I. What Are “Religious” Reasons?

Rawls argues that religious reasons need to be excluded from the deliberative process through which basic matters of justice are decided because, in a society characterized by reasonable pluralism, not all citizens can be expected to share the framework of belief within which any given form of religious reasoning would proceed. Religion is not unique in this respect. The aim is to reach a stable consensus on political fundamentals, and in a diverse society that requires bracketing all of those comprehensive doctrines which may be the source of profound controversy.Footnote ² Political liberalism thereby seeks to base itself on conceptions of right and justice that are “freestanding,” and purportedly “leaves untouched all kinds of doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral, with their long traditions of development and interpretation.”Footnote ³

It follows that these doctrines should not be invoked in the reasons citizens give to one another within the “public political forum,” where fundamental political questions are at stake.Footnote ⁴ Rawls draws a distinction between this forum and “the background culture with its many forms of nonpublic reason.” The restrictions of public reason do not apply to the latter, “the culture of civil society,” where full and open discussion is permitted.Footnote ⁵ The “public political forum,” however, includes not only formal spheres inhabited by legislators and political officials; it includes as well arenas of deliberation in which ordinary citizens speak to one another about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Within these arenas, Rawls argues, citizens owe a “duty of civility” to one another,Footnote ⁶ thinking of themselves as if they were legislators, offering reasons for political actions that they reasonably think other citizens might reasonably accept.Footnote ⁷ The duty of civility would seem to rule out altogether appeal to comprehensive doctrines in public discussion about political fundamentals, but Rawls adds the proviso that “reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons—and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines—are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.”Footnote ⁸ He emphasizes, moreover, that this model of public reason must not be equated with “secular” reason, which he defines as “reasoning in terms of comprehensive nonreligious doctrines.”Footnote ⁹

Some of these points are formulated in critical response to Habermas's position, which Rawls considers to be comprehensive in contrast with his own purely political conception.Footnote ¹⁰ Rawls is at this juncture replying to the analysis of the principles of political reasoning that Habermas presents in works like Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) and Between Facts and Norms (1992). Since then, Habermas has given increasing weight to the topic of religion in defining his views on public reason, arguing that religious traditions contain valuable and inspiring “semantic potentials” that may be lost if religious discourse is excluded from public political space.Footnote ¹¹ The liberal state, he therefore proposes, “must not discourage religious persons and communities from also expressing themselves as such in the political arena, for it cannot be sure that secular society would not otherwise cut itself off from key resources for the creation of meaning and identity.”Footnote ¹² The “as such” reflects a key feature of Habermas's position: the view that the “semantic content” of religious expressions may elude “the explanatory force of philosophical language” and “resist translation into reasoning discourses,” at least for the time being.Footnote ¹³ Habermas does, however, agree with Rawls in maintaining the need for eventual translation “from the vocabulary of a particular religious community into a generally accessible language.”Footnote ¹⁴ In place of Rawls's distinction between the public political sphere and the background culture, Habermas draws a distinction between the “formal” and “informal” public spheres, adding an “institutional translation proviso” to act as a filter between the two. While religious discourse is permitted “as such” within the informal public sphere of opinion and will formation among citizens, the proviso specifies that “only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold separating the informal public sphere from parliaments, courts, ministries, and administrations.”Footnote ¹⁵

Rawls explicitly differentiates his own conception of public political reasoning from “secular” reasoning, but by “secular reasons” Habermas does not mean reasons drawing on nonreligious comprehensive doctrines. He means, rather, “postmetaphysical” reasoning, or reasoning that avoids metaphysical judgments as far as possible. His position is therefore closer to that of Rawls than the use of the term “secular” might suggest, as witnessed by his reference to “the secularized citizen traveling with light metaphysical baggage who can accept a morally ‘freestanding’ justification of democracy and human rights.”Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, Habermas also argues for something like a duty of civility within democratic deliberation, for both principled and practical reasons. This duty entails translation of religious discourse, “for without a successful translation the substantive content of religious voices has no prospect of being taken up into the agendas and negotiations within political bodies and of gaining a hearing in the broader political process.”Footnote ¹⁷

The ban on untranslated religious discourse within formal political institutions then ensures that coercive rules will not be imposed on some citizens by others except on the basis of reasons that make sense to all:

Rawls and Habermas agree, then, that religious reasons rest on metaphysical premises that are not fully intelligible, let alone acceptable, to all citizens, and that rules and policies enforceable by state power cannot rest on reasons of this sort in a liberal democratic society whose conception of justice is supposed to be neutral towards competing worldviews.

