Religious Practices and Democratic Virtues

Some claim that religion in general—or certain religions—are disciplines that shape their adherents in ways that make them less fit for democratic politics. Religion in general (or some religion) makes people subservient or authoritarian. This chapter argues that democratic virtue theory can provide an approach to these types of concerns. Because democracy protects citizens’ associational freedoms, it should not interrogate all religious practices or all the virtues that religions value. However, it must evaluate those religious practices that citizens use in political activism. This chapter considers Gandhi’s practice of satyagraha—nonviolent direction action—as an example of this kind of assessment. The chapter asks whether satyagraha develops in its practitioners the virtues necessary for reciprocal accountability, a crucial democratic practice. This assessment acts as a model that can be extended to other politicized religious practices: prayer vigils, funerals, and the like.

Assessing the Consequences of Religious Inclusion

Many fear including religion in democratic politics because they think religious-political participation is likely to undermine public policies they value, from sexual freedoms to science education. This chapter uses a form of instrumental justification of democracy—John Dewey’s informational approach—in order to develop criteria that can determine when religious inclusion is likely to undermine crucial democratic purposes and when it will enhance them. These criteria include religion’s likely effect on the cognitive and identity diversity of the public sphere, and the public sphere’s openness and fallibility. They require analysis of the role that religious institutions play in the public sphere, demanding that citizens consider when and under what conditions religious activism publicizes relevant political information, and when it acts to prevent democratic institutions from gathering the information required to make good policy.

Chains of Persuasion

This chapter considers the roles that religious arguments may play in democratic deliberation. Attempts to include religion suffer from three problems: religious arguments are not widely persuasive; some religious people are not open to persuasion from those who do not share their religious commitments; and when those people make religious arguments in democratic discussions, they seem to appeal to a double standard—expecting their fellows to listen to them while they ignore others. These problems are a consequence of improperly understanding the nature of deliberation; when deliberation is considered as a systemic practice in democratic societies, it becomes clear that under the right circumstances, religious arguments can contribute to persuasion and religious people can be persuaded. The required condition is that religions allow internal pluralism and loose affiliation within their communities. Democratic citizens can apply this criterion to assess religious political participation.

From Public Reason to the Democratic Decision-Making Process

This chapter criticizes the ideal of public reason, showing that even when it is specified in several plausible ways, it does not provide citizens with sufficient guidance in evaluating religious politics. Instead, the ideal must be placed within a larger, way-of-life conception of democracy that considers religion’s roles in citizens’ civic lives. The chapter develops a minimal conception of public reason and analyses two criticisms of it: that public reason is a culturally protestant political approach that ignores crucial aspects of religion and that public reason violates religious citizens’ integrity. It then assesses two predominant responses to the second criticism: restricting the domain of public reason norms and adopting the convergence conception of public justification. Both responses demonstrate public reason’s inability to offer citizens sufficient guidance in evaluating religion’s political influence.

The Role of Religion in Liberal Democratic Politics

This chapter introduces the book’s main claims by analyzing three examples where religion inspired political controversy in recent US politics: Amina Wadud’s decision to lead a mixed-gender Friday prayer in New York City in 2005, the protests outside an Islamic Circle of North America fundraiser in Yorba Linda, California in 2011, and Mormons Building Bridges’ inaugural march in the Salt Lake City Pride Parade in 2012. Public discussions of these cases exemplify the dominant approaches American citizens use to evaluate religion’s roles in democratic politics. The chapter contrasts these approaches with the alternative defended in this book: a way-of-life conception of democracy. The way of life-conception implies a framework for evaluating religion in politics that is democratic, liberal, and pluralistic. Approaching religion in politics with this conception avoids prominent concerns about evaluating religion: that extant perspectives flatten and deform religious phenomena.

Mormons and Muslims in American Democracy

The concluding chapter summarizes the criteria developed above and applies them to the religions with which the book opened: Mormonism and Islam. Citizens should consider not just the values that religions teach and their compatibility with liberal democratic norms; they also need to consider whether religions structure their adherents’ relationship with the religious community to allow for internal pluralism, how the religions’ institutional forms relate to political institutions, and whether the religions shape their adherents in ways that allow them to develop the virtues necessary for crucial democratic practices like reciprocal accountability. Although Americans typically think that Mormons are religiously odd but politically benign while Muslims are more threatening, this is a consequence of insufficiently developed evaluative criteria.