In a well-known essay responding to Rawls' Political Liberalism, Michael Sandel draws attention to some of the costs, both moral and political, of implementing the liberal injunction against appealing to moral and religious views in public political debate (Sandel Reference Sandel2005). The liberal model of public reasoning has moral costs, Sandel argues, in cases where the bracketed views may be true, and the matter being debated is a morally grave one. And its political costs include the construction of a public square that is too spare to generate much interest or engagement. “The naked public square,” Sandel warns, then ends up being clothed by the “narrow, intolerant moralisms” of others who have no liberal compunctions about the rules of public debate: “fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread” (Sandel Reference Sandel2005, 246).

Over the past several decades, Sandel's has been one of many voices in America raising questions about the legitimacy, as well as the potentially negative consequences, of excluding religious speech in particular from public life. Richard Neuhaus first made the point in The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, and he also perceived a link between the privatization of religion and the rise of what he described, at that time, as “the religious new right” (Sandel Reference Sandel2005, 6). Since then, other authors opposing the ban on appeal to religious convictions in public debate have drawn attention to the fact that, among religious citizens, it is primarily those with liberal views who observe this ban, with the result that conservative religious voices achieve undue prominence in discussions about key moral and political issues.Footnote ¹ The nakedness of the public square does not, on its own, suffice to explain this phenomenon, as individuals with liberal religious convictions also experience “the yearning for a public life of broader meanings” (Sandel Reference Sandel2005, 246), and they might have rushed in where secular liberals fear to tread. A number of reasons have been suggested for why they did not do so in equal numbers, or with equal force, to their conservative co-religionists, at least until recently. Robert P. Jones notes that liberal religious voices have been “timid,” citing Stephen Hart's observation, in the context of a study of progressive religious activism, that “progressives often fail to articulate, and sometimes even try to hide, the ethical values that ground their proposals.” They behave, Hart remarks, as if they needed to follow a rule which states: “Don't bring up any basic values (religious or political) that underlie your commitment to the organization!” (Jones Reference Jones2008, 12)

This observation provides an important clue, I believe, to the perverse correlation between the operation of the liberal model of political reasoning, with its commitment to neutrality on substantive moral and religious questions, and an increase in the public presence of fundamentalist forms of religion, issuing sometimes in the demand that traditional religious views be recognized and represented in precisely those political and legal processes from which the liberal framework would exclude them. Liberal modes of reasoning, operating within legal and other political spheres, seek to balance the rights of various claimants without entering into debate about the truth of their beliefs, or the correctness of their values, where these are, in practice, often intimately connected. While the justification of these modes of reasoning within liberal political theory is usually limited to highly specific contexts,Footnote ² in social practice the “neutral” model has spread beyond these contexts, and is increasingly setting the rules of broader public debate.

I argue in this article that the principled exclusion of religious views from public debate, as a result of this commitment to neutrality, ironically gives an unwarranted power and legitimacy to religious positions that cannot withstand critical scrutiny, with negative consequences for both religion and politics. I therefore agree with John Pottenger's claim that “by encouraging tolerance and pluralism, liberal democracy sows diverse religious winds, and confronts a whirlwind of its own making (Pottenger Reference Pottenger2007, 43), but my argument suggests that it is not “tolerance and pluralism alone” that create the whirlwind, or our haplessness in the face of it. Rather, it is the commitment to these values together with a delegitimation of the kind of critical public deliberation that could refine and limit the religious options demanding attention in the public square.