To what extent is it true, though, that religious ideas are intelligible only to insiders? Rawls provides no detailed analysis of this question, but it has preoccupied Habermas in a number of his more recent works. Habermas cannot think religious ideas are wholly opaque to people outside a given community, or else he could not view them as offering “semantic” resources for public moral reasoning.Footnote ¹⁹ He claims that the partial inaccessibility of religious discourse is a function of its being embedded in the “revelation,” “ritual praxis,” and “religious experiences” of particular communities. These elements make religion what it is, in its specific difference from the universal reasoning that defines philosophy. “At best,” he says, “philosophy circumscribes the opaque core of religious experience,” a core that remains “as profoundly alien to discursive thought as the hermetic core of aesthetic experience.”Footnote ²⁰ The appropriation of religious ideas for common reason then requires a “neutralizing translation” guided by “methodical atheism,” where religious experiences are identified in language drawn “from the universe of argumentative discourse that is uncoupled from the event of revelation.”Footnote ²¹ The possibility of successful translation of this sort is attested, Habermas suggests, by its having taken place in the past. Hegel was right that “the major world religions belong to the history of reason itself,”Footnote ²² including to the genealogy of modern political reason with its fundamental commitments to human equality and individual autonomy. These values, now formulated in a generally intelligible language receiving common assent, are the product of a process to which religious traditions have contributed. Their history shows how philosophy, the medium of reason, “receives innovative impulses when it succeeds in freeing cognitive contents from their dogmatic encapsulation in the crucible of rational discourse.”Footnote ²³

But we need to ask here, what exactly is freed? What are the “cognitive contents” whose meaning can be separated from dependence on specific religious doctrines and experiences so as to be, potentially, not only intelligible but acceptable to those who do not believe in those doctrines and do not have those experiences? Although Habermas does not give a clear answer to this question, one can be reconstructed from the examples of translation he mentions. He claims, for instance, that “universalistic egalitarianism… is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.”Footnote ²⁴ Elsewhere, he alludes to the idea that “God created man in his own image,” adding “to know what this means, one need not believe it literally.”Footnote ²⁵ From the surrounding remarks, it seem Habermas has in mind, as elements common to the religious and secular versions of these ideas, the view that all human beings are free and equal and should be treated as such. In religious contexts, these views may be expressed in language speaking of God's commandments and describing the relation between God and humanity, as in the figure of being made in the image of God. That language is in turn connected with the religious lives of individuals in various communities, which may include experiences of being commanded and loved by God, as well as respect for texts in which the relation between God and human beings is held to be specially revealed and communicated to the faithful.

I contend, however, that what makes it possible to understand and appropriate the moral content of religious statements independently of their doctrinal and experiential framework is that these statements express judgments and intuitions whose validity already does not rest on theological premises. Consider, for instance, theological doctrines stating that the commandments of God stand above the laws of nations, or that the “neighbors” whom God commands us to love include people from groups we consider to be outsiders, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The “translatable” components of these two doctrines might be thought to consist in the judgments that the laws of nations are subject to evaluation by principles transcending them, and that we should be concerned about all people. But do these judgments not lie at the basis of the theological formulations in the first place, or at least of the component that can be detached from metaphysical premises so as to be independently acceptable? In other words, the sense that the established laws and conventions of a nation may be morally wrong or that we have a duty to care about people outside our communities is originally the basis for these theological views about the nature and content of God's commandments. Otherwise, we would have no explanation of how such views came about, except that they were in fact revealed by a God.Footnote ²⁶ Some individuals do believe this, but they usually still judge that God commands x, a commandment revealed in scripture, because God is good and just and x is what goodness and justice require. That is why the moral content of such judgments can also be stated in nontheological language. It is also why intrareligious disagreements about moral and political matters—homosexuality, for instance, or the appropriate roles of women—are not purely disagreements about textual interpretation, of the same sort as scholarly disputes about the meaning of a line of Shakespeare.

Similar points can be made in relation to Jeremy Waldron's position on the inclusion of religious discourse within public reason. Like Habermas, Waldron argues that while much religious speech is indeed couched in tradition-specific vocabulary that will on the face of it seem strange and incomprehensible to outsiders, it can nonetheless enrich our shared moral reasoning on matters of political consequence and should not be subject to a general ban. In “Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation”Footnote ²⁷ and “Two-Way Translation: The Ethics of Engaging with Religious Contributions in Public Deliberation,”Footnote ²⁸ Waldron gives examples of two Christian publications on political issues, one a pastoral letter by Catholic bishops entitled “Economic Justice for All,” the other an “Evangelical Declaration against Torture” by the organization Evangelicals for Human Rights. The justifications for particular political policies presented in these publications make reference to being made in the image of God, the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ, the groans of the Holy Spirit, and so forth—notions that might well seem opaque to non-Christians.Footnote ²⁹ Yet Waldron maintains that ”the opponents of religious interventions simply underestimate the prospects for mutual intelligibility and misrepresent the sources of misunderstanding,”Footnote ³⁰ for such theological conceptions are no less comprehensible in principle than are the economic theories of experts whose declarations are not equally subjected to the charge of incivility. They may simply require greater learning on the part of those unfamiliar with them.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, many Christian ideas form part of a common heritage in liberal democratic societies like the United States, whose basic political concepts are derived from theories of natural law that are in turn rooted in Christian theology. Waldron therefore agrees with Habermas about the possibility and value of “two-way translation” as a cooperative task in which religious and nonreligious citizens arrive at generally accessible arguments through sympathetic dialogue and mutual learning.Footnote ³²

