role of religion in politics essay

Religion and Politics: the Role of Religion in Politics Essay

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Introduction

Relationship between religion and politics, religious fundamentalism, works cited.

Religion is closely related to politics in a number of ways. In the traditional society, religious leaders were both temporal and civil leaders. In 1648, a treaty of Westphalia was signed, which separated politics from the Church. However, religion has always influenced policy making process and decision-making in government. In many parts of the world, religious leaders influence political leaders to come up with policies that are in line with the provisions of religious beliefs.

However, the main question is how religion influences politics. In the United States, there is a clause in the Bill of Rights referred to as the disestablishment clause, which provides that politics must be kept separate from politics. In established democracies, somebody with questionable religious record stands no chance of being elected. The populace believes that a religious leader would always be willing to listen to the wishes of the majority (Settimba 9).

A non-religious leader is believed to be indifferent to the sufferings of the majority in society. In other words, a non-religious leader would fulfill his or her own interests instead of serving those who elected him or her. During campaigns at state level in the United States, local leaders quote the Bible whenever they want to bring out a certain fact.

In human life, each group has a belief system that is established with the help of religious values. These beliefs influence the political standpoint of an individual in a political system. The media will always evaluate the life of a politician using certain religious principles.

These principles are derived from religious morals and beliefs. In this case, a candidate in an election is identified as a Christian or a Muslim. The religion of a political leader determines the number of votes he or she would gunner in an election. In the United States, politicians associate themselves with Christianity because a majority of voters are Christians.

In the Arab world, a political leader must associate himself with Islam because it is a dominant religion in the region. Furthermore, the religious sects must be stated clearly before a political leader is elected. In other countries, religion is the major variable in every electioneering year. It is believed that certain religious affiliations are related to cultural beliefs that affect the performance of leaders in any political system. Recently, the issue of religion emerged in the United States when Obama was said to be a Muslim.

Many people were much worried that Obama was a Muslim. Islam has always been associated with extremism meaning that Muslims are accused of using warped means to attain justice. It was feared that Obama could support Muslims once he became president. However, the president dispelled fears by declaring that he was indeed a Christian. This nearly cost him the presidency (Johnstone 64).

There is a popular belief among Christians that good leaders are usually sent by God. This is based on the Bible whereby many kings and prophets were sent by God to lead Israelites in the times of war and calamities. Political leaders have always presented themselves as leaders sent by God to accomplish certain missions.

Through this, they have been able to ascend to leadership positions. Whenever political leaders make speeches, they quote the Bible to show the electorate that they understand the Christian principles. The idea that political leaders must come up with policies favoring the poor is based on the teachings of the Bible. The Bible and the Koran teaches that people must always be assisted to achieve their potentials in society.

It is not the interest of the ruling class to help the poor. The main aim of the ruling class is to amass wealth and use the proletariat to ascend to power. Political parties that tend to favor the poor in their manifestos have always clinched political power. Social justice ideology is based on the teachings of the Bible because the poor must have equal access to resources including healthcare, education, and employment.

Religious fundamentalism was first used in the United States to refer to those individuals who opposed the principles of the mainstream church. Those who subscribed to the ideas of the Protestant Churches were perceived as religious fundamentalists. In other words, fundamentalism was interpreted to mean diverting from the mainstream faith.

However, what should be clear is that fundamentalists had pertinent issues with the mainstream church since the mainstream church never allowed competition. Religious fundamentalists observed that it was critical to follow the teachings of the Bible instead of subscribing to the interpretations provided by the religious leaders. Religious leaders interpreted the teachings in the Bible to suit their interests.

Many people were not happy with this behavior. The mainstream church interpreted the Bible in accordance to the new dynamics of the modern world. However, fundamentalists were never happy about this. They believed that it would be better to stick to the teachings of the Bible. In the modern society, fundamentalism is used loosely to mean diverting from the normal beliefs and principles of major religions (McGuire 76).

Fundamentalism is a relatively new term in the sociology of religion because it was first used in the 19 th century. The modern society is complex to understand because of the changes brought about globalization and technology. Therefore, fundamentalism in the modern society has a different meaning. Religion in the modern society serves a different purpose as compared to its role in the traditional society. Religion is an instrument that brings people together.

In this regard, it must be used to bring about understanding and unity. This implies that religious teachings are usually interpreted to simplify the complexities in life. Religious fundamentalists do not believe that anything has changed as far as religion is concerned. In this case, modern interpretations must not be accepted because they go against the traditional teachings of religion (Weber 22).

When other people embrace change in society, religious fundamentalists encourage conservatism. To them, religion is absolute meaning that it dictates everything in society. There is a controversy among scholars regarding the use of the term because fundamentalists are perceived as people who are not intelligent.

Others view them as uneducated individuals who believe religion is everything in society. Religious fundamentalists believe that some things should not be allowed to go on in society. For instance, they oppose science, abortion, feminism, the use of family planning drugs, and homosexuality.

Recently, the term has been associated with Islamic extremists who believe that justice should be sought through terrorism and violence. For Islamic fundamentalists, the main problem in the world is exploitation. The west has always exploited people in other parts of the world, including the Middle East. To them, the main issue is that the west has always neglected the presence of Arabs.

Johnstone, Ronald. Religion in Society: Sociology of Religion . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.

McGuire, Meredith. Religion: the Social Context . New York: Sage, 2002. Print.

Settimba, Henry (2009). Testing times: globalization and investing theology in East Africa . Milton Keynes: Author House, 2009. Print.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Los Angeles: Roxbury Company, 2002. Print.

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• Impact of the Religious Fundamentalism on Society
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Religion and Political Theory

When the well-known political theorist Leo Strauss introduced the topic of politics and religion in his reflections, he presented it as a problem —the “theologico-political problem” he called it (Strauss 1997). [ 1 ] The problem, says Strauss, is primarily one about authority: Is political authority to be grounded in the claims of revelation or reason, Jerusalem or Athens? In so characterizing the problem, Strauss was tapping into currents of thought deep in the history of political reflection in the west, ones about the nature, extent, and justification of political authority. Do monarchies owe their authority to divine right? Has God delegated to secular rulers such as kings and emperors the authority to wage war in order to achieve religious aims: the conversion of the infidel or the repulsion of unjust attacks on the true faith? Do secular rulers have the authority to suppress heretics? What authority does the state retain when its principles conflict with God's? Is the authority of the natural law ultimately grounded in divine law? These and other questions animated much of the discussion among medieval and modern philosophers alike.

With the emergence of liberal democracy in the modern west, however, the types of questions that philosophers asked about the interrelation between religion and political authority began to shift, in large measure because the following three-fold dynamic was at work. In the first place, divine-authorization accounts of political authority had lost the day to consent-based approaches. Political authority in a liberal democracy, most prominent defenders of liberal democracy claimed, is grounded in the consent of the people to be ruled rather than in God's act of authorization. Second, the effects of the Protestant Reformation had made themselves felt acutely, as the broadly homogeneous religious character of Western Europe disintegrated into competing religious communities. The population of Western Europe and the United States were now not only considerably more religiously diverse, but also deeply wary of the sort of bloodshed occasioned by the so-called religious wars. And, finally, secularization had begun to take hold. Both the effects of religious diversity and prominent attacks on the legitimacy of religious belief ensured that one could no longer assume in political discussion that one's fellow citizens were religious, let alone members of one's own religious tradition.

For citizens of contemporary liberal democracies, this three-fold dynamic has yielded a curious situation. On the one hand, most take it for granted that the authority of the state is located in the people, that the people are religiously diverse, and that important segments of people doubt the rationality of religious belief and practice of any sort. On the other hand, contrary to the predictions of many advocates of secularization theory, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and (at one time) Peter Berger, this mix of democracy, religious diversity, and religious criticism has not resulted in the disappearance or privatization of religion. Religion, especially in liberal democracies such as the United States, is alive and well, shaping political culture in numerous ways. Consequently, there very much remains a theologico-political problem. The problem, moreover, still concerns political authority, though now reframed by the transition to liberal democracy. If recent reflection on the issue is any guide, the most pressing problem to address is this: Given that state-authorized coercion needs to be justified, and that the justification of state coercion requires the consent of the people, what role may religious reasons play in justifying state coercion? More specifically, in a religiously pluralistic context such as one finds in contemporary liberal democracies, are religious reasons sufficient to justify a coercive law for which reasonable agents cannot find an adequate secular rationale?

This entry considers the most important answers to these questions offered by recent philosophers, political theorists, and theologians. We present these answers as part of a lively three-way discussion between advocates of what we call the standard view, their liberal critics, and proponents of the so-called New Traditionalism. Briefly stated, advocates of the standard view argue that in contemporary liberal democracies, significant restraints must be put on the political role of religious reasons. Their liberal critics deny this, or at least deny that good reasons have been given to believe this. New Traditionalists, by contrast, turn their back on both the standard view and its liberal critics, arguing that religious orthodoxy and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. To have a grip on this three-way debate, we suggest, is to understand that dimension of the theologico-political problem that most animates philosophical reflection in liberal democracies on the relation between religion and politics.

1. The Standard View

2.1 core components of the doctrine of religious restraint, 3.1 the argument from religious warfare, 3.2 the argument from divisiveness, 3.3 the argument from respect, 4. liberal critics of the doctrine of religious restraint, 5. the primary concern regarding the doctrine of religious restraint.

• 7. A Convergence Alternative

8.1 The Declinist Narrative of the New Traditionalism

8.2 two concerns about the narrative, other internet resources, related entries.

The standard view among political theorists, such as Robert Audi, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Larmore, Steven Macedo, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls is that religious reasons can play only a limited role in justifying coercive laws, as coercive laws that require a religious rationale lack moral legitimacy. [ 2 ] If the standard view is correct, there is an important asymmetry between religious and secular reasons in the following respect: some secular reasons can themselves justify state coercion but no religious reason can. This asymmetry between the justificatory potential of religious and secular reasons, it is further claimed, should shape the political practice of religious believers. According to advocates of the standard view, citizens should not support coercive laws for which they believe there is no plausible secular rationale, although they may support coercive laws for which they believe there is only a secular rationale. (Note that not just any secular rationale counts.) We can refer to this injunction to exercise restraint as The Doctrine of Religious Restraint (or the DRR, for short). [ 3 ] This abstract characterization of the DRR will require some refinements, which we'll provide in sections 2 and 3. For the time being, however, we can get a better feel for the character of the DRR by considering the following case.

2. The Doctrine of Religious Restraint

Rick is a politically engaged citizen who intends to vote in a referendum on a measure that would criminalize homosexual relations. As he evaluates the relevant considerations, he concludes that the only persuasive rationale for that measure includes as a crucial premise the claim that homosexual relations are contrary to a God-established natural order. Although he finds that rationale compelling, he realizes that many others do not. But because he takes himself to have a general moral obligation to make those political decisions that, as best he can tell, are both just and good, he decides to vote in favor of criminalization. Moreover, he tries to persuade his compatriots to vote with him. In so doing, he offers relevantly different arguments to different audiences. He tries to convince like-minded citizens by appealing to the theistic natural law argument that he finds persuasive. But he realizes that many of his fellow citizens are unpersuaded by the natural law argument that convinces him. So he articulates a variety of other arguments—some secular, some religious—that he hopes will leverage those who don't share his natural law theism into supporting his position. He does so even though he doubts that any of those leveraging arguments are cogent, realizes that many of those to whom he addresses them will have comparable doubts about their cogency, and so believes that many coerced by the law he supports have no good reason, from their perspective, to affirm that law.

Advocates of the standard view will be troubled by Rick's behavior. The relevantly troubling feature of Rick's behavior is not primarily his decision to support this particular policy. Rather, it is his decision to support a policy that he believes others have no good reason, from their perspective, to endorse. After all, Rick votes to enact a law that authorizes state coercion even though he believes that the only plausible rationale for that decision includes religious claims that many of his compatriots find utterly unpersuasive. In so doing, Rick violates a normative constraint at the heart of the standard view, viz., that citizens in a pluralistic liberal democracy ought to refrain from using their political influence to authorize coercive laws that, to the best of their knowledge, can be justified only on religious grounds and so lack a plausible secular rationale. [ 4 ] Or, otherwise put, Rick violates the DRR. For the DRR tells us that, if a citizen is trying to determine whether or not she should support some coercive law, and if she believes that there is no plausible secular rationale for that law, then she may not support it.

The DRR is a negative constraint; it identifies a kind of reason that cannot itself justify a coercive law and so a kind of reason on which citizens may not exclusively rely when supporting a coercive law. But this negative constraint is typically conjoined with a permission: although citizens may not support coercive laws for which they believe themselves to have only a religious rationale, they may support coercive laws for which they believe there is only a plausible secular rationale. As we'll see in a moment, advocates of the DRR furnish reasons to believe that religious and secular reasons have this asymmetrical justificatory role.

The standard view has often been misunderstood, typically by associating the DRR with claims its advocates are free to deny. It will therefore be helpful to dissociate the DRR from various common misunderstandings.

First, the DRR is a moral constraint, one that applies to people in virtue of the fact that they are citizens of a liberal democracy. As such, it need not be encoded into law, enforced by state coercion or social stigma, promoted in state educational institutions, or in any other way policed by the powers that be. Of course, advocates of restraint are free to argue that the state should police violations of the DRR (see Habermas 2006, 10). [ 5 ] Perhaps some liberal democracies do police something like the DRR. But advocates of the standard view needn't endorse restrictions of this sort. [ 6 ]

Second, the DRR does not require a thorough-going privatization of religious commitment. Indeed, the DRR permits religious considerations to play a rather prominent role in a citizen's political practice: citizens are permitted to vote for their favored coercive policies on exclusively religious grounds as well as to advocate publicly for those policies on religious grounds. What the DRR does require of citizens is that they reasonably believe that they have some plausible secular rationale for each of the coercive laws that they support, which they are prepared to offer in political discussion. In this respect, the present construal of the DRR is weaker than comparable proposals, such as that developed by Robert Audi, which requires that each citizen have and be motivated by some evidentially adequate secular rationale for each of the coercive laws he or she supports (see Audi 1997, 138 and Rawls 1997, 784ff).

Third, the DRR places few restrictions on the content of the secular reasons to which citizens can appeal when supporting coercive laws. Although the required secular reasons must be “plausible” (more on this in a moment), they may make essential reference to what Rawls calls “comprehensive conceptions of the good,” such as Platonism, Kantianism, or utilitarianism. [ 7 ] Accordingly, the standard view does not commit itself to a position according to which secular reasons must be included or otherwise grounded in a neutral source—a set of principles regarding justice and the common good such that everybody has good reason, apart from his own or any other religious or philosophical perspective, to find acceptable. Somewhat more specifically, advocates of the standard view needn't claim that secular reasons must be found in what Rawls calls “public reason,” which (roughly speaking) is a fund of shared principles about justice and the common good constructed from the shared political culture of a liberal democracy. That having been said, it is worth stressing that some prominent advocates of the standard view adopt a broadly Rawlsian account of the DRR, according to which coercive laws must be justified by appeal to public reason (see Gutmann and Thompson 1996, Larmore 1987, Macedo 1990, and Nussbaum 2008). We shall have more to say about this view in section 6.

Fourth, the DRR itself has no determinate policy implications; it is a constraint not on legislation itself, but on the configuration of reasons to which agents may appeal when supporting coercive legislation. So, for example, it forbids Rick to support the criminalization of homosexuality when he believes that there are no plausible secular reasons to criminalize it. As such, the moral propriety of the DRR has nothing directly to do with its usefulness in furthering, or discouraging, particular policy aims.

The DRR, then, is a norm that is supposed to provide guidance for how citizens of a liberal democracy should conduct themselves when deliberating about or deciding on the implementation of coercive laws. For our purposes, it will be helpful to work with a canonical formulation of it. Let us, then, formulate the DRR as follows:

The DRR : a citizen of a liberal democracy may support the implementation of a coercive law L just in case he reasonably believes himself to have a plausible secular justification for L, which he is prepared to offer in political discussion.