Neuhaus rightly observed in Reference Neuhaus1984 that the religious right faces a dilemma, “political and theological,” in so far as “it wants to enter the political arena making public claims on the basis of private truths,” whereas “public decisions must be made by arguments that are public in character” (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1984, 36). “The perplexity of fundamentalism in public,” Neuhaus continues, “is that its self-understanding is premised upon a view of religion that is emphatically not public in character” (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1984, 36). While secular liberals emphatically condemn the entry of such fundamentalist religious voices into public and political life, liberal political procedures and commitments are actually complicit, I maintain, in creating the conditions for this phenomenon. Not only do they leave the public square in need of clothing, but at the same time the liberal positioning of religion for legal and political purposes allows — and even encourages, quite contrary to its intentions — a public disengagement of religion from the demands of rationality, broadly defined as a form of dialogue in which participants are required to give grounds for what they assert to be true. Liberal political reasoning, after all, exempts those who engage in it from the requirement that they justify the substance of their comprehensive religious and moral views. It is my thesis that such an exemption leads to a public (and perhaps not only public) habit of eschewing critical self-reflection and revision, so that those who demand that they be able to present religious convictions in public do not feel an obligation to defend or debate those convictions. Consequently, liberalism's commitment to “epistemic abstinence,” to borrow a phrase from Raz (Reference Raz1990), in practice serves to undermine the very ideals and virtues that liberals generally want to promote within public life. In the sphere of religion, it is then unsurprising if the least defensible yet most belligerent forms of religion end-up dominating the public sphere, even when they do not represent the religious opinions of the quiet majority.

Furthermore, in recent years, the kind of disengagement from substantive reasoning to which I am referring has also been encouraged by the discourse of multiculturalism, and of respect for group identities in general. As political models, liberalism and multiculturalism are often seen as standing in tension with one another, but there is a significant common element in the mode of political reasoning within which these models presently function. This element, spreading beyond narrowly political spheres into public reasoning of all forms, can serve to harden religious identities in some quarters, particularly among those who see themselves as an embattled minority and reach for the logic of recognition as a means of defense. In this respect, although my focus will be on religious identity, the point I want to make also applies more widely to cultural identity, as well as to the wide areas of overlap between these two categories. The idea of “culture” presupposed by some multiculturalist theories has, to be sure, already been the subject of various critiques. Complaints have been leveled, for instance, against cultural essentialism in the context of analyses wanting to stress the internal diversity of cultural groupings, the overlaps between them, the porousness of their borders, the condition of hybridity, and so forth.Footnote ³ These are indeed important points to stress, against discourses, communal and nationalist as well as multiculturalist, which incline toward a view of cultures as homogeneous, static, or monological.Footnote ⁴ But the phenomenon I am locating is a different one. It has to do with a kind of unnatural self-objectification that results from pressures to look at identity rather than looking, thinking, and reasoning from out of it, and this is a movement encouraged, I will argue, by both liberalism and multiculturalism.

Because the motivations for this article stem from dissatisfaction with the positioning and treatment of religion and religious identities within broadly liberal democratic societies that are also committed to some variety of multiculturalism, the scope of its application is limited to these kinds of societies. My analysis will be oriented primarily toward Canada and the United States, from which I draw the majority of my examples. I will propose two remedies, in light of my diagnosis of the problem: (1) a lifting of the “gag order” on religious speech at the level of civil society, provided that it can meet certain criteria and (2) the inclusion of education about religion in publicly-funded schools.

THE PROBLEM WITH NEUTRALITY

In its most widespread current manifestations, liberal theory is committed to a species of neutrality which it derives from the priority it accords to freedom. The liberal ideal — expressed, for instance, by Rawls — imagines a society in which people will be free to live as they choose, guided by different views about what constitutes a good life, which may be situated within distinct comprehensive systems of belief and value. A just political administration is supposed to ensure a fair distribution of the goods that everyone will want (no matter what else they want), but, beyond this, it should not favor any particular conception of the good. It should allow individuals to live in accordance with their own beliefs and values, as long as these do not constrain the equal liberty of others, or impact negatively upon their legitimate interests. The various facets of this liberal ideal are usually articulated in a table of universal rights, with the right to freedom of religion being guaranteed, but needing to be balanced against other rights.

These days, within societies that adhere to a policy affirming internal multiculturalism, freedom of religion tends to get positioned not only as an individual right, but also as a group right. When inflected through liberal theory, respecting people's right to their religious beliefs and practices is then seen as an element of respecting their right to their own culture, where this latter right, within liberal multiculturalist theories, is always justified, ultimately, by appeal to the interests of individuals.Footnote ⁵ While religion is not synonymous with culture, in practice accommodation for different cultures has meant accommodating different religions. Again, it becomes a matter of balancing certain rights within an administrative structure that is supposed to be neutral toward conceptions of the good, or at least neutral in the policies it applies to different religious and cultural groups. In Canada, for instance, where many of the debates about cultural accommodation have involved religious minorities that are relatively recent arrivals to the nation, changes or exceptions to existing legislation have been made allowing Sikh officers in the federal police force to wear turbans,Footnote ⁶ and Sikh students to carry kirpans.Footnote ⁷ There are at present also legal debates about whether prayer facilities should be provided for Muslims within public institutions like universities,Footnote ⁸ and it seems very likely that the criminal status of polygamy will sooner or later be subject to legal challenge on the grounds of freedom of religion.