As in the case of Habermas, though, we need to ask what kind of content this process reveals. If a variety of religious discourse is initially opaque to nonreligious citizens as well as those whose perspective is formed by other religious traditions, what aspect of its content can become clear in such a way that it may eventually be not only comprehended but also accepted as a reason by all parties to the conversation? It is noteworthy that the religious documents Waldron cites actually mingle “secular” and “religious” justifications in articulating their positions on economic equality and torture. The Catholic pastoral letter on economic justice refers to the “dignity and basic rights” of all human beings, stating that “every human person is created as an image of God,” and concluding that “the denial of dignity to a person is a blot on this image.”Footnote ³³ The Evangelical Declaration against Torture argues that “all humans who are mistreated or tormented are… by Jesus's definition, our neighbors,” and appeals to “the sanctity of human life” in justifying its proclamation that “we renounce the use of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” As one of the authors of the document states separately, “Torture violates the intrinsic dignity of the human being, made in the image of God.”Footnote ³⁴

Clearly there is a close connection here between the notions of being “made in the image of God” and having “intrinsic dignity.” The terms are used almost interchangeably, pointing to the similarity, if not identity, of the views of humanity and corresponding moral sentiments they express, as well as to the historical connection between the two concepts. Again, I contend that what we are really doing when we claim to be “translating” religious reasons in cases like these is isolating the intuitions and judgments at the basis of such reasons. These do not depend for their validity either on theological premises or on experiences that could only be had by following a religious life. That is why they contain the “semantic potential,” to use Habermas's expression, for formulation in terms accessible to common reason. Waldron is right that the content that can be thus translated is not in principle unintelligible to outsiders, but that is because this content, to the extent that it is translatable, consists of views whose justification does not require appeal to theological doctrines acceptable only to a given religious community.

In the minds of many people, however, what defines religion as religion is precisely a dependence on such doctrines. The central reason many liberal theorists give for excluding religious discourse from public political deliberation—the thing that makes religion a “conversation stopper,” as Richard Rorty once put it—is dependence on revealed authority. “Religion,” it is often thought, is by definition rooted in forms of revelation that are inaccessible to reason and involves a mode of belief not open to argumentation; ergo, the habit of using “religion” and “faith” as synonyms in discussions of the subject. Presupposing this concept of religion, Maria Herrera Lima argues that religious claims could never be justified to nonbelievers, even through recourse to a common tradition, “since the sources of justification of religious beliefs are not historical in any case, but rest on arguments of authority (revelation as sanctioned by ecclesiastical authorities), and, from the secular side, religious faith does not belong to the language game of argumentation, the form of rational justification of truth claims available to modern philosophy.”Footnote ³⁵ J. M. Bernstein likewise maintains that “secular reason is necessarily and emphatically other to faith,”Footnote ³⁶ since the former rests on evidence and rational debate whereas believers are committed a priori to “the revealed deliverances of their chosen god.”Footnote ³⁷ Both Lima and Bernstein are arguing against Habermas's advocation of a “postsecular” society in which religious and nonreligious citizens would engage in mutually respectful deliberation.

In fact, Habermas himself connects religion with dogmatic certainty, a mode of belief he contrasts with the openness of secular reason.Footnote ³⁸ He grants, for instance, that “religiously rooted existential convictions, by dint of their if necessary rationally justified reference to the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths, evade that kind of unreserved discursive examinations to which other ethical orientations and worldviews, i.e. secular ‘conceptions of the good,’ are exposed.”Footnote ³⁹ His conception of religion emphasizes, in addition, its necessary connection with religious practice: “Religious traditions differ from philosophy in their mode of belief and their way of justifying taking-to-be-true, but above all in the stabilizing anchoring of faith in the ritual practices of a religious community.”Footnote ⁴⁰ That is why religious discourse cannot be permitted beyond the “institutional threshold” separating the informal and formal spheres of public reason. As long as religious citizens are willing to accept this condition, though, and to engage in a civil dialogue with those who disagree with them, they should not be required to “to translate their religious beliefs into a secular language before their arguments have any chance of gaining majority support.”Footnote ⁴¹ Waldron likewise argues, against Rawls and in agreement with Habermas, that civility does not demand translation from the start, on the part of religious citizens exclusively, a demand that is in fact quite uncivil. It requires, rather, a mutual willingness to listen and understand, on the part of religious and nonreligious citizens alike.Footnote ⁴²

