This book makes an important and provocative point in an extraordinarily wide-ranging and thorough yet concise and elegant manner. Areshidze's point is this: the “interreligious tolerance” that modern liberal democratic societies seek to bring about comes directly at the cost of “depressing the social capital that religion provides” to these societies (146). Areshidze persuasively establishes this conclusion by engaging the thinkers and statesmen who have most prominently and revealingly grappled with the task of blending religion and liberal democracy, from—as the well-chosen title expresses—Locke to the present.

Based on this ambitious historical range and the thorny topic under discussion, one would expect Areshidze's book to be a long and unwieldy tome. Upon seeing its slim dimensions, one might suspect that Areshidze has missed crucial dimensions of his topic or treated his subjects in a superficial or cursory manner. In fact, however, Areshidze has quite successfully accomplished that rare feat in academic scholarship: he says all that needs to be said to communicate excellent and sound arguments in the service of his overall thesis, and then he says no more.

Areshidze's choice of scholars and figures to discuss is appropriate and effective. The overall thesis is set off against Rawls on the political philosophy side and Putnam and Campbell (American Grace) on the American politics side, with Obama, Locke, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Habermas, and Tocqueville (in that order!) receiving dedicated treatments as key interlocutors. Although some may balk at the disciplinary, stylistic, and chronological range of Areshidze's study, this reviewer found it to be highly effective. Areshidze's admirable goal is to uncover, express, and meditate upon perhaps the central difficulty of modern politics (and, for that matter, premodern politics as well): the relationship between the idea of a divine order to which we human beings seem ineluctably attracted and the necessity of a mundane order which we are compelled to establish, as it were, in its shadow. Because this difficulty is basic to the human experience, there is no reason to limit one's study to a narrow time frame or to practitioners of a particular disciplinary method. Nor—though perhaps this is more contestable—is one required to proceed in a chronological manner.

Each of Areshidze's interpretations, whether of political thinkers such as Locke and Habermas or public figures such as Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., are in general very well done and make valuable contributions to scholarship on these particular subjects. Anyone writing on religion in the thought of Locke, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Habermas, Rawls, or Obama would be well advised to consult the relevant chapter of this book for one of the best-researched and most persuasively argued interpretations in recent scholarship.

This is no mean accomplishment. It does, though, simultaneously suggest one possible criticism of the book: namely, that the individual chapters are largely readable apart from the others, with less unity and integrity in the whole than might have been achieved. This feature of the book is, however, primarily attributable to the diversity of the figures discussed in the different chapters rather than to an ineffective effort to relate them to one another and to the whole.

A more serious criticism of Areshidze's book is that its analysis suffers throughout from a significant lacuna by consistently excluding or ignoring the possibility of a normative or moral reality that is (at least at certain points) commonly accessible both to secular reason and to religious faith. This appears in Areshidze's favorable reference to the “common criticism” that Rawls's theory imposes “an asymmetric burden on religious citizens today” by “expecting them to find nonreligious arguments for their positions” (15), and by referring to Obama's “translation requirement,” the insistence that “religious contributions to public deliberation undergo a rigorous process of translation into public reason” before they can be legitimately expressed (39). Such statements seem to open up an unwarranted gap between faith and reason, to inappropriately set religious believers apart from the community of reason that centrally defines human nature, and to overlook the crucial areas of overlap between the convictions of faith and the discoveries of reason. Because human nature is defined by rationality—and this human nature is, according to religious believers, created by God—one might argue even on non-Rawlsian or non-Obamian grounds for an obligation on the part of religious believers to avail themselves of their rational powers whenever possible.

This blind spot reappears in Areshidze's discussion of Locke's attempts in the Two Treatises to support his points both with reference to “natural Reason” and “Revelation,” as well as in his analysis of Lincoln's interpretation of the Bible (88). On Areshidze's reading, all such attempts to find common ground between reason and revelation may, it seems, be dismissed as examples of reason's attempts to bend revelation to its own conclusions: thus, Locke's effort “is a timeless example of the Enlightenment's appropriation of the Bible in the service of liberal and capitalist goals,” and Lincoln's effort to establish the principle of equality on the basis of faith is accomplished only “creatively and tendentiously,” finding supernatural support for a “rational theory of the natural right to property” despite the fact that such a theory is “alien to the revealed text itself” (88).

I would argue that Areshidze's exclusive association of the normative or moral with the spiritual/religious problematically overlooks the important ways in which the moral realm can serve as a bridge between reason and faith. The theory of equality in natural rights and the belief in creation “in the image and likeness of God” is, in my opinion, one such common point of contact. St. Thomas Aquinas's observations regarding the overlap between the dictates of the natural law and the second table of the Decalogue is another. This is not to dispute or diminish Areshidze's Tocquevillian point regarding the crucial benefits that strong religion provides for liberal democracies by counteracting its worst pathologies. But it is important to notice that religion provides these benefits not simply as a countervailing, alien force, but rather as a conduit for truths about reality and the human experience that is complementary to that provided by secular reason. The relationship between the faith of religious belief and the secular reason of liberal democracies can thus be described in a more nuanced way as alternately cooperation and contest between two distinct ways of reaching and expressing a single, unified reality.

Even this criticism, though, points to perhaps the chief virtue of Areshidze's book: it is thought-provoking in the best way and leads the reader to think more clearly and thoroughly about the role of religion in modern political life than he or she had before. Although only a small portion of the book is dedicated to interpreting Tocqueville's writings, the whole is wonderfully Tocquevillian. And amid the recent deluge of studies and applications of Tocqueville's thought among scholars, Areshidze's book is among the very best.