As a Princeton undergraduate in 1942 Rawls wrote a long theological thesis on the topics of sin and faith. At that point in his life he was an orthodox Episcopalian who entertained the thought of entering the seminary. His traditional religious beliefs changed, however, in response to several incidents that occurred to him as a soldier in WorldWar II. These all surrounded the theodicy problem. Nonetheless, Rawls seems to have remained a Kantian fideist (someone who believes in a God of some sort, but not as a result of rational argument) for the rest of his life, as a posthumously published 1997 essay titled “On My Religion” indicates. Rawls was not the product of a secular background (see BIMSF, especially 261–264; also LHMP 291).

Despite appearances, there is much in the very early Rawls that prefigures the political philosophy for which he was to later become famous. For example, sin is a thoroughly social phenomenon in that it is defined as that which repudiates or destroys community. Likewise, faith is defined as that which constitutes and integrates community. And the thesis that human beings are made in the image of God is interpreted not so much in terms of the presence of rationality in human beings, but rather in terms of human beings being uniquely capable of entering into community. As a result of these concepts of sin, faith, and imago Dei, the very early Rawls thought that religion and ethics could not be separated (BIMSF 113, 116, 193, 205, 207, 214, 219).