Proposals like these would not be feasible if Lima and Bernstein were right in their assumption that religious reasons are by definition appeals to authority, and only that. As Waldron points out, however, most religious interventions in public debate do not appeal to the unimpeachable authority of revealed texts or ecclesiastical pronouncements as an immediate basis for justifying coercive measures. Rather, they draw on the teachings of such authorities in the course of explaining what they feel is right or wrong on a given topic, and this is not in principle different from drawing on the teachings of any other kind of authority, that of a reputable economist, for example.Footnote ⁴³ Consequently, as long as religious citizens enter debates in the right spirit, being willing to engage with other viewpoints and to accept the outcome of the democratic process, they should not be barred from presenting religious reasons. This is, it should be noted, a conditional justification for allowing religious reasons within democratic debate. It does not maintain that any and all forms of religious discourse are necessarily compatible with the procedural principles that do need to be respected if such debate is to have a chance of being productive. A form of religious reasoning whose argumentative structure did take the form, “because the Bible/Pope/Qu'ran etc. says so,” could still be ruled out as indeed a conversation stopper.Footnote ⁴⁴ Waldron's claim is that most public religious discourse is not like that, even when it does cite religious sources taken to be authoritative, for those sources are usually cited in a manner that still permits dialogue. Their content is in principle intelligible to nonreligious citizens who are motivated to make an effort at understanding.

Waldron is one of a number of political theorists to argue in recent years that, in Simone Chambers's words, “it is the manner and spirit with which religious reasons are brought into the public as justifications that matters not their religious nature.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In Maeve Cooke's version of this argument, what should be excluded from processes of democratic legislation and decision making are not religious viewpoints but those that are “epistemologically authoritarian,” unwilling to support their claims with reasons in “open-ended, inclusive, and fair processes of argumentation.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This exclusion may cover certain forms of religious discourse, but it will not be because they are religious. The exclusion applies to any discourse, religious or other, that would present claims in the political arena while refusing to enter the fray of public reason.Footnote ⁴⁷ Chambers and Cooke both take issue with Habermas's assumption that by its very nature religious discourse cannot fully enter this fray. Although he argues for allowing religious discourse within public political deliberation up to a point, Habermas continues to think of religion as radically other to reason on account of its alleged grounding in revelation and ritual. Chambers notes that this feature of Habermas's position, which still builds a firewall between religious discourse and the legislative bodies of the state, is debatable, for “not all actual introductions of religion into public debate are appeals to what Habermas thinks of as the core of what sets religion apart from secular philosophy, that is some ultimate claim to transcendent authority for which there is no further rational argument.”Footnote ⁴⁸ For her part, Cooke objects to Habermas's claim that the validity of religious discourse cannot be publicly assessed, which severely limits the contribution such discourse may make to public deliberation. She queries as well Habermas's presumption that religious arguments contain a level of dogmatism that is not present in secular ones.Footnote ⁴⁹

In arguing that what Habermas sees as the translatable aspect of religious discourse actually consists of judgments whose validity is independent from theological premises or religious experience, I have also meant to suggest that there is nothing especially inaccessible about such discourse that would warrant limiting the terms for its inclusion within public reason. But that analysis raises another question: namely, what is the basis for those judgments themselves? On what are they grounded, if not on theological premises or religious experiences? And how does the justification on which their validity depends differ from that of their secular counterparts, if it does? This is the subject of the second part of my analysis.

II. Revelation and Reason

Cooke suggests a partial answer to the above questions through her way of challenging the sharp distinction Habermas draws between religion and reason. The basis for this distinction is supposed to be religion's reliance upon “the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths.” Cooke argues that in fact “both philosophical and religious arguments appeal to ‘dogmas’ in the sense of core convictions” that are not grounded in anything more basic.Footnote ⁵⁰ These form the “bedrock” of reasoning in both cases, and “in this sense, the Kantian moral principle, which rests on the conviction that the dignity of every human being is inviolable, is as dogmatic as the Christian idea that human beings are made in the image of God.”Footnote ⁵¹ Habermas's overlooking of this point, Cooke notes, is linked to an “insufficient appreciation of the ways in which the rational acceptability of practical validity claims in general is tied to non-argumentative ‘world-disclosure’ or ‘revelation.’”Footnote ⁵² That is, coming to accept the validity of a particular perspective may involve disclosing the world in a new way, and “disclosure in this sense is not very different from revelation.”Footnote ⁵³

Cooke's analysis rests on a view of “revelation,” and of the religious person's relation to it, that requires some unpacking. Although she does not make the point explicit, her conclusions suppose that there is more to religious belief than merely adherence to authority, and that reliance on what is held to be “revealed” within a religious framework is not simply equivalent to the argument, “because x says so.” Were that not the case, her argument would be weak, resting on a tendentious parallel between “revelation” and “disclosure.” Reliance on a basic moral intuition or judgment is quite different from reliance on the words of a divinely authorized text, individual, or institution. The former can be expected to accord with moral sentiments and is not in principle off limits to criticism if it fails to do so. The latter may conflict with basic or considered moral views and be held regardless, on the grounds that the words of scripture or ecclesiastical pronouncements supersede all human intuition and reasoning. In ruling out “epistemologically authoritarian” viewpoints, though, Cooke has already excluded from political debate interventions that would appeal to “revelation” in this sense. Thus, when she argues for a similarity between “revelation” and “disclosure” in the case of basic principles such as “human beings are made in the image of God” and “the dignity of every human being is inviolable,” she must have in mind a different understanding of “revelation” than the fact of being uttered by an authority held to be infallible.