About this formulation of the DRR, let us make two points. First, in what follows, we will remain largely noncommittal about what the qualifier “plausible” means, as advocates of the standard view understand it in different ways. For present purposes, we will simply assume that a plausible rationale is one that epistemically and morally competent peers will take seriously as a basis for supporting a coercive law. Second, according to this formulation of the DRR, a citizen can comply with the DRR even if he himself is not persuaded to support a coercive law for any secular reason. What matters is that he believes that he has and can offer a secular rationale that his secular cohorts can take seriously.

Suppose, then, we have an adequate working conception of the DRR. The question naturally arises: Why do advocates of the standard view maintain that we should conform to the DRR? For several reasons, most prominent of which are the following three arguments. Of course, there are many more arguments for the DRR than we can address here. See, for example, Andrew Lister's appeal to the value of political community (2013).

3. Three Arguments for the Doctrine of Religious Restraint

Advocates of the standard view sometimes commend the DRR on the grounds that conforming to it will help prevent religious warfare and civil strife. According to Robert Audi, for example, “if religious considerations are not appropriately balanced with secular ones in matters of coercion, there is a special problem: a clash of Gods vying for social control. Such uncompromising absolutes easily lead to destruction and death” (Audi 2000, 103). The concern expressed here, presumably, is this: for all we reasonably believe, citizens who are willing to coerce their compatriots for religious reasons will use their political power to advance their sectarian agenda—using the power of the state to persecute heretics, impose orthodoxy, and enact stringent morals laws. In so doing, these citizens will thereby provoke determined resistance and civil conflict. Such a state of affairs, however, threatens the very viability of a liberal democracy and, so, should be avoided at nearly all costs. Accordingly, religious believers should exercise restraint when deliberating about the implementation of coercive laws. Exercising restraint, however, is best accomplished by adhering to the DRR.

According to the liberal critics of the standard view, there are several problems with this argument. First, the liberal critics contend, while there may have been a genuine threat of confessional warfare in 17 th century Western Europe, there is little reason to believe that there is any such threat in stable liberal democracies such as the United States. Why not? Because confessional conflict, the liberal critics continue, is typically rooted in egregious violations of the right to religious freedom, when, for example, people are jailed, tortured, or otherwise abused because of their religious commitments. John Locke puts the point thus:

it is not the diversity of Opinions (which cannot be avoided) but the refusal of Toleration to those that are of different Opinions (which might have been granted) that has produced all the Bustles and Wars, that have been in the Christian World, upon account of Religion. (Locke 1983, 155)

If Locke is correct, then what we need to prevent confessional conflict is not compliance with a norm such as the DRR, but firm commitment to the right to religious freedom. A stable liberal democracy such as the United States is, however, fully committed to protecting the right to religious freedom—and will be for the foreseeable future. True enough, there are passionately felt disagreements about how to interpret the right to religious freedom: witness recent conflicts as to whether or not the right to religious freedom should be understood to include the right of religious objectors to be exempted from generally justified state policies (See Koppelman 2013; Leiter 2012). But it is difficult to see, the liberal critics claim, that there is a realistic prospect of these disagreements devolving into violent civil conflict.

Second, even if there were a realistic prospect of religious conflict, liberal critics claim that it is unclear that adhering to the DRR would lower the probability that such a conflict would occur. After all, the trigger for religious war—typically, the violation of the right to religious freedom—is not always, or even typically, justified by exclusively religious considerations. As historian Michael Burleigh has argued, secularists have a long history of hostility to the right to religious freedom and, presumably, that hostility isn't at all grounded in religious considerations (Burleigh 2007, 135 and, more generally, Burleigh 2005).

Third, the liberal critics maintain, when religious believers have employed coercive power to violate the right to religious freedom, they themselves rarely have done so in a way that violates the DRR. Typically, when such rights have been violated, the justifications offered, even by religious believers, appeal to alleged requirements for social order, such as the need for uniformity of belief on basic normative issues. One theological apologist for religious repression, for example, writes this: “The king punishes heretics as enemies, as extremely wicked rebels, who endanger the peace of the kingdom, which cannot be maintained without the unity of the faith. That is why they are burnt in Spain” (quoted in Rivera, 1992, 50). Ordinarily, the kind of religious persecution that engenders religious conflict is legitimated by appeal to secular reasons of the sort mandated by the DRR. (This is the case even when religious actors are the ones who appeal to those secular reasons.)

Finally, liberal critics point out that some religious believers affirm the right to religious freedom on religious grounds; they take themselves to have powerful religious reason to affirm the right of each person to worship as she freely chooses, absent state coercion. So, for example, the 4 th century Nestorian Mar Aba: “I am a Christian. I preach my faith and want every man to join it. But I want him to join it of his own free will. I use force on no man” (quoted in Moffett 1986, 216). [ 8 ] A believer such as Mar Aba might be willing to violate the DRR; however, his violation would, according to the liberal critics, help not to cause religious war but to impede it. For Mar Aba's 'sectarian rationale' supports not the violation of religious freedom but its protection.

If the liberal critics are correct, one of the problems with the argument from warfare is that there is no realistic prospect of religious warfare breaking out in a stable liberal democracy such as the United States. Still, there may be other evils that are more likely to occur under current conditions, which compliance with the DRR might help to prevent. For example, it is plausible to suppose that the enactment of a coercive law that cannot be justified except on religious grounds would engender much anger and frustration on the part of those coerced: “when legislation is expressly based on religious arguments, the legislation takes on a religious character, to the frustration of those who don't share the relevant faith and who therefore lack access to the normative predicate behind the law” (Greene 1993, 1060). This in turn breeds division between citizens—anger and distrust between citizens who have to find some amicable way to make collective decisions about common matters. This counts in favor of the DRR precisely because compliance with the DRR diminishes the likelihood of our suffering from such bad consequences.

To this argument, liberal critics offer a three-part reply. First, suppose it is true that the implementation of coercive laws that can be justified only on religious grounds often causes frustration and anger among both secular and religious citizens. The liberal critics maintain that there is reason to believe that compliance with the DRR would also engender frustration and anger among other religious and secular citizens. To this end, they point to the fact that many religious believers believe that conforming to the DRR would compromise their loyalty to God: if they were prohibited from supporting coercive laws for which they take there to be strong but exclusively religious reasons to support, they would naturally take themselves to be prohibited from obeying God. But for many religious believers this is distressing; they take themselves to have overriding moral and religious obligations to obey God. Similarly, some secular citizens will likely be frustrated by the requirement that the DRR places on religious citizens. According to these secular citizens, all citizens have the right to make political decisions as their conscience dictates. And, on some occasions, these secular citizens hold that exercising that right will lead religious citizens to violate the DRR. [ 9 ]

If this is correct, for the argument from divisiveness to succeed, it would have to provide reason to believe that the level of frustration and anger that would be produced by violating the DRR would be greater than that of conforming to the DRR. But, the liberal critics claim, it is doubtful that we have any such reason: in a very religious society such as the United States, it might be the case that restrictions on the political practice of religious believers engenders at least as much frustration as the alternative.

Second, the liberal critics argue, there is reason to believe that conformance to the DRR would only marginally alleviate the frustration that some citizens feel when confronted with religious reasons in public political debate. The DRR, after all, does not forbid citizens from supporting coercive laws on religious grounds, nor does it forbid citizens to articulate religious arguments in public. Furthermore, complying with the DRR does not prevent religious citizens from advocating their favored laws in bigoted, inflammatory, or obnoxious manners; it has nothing to say about political decorum. So, for example, because the DRR doesn't forbid citizens from helping themselves to inflammatory or demeaning rhetoric in political argument, the anger and resentment engendered by such rhetoric does not constitute evidence for (or against) the DRR.

Third, the liberal critics contend that because most of the laws that have a chance of enactment in a society as pluralistic as the United States will have both religious and secular grounds, it will almost never be the case that any of the actual frustration caused by the public presence of religion supports the DRR. Given that the DRR requires not a complete but only a limited privatization of religious belief, very little of the frustration and anger apparently engendered by the public presence of religion counts in favor of the DRR. To which it is worth adding the following point: advocates of the standard view could, with Rorty (1995), adopt a more demanding conception of the DRR that requires the complete privatization of religious belief. But, as many advocates of the standard view itself maintain, it is doubtful that this move improves the argument's prospects. The complete privatization of religion is much more objectionable to religious citizens and, thus, more likely to create social foment. (Rorty, it should be noted, softened his approach on this issue. See Rorty 2003).

There are no doubt other factors that need to be taken into consideration in the calculation required to formulate the argument from divisiveness. But, the liberal critics maintain, it is unclear how those disparate factors would add up. In particular, if the liberal critics are correct, it is not clear whether requiring citizens to obey the DRR would result in less overall frustration, anger, and division than would not requiring them to do so. The issues at stake are empirical in character and the relevant empirical facts are not known.

The third and most prominent argument for the DRR is the argument from respect. Here we focus on only one formulation of the argument, which has affinities with a version of the argument offered by Charles Larmore (see Larmore 1987). [ 10 ]

The argument from respect runs as such:

• Each citizen deserves to be respected as a person.
• If each citizen deserves to be respected as a person, then there is a powerful prima facie presumption against the permissibility of state coercion. (On this basic claim, See Gaus, 2010, Gaus and Vallier, 2009.)
• So, there is a powerful prima facie presumption against the permissibility of state coercion.
• If the presumption against state coercion is to be overcome (as it sometimes must be), then state coercion must be justified to those who are coerced.
• If state coercion must be justified to those who are coerced, then any coercive law that lacks a plausible secular rationale is morally illegitimate (as there will be many to whom such coercion cannot be justified).
• If any coercive law that lacks a plausible secular rationale is morally illegitimate, then a citizen ought not to support any law that he believes to have only a religious rationale.

However, on the assumption that the antecedent to premise (4) is true—that there are cases in which the state must coerce—it follows (given a few other assumptions) that:

• The DRR is true.

That is, the DRR follows from a constraint on what makes for the moral legitimacy of state coercion—viz., that a morally legitimate law cannot be such that there are those to whom it cannot be justified—and from the claim that citizens should not support any law that they realize lacks moral legitimacy.

The argument from respect has received its fair share of criticism from liberal critics. Perhaps the most troubling of these criticisms is that the argument undermines the legitimacy of basic liberal commitments. To appreciate the thrust of this objection, focus for a moment on the notion being a coercive law that is justified to an agent , to which the argument appeals. How should we understand this concept? One natural suggestion is this:

A coercive law is justified to an agent only if he is reasonable and has sufficient reasons from his own perspective to support it.

Now consider a coercive law that protects fundamental liberal commitments, such as the right to exercise religious freedom. Is this law justified to each citizen of a liberal democracy? Liberal critics answer: no. For there appear to be reasonable citizens who have no good reason from their own perspective to affirm it. Consider, for example, a figure such as the Islamic intellectual Sayyid Qutb. While in prison, Qutb wrote an intelligent, informed, and morally serious commentary on the Koran in which he laid the ills of modern society at the feet of Christianity and liberal democracy. [ 11 ] The only way to extricate ourselves from the problems spawned by liberal democracy, Qutb argued, is to implement shariah or Islamic legal code, which implies that the state should not protect a robust right to religious freedom. In short, Qutb articulates what is, from his point of view, a compelling theological rationale against any law that authorizes the state to protect a robust right to religious freedom. If respect for persons requires that each coercive law be justified to those reasonable persons subject to that law, and if a person such as Qutb were a citizen of a liberal democracy, then the argument from respect implies that laws that protect the right to religious freedom are morally illegitimate, as they lack moral justification—at least for agents such as Qutb. [ 12 ] And for a defender of the standard view, this is certainly an unwelcome result.

This kind of case leads liberal critics of the standard view to deny the fourth premise of the argument from respect. If they are correct, it is not the case that coercive laws must be justified to those who must obey them (in the sense of justified to introduced earlier). Although having a persuasive justification would certainly be desirable and a significant moral achievement, the liberal critics maintain that the moral legitimacy of a law is not a function of whether it can be justified to all citizens—not even to all reasonable citizens. Some citizens are simply not in a strong epistemic position to recognize that certain coercive laws are morally legitimate. In such cases, liberal critics claim that we should do what we can to try to convince these citizens that they have been misled. And we should certainly do what we can to accommodate their concerns in ways that are consistent with basic liberal commitments (see Swaine 2006). At the end of the day, though, we may have no moral option but to coerce reasonable and epistemically competent peers whom we recognize have no reason from their perspective to recognize the legitimacy of the laws to which they are subject. However, if a coercive law can be morally legitimate even though some citizens are not in a strong position to recognize that it is, then (in principle) a coercive law can be justified even if it requires a religious rationale. After all, if religious reasons can be adequate (a possibility that advocates of the standard view do not typically deny), then they are just the sort of reason that can be adequate without being recognized as such even by our morally serious and epistemically competent peers.

It should be conceded, however, that this objection to the argument from respect relies on a particular understanding of what it is for a coercive law to be justified to an agent. Is there another account of this concept that would aid the advocates of the standard view? Perhaps. Nearly all theorists have argued that a coercive law's being justified to an agent does not require that that agent actually have what he regards as an adequate reason to support it (see Gaus 1996, Audi 1997, and Vallier 2014). “The question is not what people do endorse but what people have reason to endorse” (Gaus 2010, 23). Better to understand the concept being a coercive law that is justified to an agent along the following lines:

A coercive law is justified to an agent only if, were he reasonable and adequately informed, then he would have a sufficient reason from his own perspective to support it.

Given this weaker, counterfactual construal of what makes for morally permissible coercion, the argument from respect needn't undermine the legitimacy of the state's using coercion to protect basic liberal commitments. For we can always construe those counterfactual conditions in such a way that those who in fact reject basic liberal commitments would affirm them if they were more reasonable and better informed. In that case, using coercion to ensure that they comply with basic liberal commitments would not be to disrespect them. If this is correct, the prospect of there being figures such as Qutb, who reject the right to religious freedom, need not undermine the legitimacy of the state's coercive enforcement of that basic liberal commitment.

Liberal critics find this response unsatisfactory. After all, if this alternative construal of the argument is to succeed, it must be the case not only that:

Were an agent such as Qutb reasonable and adequately informed, he would have sufficient reason from his own perspective to support coercive laws that protect the right to religious liberty;

Every coercive law that protects basic liberal commitments is such that adequately informed and reasonable secular citizens would have a sufficient secular reason to support it.

These two claims, however, are highly controversial. Let us consider the first. Were we to ask Qutb whether he would have reasons to support laws that protect a robust right to religious freedom if he were adequately informed and reasonable, surely he would say: no. Moreover, he would claim that his compatriots would reject the liberal protection of such a right if they were adequately informed about the divine authorship of the Quran and the proper rules of its interpretation. While Qutb's say-so doesn't settle the issue of who would believe what in improved conditions, liberal critics maintain that his response indicates just how complicated the issue under consideration is. Among other things, to establish that Qutb is wrong it seems that one would have to deny the truth of various theological claims on which Qutb relies when he determines that he would reject the right to religious freedom were he adequately informed and reasonable. That would require advocates of the standard view to take a stand on contested religious issues. However, liberal critics point out that defenders of the standard view have been wary of explicitly denying the truth of religious claims, especially those found within the major theistic religions.

Turn now to the second claim. Some liberal critics of the standard view, such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, maintain that at the heart of liberal democracy is the claim that some coercive laws function to protect inherent human rights. Wolterstorff further argues that attempts to ground these rights in merely secular considerations fail. Only by appeal to explicitly theistic assumptions, Wolterstorff argues, can we locate an adequate justification for the ascription of these rights (see Wolterstorff 2008, Pt. III as well as Perry 2003). What would a reasonable and adequately informed secular citizen make of Wolterstorff's arguments? Would he endorse them?

It's difficult to say. Liberal critics maintain that we are simply not in good epistemic position to judge the reasons an agent would have to support laws that protect basic liberal commitments were he better informed and more reasonable. More exactly, liberal critics maintain that we are not in a good epistemic position to determine whether a secular agent who is reasonable and better informed would endorse or reject the type of theistic commitments that philosophers such as Wolterstorff claim justify the ascription of natural human rights. The problem is that we don't really have any idea how radically a person would change his views were he to occupy these conditions. The main, and still unresolved, question for this version of the standard view, then, is whether there is some coherent and non-arbitrary construal of the relevant counterfactual conditions that is strong enough to prohibit exclusive reliance on religious reasons but weak enough to allow for the justification of basic liberal commitments. (See Vallier 2014 for the most recent and sophisticated attempt to specify those counterfactual conditions.)

