One learns about Rawls’s own approach to religious faith in published writings at the very beginning and the very end of his career. In his undergraduate thesis at Princeton (1942) he indicated a religious faith under the inluence of neo-orthodox Protestant thinkers like Emil Brunner. At this stage he thought that faith inGod was not sheer fancy and that one could give reasons for religious belief, even if he did not have a great deal of conidence in rational or natural theology. By “faith” he meant a spiritual disposition to be fully integrated into community and to be rooted in the divine source which sustains it. That is, faith is inherently personal, in contrast to “belief,” which is a cognitive attitude that holds certain propositions to be true or false. Strictly speaking, he thought, one might believe that God exists, but one has faith in God as personal. At this very early stage of his career, the opposite of faith was “sin,” which he defined as the destruction of personal community (BIMSF 113, 123–125, 214).

Late in life (1997) Rawls drafted an essay titled “On My Religion” in which he described the history of his own religious beliefs and attitudes toward religion, including his abandonment of orthodoxy during World War II, largely due to orthodoxy’s inability to deal convincingly with the theodicy problem. Apparently his views changed several times over the years. Although it is clear that he abandoned orthodoxy, it is not clear that he abandoned theism, in general. In fact, he speaks of his “ideism” (BIMSF 261, 263). In addition to this late essay, it also makes sense to suspect that Rawls’s own religion is illuminated by his comments on “reasonable faith” in Kant in that Rawls’s own comprehensive doctrine seems to have been Kantian until the end of his life (LHMP 16, 147, 288–289, 306, 309–310, 319–322, 363).