I believe that Cooke's argument is implicitly premised on the thesis I presented above: namely, that “revealed” religious doctrines of the sort that are relevant to moral and political debates are themselves rooted in basic judgments that are not different in kind from the core convictions of reasoned moral arguments.Footnote ⁵⁴ That is why Cooke can draw a genuine parallel between these doctrines and the forms of “disclosure” to which the validity claims of purportedly secular moral arguments are tied, for both rest on some fundamental views for which there is no further ground. Consequently, as long as religious reasons are not presented in a manner that refuses to countenance debate—this is, like Waldron's, a conditional argument—they are no more dogmatic than secular ones.

Furthermore, on Cooke's analysis, the fundaments of practical reasoning are not actually a permanent bedrock; they are more like “riverbeds of thought (and experience)” which change over time in a process to which new disclosures are essential.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cooke worries that Habermas's conception of reason closes the door to such change by implying “that no further learning as regards the very idea of justice is necessary.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Waldron raises a similar complaint against Rawls, arguing that in practice the demand for “reasons all can accept” within processes of political deliberation ”suggests that justificatory moves must always connect with an existent consensus, with the stock of ideas already ‘implicit in the political culture’ of our society,” whereas in fact “moves may be made in political argument that bear no relation to existing conventions or commonly held opinions, but which nevertheless gain a foothold as soon as they are considered and discussed by persons with open minds.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Rawls takes issue with this criticism, claiming that “the forms of permissible public reason are always several” and that “new variations may be proposed from time to time and older ones may cease to be represented.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This response, however, does not truly answer the complaint that the restrictions he would place on “permissible” arguments within public political deliberation rule out the presentation of genuinely novel reasons, which might well conflict with the settled views that constitute the common sense of a given society.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rawls means to limit these restrictions to deliberation about “constitutional essentials” and “matters of basic justice,”Footnote ⁶⁰ but these may be precisely the matters at issue when uncommon reasons are presented.

Disallowing such reasons when they challenge the basic political principles of a liberal society might seem an acceptable, indeed desirable, consequence of Rawls's account of public reason. That depends, however, on what one imagines the alternatives to be. If liberal commitments to treating all persons as free and equal rule out arguments for theocracy or slavery, that would surely be a more than acceptable consequence to virtually all citizens in a democratic society. But what of arguments that bring to light culturally specific biases in the liberal conception of persons, in a way that challenges basic political principles but is not self-evidently morally odious? One example is that of emerging discourses on the human relation to the nonhuman world, which challenge what has been the status quo in most Western countries on the latter's legal and moral standing. Broadly religious voices are prominent among these discourses, including ones expressing perspectives that neither belong to nor harmonize with the religious traditions that Habermas, for one, sees as central to the genealogy of modern Western reason.

A recent anthology called Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth offers a helpful survey of such voices.Footnote ⁶¹ They are varied, but a common theme among them is the sense that the natural world is infused with the sacred, and that human beings belong to this sacred reality rather than being set over against it as radically different. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, the editor of the anthology, writes in his introduction that “the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.”Footnote ⁶² Other authors in the volume express similar views, drawing on a variety of traditions, especially indigenous and Asian ones, to announce the need for a radical change in the dominant Western view of nature, human beings, and the relation between the two. They frequently suggest that the Western monotheistic religions have been instrumental in shaping and entrenching that view, a point expressed by Sister Miriam McGillis, for one:

This view has serious political implications. McGillis criticizes Monsanto in language that includes reference to “the sacramental aspect of seeds” and she describes “the whole technology of genetically engineering life” as involving “desecration.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Many authors in the anthology allude to the political consequences of the views about nature and humanity that they are expressing. Susan Murphy asks, “What would we find ourselves to be, and how would we behave” if “we were to recognize the rights of earth and other species in law, to mould agricultural and economic choices and the design of our technologies accordingly”?Footnote ⁶⁵ Winona LaDuke describes the relation between the Winneman Wintu, an indigenous people in Northern California, and the Nur, “the salmon people” to whom the Wintu feel they have a sacred responsibility of protection and care.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reflecting on this perspective, she remarks that “America is a country where private property is enshrined as a constitutional right, but the rights of nature, of the natural world, or of unborn generations are not.”Footnote ⁶⁷ John Stanley and David Loy also demand concern for “inter-generational justice” in considering the environmental impacts of current economic activities, citing the fossil fuel industry's effects on global climate as a prime example.Footnote ⁶⁸ “Because climate changes everything,” they argue, “the global emergency requires that a new article be added to the Declaration [of Human Rights], specifying the human right to a safe climate.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Some of these prescriptions could readily form an overlapping consensus with liberal conceptions of the human person in relation to the rest of what there is, as well as with the traditional religious viewpoints that agree with those conceptions and have helped to shape them. “The human right to a safe climate” could be affirmed without any principled challenge to notions of human dignity and freedom or having been made in the image of God, even if it led to restrictions on individual autonomy that some people schooled in a liberal spirit found objectionable. That is not the case, however, for perspectives recognizing nonhuman species as persons, as in the Wintu's view of the Nur, or proposals to give rights to the earth itself, or Bill Plotkin's vision of “a future biocracy” affirming “the inalienable rights of all species and all habitats.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that problems of extending justice to future generations, to political relations between peoples, and to “our relations to animals and the order of nature” can be resolved by starting from the status of adult citizens.Footnote ⁷¹ But this will not accommodate the moral and political demands of those who start with “a profound sympathy for Gaia as our beautiful living Earth, and a compassion for all of her creatures,” as Jules Cashford puts it,Footnote ⁷² or who imagine their identities on the model of “the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of the planet.”Footnote ⁷³

It is telling that Rawls thinks a “reasonable” answer to the question of the claims of nonhuman animals and the rest of nature can be found by proceeding according to “the traditional view of Christian ages” wherein “animals and nature are subject to our use and wont.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Now some, he grants, might see this as “a narrowly anthropocentric point of view,” arguing instead that “human beings should assume a certain stewardship toward nature and give weight to an altogether different family of values.” “In this case,” he continues, “our attitude might be much the same as those who reject abortion on theological grounds.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Here, Rawls does not seem fully to recognize that “the traditional view of Christian ages” is no less a theological position than is the opposing one drawn from “an altogether different family of values,” which actually might commit one to something stronger than “stewardship,” a notion that remains within a theological framework that conceives the nonhuman world as given in keeping to human beings. It will not suffice in this context to add, as Rawls does, that “the status of the natural world and our proper relation to it is not a constitutional essential or a basic question of justice,” and that therefore “the limits of public reason do not apply.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For the very fact that he conceives the matter in this way will be the problem for those who think we need constitutional guarantees protecting habitats, or that the fair treatment of animals is a question of basic justice.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rawls's account thus turns out to be not as “freestanding” as he supposes, being in fact nonneutral towards comprehensive views, favoring, on this point, a view derived from a particular religious tradition.

Habermas's position does so as well, and more starkly than he realizes. He objects to “neopaganism,” meaning the attempted revival of a form of mythical thought that predates Western monotheism, which he associates with Nietzsche and Heidegger.Footnote ⁷⁸ He also displays little knowledge of “Eastern religions,” which he supposes to be “unlike the monotheistic world-views” in that they “are based not on the acting person but on the impersonal consciousness of an entirely indeterminate Something.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This is a remarkably sweeping and shallow generalization, relying on conventional Western clichés. Habermas is inclined to dismiss new religious movements as well, though admitting that he has not studied “any of the new, de-institutionalized and de-differentiated forms of religiosity” and it is possible that “not everything on the market is Californian claptrap or neopaganism.”Footnote ⁸⁰ These are not helpful attitudes in someone who claims that one of the valuable functions of religion is to articulate “an awareness of what is lacking or absent.”Footnote ⁸¹ Notice that the “green” perspectives cited above are connected precisely to the forms of religiosity Habermas contrasts with Western monotheism, which are frequently lumped together and disparaged as “pagan” within Western religious discourses.

In fact, Habermas's very concept of religion as rooted in established cultic practice and adherence to “infallible revealed truths” leaves little room for registering what is lacking through novel formulations of the sacred. It is at the same time unable to describe the origins of the religious traditions he does valorize, and for precisely the same reason. If religion is in its essence rooted in something established, be it a creed or a form of worship, how does the content of any religious tradition arise to begin with? What, for instance, is the source of the “revelation” that man is made in the image of God? Cooke's analysis draws attention to these kinds of questions. Habermas complains of Cooke's “problematic blurring of the boundary between secular and religious utterances,”Footnote ⁸² but without grasping her point that secular practical reason also rests on some bedrock, or rather “riverbed,” of concepts and judgments that are “disclosed” or “revealed” in the sense that they cannot be further justified. For instance, while the existence of human capacities like reasoning and moral choice is an empirically supportable fact, no parallel support adducing more basic reasons can be given for the claim that the possession of these faculties gives human persons a special “dignity,” or warrants “respect.” These moral intuitions and attitudes, fundamental to the liberal political framework accepted by Habermas, cannot be further grounded. They have emerged from “revelation” in a sense but in an equally important sense still rest on it. They now belong to the settled stock of ideas on which “common reason” depends, being no longer expressed in a discourse that appeals to God or other narrowly “religious” premises. This does not mean, though, that such premises have now magically lost their character as basic value judgments for which no deeper rational justification can be provided.