In the last section, we considered three arguments for the DRR and responses to them offered by the liberal critics. In the course of our discussion, we began to see elements of the view that liberal critics of the standard view—critics such as Christopher Eberle, Philip Quinn, Jeffrey Stout, and Nicholas Wolterstorff—endorse. To get a better feel for why these theorists reject the DRR, it will be helpful to step back for a moment to consider some important features of their view.

Earlier we indicated that liberal critics of the standard view offer detailed replies to both the Argument from Religious Warfare and the Argument from Divisiveness. Still, friends of the standard view may worry that there is something deeply problematic about these replies. For by allowing citizens to support coercive laws on purely religious grounds, they permit majorities to impose their religious views on others and restrict the liberties of their fellow citizens. But it is important to see that no liberal critic of the standard position adopts an “anything goes” policy toward the justification of state coercion. Citizens, according to these thinkers, should adhere to several constraints on the manner in which they support coercive laws, including the following.

First, liberal critics of the standard view assume that citizens should support basic liberal commitments such as the rights to religious freedom, equality before the law, and private property. Michael Perry argues, for example, “that the foundational moral commitment of liberal democracy is to the true and full humanity of ever y person—and therefore, to the inviolability of every person—without regard to race, sex, religion… .” This commitment, Perry continues, is “the principal ground of liberal democracy's further commitment to certain basic human freedoms” that are protected by law (Perry 2003, 36). [ 13 ] More generally, liberal critics maintain that citizens should support only those coercive laws that they reasonably believe further the common good and are consistent with the demands of justice. These commitments, they add, are not in tension with the claim that citizens may support coercive laws that they believe to lack a plausible secular rationale. So long as a citizen is firmly committed to basic liberal rights, she may coherently and without impropriety do so even though she regards these laws as having no plausible secular justification. More generally, liberal critics of the DRR maintain that a citizen may rely on her religious convictions to determine which policies further the cause of justice and the common good and may support coercive laws even if she regards them as having no plausible secular rationale.

Second, liberal critics of the standard view lay down constraints on the manner in which citizens arrive at their political commitments (see Eberle 2002, Weithman 2002, and Wolterstorff 1997, 2012a). So, for example, each citizen should abide by certain epistemic requirements: precisely because they ought not to support coercive laws that violate the requirements of justice and the common good, citizens should take feasible measures to determine whether the laws they support are actually just and good. In order to achieve that aim, citizens should search for considerations relevant to the normative propriety of their favored laws, weigh those considerations judiciously, listen carefully to the criticisms of those who reject their normative commitments, and be willing to change their political commitments should the balance of relevant considerations require them to do so. Again, liberal critics deny that even the most conscientious and assiduous adherence to such constraints precludes citizens from supporting coercive laws that require a religious rationale. No doubt, those who support coercive laws that require a religious rationale might do so in an insular, intransigent, irrational, or otherwise defective manner. But they need not do so and, thus, their religiously-grounded support for coercive laws need not be defective.

Third, critics of the standard view need have no aversion to secular justification and so need not object to a state of affairs in which each person, secular or religious, has what he or she regards as a compelling reason to endorse coercive laws of various sorts. (Indeed, they claim that such a state of affairs would arguably be a significant moral achievement—a good for all concerned.) According to the liberal critics, however, what is most important is that parity reigns: any normative constraint that applies to the reasons on the basis of which citizens make political decisions must apply impartially to both religious and secular reasons. Many secular reasons employed to justify coercion—ones that appeal to comprehensive perspectives such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, for example—are highly controversial; in this sense, they are very similar to religious reasons. For this reason, some advocate for a cousin —more or less distant, depending on the formulation—of the DRR, namely, one that lays down restrictions on all religious reasons and on some particularly controversial secular reasons. (See section 6 below.) Moreover, the normative issues implicated by certain coercive laws are so complex and contentious that any rationale for or against these laws will include claims that can be reasonably rejected—secular or religious as the case might be.

If this is right, according to the liberal critics, equal treatment of religious and secular reasons is the order of the day: religious believers have no more, and no less, a responsibility to aspire to persuade their secular compatriots by appeal to secular reasons than secularists have an obligation to aspire to persuade their religious compatriots by appeal to religious reasons. Otherwise put, according to the liberal critics, if we accept the claim that:

If a religious citizen finds herself in a position in which she has excellent reason to believe that she cannot convince a fellow secular citizen to support a coercive law that she deems just by appeal to religious reasons, then she should do her best to appeal to secular reasons—reasons that her cohort may find persuasive;

we should also accept:

If a secular citizen finds herself in a position in which she has excellent reason to believe that she cannot convince a fellow religious citizen to support a coercive law that she deems just by appeal to secular reasons, then she should do her best to appeal to religious reasons—reasons that her cohort may find persuasive.

Recognizing parity of this sort, according to the liberal critics, lies at the heart of what it is to be a good citizen of a liberal democracy. For being a good citizen involves respecting one's fellow citizens, even when one disagrees with them. In a wide range of cases, however, an agent exercises respect not by treating her interlocutor as a generic human being or a generic citizen of a liberal democracy, but by treating her as a person who has a particular narrative identity and life history, say, as an African American, a Russian immigrant, or a Muslim citizen. But doing this often requires pursuing and appealing to considerations that it is likely that one's interlocutors with their own particular narrative identity will find persuasive. And depending on the case, these reasons may be exclusively religious.

To this we should add a clarification: strictly speaking, the liberal critics' insistence on parity between the pursuit of secular and religious reasons is consistent with the DRR. For, as we have construed it, the DRR allows that religious citizens may support coercive laws for religious reasons (so long as they have and are prepared to provide a plausible secular justification for these laws). And while its advocates do not typically emphasize the point, the DRR permits secular citizens to articulate religious reasons that will persuade religious believers to accept the secular citizens' favored coercive laws (for reservations about this practice, see Audi 1997, 135-37 on “leveraging reasons”. See also Schwartzman 2014). Still, the DRR implies that there is an important asymmetry between the justificatory role played by religious and secular reasons. To this issue we now turn.

Assume that, in religiously pluralistic conditions, religious citizens have good moral reason—perhaps even a moral obligation—to pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws. Assume as well that secular citizens have good reason to pursue religious reasons for their favored coercive policies (if only because, with respect to some coercive laws, some of their fellow citizens find only religious reasons to support them). What should citizens do, religious or secular, when they cannot identify these reasons?

According to advocates of the standard view, if a religious citizen fails in his pursuit of secular reasons that support a given coercive law, then he is morally required to exercise restraint. After all, if his pursuit of these reasons fails, then he does not have any secular reason to offer in favor of that law. Liberal critics of the standard view, by contrast, deny that citizens so circumstanced are morally required to exercise restraint. They claim that from the fact that religious citizens are morally required to pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws (when that is necessary for persuasion), it does not follow that they should refrain from supporting coercive laws if their pursuit of secular reasons fails. Because our having an obligation to try to bring about some state of affairs tells us nothing about what we ought to do if we cannot bring it about, nothing like the DRR follows from the claim that citizens should pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws. According to the liberal critics, a parallel position applies to non-religious citizens: from the fact that non-religious citizens are morally required to pursue religious reasons for their favored laws (when that is necessary for persuasion), it doesn't follow that they should refrain from supporting coercive laws if their pursuit of religious reasons fails. For the liberal critics, parity between the religious and the secular obtains both with respect to the obligation to pursue justifying reasons and with respect to the permission not to exercise restraint when that pursuit fails.

Have we identified a genuine point of disagreement between the liberal critics and advocates of the standard view? It seems so. If the liberal critics are correct, all that can be reasonably asked of religious citizens is that, in a pluralistic liberal democracy, they competently pursue secular reasons for the coercive laws they support. If the pursuit fails, then they may support these laws for exclusively religious reasons. Proponents of the standard view disagree, maintaining that if the pursuit fails, these citizens must exercise restraint. This disagreement is rooted in differing convictions about the justificatory role that religious reasons can play. Once again, advocates of the standard view maintain that religious reasons can play only a limited justificatory role: citizens must have and be prepared to offer (at least certain kinds of) secular reasons for any coercive law that they support, as religious reasons are not enough. The liberal critics deny this, maintaining that no persuasive arguments have been offered to believe this. The DRR highlights this disagreement, as it incorporates an assumption that religious and secular reasons play asymmetrical roles in justifying coercive laws. [ 14 ]

As we have explicated the view of the liberal critics, religious citizens are (in a wide range of cases) morally required to pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws, but they needn't exercise restraint if they fail in their pursuit. But this position raises a question: What's so bad about requiring citizens to exercise restraint? Why should liberal critics object to this?

According to the liberal critics, one of the core commitments of a liberal democracy is a commitment to religious freedom and its natural extension, the right to freedom of conscience. When citizens use the modicum of political influence at their disposal, liberal critics claim that we should want them to do so in a way that furthers the cause of justice and the common good. So, for example, when a citizen deliberates about whether he should, say, support the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its NATO allies, we want him to determine, as best he can, whether the invasion of Afghanistan is actually morally appropriate. In order to determine that, he should be as conscientious as he can in his collection and evaluation of the relevant evidence, reach whatever conclusions seem reasonable to him on the available evidence, and act accordingly. If he concludes that invading Afghanistan would be unjust, then he should oppose it. That he does so is not only his right but also morally excellent, as acting in accord with responsibly held normative commitments is an important moral and civic good.

This, the liberal critics maintain, suggests a general claim. Whatever the policy and whatever the reasons—whether religious or secular—we have powerful reason to want citizens to support the coercive policies that they believe, in good conscience, to be morally appropriate. But that general claim has direct application to the issue at hand. It is possible, the liberal critics claim, for a morally sensitive and epistemically competent citizen to regard only certain religious considerations as providing decisive support for a given coercive law. Nicholas Wolterstorff, to return to an earlier example, maintains that only theistic considerations can ground the ascription of inherent human rights, some of which are protected by coercive law. Arguably, were a citizen to find a position such as Wolterstorff's persuasive, then he should appeal to those considerations that he actually believes to further the cause of justice and the common good. And this should lead us to want him to support that law, even though he does so solely on religious grounds, even if he regards that law as having no plausible secular justification. Good citizenship in a pluralistic liberal democracy unavoidably requires citizens to make political commitments that they know their moral and epistemic peers reject but that they nevertheless believe, with due humility, to be morally required. This ideal of good citizenship, so the liberal critics claim, applies to religious and secular citizens alike.

The portrait that we have offered of the standard view (and that of its liberal critics) is a composite, one which blends together various claims that its advocates make about the relation between coercive law and religious reasons. Because of this approach we have made relatively little explicit mention of particular advocates of the standard view, such as that towering figure of contemporary political philosophy, John Rawls. Of all the contemporary figures who have shaped the debate we are considering, however, none has exercised more influence than Rawls. It is natural to wonder, then, whether we've presented the standard view in its most powerful form and, thus, whether we've omitted a crucial dimension of the debate between the standard view and its liberal critics. We believe not. The version of the standard view that we have considered is one that borrows liberally from Rawls' thought, albeit softened and modified in certain ways. Still, before moving forward, it will be helpful to say something more about Rawls' view. We limit ourselves to the following three observations.

First, Rawls' own position about the relation between coercive law and religious reasons has shifted. In Political Liberalism , Rawls admits that at one point he inclined toward accepting an ambitious version of the DRR according to which each citizen of a liberal democracy ought not to appeal to religious reasons when deliberating about matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials (see Rawls 1993, 247 n.36). In the face of criticism, Rawls modified his position, arriving at a close relative of the DRR, viz., that while an agent may appeal to religious reasons to justify coercive law, he may not appeal solely to these reasons. Secular reasons must be forthcoming (see Rawls 1997). [ 15 ]

Second, Rawls places significant restrictions on the content of the secular reasons to which an agent may appeal. To advert to a point made earlier, Rawls argues that when deliberating about matters of basic justice and constitutional essentials, citizens should appeal to “public reason,” which (roughly speaking) is a fund of shared principles about justice and the common good that is constructed from the shared political culture of a liberal democracy—principles that concern, for example, the equality of citizens before the law and their right to a fair system of cooperation. In Rawls' view, when deliberating about these matters, appealing solely to secular comprehensive accounts of the good such as Aristotelianism or utilitarianism is no more legitimate than appealing solely to religious reasons. For all of these comprehensive doctrines will be alien to some of one's reasonable compatriots.

As will have been evident, in our presentation of the DRR, we have relaxed Rawls' stipulation, allowing for the legitimacy of appealing to only secular reasons that have their home in one or another comprehensive conception of the good. This might render the DRR vulnerable to the criticism that it invidiously and arbitrarily discriminates against religion. But the Rawlsian 'public reason' alternative is also vulnerable to criticism. It is not clear, for one thing, that the content of public reason will be rich enough to provide compelling reasons to support genuinely informative positions on matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials. Perhaps, for example, the claims that belong to public reason are only fairly sweeping ones that ascribe basic rights of various sorts but offer no guidance about how they should be weighed (see Quinn 1997, 149-52). Furthermore, it is unclear that appealing to public reason is the best way to respect one's fellow citizens. Perhaps, as Wolterstorff and Stout have argued, respect is better served both by explicitly disclosing to one's interlocutors the reasons one finds most persuasive (whatever they may be) and appealing to reasons that they might most find most persuasive, given their own commitments to one or another comprehensive perspective (see Wolterstorff 1997 and Stout 2004, Chs. 2-4).

In fact, Wolterstorff has argued that, ironically, Rawls' methodology has the implication that appealing to public reason would be to treat others with profound disrespect. For note that when Rawls formulates his version of public reason, he claims that it will incorporate the idea that liberal democracy is a society with a system of fair cooperation over time. How do we identify such a system? Rawls maintains that doing so requires that we set off to the side those who are “unreasonable” – these being those who are “unwilling to honor, or even to propose … fair terms of cooperation” (Rawls 1993, 51). But, as Wolterstorff contends, there are many who do not satisfy Rawls' account of reasonability, including those who think of politics not in terms of distributive justice but other categories such as preserving individual liberty, protecting small government, maximizing their own wealth, and so on. The implication of setting these people off to the side is that, when engaging in public political deliberation about some issue of basic justice, the “reasonable” citizens are free to ignore the views of their “unreasonable” compatriots. This, however, raises the concern that far from advocating a system in which all other citizens are respected as free and equal, Rawls' view has the paradoxical implication that “to follow the duty of civility is perforce to perpetrate injustice” by Rawls' own lights (Wolterstorff 2012, 121).

Third, as Paul Weithman points out (in Weithman 2007), there are really two types of argument that Rawls provides in favor of his position. The first is a variant of the argument from respect. More specifically, it is a relative to the first version of the argument from respect that we considered earlier, which maintains that coercive laws are morally legitimate only if they can be justified to citizens of a liberal democracy with their actual commitments and beliefs. This argument, if the liberal critics are correct, is subject to some fairly powerful replies, among which is that, given the fact that there is widespread pluralism about God and the good among the citizens of liberal democracies, it is impossible for coercive laws that protect basic liberal commitments to be justified to them. The second type of argument that Rawls provides in favor of his favored restrictions on religious reasons, however, appeals not to the claim that justifying coercion on the basis of alien reasons disrespects our compatriots, but to the idea that the reasons on which we rely must be ones that others can endorse as autonomous agents. In Kantian categories, this second line of argument singles out not the evil of heteronomous considerations, but the goodness of considerations that autonomous and reasonable agents could accept as an appropriate basis for settling fundamental political questions.

It is difficult to see, however, that this latter argument genuinely moves beyond the argument from respect. The problem is that it is not evident that the content of what Rawls terms public reason is that to which reasonable and autonomous agents would primarily appeal when attempting to settle fundamental political questions. Once again, the content of public reason may be too thin to settle anything of importance. Moreover, it is unclear that reasonable and autonomous agents would regard as inappropriate a democratic system in which agents bring to the table whatever reasons that seem best to them and vote solely on their basis.

