The public-private myth: Why religion can’t be kept behind closed doors

Few people have heard of Sir Edward Coke, but most people reading this live under his rule. Coke served as the Attorney General of England in the early 17th century, which meant he would recommend laws to the Crown to implement. And in 1604, he gave us one of the bedrocks of the Common Law, used all around the world: “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

Of course, today we might say an American’s, a Canadian’s, or an Australian’s, but Coke’s legal point was that what you did within your home, so long as it was within the law, was your business. The police cannot enter your home unwarranted. The sheriffs cannot bash your door down without good reason. What you did in private was up to you.

The distinction between the private and public spheres extends far beyond Coke’s corner of jurisprudence. There exists a long philosophical tradition that divides what we do, say, and believe in public, and what happens behind closed doors. How you eat, talk, or have sex are matters for the home. How you raise your kids or spend your free time are private things. But one of the most prominent topics philosophers have often hoped to banish to the parlor room was religion. Philosophize in public, worship in private. Rationality in the marketplace, faith and emotion at home.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, philosopher Simon Critchley, author of On Mysticism, argues this needs to change.

The German divide

The idea that you can believe what you like at home but must reason like everyone else in public owes much of its popularity to Martin Luther and Immanuel Kant. Both wrestled with a similar anxiety: What happens when private religious feelings spill out into the street? Luther, who opened the doors to the Reformation and made the Bible readable by the masses, quickly became nervous when people began reading it too freely. The radical fringes — peasants, Anabaptists, visionaries — started claiming divine authority for political revolt. Luther recoiled, siding with princes and writing that rebellious peasants should be “struck down like rabid dogs.”

Kant inherited this wariness and tried to offer a compromise for Protestantism. “What Kant gives us,” Critchley says, “is this modern idea of religious experience as authorized privately, but as not being sanctioned publicly.” In his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment?, Kant argues that “public reason” must be disciplined and rational, while “private reason” can hold whatever faith it likes — so long as it stays in its lane. As Critchley puts it, “Privately, you can believe whatever you like, but you have to respect that distinction between the public and the private.”

It’s a tidy solution: Religion can flourish quietly in the home but mustn’t interrupt public life. The Enlightenment, in this view, is defined by sober rationality that keeps emotion and mysticism at arm’s length. For Critchley, though, this isn’t reason — it’s repression. It’s probably not even possible.

The Jamesian clawback

William James was a psychologist and philosopher, and he was brilliant at both. He was also one of the first thinkers to point out that we cannot neatly compartmentalize bits of our mind. We can’t say, “I’ll think like this in the morning and like this in the afternoon.” You do not hang up your beliefs when you put on your work clothes. As Critchley tells me, it’s an odd notion that “you can be a Buddhist or a Catholic or whatever, but that mustn’t interfere in your life as a citizen.”

James’ pragmatism, which is a kind of fusion of his psychology and philosophy, makes room for the fact that how we think and what we believe affects us all the time. Even if we patronizingly sneer that faith is something soft, sentimental, or ultimately irrelevant, it cannot be brushed aside. It’s an unignorable data point and a reality for most people.

According to both James and Critchley, feelings of transcendence, mystical visions, and sudden conversions cannot be easily dismissed as hallucinations or ephemera. They were events in people’s lives. They mattered and need to be understood — not only as experiences in themselves but as radically transformative moments in many people’s lives.

In his Varieties of Religious Experience, James gave an account of mysticism that was radical for his time (and perhaps still is). “He just tries to understand what’s going on,” Critchley says. “Things which he hasn’t experienced himself, but he thinks are important, and so he tries to describe as best he can with understanding and empathy.”

A poorer discipline

For a long time, mysticism has been painted as the embarrassing cousin at the philosophical dinner table. Critchley often refers to this as a form of “secular elitism,” and it’s seen especially in academia. In his experience, there is a “ferocious secularism in philosophy departments and a deep suspicion of people who avowed some religious faith. Even if some of them did quietly avow such faith, it was not seen as being acceptable.”

Critchley wants to push back against that narrative. What we call mysticism was never meant to be cordoned off from the rest of life. It began in monasteries and convents and was woven into daily rituals, including prayer, silence, fasting, and writing. It makes no sense to talk about a “religious life” and a “public life” — there is just life, with its blurry borders and messy delineations.

The problem isn’t just practical but also philosophical. Because, for Critchley, the modern split between reason and religion — between what counts as public knowledge and private feeling — has shrunk what we think philosophy can be. Philosophy is poorer for the divide.

“The secular mindset has narrowed what’s accepted as something that you can talk about in civilized circles,” Critchley says. “And I think that needs to be smashed apart and broken down.”

Mysticism isn’t an awkward non-philosophy. It’s a way of thinking, feeling, and being. And when we dismiss it to behind closed doors or condescendingly laugh it off, we are also mocking and locking away a great many people who believe in it.