Nor can any deeper rational justification be provided for the long-standing supposition, within Western traditions, that nature is given to human beings to use, a claim that can be, and is being, challenged through alternative discourses of the sacred. One of the reasons for permitting religious reasons within reasoning is indeed that, as Habermas says, they can register an awareness of what is lacking or absent. But registering what is wrong is an ongoing historical process that may well lead to revisions of even the basic political concepts Habermas views as nonnegotiable. If a sense that human beings are set apart from the nonhuman world forms the basis for both the ideas of being made in the image of God and of human beings possessing a special dignity, then there is no reason to exclude from public deliberation discourses offering an opposing view, in response to new sensitivities and sources of distress, that expresses a perception of human continuity with nature.

There is a serious danger, moreover, in predominant paradigms coming to see themselves as “rational” all the way down, or as metaphysically “neutral,” out of a failure to recognize the thickness of their own bedrock assumptions. Such a self-conception too easily allows discourses challenging those assumptions to be dismissed as “religious” or “irrational.” Consider, for example, a moment in the Canadian documentary Water on the Table, where Terence Corcoran characterizes Maude Barlow, an opponent of water privatization, as standing at one end of what he describes as “almost a religious divide.” The comments that follow actually position only one side of this ideological divide as religious, the one represented by Barlow. Barlow “chooses to portray water as part of a God-like nature,” Corcoran maintains, a view he describes as “extreme” and “absurd.” The opposing view, which is also his own, sees water as “part of the natural resources that exist on the planet, not much different from gold or oil or land or any other commodity” and thus “just a thing that is usable.” This is the presumed “rational” view. It actually rests on a complex, culturally specific and historically evolved, set of ideas about human beings, nature, and property. Not only is this fact rendered invisible, however, through the deployment of a dichotomy between the religious and the rational, but the views placed on the religious side of the dichotomy are through this gesture deprived of authority.Footnote ⁸³

At the same time, if moral and metaphysical views consonant with (because derived from) Christianity are rebaptized as truths of reason, their assertion may function to delegitimize minority perspectives in ways that reinforce existing inequalities. The treatment of indigenous peoples, whose political claims may be based on ontologies about the social and natural world that are very different from Christian ones, is a case in point.Footnote ⁸⁴ My purpose in this article is not to argue for these ontologies, however, which are certainly contestable. It is only to point out that they are unfairly disadvantaged in democratic deliberations where the secularized descendants of Christian doctrines present themselves as rational, while restricting full entry to alternative discourses alleged to be religious.

Permitting access to deliberation is of course only that; it does not entail any particular outcome, whether of acceptance, rejection, or compromise. In this context, we should see that if discourses challenging liberal principles carry risks, this is no less true of ones based on those principles. Among voices calling for greater respect for nonhuman entities, there may be a few that appeal to biotic egalitarianism to support ethically unpalatable policies,Footnote ⁸⁵ just as there are some who argue—at times highly successfully, one might add—for problematic policies on the basis of individual rights and freedoms, such as unrestricted gun ownership. In both cases, the formulation, application, and interpretation of the principles on which such arguments are based can be debated. The question here is only whether one party should be excluded from the debate altogether. Waldron claims that “liberals must be prepared to stand up for the distinctive features of their conception of the human person” which are rooted historically in specifically Christian approaches, for “they cannot be neutral about everything.”Footnote ⁸⁶ That may be so, but they should also be willing to listen to voices challenging aspects of that conception from ethically respectable perspectives.Footnote ⁸⁷ The resulting conversation could lead to revisions of fundamental liberal ideas that are more radical than we could have envisioned because they are different from what we envisioned—not calls to restore slavery or theocracy, which we can all accept to leave off the table as bad ideas that have been rightly surpassed, but genuinely novel conceptions, evolved in response to new realities.

III. Conclusion: An Evolving Consensus

I have been arguing that religious arguments should be allowed within public political reasoning on the grounds that they are not necessarily more dogmatic than other forms of discourse, and may yield fresh insights. It remains true, however, that democratic legitimacy is compromised when laws are formulated in a language alien to those who must obey them. Even if it is unrealistic to require that laws and governmental structures be justified through reasons all can accept,Footnote ⁸⁸ it is eminently fair to ask that the mode of reasoning through which they are reached and the terms in which they are expressed should command the widest possible social consensus. It would certainly be undemocratic for a state to give “nature is sacred” as a justification for an item of legislation when many of its citizens do not hold nature to be sacred or have no notion of the sacred at all. Rawls and Habermas are therefore right that the language of a democratic state needs to be “neutral” towards the diverse views of its citizens in a certain sense.