Imagine, for example, a scenario in which citizens of a liberal democracy such as ours must deliberate on an issue of basic justice such as health care reform. One approach these citizens might take is Rawls': they appeal primarily to public reason. Another approach is that they try to forge a consensus about the issue that incorporates features that belong to rather different comprehensive perspectives. According to this latter approach, Jews, Christians, Kantians, Buddhists, and Aristotelians all offer each other the reasons from their own comprehensive perspectives that seem to support health care reform, pointing out to each other the degree to which their reasons overlap. No public reasons are offered, only a plethora of particularistic reasons each of which is reasonably rejected by some citizens. Then the matter is put to a vote. Would an agent who is reasonable and autonomous reject this procedure in favor of appealing to public reason? According to the liberal critics, it is difficult to see why we should believe he would. If so, the connection that Rawls attempts to forge between the exercise of autonomy and public reason is too tight. (In the next section, we discuss a version of ‘public reason liberalism’ that incorporates the basic idea that respect for persons is compatible with each citizen’s offering to one non-shared, non-public reasons for state coercion.)

A final concern is worth airing. Figures such as Philip Quinn, Jeffrey Stout, and Nicholas Wolterstorff interpret Rawls as addressing the issue of how citizens in actual liberal democracies ought to conduct themselves when debating matters of justice and the common good. But there is evidence that Rawls' texts ought not to be read in this way. For, as Rawls indicates at various places, he takes himself to be discussing well-ordered societies. A well-ordered society is such that it contains no egoists, everyone complies with the principles of justice, everyone wants to participate in forms of social life that call forth their own and others' natural talents, treachery and betrayal are absent, and its members want to cooperate with others on terms that are mutually justifiable and affirm only reasonable comprehensive doctrines (Weithman 2012, 65, 162, 169, 310). In short, a well-ordered society is nothing like the actual world but is something approximating a political Utopia.

Suppose Rawls were to establish that in a well-ordered society agents would conform to his favored version of the restrictions on religious reasons. This would not imply that, in those circumstances in which we actually find ourselves, citizens should appeal to his version, thinking of it as a regulatory ideal in their political thinking. Not all ideals, after all, are worth pursuing. It might be, for example, that pursuing the Rawlsian ideal would make it much more difficult for citizens to employ other approaches to political deliberation that would result in a liberal democracy being sufficiently stable for the right reasons, which, says Rawls, should be a primary objective of any liberal democracy. If this were correct, then Rawls's project would have very modest implications for how to think about the relation between religion and public reason, since it would provide little or no guidance for how citizens ought to conduct their behavior (see Cuneo 2013).

7. A Convergent Alternative

Liberal critics of the standard view have not been free of their own critics. We conclude this part of our discussion by articulating one important response.

At the heart of the liberal critics’ conception of religion and public life is a commitment to parity between the religious and the secular: because there are no morally, sociologically, or epistemically relevant differences between religious and secular reasons, religious and secular reasons may play exactly the same role in a citizen’s deliberations or decision-making regarding state coercion. This parity claim seems flatly inconsistent with the DRR – which singles out religious reasons for special, discriminatory treatment. But some theorists have argued that the parity claim, which is so important to the liberal critics, is in fact consistent with a version of the DRR. An argument of this sort has been articulated by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier (Gaus 2012, Gaus and Vallier, 2009, Vallier, 2014).

Gaus and Vallier's argument rests on two central claims. First, state coercion is presumptively wrong; each and every coercive state enactment must be justified by each and every citizen subject to it. By contrast, the lack of any state policy is not presumptively wrong, and so need not be justified – even to citizens whose well-being is affected by the lack of state activity. Second, the reasons by which state coercion is justified need not be shared by (or be accessible to) the citizens who are subject to a given coercive measure. What matters for purposes of the justification of coercion is that each citizen has sufficient reason, as judged from his or her particular perspective, to endorse state coercion. Since this view places no restrictions on the reasons to which an agent might appeal, religious and secular reasons can play exactly the same justificatory role, namely, to defeat what would, in the absence of contrary reasons, be permissible acts of state coercion.

Gaus and Vallier, then, have defended a convergence rather than a consensus account of the standard view. If this account is correct, state coercion must be justifiable to religious citizens as religious believers and when it is not, then state coercion lacks moral legitimacy. The same holds true for non-religious citizens. Although the convergent conception of the standard view accords religious reasons a potentially decisive role in defeating state coercion, and so accords religious reasons a much more prominent role in the justification of state coercion than religious reasons have on most alternative formulations of the standard view, it is also consistent with the DRR. How so?

In any liberal polity, there will inevitably be some secular citizens. If there is nothing to be said from any secular perspective that decisively justifies some coercive measure, and if the only plausible rationale for that coercive measure is a religious rationale, then there will inevitably be some citizens to whom that coercive measure cannot be justified. According to the view under consideration, such a coercive measure would be disrespectful and so illegitimate. So the convergent variation on the standard view maintains the core conviction that religious considerations cannot decisively justify state coercion in pluralistic liberal politics. The implications for the duties of religious citizens seem direct: they ought to restrain themselves from supporting any act of state coercion that they know cannot be justified other than by religious reasons. That is, they must comply with the DRR. If Gaus and Vallier are correct, then, commitment to equal treatment of religion is entirely consistent with a version of the DRR. (Gaus and Vallier, it is worth noting, reject the DRR as an account of the duties of citizens, accepting only a milder version that applies to certain public officials in certain circumstances.)

Although the convergent variation of the standard view will likely be more attractive to liberal critics than familiar alternatives, they still have reason to be skeptical. The convergent conception of the standard view is, after all, demanding: state coercion must pass muster before the bar of religious and secular reasons. However, many citizens will have compelling reasons to reject core liberal commitments. It follows that, according to the convergence view, those liberal commitments will lack justification. If so, liberal critics have reason to reject the convergent view, not because of its implications for religion but for liberalism. Consider in this regard the case of Qtub treated earlier. Qtub seems to have articulated compelling theological objections to the right to religious freedom, and thus articulated compelling theological reasons to deny that the state may coercively enforce that right. In this case, the state's enforcement of the right to religious freedom seems, according to the convergent conception, to lack legitimacy.

8. The New Traditionalism

To this point, we have been primarily concerned to articulate the standard view and lay out the response offered to it by its liberal critics. We have emphasized that there are important differences between these two views. While not trivial, these differences should not be exaggerated, however. Both views are deeply committed to the core components of liberal democracy, including the protection of basic freedoms such as the freedom to practice religion as one sees fit. Furthermore, both views recognize the legitimacy of religious reasons in political deliberation, noting the role of such reasons in important social movements such as the civil rights movement. The main difference between advocates of the standard view and their liberal critics, we've contended, is how they view the justificatory role of these reasons. That said, the liberal critics are not the only or even the most influential critics of the standard view. Indeed, if the central argument of Jeffrey Stout's book Democracy and Tradition is correct, the standard view has generated a worrisome backlash among prominent Christian theologians and political theorists. These theologians and political theorists, who Stout labels the New Traditionalists , reject not only the standard view, but also liberal democracy as such—their assumption being that the standard view is a more or less inevitable outgrowth of liberal democracy. In spite of their fairly radical position, Stout contends that these thinkers need to be taken seriously by the friends of democracy, as they exercise considerable influence in certain sectors of the academy and the culture at large.

Suppose Stout is right to say that New Traditionalists such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Stanley Hauerwas are widely influential in the academy and elsewhere. Should they be taken seriously by political philosophers? That depends on what one understands the role of political philosophers to be. Suppose, however, we assume that political philosophers should be multidisciplinary in orientation, engaging with what sociologists, psychologists, and theologians write and say. If we assume this, then taking a multidisciplinary approach in this case seems to make sense. The topic under consideration, after all, is the relation between religion and politics, and theologians have had much to say about their interrelations. Furthermore, while the approach that the New Traditionalists take to our topic is different from that taken by the advocates of the standard view—the New Traditionalists tell a historical narrative about the ills of liberal democracy—the narrative that they tell is a philosophical one. Indeed, it is a narrative whose main lines will be familiar to most philosophers working in ethics and political philosophy. It is natural to want to know whether this historical-philosophical narrative survives philosophical scrutiny. We shall close, then, by considering the narrative that the New Traditionalists tell about the emergence of modern liberal democracies, highlighting the response offered to it by the liberal critics.

Those familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre will immediately recognize the New Traditionalists' narrative. For in its broad structure, it bears a close resemblance to the one that MacIntyre tells in his three books After Virtue , Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (MacIntyre 1984, 1988, and 1990, respectively). [ 16 ] The MacIntyrean narrative is broadly declinist in character, depicting the degeneration of Western moral and political thought in the following four stages.

In the first stage, the New Traditionalists maintain that the late ancient and the high medieval thinkers of the west embraced a unified philosophical vision that includes three fundamental components. The first component is a commitment to a “thick” teleological account of the human good, according to which human beings have rational natures that can be perfected. The second component is a commitment to the claim that virtue consists in the perfection of our rational nature in both its practical and theoretical dimensions. Practical reason, according to the vision, can ascertain not merely the means to achieve one's ends, but also the very telos or end for human beings. And theoretical reason, so the vision has it, can gain genuine insight into the world by viewing the entire created order as participating in or resembling the divine nature. The third component of the vision is that moral thought and discourse should be framed primarily in terms of the virtues—the virtues providing the dominant conceptuality in terms of which we conduct moral reasoning. To which it is worth adding the following point: advocates of the MacIntyrean narrative do not deny that pre-modern societies had their share of moral, religious, and political problems. Their claim is merely that these societies enjoyed (at least in principle) the shared conceptual resources with which they could coherently address and remedy them.

In the second stage of the narrative, there is a fall into our current fragmented moral and religious condition. Although the New Traditionalists regard different movements and figures as responsible for the fall, they agree on this much: the philosophical vision that unified the societies of pre-modernity fell apart. The teleological worldview was replaced by a nominalist and mechanistic one. Practical reason became instrumentalized—viewed as merely a “slave of the passions,” to use Hume's phrase. And theoretical reason was conceived of as working in a perfectly adequate fashion apart from any commitment to there being a divinely-ordered reality. Furthermore, the language of justice and individual rights supplanted that of virtue. As a result, the state that we now occupy is one in which we no longer enjoy a shared conception of the good, and politics has become—to use MacIntyre's memorable phrase—“civil war by other means.” Without such a conception of the good, we now face all manner of moral, religious, and political problems that we lack the conceptual resources to resolve or even properly understand.

In the third stage of the narrative, New Traditionalists maintain that liberal democracy emerges as the more or less natural political consequence of the fall from the pre-modern state. Liberal democracy, according to the New Traditionalists, is not only a political structure that protects putative individual rights (such as to religious freedom), but is also committed to a broad thesis of neutrality with respect to notions of God and the good. According to this understanding of liberal democracy, the state should not enact laws that require a religious rationale and citizens should therefore comply with the DRR. Given its commitment to neutrality and the DRR, the New Traditionalists claim that liberal democracy is a mode of governance that is fundamentally at odds with the type of traditional religious way of life that informed society during its pre-modern state.

In the final stage of the narrative, New Traditionalists offer proposals of various sorts for how traditionally religious believers should cope with being citizens of a political system whose fundamental commitments are at odds with their own. The proposals are generally not injunctions to transform the liberal state. Rather, they are broadly separatist in nature, exhorting traditional believers to distance themselves from the liberal state, say, by living in small religious communities, which owe their ultimate allegiance to the church or some larger religious tradition. If they are correct, the DRR is both crucial to liberal democracy and an important reason for traditional believers to reject it.

The MacIntyrean narrative is intriguing but highly controversial. Liberal critics have raised the following two objections to it.

The first feature of the narrative to which liberal critics have drawn attention is its highly intellectualized character. If John Milbank and MacIntyre are correct, for example, the fall into secularist liberalism is driven by the influence of some fairly abstract philosophical claims about the nature of reason and existence, which were defended by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. By rejecting the broadly Augustinian/Thomistic picture of reason and existence, the New Traditionalists claim, Scotus paved the way for the rise of secularism, which is endemic to contemporary liberal democracies (see Milbank 1990 and MacIntyre 1990, Ch. 7).

Liberal critics maintain that, as a matter of intellectual history, this is not correct. Proponents of broadly Scotistic or anti-theistic views, according to thinkers such as Stout, never had the numbers or clout to change the world as dramatically as New Traditionalists claim. In fact, if Stout is correct, there is a counter-narrative to tell that is at least as plausible as the one that New Traditionalists champion. According to this counter-narrative, we should distinguish two types of secularism: on the one hand, there is secularism as understood by the standard view, which tells us that appeal to religious reasons in public political discourse is insufficient to justify coercive laws. On the other, there is broadly pluralistic secularism, which tells us merely that participants in public political discourse are not in a position to assume that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions that they are. Stout maintains that liberal democracy is committed only to secularism of the second sort. Indeed, even critics of the standard view who affirm liberal democracy on religious grounds, such as Wolterstorff, grant that liberal democracy is secular in Stout's second, pluralistic sense. Certainly, the liberal critics maintain, there is nothing about liberalism that commits it to a version of secularism in which the liberal state is an anti-Christian ecclesia or an alternate vehicle for salvation, as some New Traditionalists have claimed (see, for example, Milbank, et al. 1999, 192).

Suppose that the liberal critics are correct in their contention that liberal democracy is committed only to pluralistic secularism. Is this commitment the upshot of a broadly Scotistic view about reason and existence having taken root in modernity? If thinkers such as Stout and Wolterstorff are correct, the answer to this question is also: no. Rather, both Stout and Wolterstorff suggest that liberal democracy's commitment to secularism is the result of Christians themselves recognizing that post-Reformation Christianity itself had become so fragmented that Christians could no longer appeal to scripture and tradition in public discourse under the assumption that their interlocutors would share their views regarding scripture and tradition (see Zagorin 2003).

In support of this contention, Stout appeals to the historian Christopher Hill who maintains that in 17 th century English parliamentary politics, one increasingly finds members of parliament appealing rather less to scripture when engaging in public political discourse and rather more to considerations upon which they and their interlocutors could agree. According to this counter-narrative, “secularization was not primarily brought about by the triumph of a secularist ideology….What drove the secularization of political discourse forward was the increasing need to cope with religious plurality discursively on a daily basis under circumstances where improved transportation and communication were changing the political and economic landscape” (Stout 2004, 102). To which Stout adds that secularization (in the second, pluralistic sense specified earlier) thus understood doesn't morally or pragmatically preclude citizens from voicing their religious convictions in the public square. Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeals to religious considerations, for example, were highly politically effective.

The first worry regarding the New Traditionalists' declinist narrative, then, is that it is overly intellectualized, portraying the rise of secularism as owing primarily to the influence of philosophical ideas and not to more mundane sociological facts, such as the need to cope with increasing religious pluralism. The second worry about the narrative is that the New Traditionalists misdiagnose the character of liberal democracy, attributing to its advocates commitments that they needn't accept. To better understand this worry, recall the pattern of argument that the New Traditionalists employ, which is roughly the following:

Liberalism is committed to various philosophical claims and practices that are incompatible with orthodox theism (or at least orthodox theism in its best forms, such as Thomism).

So, orthodox theists should reject liberalism.

What are some of the claims and practices that fit poorly with orthodox theism and to which liberalism is committed? If the New Traditionalists are correct, at least these two: first, liberalism tells us that political systems should be neutral regarding various notions of God and the good; they should not operate with an account of an overriding good for human beings in whose light subsidiary goods can be ordered. Second, liberalism is committed to the claim that moral and political discourse should be couched not primarily in terms of the virtues, but individual rights. This, say the New Traditionalists has rendered liberal democracies a breeding ground for citizens who are individualistic, self-focused, and whose views and behavior are destructive of community. According to the New Traditionalists, these two claims are connected. It is because liberal democracies do not operate with a thick notion of the good that the language of rights has supplanted that of virtue. For in order for the language of the virtues to be intelligible, it must be grounded in a thick account of the good.

When properly qualified, liberal critics such as Stout are willing to grant the first of these claims: liberalism does not in fact operate with a thick notion of the good. But they reject the further claim that this has rendered appeal to the virtues in a liberal democracy irrelevant or somehow deeply conceptually confused. For consider, Stout argues, champions of liberalism within the broadly pragmatist tradition, such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey. These thinkers do not fit well into the MacIntyrean paradigm. At their best, Stout maintains, Whitman and Dewey consciously theorize from the perspective of a broadly pragmatic tradition that is committed to the centrality of the virtues, albeit within a society characterized by competing and rival conceptions of God and the good.