In France, there was the much-publicized affaire du foulard, the controversy surrounding the banning of headscarves in state-funded schools. While the French variety of liberalism is arguably less anti-perfectionist, less committed to a general neutrality about the good than are the Canadian and American ones, it is certainly not less committed, publicly, to neutrality about religious matters. The state did not, in this case, justify its decision on substantive grounds, by arguing, rightly or wrongly, that the Muslim headscarf symbolizes female subservience, or that its wearing exemplifies a form of religious traditionalism which it wants to discourage. Instead, it argued against the display of religious symbols, at least “conspicuous” ones, within its institutions on the grounds that such display violates its own secular character, where “secularism” means, in France, equal social toleration accompanied by an equal exclusion from public and political life.

There are in fact many cases in relation to which liberal states have struggled to reconcile tensions between their acknowledgment of the rights of religious communities, grounded in a guarantee of freedom of religion within the private sphere, with political secularism, where the latter involves, among other things, excluding religion from playing any role within public justifications for specific laws as well as for legal principles, as enshrined within constitutional provisions. Some of the very public legal debates about gay rights in Canada, for example, have involved Christian groups who disapprove of homosexuality. In these debates, the discourse used both within and outside the courts has framed the issues in terms of weighing the rights of these groups against the rights of all Canadians to be treated equally in matters of employment, education, and marriage. The court cases have generally adjudicated the question of whether religious groups have the right to adopt policies within their own institutions that would be considered discriminatory according to the Canadian Charter of Rights: whether a Christian college can dismiss a teacher for homosexual practice,Footnote ⁹ for example, or whether a Christian school can forbid a student to bring a same-sex partner to a prom,Footnote ¹⁰ or whether a Christian group can refuse to rent its hall for a same-sex wedding ceremony.Footnote ¹¹

However, in wider public discussions, one also hears complaints from religious communities that their views are being disregarded or suppressed, through legal and other measures, in public deliberations about various issues. Often, these complaints appeal to freedom of religion, as do complaints about the state imposing unwelcome policies and sanctions upon religious groups. In Canada, such complaints are increasingly being pitched in terms of group and minority rights. Part of the explanation for this trend lies in the peculiarities of the legal battles in Canada involving conflicts between freedom of religion and universal equality rights. These have had recourse to a section of the Canadian Charter of Rights that forbids discrimination against individuals on the basis of their group-identity, specifically naming “race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability” (Section 15). It has been argued that sexual orientation should be included in this section, and that it is in any case entailed, so that the Charter forbids in principle any form of discrimination against homosexuals.Footnote ¹² In popular public debate, religious groups have appropriated the language of these arguments to counter that they are being discriminated against when their opposition to homosexuality is silenced, or infringed upon in some other fashion.Footnote ¹³ It is then but a short step to conceiving the matter as a conflict between the rights of different groups. The Muslim Canadian Congress, for instance, a voice for progressive Muslims in Canada, does precisely this when it suggests that Muslim Canadians need to stand up for the rights of gays and lesbians as a matter of solidarity between one, historically marginalized, minority community and another.Footnote ¹⁴ Note that this way of framing the issue carefully avoids making any substantive judgement about same-sex marriage, or homosexuality in general. It thus exemplifies the liberal commitment to maintaining moral and religious neutrality within public reasoning about matters of justice.