But in what sense? Charles Taylor points out that “state neutrality is basically a response to diversity,” and that what needs to be “neutral” between competing worldviews in a plural polity is “the official language of the state,” meaning “the language in which legislation, administrative decrees, and court judgments must be couched.”Footnote ⁸⁹ However, it needs to avoid appealing to all (not only religious) sources of authority that are not commonly acceptable, to Marx and Kant no less than to the Bible.Footnote ⁹⁰ “Neutrality” in this case does not mean being free of thick metaphysical assumptions, or resting on principles that can be identified prior to our actual deliberations. It means, rather, that the justifications given for coercive state policies appeal to moral and political principles that as a matter of fact are acceptable to those who must live by them.

In light of my analysis, I would add that this “neutrality,” if we continue to call it that,Footnote ⁹¹ is best conceived as a historically evolvingFootnote ⁹² wide (not universal) agreement, and as a confluence of various types of agreement, justified in a commonly acceptable language whose form we cannot anticipate in advance.Footnote ⁹³ Consider again the example of the human relation to the nonhuman world. On this issue, there is substantial scope for convergence on particular policies among citizens who might support those policies for different reasons. Many of the selections even in Spiritual Ecology actually blend different kinds of arguments, such as the statement from the “Earth Charter” that “we must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Native activists seeking to protect land from unwanted forms of use, such as oil extraction, also frequently mingle the language of the sacred with appeal to the rights of their communities over the land in question, as well as to concerns over potential harm to the health and well-being of individuals within these communities.Footnote ⁹⁵ In addition, while contemporary “green” religious discourses often define themselves in opposition to the idea of nature as made for human use in the Judeo-Christian tradition, ideas of stewardship or of nature as a gift from God found within that tradition may in practice lead to some of the same conclusions.Footnote ⁹⁶ These may in turn overlap with conclusions reached through considerations of utility or human rights. In such cases, the commonality, whose mutually agreeable language we are in the process of forging, is sometimes a result of convergence for different reasons, sometimes of common intuitions expressed in different vocabularies amounting to a partial consensus for the same reasons, and sometimes a complex and unclear blend of these.

It will not, however, be “freestanding” in a Rawlsian sense, for it is not a “purely political” conception that is independent of metaphysical doctrines and thick value judgments in relation to political fundamentals. It cannot be determined through a process of reflection occurring prior to the actual deliberative conversations people have in a democracy. Nor can we expect full agreement on all political fundamentals, whether by convergence or consensus, and a minority of citizens will have to tolerate a situation where they disagree profoundly with the rules of their society, which they may respect only for practical reasons. If, for instance, the majority of citizens in a democratic society were to decide that nonhuman animals have rights against human beings, or that nature may not be treated purely as a resource for human well-being, this decision could well affect the constitutional provisions of that society along with its formulation and ordering of basic rights and freedoms.Footnote ⁹⁷ The decision would involve privileging a particular substantive view, expressed in a widely acceptable language. But so does the status quo in most Western nations, with its conception of the human person and corresponding judgments about the rest of what exists, and some citizens are now forced to tolerate what they see as grievous moral wrongs as a result.Footnote ⁹⁸Both views rest on metaphysical doctrines, comprehensive and competing judgments about the nature of humanity and being, and both must leave some citizens unsatisfied with resulting state policies and the character of the reasons on which these are based.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rawls wants to “leave untouched” all such doctrines, “with their long traditions of development and interpretation,” but that is impossible, and reveals a naiveté about how his own fundamental assumptions privilege a particular comprehensive view that is in turn indebted to a specific religious tradition.

Habermas seeks to trace the genealogy of those assumptions, which he largely shares, but in doing so he overrates the extent to which reason can free itself from metaphysical judgments relying on basic disclosures of the self and the world. As Wolterstorff argues, there is in truth no “postmetaphysical” philosophy,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and what looks to Habermas like “secular”—where that means postmetaphysical—reason is actually founded on a settled riverbed of views whose origins in a particular stream of thought have been lost from sight. That loss is dangerous, for it tends to close possibilities of critique and conceptual innovation in response to changing historical circumstances and previously unrecognized forms of affliction and injustice. Religious discourses can play an important role in registering these lacks and articulating solutions, as they have for much of human history, subject only to the condition that those who present them be prepared to engage in respectful conversation with others. This does involve being willing to give reasons and to listen to the reasons given by others,Footnote ¹⁰¹ but demanding translation risks losing precisely the novel insights that these discourses may reveal. Reasons acceptable to most (preferably almost all) citizens are, on the other hand, required to justify coercive state policies, and the goal of discovering, or constructing, such reasons can fairly be posited as a regulative ideal for political deliberation. Only, we should not try to limit in advance or fix once and for all what may emerge from our plural conversations as the truths of common reason, which we allow across the thresholds of our courts and parliaments.