as loneliness and neglect; politically, these outcomes empty political life of value-driven content and fuel excessive individualism. Lord Sacks hopes that two kinds of covenant-based communitarianism can solve such problems. Social communitarianism, grounded in localized covenants, can invigorate local communities and contribute to an all-important civil society. A national covenant can bring together different communities and provide an alternative to growing societal isolationism.

In evaluating Lord Sacks’ proposals, we need to distinguish his social communitarianism from his political or statist communitarianism. His social communitarianism is valuable; it is difficult to argue against the importance of social communality, of covenant-based localities, and the importance of a lively civil society. His version of religiosity—tolerant and well informed of contemporary philosophy and the social sciences—is impressive and has been admired by religious figures within and outside of Judaism, and by many other readers, who, regardless of their religious identity or lack thereof, have found that it resonated with their own intuitions and thoughts.

Lord Sacks’ political-statist, covenant-based communitarianism is a different issue. Any attempt to infuse the identity of the state with substantive cultural and religious content, even a dialogical and cordial strategy consistent with Sacks’ vision, is bound to collide with the deep diversity and pluralism of large Western societies. Moving beyond constitutional principles in crafting the identity of a country would place minorities at a disadvantage, and such statism, aiming to serve the national culture, will likely be translated into simple majoritarian politics. This is inconsistent with Sacks’ overall covenant-based approach and should probably be rejected.

Finally, Lord Sacks invites his readers to see in religion the kind of virtues that he sees in it: kindness, charity, caring for the other, and so on. This is an admirable effort and perhaps his vision of an invigorated civil society can be adopted by introducing other kinds of associations—from youth movements to sports clubs and so on—that would maintain such values while including non-observant citizens, a vision that is certainly in line with the kind spirit of Lord Sacks’ covenant-based social communitarianism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nahshon Perez

Nahshon Perez is an associate professor at the Department of Political Studies, Bar Ilan University. His most recent books are: Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions: Contemporary Entanglements of Faith and Government (Oxford University Press, 2023); Governing the Sacred: Political Toleration in Five Contested Sacred Sites (Oxford University Press, 2020, co-authored with Y. Jobani). His research focuses on the contested relations between religion and government in a variety of contexts.

Notes

1 See https://institute.global/tony-blair/tony-blairs-tribute-rabbi-lord-jonathan-sacks

2 See Parekh (1999, 96).

3 Sacks relies here on the writings of Daniel Elazar; (see Elazar 1989, 19).

4 Daniel Elazar, who dedicated much time and effort to develop this concept, offerrs this definition: “A covenant is a morally-informed agreement or pact between parties having an independent and sufficiently equal status, based on voluntary consent and established by mutual oaths or promises witnessed by the relevant higher authority” (1980, 6). Notably, Elazar's understanding of a covenant is much closer to a contract.

5 The most famous contemporary example is Rabbi D. Hartman in his book A Living Covenant (1997).

6 See Bretherton (2020).

7 On Althusius’ covenant-based ideas, see Elazar (1991); on the centrality of covenantal thinking in early modern Christian scholarship (especially the Reformed tradition with an emphasis on the role of Althusius), see Henreckson (2019).

8 On the idea of a covenant in Jewish classical sources, (see Walzer 2000, 5–46).

9 On the difference, (see Waldron 1991, ch. 1).

10 See Lautsi v. Italy (2011), Application no. 30814/06; in this case, the ECtHR accepted as legitimate the policy of mandatory placement of the crucifix in all public school classrooms in Italy ; on this well-known case, (see Weiler 2010).

11 Walzer argued that the norms of justice depend on, or are the results of, the shared understandings of the relevant community to whom such norms are applicable, see (1983, 313).

12 Sandel argued that the “individual” that is portrayed in some liberal theory scholarship presents an unrealistic version of the citizens of modern societies; unlike the noted “individual,” such citizens are constituted by specific pasts, traditions, and so on that make the prescriptive conclusions of theorists such as Rawls inapplicable to modern societies.

13 See Abramowitz and Saunders (2008).

14 This term is used to evoke Schumpeter’s famous expression: “the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today—linking up with elevators and railroads—is a history of Revolutions … the opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation … incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in … ” (Schumpeter 2013, 96).

15 On such systems, (see Laycock 1985; Carens 2000).

16 See paragraph 4 of the decision in R (E) v. Governing Body of JFS [2009] UKSC 15.

17 See Habermas (1996, 500).

18 The difficulty of translating majoritarian cultural ideas into concrete political mechanisms is not unique to Sacks or to covenantal thinking as a whole; it can also be found in liberal-national thinking like that advanced by Miller (1995) and Tamir (1995); for a critique of such mechanisms, see Perez (2020).