While legal cases concerning religion have followed a different course in the United States than in Canada, religious groups in the United States are at times also appealing to the language of group rights, along with that of tolerance and the right to free expression. Consider, for instance, this description on the back cover of The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today:

As one might expect, the word “liberal” does not carry positive significations for the authors of this book (Sears and Osten Reference Sears and Osten2003, 194). But they complain repeatedly that Christians are being silenced or being forced to violate their religious beliefs (Sears and Osten Reference Sears and Osten2003, 171–173), and these complaints are couched in terms of very liberal political values enshrined in the United States constitution; namely, freedom of religion and freedom of expression. Moreover, as revealed in the above citation, they also convey the message that the rights of Christians, as a group, are under threat.Footnote ¹⁵

The authors of The Homosexual Agenda hold leadership positions in the Alliance Defence Fund, a Christian group that describes itself as defending religious freedom. On the issue of the rights of gays and lesbians, and on many other matters, its position is the direct opposite of that held by the progressive Muslim Canadian Congress. There is, however, a similarity in the form of reasoning employed at times, although not consistently, by both of these groups, which frames the issue in terms of freedom, tolerance, and group rights. This reasoning eschews critical engagement with the actual subject at hand, and adopts, I would argue, a reifying and uncritical relation to the beliefs that are supposed to identify the religious group in question. In these respects, it is influenced by, and mimics, the concepts and modes of argumentation proper to the neutral liberal paradigm, in combination with the multiculturalist one, with its commitment to respecting the beliefs and values of diverse groups. Even if adoption of this rhetoric by some groups is initially disingenuous, as one strongly suspects it is, amounting to a tactic rather than a matter of principle, it nonetheless sets up a dialogical situation in which substantive arguments are deflected in favor of ones involving justificatory appeals to the putative beliefs and values of this or that community. Not only does this leave opponents of religious fundamentalism, believers and atheists alike, without some of the crucial resources they need in order to mount effective counter-arguments, it establishes a climate of public debate in which the content of religion is bracketed, and presented as being out of bounds for critical scrutiny.

The above-cited cases are symptomatic, I am arguing, of a certain accidental productive impact of liberal and multiculturalist paradigm upon the overlapping spheres of religion and culture. Working in combination, these paradigms can serve to promote and legitimize the adoption of an unreasoning stance in both of these spheres. The requirement that questions concerning the truth of comprehensive moral views should be bracketed in legal and political reasoning — including, and especially, views specific to particular religious and cultural communities — moves public dialogue away from critical discussions about the substance of these views, toward questions of religious freedom and community rights. In so doing, it encourages people to think of religions and cultures as fixed systems of belief, rather than as dynamic bodies of thought, in which ideas and principles handed over by a particular tradition are reflectively appropriated, applied, and revised. In relation to religion, many people — believers as well as non-believers — are then inclined to think of being a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu as a matter of adhering to a set of established guidelines, rather than as a living process that engages, for instance, textual exegesis, theological reasoning, moral intuition, and varieties of religious experience. Religious dogmatism is not itself a new phenomenon, of course, but the appropriation and application of religious principles and traditions, even ones that are understood as essential elements of a given faith, can take a variety of forms. It can be more or less rigid, more or less intelligent and thoughtful, as the history of the world's many religions reveals. The positioning of religion as a matter either of private belief or of identity may serve, in practice, to undermine the better possibilities in this regard, while encouraging the worse, because it allows people to present, in the course of public and political discussions, claims that their beliefs, or their identity, be recognized and respected, and yet disallows critical debate about the content of the views or practices that are at stake in these claims.

With respect to multiculturalism, I want here to identify a general problem with discursive paradigms that incite, or, within legal contexts, even compel, people to make explicit appeals to culture and religion as forms of justification. It is important to see that the move of making such appeals differs in kind from the act of uttering statements, or presenting arguments, within the shared language of a specific religion and/or culture. The latter, it can reasonably be claimed, is inevitable; we all reason, and speak, and feel through the medium of the concepts and patterns of thought that we inherit and with which we are familiar. One needs to distinguish this natural being embedded in a tradition, or set of traditions, from the reflective act of appealing to the fact of embeddedness as a justificatory defense of particular beliefs and practices. To state, for instance, that you believe that homosexuality is a perversion of a natural relation ordained by the creator of the world is one thing. To claim that your beliefs about homosexuality should be respected because they are an element of your religion is quite another. In a dialogical situation, the first statement leaves open the possibility of a response, including a theological response, to the substance of what is being asserted. The second does not. It shifts the discussion to a plane where questions about the truth of beliefs are simply ruled out.