More specifically, Stout maintains that according to pragmatist liberals such as Dewey, good citizens of a liberal democracy aspire to express not only civility and respect in public political discourse, but also to accept some measure of responsibility for the conditions of society and the political arrangements it makes for itself. And to do this, citizens must reason with one another about the ethical issues that divide them and hold each other responsible, in ways that are decent and fair, for what is done and said. If the pragmatist liberals are right, reasoning of this sort requires that citizens of liberal democracies display virtues of various sorts, such as openness to the views of others, proper respect for their positions, and so forth. In an inversion of the MacIntyrean position, Stout contends that it is at least in part because liberal democracies do not espouse some overarching, thick conception of the good that virtues such as civility and respect are especially called for. And, particularly important for our discussion is Stout's further claim that pragmatism of this variety needn't lend any support to the standard view. Expressing the virtues of civility and respect is perfectly compatible with appealing only to religious considerations when making and supporting political decisions.

So, if the liberal critics are correct, one place to press the New Traditionalists' narrative is its claim that only within a thick, overarching account of the human good are the virtues intelligible. There is, however, a second place to press the narrative, which is its skepticism about rights. As intimated earlier, MacIntyre and the New Traditionalists portray individual rights claims as both false and dangerous, indeed, as the upshot of an Enlightenment conception of morality that is inimical to a properly religious way of life (see MacIntyre 1984 and 1983). MacIntyre, for example, writes that not only are rights claims on par with belief in “witches and unicorns,” but also that:

there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English or Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. (MacIntyre 1984, 69)

In reply, the liberal critics make two points. First, as a matter of historical fact, it is simply false that rights claims have their conceptual roots in the soil of late medieval nominalism and Enlightenment morality, as MacIntyre claims. Rather, as Wolterstorff argues, appeals to rights are ubiquitous throughout history. One can find them, for example, in the ancient Romans juridical documents such as Justinian's Digest , the writings of the church fathers, and the work of the medieval canon lawyers. [ 17 ] Indeed, according to Wolterstorff, appeals to what we call inherent or natural human rights can be traced back to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (see Wolterstorff 2008, Pts. I-II). If Wolterstorff is correct, the scriptural tradition not only birthed our conception of inherent human rights, but also provides the conceptual soil most conducive to its survival, for it offers the most cogent account of the worth of human beings. If this is true, according to Wolterstorff, there is no incompatibility between the liberal tradition's reliance on rights and a commitment to orthodox theism. To reject liberalism because it is committed to and relies heavily on the notion of rights would be a mistake.

Second, the liberal critics contend that any connection between the appeals to rights in liberalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward individualism in its citizens, on the other, is highly contingent. Perhaps it is true that contemporary liberal democracies have in fact had a strong tendency to promote individualism, where this is understood as a person's having a distorted focus on her rights to the exclusion of her obligations and responsibilities to others. But if we construe a liberal democracy minimally, as a political structure that effectively protects a certain schedule of individual rights (to religious freedom, speech, due process, and the like), it is plausible to suppose that exclusive focus on individual rights is itself a betrayal of liberalism. After all, claim-rights almost always have correlative obligations: if you have a right to religious freedom, then I have an obligation not to violate that right. Furthermore, I also have an obligation to take feasible measures to support political institutions that protect that right. Any understanding of a liberal democracy according to which citizens may insist on their rights without due regard for the obligations they bear to others and social institutions that protect these rights is arguably both incoherent and a betrayal of basic liberal commitments. Thinkers such as Wolterstorff add that for theists who affirm liberal democracy, it is natural to suppose that citizens who ignore their obligations to respect the rights of their compatriots thereby also violate God's rights. For, according to these thinkers, God has a right to be obeyed, and God demands that we respect the worth of each human being. If the liberal critics are correct, then, any individualism that attends liberal democracy is a corruption. Perhaps it is a corruption to which liberal democracies are prone; but individualism is neither a liberal commitment nor, if thinkers such as Stout and Wolterstorff are correct, an inevitable manifestation of liberal commitments.

The liberal critics, then, are highly suspicious of the New Traditionalists' narrative and the philosophical lessons they glean from it. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the narrative is largely compelling. Even if it is compelling, the liberal critics insist that the New Traditionalists have ignored an important option, viz., a minimalist account of liberal democracy. According to this position, liberalism is committed to the following pair of theses. First, the state is to be neutral with respect to different conceptions of the good. The neutrality in question, however, is inclusive in nature. It does not rule out the appeal to comprehensive conceptions of the good when making fundamental political decisions. Rather, it only rules out the claim that the state is committed to promoting one such conception. Second, the state is to protect a schedule of basic rights and liberties enjoyed by all its citizens. Its role is to ensure that its citizens can enjoy such goods as freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and equality before the law.

The liberal critics maintain that a view such as this deserves serious consideration by both defenders of the standard view and orthodox religious believers. The challenge that liberal critics such as Stout and Wolterstorff pose to New Traditionalists in particular is this: Given that moral and religious pluralism are here to stay, why would Christians and other people of faith want to reject minimal liberal democracy—liberal democracy shorn of its commitment to the standard view? What morally feasible alternative is there to a political order in which the state employs its coercive powers to protect the rights of each of its citizens?

Proponents of the New Traditionalism find this attempt on the part of the liberal critics to marry liberal democracy with traditional religious belief naïve. If they are right, any political system that professes neutrality with respect to conceptions of God and the good is unacceptable. At best, it will be inhospitable soil for a genuinely virtuous and religious way of life. At worst, any such system will be an attempt to conceal the fact that the deep structure of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on personal freedoms and procedural justice, fits poorly with the thick account of the good that orthodox religious believers endorse. According to these thinkers, the conflict between liberal democracy and traditional religion runs too deep for appeals to minimalist accounts of liberalism to be effective.

The theologico-political problem is one that concerns the problem of political authority. In its contemporary form, it primarily concerns the justification of authoritative political acts, such as the implementation of coercive laws. Can religious reasons justify the implementation of such laws? This is the central question with which political philosophers have been concerned. The standard view tells us that religious reasons are never sufficient to justify coercive law. It therefore champions the DRR, or the claim that, if a citizen is trying to determine whether or not she should support some coercive law, and if she believes that there is no plausible secular rationale for it, then it is impermissible for her to support that law. The main responses to the standard view divides into two types. Liberal critics of the view hold fast to the principles of liberal democracy but reject the DRR—in part for the reason that the DRR is illiberal. New Traditionalists, by contrast, reject both liberal democracy itself and the DRR, viewing the latter as more or less a component of the former. (On this latter point, they agree with advocates of the standard view.)

Is there likely to be any sort of rapprochement between these views? It is difficult to know. Sometimes, however, positions that occupy the conceptual middle-ground in a debate are the best candidates for unifying what can appear to be irreconcilable positions. In the case at hand, the liberal critics appear to occupy this conceptual middle-ground, straddling the standard view and the New Traditionalism. On the one hand, the liberal critics find themselves sympathetic with the political commitments of the standard view but not with the wariness about religion that often animates this position. On the other hand, the liberal critics find themselves sympathetic with some of the religious commitments embraced by the New Traditionalists but not with their suspicion of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the liberal critics are vulnerable to criticisms from both sides. Advocates of the standard view will charge that they do not take seriously enough the destructive and divisive effects of religion, hard to quantify as they might be. And friends of the New Traditionalism will maintain that they fail to recognize the corrosive effects of liberal democracy on traditional religious ways of life. These are important criticisms, married to passions that deeply divide the proponents of these views. Still, members of all parties to the debate agree that the task at hand is to articulate ways in which citizens of a deeply pluralistic liberal democracy can conduct their behavior in manners that are not only faithful to whatever religious identities they may have, but are also just and contribute to the common good.

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Here to Stay: The Role of Religion in Contemporary Politics

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Despite gradual elimination of religion’s institutional and normative links with the modern Western state, the loss of its legitimating function and its withdrawal from many spheres of social life, religious organizations remain active in the public sphere. Their survival strategy consists of claiming unique philosophical and legal status for religion and, at the same time, relegitimating themselves by emulating the behaviour of other political actors in the pluralistic public arena (mimicry strategies). In addition, they use certain religion-specific strategies grounded in their supernatural claims and thus unavailable for secular actors. This chapter concludes with a multilevel analysis of the relationship between religion and political conflict, including phenomena such as religion-induced transformation of contemporary states, religious symbolic conflict and religious extremism.

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“Successfully” does not necessarily mean without conflicts between confessions and sects within Christianity or between the church and secular rulers (over investiture, for instance). Nonetheless, nobody had seriously challenged the basic belief in the divine origin of power, even if the particulars of the relation between God and the ruler, whether it should be mediated by the church and so on, were hotly disputed.

Stark and Finke list “disenchantment” among the unfulfilled secularization prophecies ( 2000 , 58), but Weber seemed to have in mind the process whereby various spheres of life, including the political sphere, cease to be perceived from a religious perspective, as intimately linked with religion, sacralization—and not the disappearance of religiosity as such.

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Constitution of the Republic of Poland , Constitution of Ireland , Constitution of Greece . See Szymanek 2011 for a general discussion of the constitutional expression of the idea of a confessional state.

This extensive interpretation of religious freedom was reversed in the 1990s by the divided Supreme Court among hot political controversy (Potz 2015 , chaps. 2 and 5).

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — Religious Pluralism — Role of Religion in Society: Exploring its Significance and Implications

Role of Religion in Society: Exploring Its Significance and Implications

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Introduction, the significance of religion in society, the implications of religion in society, the debate surrounding the role of religion in society, the historical context of religion in society, the impact of religion on culture and identity, the role of religion in promoting social cohesion, the impact of religion on politics and governance, the relationship between religion and morality, the role of religion in promoting social justice and equality, the debate between secularism and religious influence in society, the impact of cultural attitudes towards religion on the debate, the potential consequences of religion's role in society.

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17.3 Sociological Perspectives on Religion

Learning objectives.

• Summarize the major functions of religion.
• Explain the views of religion held by the conflict perspective.
• Explain the views of religion held by the symbolic interactionist perspective.

Sociological perspectives on religion aim to understand the functions religion serves, the inequality and other problems it can reinforce and perpetuate, and the role it plays in our daily lives (Emerson, Monahan, & Mirola, 2011). Table 17.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes what these perspectives say.

Table 17.1 Theory Snapshot

The Functions of Religion

Much of the work of Émile Durkheim stressed the functions that religion serves for society regardless of how it is practiced or of what specific religious beliefs a society favors. Durkheim’s insights continue to influence sociological thinking today on the functions of religion.

First, religion gives meaning and purpose to life . Many things in life are difficult to understand. That was certainly true, as we have seen, in prehistoric times, but even in today’s highly scientific age, much of life and death remains a mystery, and religious faith and belief help many people make sense of the things science cannot tell us.

Second, religion reinforces social unity and stability . This was one of Durkheim’s most important insights. Religion strengthens social stability in at least two ways. First, it gives people a common set of beliefs and thus is an important agent of socialization (see Chapter 4 “Socialization” ). Second, the communal practice of religion, as in houses of worship, brings people together physically, facilitates their communication and other social interaction, and thus strengthens their social bonds.

The communal practice of religion in a house of worship brings people together and allows them to interact and communicate. In this way religion helps reinforce social unity and stability. This function of religion was one of Émile Durkheim’s most important insights.

Erin Rempel – Worship – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

A third function of religion is related to the one just discussed. Religion is an agent of social control and thus strengthens social order . Religion teaches people moral behavior and thus helps them learn how to be good members of society. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments are perhaps the most famous set of rules for moral behavior.

A fourth function of religion is greater psychological and physical well-being . Religious faith and practice can enhance psychological well-being by being a source of comfort to people in times of distress and by enhancing their social interaction with others in places of worship. Many studies find that people of all ages, not just the elderly, are happier and more satisfied with their lives if they are religious. Religiosity also apparently promotes better physical health, and some studies even find that religious people tend to live longer than those who are not religious (Moberg, 2008). We return to this function later.

A final function of religion is that it may motivate people to work for positive social change . Religion played a central role in the development of the Southern civil rights movement a few decades ago. Religious beliefs motivated Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to risk their lives to desegregate the South. Black churches in the South also served as settings in which the civil rights movement held meetings, recruited new members, and raised money (Morris, 1984).

Religion, Inequality, and Conflict

Religion has all of these benefits, but, according to conflict theory, it can also reinforce and promote social inequality and social conflict. This view is partly inspired by the work of Karl Marx, who said that religion was the “opiate of the masses” (Marx, 1964). By this he meant that religion, like a drug, makes people happy with their existing conditions. Marx repeatedly stressed that workers needed to rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie. To do so, he said, they needed first to recognize that their poverty stemmed from their oppression by the bourgeoisie. But people who are religious, he said, tend to view their poverty in religious terms. They think it is God’s will that they are poor, either because he is testing their faith in him or because they have violated his rules. Many people believe that if they endure their suffering, they will be rewarded in the afterlife. Their religious views lead them not to blame the capitalist class for their poverty and thus not to revolt. For these reasons, said Marx, religion leads the poor to accept their fate and helps maintain the existing system of social inequality.

As Chapter 11 “Gender and Gender Inequality” discussed, religion also promotes gender inequality by presenting negative stereotypes about women and by reinforcing traditional views about their subordination to men (Klassen, 2009). A declaration a decade ago by the Southern Baptist Convention that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership reflected traditional religious belief (Gundy-Volf, 1998).

As the Puritans’ persecution of non-Puritans illustrates, religion can also promote social conflict, and the history of the world shows that individual people and whole communities and nations are quite ready to persecute, kill, and go to war over religious differences. We see this today and in the recent past in central Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. Jews and other religious groups have been persecuted and killed since ancient times. Religion can be the source of social unity and cohesion, but over the centuries it also has led to persecution, torture, and wanton bloodshed.

News reports going back since the 1990s indicate a final problem that religion can cause, and that is sexual abuse, at least in the Catholic Church. As you undoubtedly have heard, an unknown number of children were sexually abused by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States, Canada, and many other nations going back at least to the 1960s. There is much evidence that the Church hierarchy did little or nothing to stop the abuse or to sanction the offenders who were committing it, and that they did not report it to law enforcement agencies. Various divisions of the Church have paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits. The numbers of priests, deacons, and children involved will almost certainly never be known, but it is estimated that at least 4,400 priests and deacons in the United States, or about 4% of all such officials, have been accused of sexual abuse, although fewer than 2,000 had the allegations against them proven (Terry & Smith, 2006). Given these estimates, the number of children who were abused probably runs into the thousands.

Symbolic Interactionism and Religion

While functional and conflict theories look at the macro aspects of religion and society, symbolic interactionism looks at the micro aspects. It examines the role that religion plays in our daily lives and the ways in which we interpret religious experiences. For example, it emphasizes that beliefs and practices are not sacred unless people regard them as such. Once we regard them as sacred, they take on special significance and give meaning to our lives. Symbolic interactionists study the ways in which people practice their faith and interact in houses of worship and other religious settings, and they study how and why religious faith and practice have positive consequences for individual psychological and physical well-being.

The cross, Star of David, and the crescent and star are symbols of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, respectively. The symbolic interactionist perspective emphasizes the ways in which individuals interpret their religious experiences and religious symbols.

zeevveez – Star of David Coexistence- 2 – CC BY 2.0.

Religious symbols indicate the value of the symbolic interactionist approach. A crescent moon and a star are just two shapes in the sky, but together they constitute the international symbol of Islam. A cross is merely two lines or bars in the shape of a “t,” but to tens of millions of Christians it is a symbol with deeply religious significance. A Star of David consists of two superimposed triangles in the shape of a six-pointed star, but to Jews around the world it is a sign of their religious faith and a reminder of their history of persecution.

Religious rituals and ceremonies also illustrate the symbolic interactionist approach. They can be deeply intense and can involve crying, laughing, screaming, trancelike conditions, a feeling of oneness with those around you, and other emotional and psychological states. For many people they can be transformative experiences, while for others they are not transformative but are deeply moving nonetheless.

