Religion, Reason, and the Politics of Progress

Chapter 7 examines the politics surrounding California’s stem cell ballot initiative. The chapter explores how the promise of cures derived from human embryonic stem cell research elicited accounts of citizenship and the public good that treated biomedical innovation as an unequivocal public good. The chapter examines how actors used this idea of innovation to construct science and public reason as allied, secular institutions, and critics of the initiative as injecting unwarranted, private religious perspectives into processes of democratic judgment.