The problem with moving on this plane is not only that the beliefs, practices, and values allegedly proper to given cultures and religions cannot then be challenged by others. It is also that members of those cultures and religions themselves develop the intellectual habit of relating to their traditions as fixed creeds to which they ascribe insofar as they identify themselves as members of this or that group. This habit is encouraged by a problematic fusion between the liberal discourse of neutrality and freedom and the multiculturalist call for"recognition” of group identities, even though these discourses sometimes explicitly speak in opposition to one another. Many multiculturalists, for instance, reject liberal individualism as having failed to understand the extent to which selves are constituted by common horizons of meaning which they do not choose, and from which they cannot separate themselves.Footnote ¹⁶ There is considerable merit in these accounts of the relation between identity and culture. At the same time, though, there is something distinctly odd, and artificial, and ultimately incoherent, in the move through which a descriptive account of our necessarily limited and definite cultural horizons is converted into a ground for the claim that I cannot be expected to extend some part of those horizons, even when I have become reflectively aware of it and am confronted with a comprehensible challenge. In practice, liberal neutrality and multicultural recognition collaborate in the political demand that the state should mediate between different, and often competing, bundles of belief and value by acknowledging the equal rights of their possessors without making substantive judgments about their content.

Within most liberal and multiculturalist theories, this demand is supposed to operate only in select legal and political contexts, and is not meant to prevent broader public debate on, for instance, the content of religious beliefs, let alone private critical reflection on these. The problem I am identifying in this article, however, concerns not the intentions of these theoretical paradigms, but the effect of their actual operation upon public discourse. The terms of debate commonly employed these days in public discussions across various media — newspapers, radio, television, the internet — and well as within classrooms, reveals that a rather crude form of the “neutral” approach to religion has become quite pervasive, at least in Canada and the United States. As Tomasi points out, the demands of liberal public reason have “unintended spillovers” that affect the general moral outlook of citizens in a liberal society (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 13–16). Usually, these spillovers are thought to consist of the “thicker” values of liberalism, such as individualism, autonomy and critical reflection. That is what Tomasi himself supposes, citing Larmore, Galston and Macedo, who all claim that liberalism is not neutral in its effects, but favors ethical world views and ways of life that correspond to its own specific values (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 14). I am maintaining, on the other hand, that in some cases liberalism actually promotes the opposite of these values, because it asks people to adopt a form of reasoning that specifically, and very deliberately, as a matter of principle, does not require them to face challenges to the veracity of their beliefs, but only involves balancing the rights and freedoms of those who believe one thing against the equal rights and freedoms of those who believe another. It thereby fosters a public culture in which religious systems of belief, along with others, are insulated from criticism, and in which the holders of these beliefs do not feel an obligation to examine, review and, if necessary, to revise them. Liberals sometimes object to the politics of identity on the grounds that it allows people to opt out of reason-based argument (Barry Reference Barry2001, 252–58; cf. Waldron Reference Waldron, Kymlicka and Norman2000), but without noticing that the liberal paradigm of neutrality can also do so, as is demonstrated by the logic of certain appeals to freedom of religion.

My argument is not, however, straightforwardly directed against the content of liberal theory. Some have argued, for instance, that the Rawlsian ideal of public reason, as developed in A Theory of Justice, or in Political Liberalism, does not truly require such a profound, or wide, commitment to excluding substantive arguments from public and political debate (See Kenny Reference Kenny2004, 53). That may be true, but the topic of this article is not what exactly Rawls said, or meant, nor what an ideal form of liberalism might look like in the minds of its philosophical defenders.Footnote ¹⁷ The criticism I am formulating pertains to how the discourse of liberalism — along with that of multiculturalism — is in fact functioning, in countries like Canada and the United States. I would assert further, though, that any demand requiring people to adopt a particular form of reasoning in one central social sphere is sure to have an influence upon others. This problem cannot be resolved simply by stating, at the level of theory, that a certain political paradigm is not meant to be applied outside of specified contexts. Rather, modifications will need to be made, and strategies devised, to minimize and counteract the inevitable spread of the habits of thought that this paradigm promotes.Footnote ¹⁸