Key Takeaways

• Religion ideally serves several functions. It gives meaning and purpose to life, reinforces social unity and stability, serves as an agent of social control, promotes psychological and physical well-being, and may motivate people to work for positive social change.
• On the other hand, religion may help keep poor people happy with their lot in life, promote traditional views about gender roles, and engender intolerance toward people whose religious faith differs from one’s own.
• The symbolic interactionist perspective emphasizes how religion affects the daily lives of individuals and how they interpret their religious experiences.

For Your Review

• Of the several functions of religion that were discussed, which function do you think is the most important? Why?
• Which of the three theoretical perspectives on religion makes the most sense to you? Explain your choice.

Emerson, M. O., Monahan, S. C., & Mirola, W. A. (2011). Religion matters: What sociology teaches us about religion in our world . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Gundy-Volf, J. (1998, September–October). Neither biblical nor just: Southern Baptists and the subordination of women. Sojourners , 12–13.

Klassen, P. (Ed.). (2009). Women and religion . New York, NY: Routledge.

Marx, K. (1964). Karl Marx: Selected writings in sociology and social philosophy (T. B. Bottomore, Trans.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Moberg, D. O. (2008). Spirituality and aging: Research and implications. Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging, 20 , 95–134.

Morris, A. (1984). The origins of the civil rights movement: Black communities organizing for change . New York, NY: Free Press.

Terry, K., & Smith, M. L. (2006). The nature and scope of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and deacons in the United States: Supplementary data analysis . Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Americans Have Positive Views About Religion’s Role in Society, but Want It Out of Politics

Most say religion is losing influence in American life

Table of contents.

• 1. Many in U.S. see religious organizations as forces for good, but prefer them to stay out of politics
• 2. Most congregants trust clergy to give advice about religious issues, fewer trust clergy on personal matters
• 3. Americans trust both religious and nonreligious people, but most rarely discuss religion with family or friends
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

A large majority of Americans feel that religion is losing influence in public life, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. While some say this is a good thing, many more view it as a negative development, reflecting the broad tendency of Americans to see religion as a positive force in society.

At the same time, U.S. adults are resoundingly clear in their belief that religious institutions should stay out of politics. Nearly two-thirds of Americans in the new survey say churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters, while 36% say they should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions. And three-quarters of the public expresses the view that churches should not come out in favor of one candidate over another during elections, in contrast with efforts by President Trump to roll back existing legal limits on houses of worship endorsing candidates. 1

In addition, Americans are more likely to say that churches and other houses of worship currently have too much influence in politics (37%) rather than too little (28%), while the remaining one-third (34%) say religious groups’ current level of influence on politics is about right.

On balance, U.S. adults have a favorable view about the role religious institutions play in American life more broadly – beyond politics. More than half of the public believes that churches and religious organizations do more good than harm in American society, while just one-in-five Americans say religious organizations do more harm than good. Likewise, there are far more U.S. adults who say that religious organizations strengthen morality in society and mostly bring people together than there are who say that religious organizations weaken morality and mostly push people apart. On all three of these questions, views have held steady since 2017 , the last time the Center measured opinions on these issues.

The survey also shows that roughly four-in-ten U.S. adults – including a majority of Christians – lament what they perceive as religion’s declining influence on American society, while fewer than two-in-ten say they think religion is losing influence in American life and that this is a good thing. In addition, roughly two-thirds of the public believes that religious leaders in general have high or very high ethical standards, and a larger share of Americans who attend religious services at least a few times a year say this about the clergy in their own congregations. Among these U.S. adults who attend religious services, majorities express at least “some” confidence in their clergy to provide useful guidance not only on clearly religious topics (such as how to interpret scripture) but also on other matters, such as parenting and personal finance (see Chapter 2 ).

These are among the key findings from a nationally representative survey of 6,364 U.S. adults conducted online from March 18 to April 1, 2019, using Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points. Many of the questions in the survey were asked only of U.S. adults who attend religious services a few times a year or more often; results for that group have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

The survey, part of an ongoing effort by the Center to explore the role of trust, facts and democracy in American society, was designed to gauge the public’s views about many aspects of religion’s role in public life, as well as asking how much U.S. adults trust clergy to provide various kinds of guidance, what messages Americans receive from their clergy about other religious groups, how satisfied they are with the sermons they hear, how close they feel to their religious leaders, and whether they know – and share – the political views of the clergy in their houses of worship.

The survey shows that slightly more than half of U.S. adults say that the Republican Party is friendly toward religion (54%), while just under half say the same about the Trump administration (47%). Far fewer say these two groups are unfriendly toward religion. Other major societal institutions are viewed by majorities or pluralities of the public as neutral toward religion; for instance, roughly seven-in-ten U.S. adults say the Supreme Court is neutral toward religion.

Equal shares say that reporters and the news media (54%) and university professors (54%) are neutral toward religion, and 48% say this about the Democratic Party. In each of these cases, however, Americans are considerably more likely to say these groups are unfriendly toward religion than to say they are friendly. For instance, more than one-third of the public (37%) says university professors are unfriendly to religion, while just 6% say professors are friendly to religion.

On balance, Republicans and Democrats mostly agree with each other that the GOP is friendly toward religion. They disagree, however, in their views about the Democratic Party; most Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party say the Democratic Party is unfriendly toward religion, while most Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party view their own party as neutral toward religion.

Partisan differences in views toward religion in public life

The survey also finds that four-in-ten U.S. adults (including six-in-ten among those who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party) think religious conservatives have too much control over the Republican Party. At the same time, one-third of Americans (including six-in-ten among those who identify with or lean toward the GOP) say liberals who are not religious have too much control over the Democratic Party.

More broadly, Republicans and Democrats express very different opinions about religion’s impact on American public life. Seven-in-ten Republicans say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm in the U.S., and two-thirds say these institutions strengthen morality in American society and mostly bring people together (rather than push them apart). On all three of these measures, Democrats are less likely to share these positive views of religious organizations. 2

Furthermore, most Republicans say religion either has about the right amount of influence (44%) or not enough influence (38%) in the political sphere, while a slim majority of Democrats say that religion has too much influence in politics (54%). And although most Republicans and Democrats (including those who lean toward each party) agree that religion is losing influence in American life, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to view this as a regrettable development (63% vs. 27%). There are about as many Democrats who say religion’s decline is a good thing (25%) as there are who say it is a bad thing (27%), with 22% of Democrats saying religion’s declining influence doesn’t make much difference either way.

Feelings about religion vary among Democrats based on race and ethnicity

There are stark racial differences among Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party in views on religion’s role in society: Black Democrats consistently express more positive views of religious institutions than do white Democrats. For example, half or more of black Democrats say churches and religious organizations do more good than harm in American society, mostly bring people together (rather than push them apart), and strengthen morality in society. White Democrats are substantially less inclined than black Democrats to hold these views.

In addition, two-thirds of white Democrats say churches have too much political power, compared with only three-in-ten black Democrats and four-in-ten Hispanic Democrats who say this. In fact, black Democrats are just as likely as white Republicans to say churches do not have enough influence in politics (37% each). 3  And while one-third of white Democrats (33%) say that religion is losing influence in society more broadly and that this is a good thing, far fewer black (9%) and Hispanic (18%) Democrats agree.

Americans who attend religious services largely satisfied with political talk by clergy

The survey also sought to gauge people’s perceptions about the politics of their clergy, finding that relatively few Americans say their clergy are united on one side of the partisan divide. In fact, many Americans who attend religious services at least a few times a year say they are unsure of the party affiliation of the clergy at their place of worship (45%), while about one-in-four say their clergy are a mix of both Republicans and Democrats (27%). 4  When those who attend religious services think they know their leaders’ party affiliation, slightly more say their clergy are mostly Republicans (16%) than say they are mostly Democrats (11%).

Among partisans, few say their clergy are mostly members of the opposite party. For example, among those who attend religious services at least a few times a year and identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, just 4% say their clergy are mostly Democrats, while 23% say they are Republicans. Similarly, among Democrats and Democratic leaners, 8% say their clergy are Republicans, while 20% say their clergy are Democrats. Among both groups, most say they are unsure of the political leanings of their clergy, or say that there is a mix of both Republicans and Democrats in the religious leadership of their congregation.

Most attenders – including majorities in both parties – are satisfied with the amount of political discussion they’re hearing in sermons. About seven-in-ten say the sermons at their place of worship have about the right amount of political discussion, while 14% say there is not enough political talk and 11% say there is too much political talk in the sermons they hear.

Furthermore, congregants tend to agree with their clergy when politics is discussed: Overall, about six-in-ten say they generally agree with their clergy about politics (62%), although Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say this (70% vs. 56%).

The survey asked those who attend religious services at least a few times a year the extent to which religious leaders help inform their opinion about three social and political issues: abortion, immigration and global climate change. Four-in-ten religious service attenders have a lot of confidence in their clergy to provide useful guidance to inform their opinion on abortion. Smaller shares have a lot of trust in their clergy’s guidance about immigration (20%) or global climate change (13%).

Republican attenders are much more likely than Democrats who go to religious services to say they have a lot of confidence in their clergy to provide guidance about abortion (53% vs. 25%). Catholics are consistently less likely than Protestants – particularly evangelical Protestants – to say they trust their clergy on all three issues. On abortion, for example, 34% of Catholics say they have a lot of trust in their clergy to provide guidance that helps form their opinion, compared with 46% of Protestants overall and 57% of evangelical Protestants who say this. Mainline Protestants (33%) and members of the historically black Protestant tradition (32%) look similar to Catholics on this question.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• Americans who attend religious services with any regularity express “a lot” of trust in the clergy or other religious leaders at their place of worship to provide advice about religious questions, such as growing closer to God or how to interpret scripture. They are more skeptical about advice from their religious leaders on other common life milestones and issues, such as marriage and relationships, parenting, mental health problems, and personal finances, although most express at least “some” confidence in their clergy to weigh in on these topics. And in general, Catholics are less likely than Protestants to say they trust their clergy to provide advice on these issues. (For more, see here .)
• Most adults who attend religious services a few times a year or more describe themselves as having at least a “somewhat close” relationship with the clergy at their place of worship, although respondents are much more likely to say they have a “somewhat close” relationship with their clergy (50%) than a “very close” one (19%). About three-in-ten say they are not close with the clergy at their congregation (29%). Just 8% of Catholics say they are very close with their clergy, a much lower share than in any other major U.S. Christian group analyzed. (For more, see here .)
• Many U.S. adults hear messages about religious groups other than their own from their clergy or other religious leaders. About four-in-ten religious service attenders have heard their clergy speak out about atheists (43%), while slightly fewer have heard clergy speak out about Catholics or Jews (37% each). About one-third of attenders say they’ve heard their clergy mention evangelical Christians (33%) or Muslims (31%). In terms of the types of messages congregants are hearing from their clergy, the messages about atheists tend to be more negative than positive, while the sentiments toward Jews are mostly positive. 5  (For more, see here .)
• When searching for information about their religion’s teachings, religiously affiliated adults say scripture is the most trusted source. Six-in-ten U.S. adults who identify with a religious group say they have “a lot” of confidence in the information they’d find in scripture, and an additional three-in-ten say they have “some” confidence in this source. Four-in-ten would have a lot of confidence in the clergy at their congregation to give information about religious teachings. Fewer place a high level of trust in family, professors of religion, friends, religious leaders with a large national or international following, or information found online. (For more, see here .)
• Most Americans (66%) say religious and nonreligious people generally are equally trustworthy, while fewer think religious people are more trustworthy than nonreligious people (21%) or that nonreligious people are the more trustworthy ones (12%). Majorities across religious groups say religious and nonreligious people are equally trustworthy, but evangelical Protestants are more likely than others to say religious people are especially trustworthy, and self-described atheists are particularly likely to put more trust in nonreligious people. (For more, see here .)
• When U.S. adults find themselves in an argument about religion, most say they approach the conversation in a nonconfrontational manner. About six-in-ten say that when someone disagrees with them about religion, they try to understand the other person’s point of view and agree to disagree. One-third say they simply avoid discussing religion when a disagreement arises, and only 4% say they try to change the other person’s mind. (For more, see here .)

The remainder of this report examines the public’s views about religion in public life and religious leaders in further detail, including differences in opinions across religious groups. Chapter 1 looks at Americans’ views about religion in public life. Chapter 2 explores levels of confidence in clergy (and other clergy-related opinions) held by Americans who attend religious services at least a few times a year. And Chapter 3 looks at religion’s role in some of Americans’ interpersonal relationships, including levels of trust in religious and nonreligious people.

• This is not the first time Pew Research Center has asked these questions of the U.S. public. However, previous surveys were conducted over the phone by a live interviewer, and are not directly comparable to the new survey, which respondents self-administered online as part of the Center’s American Trends Panel . ↩
• Another question asked on a different 2019 Pew Research Center survey – conducted by telephone – found that Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party also are much more likely than Democrats and their leaners to say churches and other religious organizations are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country (68% vs. 38%). The overall share of Americans who say churches are having a positive impact has declined in recent years, according to telephone surveys. ↩
• Researchers were not able to separately compare the views of black and Hispanic Republicans due to limited sample size. Previous Pew Research Center telephone surveys have found that majorities of black and Hispanic adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party while minorities in these groups identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. ↩
• Many places of worship have multiple clergy, while others have just one. The question was asked this way so that it would apply to respondents regardless of how many clergy work at their place of worship. ↩
• Results are based only on respondents who are not a member of the group in question. For example, results about Catholics do not include the views of Catholics themselves. See topline for filtering and question wording. ↩

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America Without God

As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen. Will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea?

This article was published online on March 10, 2021.

T he United States had long been a holdout among Western democracies, uniquely and perhaps even suspiciously devout. From 1937 to 1998, church membership remained relatively constant, hovering at about 70 percent. Then something happened. Over the past two decades, that number has dropped to less than 50 percent, the sharpest recorded decline in American history. Meanwhile, the “nones”—atheists, agnostics, and those claiming no religion— have grown rapidly and today represent a quarter of the population.

But if secularists hoped that declining religiosity would make for more rational politics, drained of faith’s inflaming passions, they are likely disappointed. As Christianity’s hold, in particular, has weakened, ideological intensity and fragmentation have risen. American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it’s just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief. Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like.

Not so long ago, I could comfort American audiences with a contrast: Whereas in the Middle East, politics is war by other means—and sometimes is literal war—politics in America was less existentially fraught. During the Arab Spring, in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, debates weren’t about health care or taxes—they were, with sometimes frightening intensity, about foundational questions: What does it mean to be a nation? What is the purpose of the state? What is the role of religion in public life? American politics in the Obama years had its moments of ferment—the Tea Party and tan suits—but was still relatively boring.

We didn’t realize how lucky we were. Since the end of the Obama era, debates over what it means to be American have become suffused with a fervor that would be unimaginable in debates over, say, Belgian-ness or the “meaning” of Sweden. It’s rare to hear someone accused of being un-Swedish or un-British—but un-American is a common slur, slung by both left and right against the other. Being called un-American is like being called “un-Christian” or “un-Islamic,” a charge akin to heresy.

From the October 2018 issue: The Constitution is threatened by tribalism

This is because America itself is “almost a religion,” as the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak once put it, particularly for immigrants who come to their new identity with the zeal of the converted. The American civic religion has its own founding myth, its prophets and processions, as well as its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers . In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wished that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” The very idea that a nation might have a creed—a word associated primarily with religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity as well as its predicament.

The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this “the law of the conservation of religion”: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed.

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How American Politics Went Insane

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race

No longer explicitly rooted in white, Protestant dominance, understandings of the American creed have become richer and more diverse—but also more fractious. As the creed fragments, each side seeks to exert exclusivist claims over the other. Conservatives believe that they are faithful to the American idea and that liberals are betraying it—but liberals believe, with equal certitude, that they are faithful to the American idea and that conservatives are betraying it. Without the common ground produced by a shared external enemy, as America had during the Cold War and briefly after the September 11 attacks, mutual antipathy grows, and each side becomes less intelligible to the other. Too often, the most bitter divides are those within families.

No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation’s founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead , in the realization of a just society here on Earth. After Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September, droves of mourners gathered outside the Supreme Court—some kneeling, some holding candles—as though they were at the Western Wall.

On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the result is a movement that often looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness. Donald Trump’s boisterous rallies were more focused on blood and soil than on the son of God. Trump himself played both savior and martyr, and it is easy to marvel at the hold that a man so imperfect can have on his soldiers. Many on the right find solace in conspiracy cults, such as QAnon, that tell a religious story of earthly corruption redeemed by a godlike force.

From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the prophecies of Q

Though the United States wasn’t founded as a Christian nation, Christianity was always intertwined with America’s self-definition. Without it, Americans—conservatives and liberals alike—no longer have a common culture upon which to fall back.

Unfortunately , the various strains of wokeism on the left and Trumpism on the right cannot truly fill the spiritual void—what the journalist Murtaza Hussain calls America’s “God-shaped hole.” Religion, in part, is about distancing yourself from the temporal world, with all its imperfection. At its best, religion confers relief by withholding final judgments until another time—perhaps until eternity. The new secular religions unleash dissatisfaction not toward the possibilities of divine grace or justice but toward one’s fellow citizens, who become embodiments of sin—“deplorables” or “enemies of the state.”

This is the danger in transforming mundane political debates into metaphysical questions. Political questions are not metaphysical; they are of this world and this world alone. “Some days are for dealing with your insurance documents or fighting in the mud with your political opponents,” the political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel recently told me, “but there are also days for solemnity, or fasting, or worship, or feasting—things that remind us that the world is bigger than itself.”

Absent some new religious awakening, what are we left with? One alternative to American intensity would be a world-weary European resignation. Violence has a way of taming passions, at least as long as it remains in active memory. In Europe, the terrors of the Second World War are not far away. But Americans must go back to the Civil War for violence of comparable scale—and for most Americans, the violence of the Civil War bolsters, rather than undermines, the national myth of perpetual progress. The war was redemptive—it led to a place of promise, a place where slavery could be abolished and the nation made whole again. This, at least, is the narrative that makes the myth possible to sustain.

For better and worse, the United States really is nearly one of a kind. France may be the only country other than the United States that believes itself to be based on a unifying ideology that is both unique and universal—and avowedly secular. The French concept of laïcité requires religious conservatives to privilege being French over their religious commitments when the two are at odds. With the rise of the far right and persistent tensions regarding Islam’s presence in public life, the meaning of laïcité has become more controversial. But most French people still hold firm to their country’s founding ideology: More than 80 percent favor banning religious displays in public, according to one recent poll.

In democracies without a pronounced ideological bent, which is most of them, nationhood must instead rely on a shared sense of being a distinct people, forged over centuries. It can be hard for outsiders and immigrants to embrace a national identity steeped in ethnicity and history when it was never theirs.

Take postwar Germany. Germanness is considered a mere fact—an accident of birth rather than an aspiration. And because shame over the Holocaust is considered a national virtue, the country has at once a strong national identity and a weak one. There is pride in not being proud. So what would it mean for, say, Muslim immigrants to love a German language and culture tied to a history that is not theirs—and indeed a history that many Germans themselves hope to leave behind?

An American who moves to Germany, lives there for years, and learns the language remains an American—an “expat.” If America is a civil religion, it would make sense that it stays with you, unless you renounce it. As Jeff Gedmin, the former head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, described it to me: “You can eat strudel, speak fluent German, adapt to local culture, but many will still say of you Er hat einen deutschen Pass —‘He has a German passport.’ No one starts calling you German.” Many native-born Americans may live abroad for stretches, but few emigrate permanently. Immigrants to America tend to become American; emigrants to other countries from America tend to stay American.

The last time I came back to the United States after being abroad, the customs officer at Dulles airport, in Virginia, glanced at my passport, looked at me, and said, “Welcome home.” For my customs officer, it went without saying that the United States was my home.

In In the Light of What We Know , a novel by the British Bangladeshi author Zia Haider Rahman, the protagonist, an enigmatic and troubled British citizen named Zafar, is envious of the narrator, who is American. “If an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said ‘Welcome home’ to me,” Zafar says, “I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that.” The narrator reflects later that this was “a bitter plea”:

Embedded in his remark, there was a longing for being a part of something. The force of the statement came from the juxtaposition of two apparent extremes: what Zafar was prepared to sacrifice, on the one hand, and, on the other, what he would have sacrificed it for—the casual remark of an immigration official.

When Americans have expressed disgust with their country, they have tended to frame it as fulfillment of a patriotic duty rather than its negation. As James Baldwin, the rare American who did leave for good, put it: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Americans who dislike America seem to dislike leaving it even more (witness all those liberals not leaving the country every time a Republican wins the presidency, despite their promises to do so). And Americans who do leave still find a way, like Baldwin, to love it. This is the good news of America’s creedal nature, and may provide at least some hope for the future. But is love enough?

Conflicting narratives are more likely to coexist uneasily than to resolve themselves; the threat of disintegration will always lurk nearby.

On January 6, the threat became all too real when insurrectionary violence came to the Capitol. What was once in the realm of “dreampolitik ” now had physical force. What can “unity” possibly mean after that?

Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment? There is little sign, so far, that it can. If matters of good and evil are not to be resolved by an omniscient God in the future, then Americans will judge and render punishment now. We are a nation of believers. If only Americans could begin believing in politics less fervently, realizing instead that life is elsewhere. But this would come at a cost—because to believe in politics also means believing we can, and probably should, be better.

In History Has Begun , the author, Bruno Maçães—Portugal’s former Europe minister—marvels that “perhaps alone among all contemporary civilizations, America regards reality as an enemy to be defeated.” This can obviously be a bad thing (consider our ineffectual fight against the coronavirus), but it can also be an engine of rejuvenation and creativity; it may not always be a good idea to accept the world as it is. Fantasy, like belief, is something that humans desire and need. A distinctive American innovation is to insist on believing even as our fantasies and dreams drift further out of reach.

This may mean that the United States will remain unique, torn between this world and the alternative worlds that secular and religious Americans alike seem to long for. If America is a creed, then as long as enough citizens say they believe, the civic faith can survive. Like all other faiths, America’s will continue to fragment and divide. Still, the American creed remains worth believing in, and that may be enough. If it isn’t, then the only hope might be to get down on our knees and pray.

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Three Essays on Religion

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  September 1, 1948 to May 31, 1951 ?

Location:  Chester, Pa. ?

Genre:  Essay

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

In the following three essays, King wrestles with the role of religion in modern society. In the first assignment, he calls science and religion “different though converging truths” that both “spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.” King emphasizes an awareness of God’s presence in the second document, noting that religion’s purpose “is not to perpetuate a dogma or a theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.” In the final handwritten essay King acknowledges the life-affirming nature of Christianity, observing that its adherents have consistently “looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.”

"Science and Religion"

There is widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But there is no fundamental issue between the two. While the conflict has been waged long and furiously, it has been on issues utterly unrelated either to religion or to science. The conflict has been largely one of trespassing, and as soon as religion and science discover their legitimate spheres the conflict ceases.

Religion, of course, has been very slow and loath to surrender its claim to sovereignty in all departments of human life; and science overjoyed with recent victories, has been quick to lay claim to a similar sovereignty. Hence the conflict.

But there was never a conflict between religion and science as such. There cannot be. Their respective worlds are different. Their methods are dissimilar and their immediate objectives are not the same. The method of science is observation, that of religion contemplation. Science investigates. Religion interprets. One seeks causes, the other ends. Science thinks in terms of history, religion in terms of teleology. One is a survey, the other an outlook.

The conflict was always between superstition disguised as religion and materialism disguised as science, between pseudo-science and pseudo-religion.

Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought. They are different though converging truths. Both science and religion spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.

Science is the response to the human need of knowledge and power. Religion is the response to the human need for hope and certitude. One is an outreaching for mastery, the other for perfection. Both are man-made, and like man himself, are hedged about with limitations. Neither science nor religion, by itself, is sufficient for man. Science is not civilization. Science is organized knowledge; but civilization which is the art of noble and progressive communal living requires much more than knowledge. It needs beauty which is art, and faith and moral aspiration which are religion. It needs artistic and spiritual values along with the intellectual.

Man cannot live by facts alone. What we know is little enough. What we are likely to know will always be little in comparison with what there is to know. But man has a wish-life which must build inverted pyramids upon the apexes of known facts. This is not logical. It is, however, psychological.

Science and religion are not rivals. It is only when one attempts to be the oracle at the others shrine that confusion arises. Whan the scientist from his laboratory, on the basis of alleged scientific knowledge presumes to issue pronouncements on God, on the origin and destiny of life, and on man’s place in the scheme of things he is [ passing? ] out worthless checks. When the religionist delivers ultimatums to the scientist on the basis of certain cosomologies embedded in the sacred text then he is a sorry spectacle indeed.

When religion, however, on the strength of its own postulates, speaks to men of God and the moral order of the universe, when it utters its prophetic burden of justice and love and holiness and peace, then its voice is the voice of the eternal spiritual truth, irrefutable and invincible.,

"The Purpose of Religion"

What is the purpose of religion? 1  Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion synonymous with theology?

Harry Emerson Fosdick says that the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last. 2  This statement will shock some. But is the purpose of religion the perpetuation of theological ideas? Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.

This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds and dogmas or in experience. Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church, its creeds, its popes and bishops have recited the essence of religion and that is all there is to it. On the other hand we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God; that no creed can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said, “There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature. But there is also a revealed religion which man receives from a supernatural reality.” 3 Relevant religion therefore, comes through revelation from God, on the one hand; and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand. 4  Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.

This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is aware of God seeking him and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.

Religion has to be interpreted for each age; stated in terms that that age can understand. But the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.

[ signed ] M. L. King Jr. 5

"The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry"

Basically Christianity is a value philosophy. It insists that there are eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good. This value content is embodied in the life of Christ. So that Christian philosophy is first and foremost Christocentric. It begins and ends with the assumption that Christ is the revelation of God. 6

We might ask what are some of the specific values that Christianity seeks to conserve? First Christianity speaks of the value of the world. In its conception of the world, it is not negative; it stands over against the asceticisms, world denials, and world flights, for example, of the religions of India, and is world-affirming, life affirming, life creating. Gautama bids us flee from the world, but Jesus would have us use it, because God has made it for our sustenance, our discipline, and our happiness. 7  So that the Christian view of the world can be summed up by saying that it is a place in which God is fitting men and women for the Kingdom of God.

Christianity also insists on the value of persons. All human personality is supremely worthful. This is something of what Schweitzer has called “reverence for life.” 8  Hunan being must always be used as ends; never as means. I realize that there have been times that Christianity has short at this point. There have been periods in Christians history that persons have been dealt with as if they were means rather than ends. But Christianity at its highest and best has always insisted that persons are intrinsically valuable. And so it is the job of the Christian to love every man because God love love. We must not love men merely because of their social or economic position or because of their cultural contribution, but we are to love them because  God  they are of value to God.

Christianity is also concerned about the value of life itself. Christianity is concerned about the good life for every  child,  man,  and  woman and child. This concern for the good life and the value of life is no where better expressed than in the words of Jesus in the gospel of John: “I came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” 9  This emphasis has run throughout the Christian tradition. Christianity has always had a concern for the elimination of disease and pestilence. This is seen in the great interest that it has taken in the hospital movement.

Christianity is concerned about increasing value. The whole concept of the kingdom of God on earth expressing a concern for increasing value. We need not go into a dicussion of the nature and meaning of the Kingdom of God, only to say that Christians throughout the ages have held tenaciouly to this concept. They have looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.

In the light of all that we have said about Christianity as a value philosophy, where does the ministry come into the picture? 10

1.  King may have also considered the purpose of religion in a Morehouse paper that is no longer extant, as he began a third Morehouse paper, “Last week we attempted to discuss the purpose of religion” (King, “The Purpose of Education,” September 1946–February 1947, in  Papers  1:122).

2.  “Harry Emerson Fosdick” in  American Spiritual Autobiographies: Fifteen Self-Portraits,  ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 114: “The theology of any generation cannot be understood, apart from the conditioning social matrix in which it is formulated. All systems of theology are as transient as the cultures they are patterned from.”

3.  King further developed this theme in his dissertation: “[Tillich] finds a basis for God’s transcendence in the conception of God as abyss. There is a basic inconsistency in Tillich’s thought at this point. On the one hand he speaks as a religious naturalist making God wholly immanent in nature. On the other hand he speaks as an extreme supernaturalist making God almost comparable to the Barthian ‘wholly other’” (King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” 15 April 1955, in  Papers  2:535).

4.  Commas were added after the words “religion” and “salvation.”

5.  King folded this assignment lengthwise and signed his name on the verso of the last page.

6.  King also penned a brief outline with this title (King, “The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry,” Outline, September 1948–May 1951). In the outline, King included the reference “see Enc. Of Religion p. 162.” This entry in  An Encyclopedia of Religion , ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) contains a definition of Christianity as “Christo-centric” and as consisting “of eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good.” King kept this book in his personal library.

7.  Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563–ca. 483 BCE) was the historical Buddha.

8.  For an example of Schweitzer’s use of the phrase “reverence for life,” see Albert Schweitzer, “The Ethics of Reverence for Life,”  Christendom  1 (1936): 225–239.

9.  John 10:10.

10.  In his outline for this paper, King elaborated: “The Ministry provides leadership in helping men to recognize and accept the eternal values in the Xty religion. a. The necessity of a call b. The necessity for disinterested love c. The [ necessity ] for moral uprightness” (King, “Philosophy of Life,” Outline, September 1948–May 1951).

Source:  CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands, Sermon file.

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The Pew Research Center’s largest study of India explores the intersection of religion and identity politics.

Bounded on the north by the Himalayas, east by the Ganges River and Bay of Bengal, west by the otherworldly salt marshes known as the Rann of Kutch, and south by the spice-scented Cardamom Hills, India’s 1.4 billion citizens revere deities as diverse as their nation’s topography: the elephant-headed Ganesha, Allah of Islam, the protector-god Vishnu, Jesus, the Sikhs’ Waheguru, and many more. 

And the great majority of the nation’s adults—84%—regard religion as “very important” in their lives, according to the largest single-country survey ever conducted by the Pew Research Center outside the United States. Even more say religious tolerance is central to what it means to be “truly Indian.”

Nine out of 10 of the nearly 30,000 adults interviewed for the study— “ Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation ,” released last June—say they feel “very free” to practice their faith, and many borrow from one another’s beliefs in ways that Westerners might find baffling. More than 3 in 4 Indian Muslims subscribe to the Hindu concept of karma, for example. A third of India’s Christians believe in the purifying properties of the Ganges River, and nearly 1 in 5 Jains and Sikhs celebrate Christmas.   

Yet the survey also reveals palpable religious differences in the vast, rapidly modernizing nation. The 232-page report notes that significant minorities of Indian adults say they would not be willing to accept people of other faiths in their neighborhoods. Most form close friendship circles within their own faith , and large majorities oppose interfaith marriage. 

“People in India’s major religious communities tend to see themselves as very different from others,” according to the study, which was conducted as India’s electoral politics have sharpened tensions between the 81% Hindu majority and the 14% Muslim population. The report found that two-thirds of Hindus view themselves as very different from Muslims, for example, while 64% of Muslims “return the sentiment.”  

In light of the controversial policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who has been in office since 2014 and is often described as promoting a Hindu nationalist ideology—these attitudes have particular relevance in the public life of modern India. In February 2020, after India’s parliament gave migrants of all South Asia’s major religions—except for Muslims—an expedited path to Indian citizenship, clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Delhi left more than 50 dead.

Hindus “tend to see their religious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined,” the survey found, with nearly two-thirds (64%) saying it is “ very important to be Hindu to be ‘truly’ Indian .” Of those who share that view, 80% also say it is equally important to speak Hindi—one of India’s two official languages, but just one of 22 constitutionally recognized languages—to be authentically Indian. And of those who share both views, the survey found that 60% voted with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in the last national election in spring of 2019.  

The survey was conducted as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project , a Pew partnership with the John Templeton Foundation that analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Undertaken between late 2019 and early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the survey was conducted entirely in face-to-face interviews among 29,999 adults in 17 languages and is the Pew Research Center’s most comprehensive, in-depth exploration of India.