RELIGION AND REASON

For those accustomed to thinking of religion simply as a system of dogmatic belief, the very idea of reasoning about a claim couched in religious language may seem strange. But consider the various kinds of substantive response that might be given to the statement mentioned earlier: “homosexuality is a perversion of a natural relation ordained by the creator of the world.” First, certain beliefs of an empirical nature might be implicated in this claim: for instance, the belief that homosexual activity only occurs among human beings, or that sexual orientation is a matter of choice, or that gays and lesbians lead especially promiscuous lives, or form relationships that are necessarily physically and emotionally harmful. These sorts of beliefs can be challenged through the provision of empirical data that contradict them. One might also focus on issues raised by the term “natural relation,” asking questions about the normativity of the so-called “natural,” and about the true good of romantic and sexual unions. In addition, there are more narrowly theological arguments that might be adduced. Combining the empirical evidence with the belief that God is a just and benevolent being, for instance, and with the emphasis on exercising conscience and compassion common to most religions, it could be argued that God simply would not have created human beings with this sexual orientation, while declaring romantic relationships between them to be a sin. Finally, there are a variety of textual arguments that can be made, in a context where a certain text, like the Christian bible, is taken to be holy. One can point out that there is not much in this text about homosexuality, in comparison with other issues, and that the statements that there are need to be understood in their context. One can also challenge literalism, making a distinction between religious ethical principles and their application in specific historical contexts, and arguing for a more sophisticated form of biblical hermeneutics. Exposing the hypocrisy of those who insist on literal interpretation can form part of such an argument, as they may not be so inclined to accept literally other passages, such as those requiring poverty as a condition for salvation. And since I am imagining here a speech situation in which none of the restrictive rules of liberal public reason apply, there is no principled bar to objections based on historical scholarship about the redaction of the various pieces of writing assembled in this text, or about the difficulties of translation.

These kinds of arguments are made within scholarly literature and academic debate. But there seems to be less and less space for them in the mainstream public media. They are remarkably absent from that level of society which Austen Dacy, in The Secular Conscience, defines as follows:

Dacy's orientation is quite different from my own. I do not share his conviction that “secularists have the moral high ground,” and my complaint is not about a “religious monopoly on the language of ethics and values” (Dacy Reference Dacy2008, 20). On the contrary, it is about the monopolizing of debate by certain political paradigms, and the negative effect this has on religion. We agree, however, on at least a part of the solution to our respective criticisms; namely, that “secular liberals must lift the gag order on ethics, values, and religion in public debate” (Dacy Reference Dacy2008, 17).

This self-imposed gag order creates a situation in which many citizens, believers and atheists alike, do not encounter critical reflection on religious subjects at all, and are consequently unfamiliar with the modes of reasoning that such reflection may employ. Under these circumstances, it is predictable that when religious citizens do return to the public square, they will express “outbursts of resentment” rather than “reasoned and civil discussion,” as Nicholas Wolsterstoff notes. We need to take very seriously the questions Wolsterstoff goes on to pose:

Religious reasoning is possible, but it will not flourish in a social context where the common rules of public debate work against the acquisition of the knowledge, skills, and habits it requires.

When, in addition, the only public debates about religion to which citizens are regularly exposed revolve around cases in which the “rights” of religious believers are pitted against the rights of others, both those who are persuaded of religious claims and those who are not internalize the view that these claims cannot be subjected to scrutiny. Those who are sympathetic suppose that is because these claims are a matter of “faith,” without engaging in any analysis of what that might mean, and without acquiring knowledge of the variety of views on this topic in the history of religious and theological traditions. Those who are unsympathetic interpret this “faith” as nothing more than a blind, and ethically dangerous, adherence to dogma. The latter view is reinforced by the fact that the forms of religious belief being presented on the public stage are those that are asserted in the course of legal and political contests. These often come from the more conservative segments of religious communities, ones that may indeed be uninterested in critical self-reflection, and they tend to be claims that infringe upon the rights of others. As a result, within public debate, a divide is constantly established and reinforced between equality rights, on the one hand, and religious belief, on the other, with the task being to balance the conflicting claims of these. Naturally, some people are then left with the impression that, when it comes to matters of ethics, religion is by its very nature something potentially harmful that needs to be kept in check through arguments external to it.