“If you’re interested in studying the role of religion in statecraft and building identity around the world, there’s no better place to do it than India,” says Neha Sahgal , associate director of research at the Center. “This is a country where religion and identity politics are hugely important, but there’s hardly been any data informing its very emotional debates—let alone its policymaking. So the opportunity to make an impact was huge because data has the power to ground public debate in a set of facts.

“There’s one very surprising fact in the data, and that’s India’s unique concept of tolerance,” Sahgal continues. “For Indians, being tolerant of others and valuing tolerance is not antithetical to wanting to live a religiously segregated life.” As such, she says, “it couldn’t be more different from the American ‘melting pot’ model of pluralism. Indians instead favor a thali model of pluralism: a humongous plate containing bowls of different flavors that all remain separate.”

Several Indian scholars who helped develop the survey say they take comfort in findings that offer a seemingly contradictory “tolerant but separate” picture of Indian religiosity, noting that it challenges the media’s picture of a deeply divided nation. 

“This is very, very interesting—a new idea of India,” says Hilal Ahmed , associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, where he researches political Islam and cultural perceptions of Muslims. “When people say that respecting each other’s religion is very important not merely for being a good Indian but a good Hindu, a good Sikh, a good Muslim, it means people have tremendous respect for minorities and want an inclusive society,” says Ahmed. “For me, this is the most important finding of the survey.”

Ravinder Kaur , professor of sociology and social anthropology whose work at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi focuses on kinship, migration, social change, and gender, says the findings give her optimism at this time of religious tension in her country. Politically driven Hindu nationalism, or hindutva, “cannot ultimately damage the fabric of our communities,” she predicts, “because our diversity and respect for tolerance are so great.”

Kaur, a Sikh, points to the northern city of Ayodhya, where tensions still simmer over a Hindu mob’s destruction of a centuries-old mosque in 1992. “And yet Hindus and Muslims there are still very intertwined, economically and politically,” she says, in subtle ways that even a detailed survey such as this one would find hard to capture. Ayodhya’s Muslim community, Kaur notes, has long provided much of the religious paraphernalia, such as garlands, that Hindus use in their religious ceremonies. “It’s a coexistence,” she says, “that’s been carrying on forever.” 

Nonetheless, the Pew survey found that a sense of differentness is “reflected in traditions and habits that maintain the separation of India’s religious groups.”  Religious conversions, and marriages across religious lines, are “exceedingly rare,” for example, with about two-thirds of Hindus and nearly 80% of Muslims saying it is “very important to stop people in their community from marrying into other religious groups.”

Indians also tend to socialize with members of their own religious group. “Hindus overwhelmingly say that most or all of their friends are Hindu,” according to the report, and 36% say they would not be willing to accept Muslims in their neighborhoods. About a quarter of Muslims say they would not accept Christians, Sikhs, or Buddhists as neighbors, and 16% of Muslims said the same of Hindus. 

Such pervasive self-segregating seems a measure of the value Indians place on their distinct religious identities, says Ajay Verghese , assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College. “One way to keep religion intact is to not come in contact with outside influences,” he notes—and it seems to be working. The survey found that despite the nation’s growing prosperity, “India’s population so far shows few, if any, signs of losing its religion.”

While one-third of Buddhists do not subscribe to belief in a deity, 97% of all Indians say they believe in God and roughly 80% are “absolutely certain” God exists. Slightly more than half the population (54%) say there is one God with “many manifestations,” a view held by 61% of Hindus and 54% of Jains. Two out of 3 Muslims and Christians, meanwhile, believe in “only one God.”

Westerners seeking to grasp why so many Indians adhere to religion should recognize that “the term ‘religion’ is way more expansive in India than in the West,” says Verghese, who studies Indian politics, ethnicity, religion, and political violence. “It’s much harder to secularize in a country where religion affects every aspect of your life, from what you eat and the clothes you wear to who you marry.” 

He points, however, to some tantalizing Pew data that may augur change. The survey found that only 69% of respondents in the nation’s wealthier, better-educated South say religion is “very important” to them, a figure well below the national average of 84%. Whether Indians in other regions will become less religious as they grow more prosperous “is an interesting question,” he says. 

But with interreligious marriage so unpopular, and nearly everyone agreeing it’s “highly important” to observe religious ceremonies for birth, marriage, and death, Verghese predicts that “religious identity will likely stay high” in India for the foreseeable future.

For all their religious self-segregating and identity politics, however, many Indians are highly eclectic in their spiritual beliefs and practices . More than half of Christians (54%) believe in karma and 29% believe in reincarnation, for example, and 31% of Christians and 20% of Muslims celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights traditionally celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains.

Roughly 7 in 10 Indians also say they believe in fate; 44% believe that the position of planets and stars can influence events in one’s life, and 39% believe lives can be influenced by magic, sorcery, or witchcraft. Many of these beliefs are highest among the less educated, though 29% of those with college degrees say they believe in the efficacy of magic.

Although focused on religion, the survey explored other important aspects of Indian life. Unemployment tops the list of national concerns, with 84% of all respondents calling it a “very big problem.” About 3 in 4 also cited crime, corruption, and violence against women. Ninety-five percent of Muslims say they are “very proud” to be Indian, and 85% agreed with the statement that “Indian people are not perfect, but Indian culture is superior to others.” 

About 30% of Indians identify as belonging to a grouping of higher castes known as “general category” caste, with the rest of the population saying they belong to protected castes that have historically been discriminated against known as “Scheduled Caste,” “Scheduled Tribe,” or “Other Backward Class.” Nearly half (46%) of Muslims and Sikhs identify as belonging to the general caste, as do 76% of Jains. Just 28% of Hindus, however, identify with the general castes. 

Nearly two-thirds of all Indians, and about 7 in 10 Muslims, say it is very important to stop people from marrying outside their caste . Only a third of Christians and half of college graduates agreed. 

Significantly, the survey found that despite Indians’ acute sense of religious difference, complaints of religious discrimination are relatively low.  Only 24% of the nation’s nearly 98 million Muslim adults report facing “a lot” of discrimination, although the numbers are notably higher—about 40%—among Muslims living in the north of the country, which includes the national capital territory of Delhi. Additionally, only about 1 in 5 Indians said there is “a lot” of discrimination against members of the lower castes. 

Those relatively low numbers were “a shock” to Verghese, whose research focuses on Hindus, because he had supposed discrimination in India to be more pervasive. “There are two ways to interpret” the survey’s findings on discrimination, he says. 

“One is that people don’t want to admit [to survey interviewers] that they’ve been discriminated against,” he says. “The other is that we [social scientists] may be incorrect about the extent of discrimination” in India. “If you work on discrimination questions you have to ask yourself:  ‘Why is it lower than we think?’”

That is what makes the findings such a rich starting point for further research about India, its religiosity, and its politics as the nation and its international influence grows.

“We will have to grapple with some of these statistics,” says Verghese. “A survey of this magnitude is something scholars who work on Indian religions have needed for a long time.”

David O’Reilly was the longtime religion reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Religion and Politics in India

Introduction

Religion and politics in india before independence, relationship between religious and political beliefs, relationship between religion and groups/institutions, works cited.

Globally, religion has always played an integral part in influencing political culture of nations. For many decades, not only has religion influenced social living through its doctrine teachings, but also has been continuously powerful in propelling political ideologies in many nations. Coupled with its linguistic federalism, ethnic problems, and religious discrimination issues, religions have historically spurred political mobilization.

Several Asian studies have constantly indicated a great connection among religions and political development and reforms of the Asian continent, before and after their independence. Two main historical religions of India, the Hinduism, and the Muslim have greatly contributed to fragmented Indian nationalism, with this nation experiencing a mixture of peace and hostility resulting from religious politics. Religious attrition and differences in India before and after its independence may have been significant to the India’s politics. Central to examining democracy development in India, the essay explores the association religion and politics in India before and after independence.

Major political transformations in India greatly associates with the involvement of religious political movements, which since history initiated communal participation in development of nationalism of India (Moore 316). Before independence, political pressure was eminent in India and characterised by political differences between non-Hindu and ethnic minority. Indian State was initially a nation that served in the ideology of secular nationalism under the reign of secular Congress Party that dominated Indian politics (Sahu 243). However, Hinduism was politically influential but their Muslim counterparts remaining sceptical about Hindus religious politics.

Before independence, the caste notion in Hindu society was most influential in social and political organisation. Moore (317) describes “caste system as the organisation of the population into hereditary and endogamous groups” where males engaged in social and political functions. There were four castes in hierarchical order and associated with spiritual, social and political progression in India. Sahu (246) identifies the castes as “Brahmanas (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (political rulers and soldiers), Vaishyas (merchants and cultivators), and Sudras (artisans and labourers)”

The caste system significantly contributed to political systems in India during the Mogul era from sixteenth century throughout to eighteenth century. The caste system strongly engaged in political reforms and improved the lives of Hindus, though with limited operations following incessant confrontations with the Muslims. As stated by Moore (317), “caste served, and still serves, to organise the life of village community, the basic cell of the Indian society and the fundamental unit that determined strong leadership.” The caste system having a great affiliation with the Hindu religion had significant obstruction to Indian democracy as history identifies this socio-political system as an era of agrarian bureaucracy.

Caste system symbolized the Indian polity and imposed political governance based on military rule that supported taxation and leadership under the chieftains. This means that politicians of Mogul era used the caste reservations to acquire unfair wealth.

The differences towards nationalism before independence of Hindu and formation of the Muslim-dominate Pakistan may be the potential backdrop to fragmented political beliefs and stands in India (Moore 371). Subsequent to Indian partition, disparity commenced intensely on political ideologies as Muslims had most majority of its potential leaders to the Muslim-dominate Pakistan. Following such issues “Indian Muslims supported and voted for the secular Congress party on the understanding that the Congress government would maintain Muslim Personal Law and other aspects of the Muslim culture” (Sahu 245).

The confrontation between the Muslim and the Hindus continued when the Hindu nationalist parties including Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pressured the secularist Congress Party that began losing its political authority after the split. Along religious differences, proponents of secularism and Hinduism have always differed in political beliefs regarding to nationalism and doctrine that should dominate national leadership. Despite having greater political influence, Hinduism has failed to consolidate its religious authority in India.

Hinduism is the most complicated religion as each cultural linguistic zone contains its own worshiping culture and doctrine. As noted by Sahu (245), “Hindus worship different gods and goddesses, which are limited portrayals of the unlimited – ultimate reality that is formless, nameless and without personality.” Coupled with the fact that the BJP possesses leaders from Hindus, but with different religious ideologies following their broad cultural homogeneity, there exists no state religion with dominant principles in national governance. Each of the political parties contains a mixture of religious cultures practiced concomitantly, with each of the two religions influencing each other ideologically (Moore 368).

Contesting to the power of nationalism, none of the religions has managed to conquer national governance. Being proponents of secularism, Muslim differ distinctively in religious ideologies; other minor religions differ with Hinduism, and Hindus themselves have differing doctrine principles. Having shared religious power in national governance where both Muslim and Hindu religious practices apply, there is no State religion.

The India’s partition of 1947 was arguably the backdrop to formation of political groups and institutions that emerged on religious divide. Thought to be the solution towards political differences between the Hindus and the Muslim, the 1947 partition itself was the course of major political pressures in India (Moore 371). Majority Hindus differ between themselves, Muslims have different religious ideologies and Christians, and other minority groups differ as well. BJP, Ram Rajya Parishad, and RSS who were the most anti-congress parties continually existed on the foundations of Hinduism or Hindu nationalism.

Contrary to its opponents, majority of Muslims commenced with their support over Congress secularist party. Following incessant religious attritions on which religion should become a state religion, politics of India divided along linguistic lines. According to Sahu, “religious politics divided as follows: “Indian Muslims developed their own form of occupation-based caste distinction (247); Sikhs demanded a creation of a Punjabi-speaking province” (248) and Hindus remained devoted to their motive of making India a Hinduism state.

The history associated with India’s political transformations on religious grounds is considerably diverse and complicated. Religious contribution to Indian nationalism has remained a convoluted issue, with all religions existing in India having different ideologies towards state nationalism. The Indian Muslims who remained in India after the 1947 partitioning strongly opposes the efforts of Hindus in developing of Hindu nationalism, Christians and other minority religions have had a notion of discrimination.

In addition, Hindu themselves posses different religious ideologies, with some worshiping single god, others worshiping several gods, with all having different worshiping centres. India is still a nation of many religions with shared political influence and none of the religions has dominance in the national governance. This means that efforts of partitioning India into India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan was not a solution towards religious differences as the remaining Indian Muslims have also had significant political consequences in the India’s political stand.

Moore, Barrington. Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world, Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1967. Print.

Sahu, Sunil. Religion and politics in India: The emergence of Hindu Nationalism and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Essay on Religion and Politics in India

Students are often asked to write an essay on Religion and Politics in India in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Religion and Politics in India

Introduction.

Religion and politics in India are deeply intertwined. India is a land of diverse religions, and this diversity influences its political landscape.

Religious Influence

Religion plays a significant role in Indian politics. Many political parties are based on religious identities, leading to a blend of religion and politics.

Secularism in Politics

Despite the religious influence, India is a secular country. The government is committed to treating all religions equally, ensuring no discrimination.

Challenges and Conclusion

While the blend of religion and politics can create unity, it can also lead to conflicts. It’s crucial for India to maintain its secular nature while respecting religious diversity.

250 Words Essay on Religion and Politics in India

Historical perspective.

The birth of India as an independent nation was marked by a partition along religious lines, setting a precedent for the interplay between religion and politics. The political discourse in India has been marked by religious identity, with parties often using religion as a tool to mobilize voters.

Religion as a Political Tool

Religion in India is not just a spiritual matter; it’s a socio-political entity. Political parties capitalize on religious sentiments to foster a sense of identity and unity among their supporters. This strategy often leads to the polarization of society along religious lines, creating a breeding ground for communal tensions.

Secularism and Politics

The Indian constitution advocates for secularism, ensuring equal rights and freedom for all religions. However, the practical implementation often gets blurred with political interests. The selective use of secularism by political parties to appease certain religious groups has raised questions about the true essence of Indian secularism.

The intersection of religion and politics in India is a complex phenomenon. While religion plays a significant role in shaping political ideology and voter behavior, it also poses challenges to India’s secular fabric. Striking a balance between religious freedom and political integrity is crucial for the sustenance of India’s pluralistic democracy.

500 Words Essay on Religion and Politics in India

The interplay of religion and politics in india.

India is a country characterized by a rich cultural, religious, and political tapestry. The interplay of religion and politics in India is a complex and profoundly influential dynamic that shapes the nation’s social and political landscapes.

The Historical Context

Religion in political discourse.

Religion plays a significant role in the political discourse in India. Political parties often employ religious symbolism and rhetoric to mobilize support. This can be seen in the way political campaigns are often crafted around religious identities, with promises made to protect the interests of specific religious communities. This has led to a form of identity politics where religious affiliations often dictate political alignments.

Religious Mobilization and Vote Bank Politics

The concept of ‘vote bank’ politics has further entrenched the role of religion in Indian politics. Political parties often target specific religious communities, promising to protect their interests in return for their votes. This has created a situation where religion is used as a tool to garner political support, often leading to divisive politics and communal tensions.

The Challenges and Implications

While religion can provide a sense of identity and community, its intertwining with politics has led to a number of challenges. It has often resulted in divisive politics, fostering communal tensions and sometimes even leading to violence. The politicization of religion also undermines the secular ideals enshrined in the Indian constitution, which envisages India as a secular state where all religions are treated equally.

The Way Forward

The way forward lies in strengthening the secular fabric of the nation. This requires promoting a political culture where religion is not used as a tool for political gains. It involves fostering a sense of inclusive nationalism that transcends religious identities. Education and awareness can play a crucial role in this, helping to promote a culture of tolerance and mutual respect.

In conclusion, religion and politics in India are deeply intertwined, shaping the nation’s social and political landscapes. While this dynamic has led to challenges, it also presents opportunities for fostering a more inclusive and tolerant society. By promoting a culture of secularism and mutual respect, India can ensure that religion serves as a force for unity rather than division.

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