None of the objections I described above in relation to same-sex unions, however, should be construed as “external” to religion, as every one of them could be formulated by someone who considers herself to be religious. There is no principled incompatibility between being religious and questioning a particular religious belief. After all, those who take religious beliefs seriously think there is a truth of the matter about God, the purpose of existence, the afterlife, and so on, in which case a belief about one of these subjects can certainly be false. Admittedly, some members of religious communities think that one should not reason in any way about anything in a sacred text, as it is the direct word of God. But, again, one may challenge this way of relating to religious texts, and that response is a possible move within religious discourse. Bhikhu Parekh does not state something intrinsically irreligious when he claims that “the divine will is communicated in a human language with all its obvious limitations,” and that “the authorized guardians of the sacred texts too are fallible human beings prone to errors, misjudgments, biases and pressures of dominant interests” (Parekh Reference Parekh2006, 334).Footnote ¹⁹

It is true that certain kinds of believers may choose simply to turn away from arguments and points of view that challenge their beliefs, and be unwilling to engage with them. In that case, however, they should not — and in open public debate cannot — ask that their beliefs be respected as part of the conversation. Views presented in public must be accountable to public reason (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1984, 15). They must, in other words, be of such a nature that they can be understood and debated by those who do not share them. Amy Gutmann therefore proposes that, while there is no principled bar on “admitting religiously based beliefs into politics on the same terms as any other beliefs” (Gutmann Reference Gutmann and Rosenblum2000, 137), if the sole reason offered in support of the belief is, for example, that “‘God commands it and therefore I am advocating it as law,’ the reason should be rejected by people who lack access to the divine command” (Gutmann Reference Gutmann and Rosenblum2000, 140). In other words, religious citizens cannot have it both ways, expecting public policy to be implemented on the basis of essentially private reasons. They cannot demand that religious beliefs be allowed in public debates, and, simultaneously, that they be immune to criticism on the grounds that they are religious beliefs.

Liberal theorists wanting to exclude religion from public life have been wrong to assume, however, that all religious arguments rest on premises which are inaccessible to others. As Ronald Thiemann points out, “religious convictions can be developed into public theological arguments that fully meet the appropriate ‘conditions for publicity’” (Thiemann Reference Thiemann1998, 90), as long as the latter “are not explicitly designed to exclude religion from public discussion” (Thiemann Reference Thiemann1998, 156). The assumption that religious beliefs could not possibly meet reasonable criteria for publicity is based on the misconception that religion, being a matter of “faith,” is inherently irrational, or at least non-rational. Brendan Sweetman complains about this misconception in Why Politics Needs Religion, arguing that it has become a mainstream view “among the intelligentsia, the educated elites and the media” in the United States, and, further, that “many religious believers themselves in all denominations have been thoroughly seduced by the view that religion is a matter of faith, and so has no role in politics” (Sweetman Reference Sweetman2006, 19). Sweetman points out that “faith” can mean many things and that there is such a thing as “rational faith,” meaning a firmly held belief that is “well supported by evidence and argument” (Sweetman Reference Sweetman2006, 39). What still makes this faith is that “the evidence is not certain or conclusive” (Sweetman Reference Sweetman2006, 38–39).

As it happens, I disagree with most of the positions Sweetman favors on particular moral issues, and think that the arguments he presents are weak. But they are not weak because they are religious arguments, nor are they couched in terms with which a non-religious person would be unable to engage. For instance, at one point Sweetman illustrates his argument for rational religious discourse with this example:

The putative immorality of marijuana use rests, in this argument, on a number of consequentialist claims. If these claims are false (as I believe they are), the intermediate conclusion that marijuana use would lead to an increase in human misery is also false, which in turn invalidates the final conclusion that it is “against God's moral plan for humanity.” Thus, the argument actually revolves around exactly the same issues that are contested within secular debates on the subject. Even though it appeals to God, one can make sense of it, and engage with it critically, without either accepting or disputing the existence of God, just as one can in the case of atheistic moral arguments.Footnote ²⁰

It is important, moreover, that such arguments be tested in public debate, so that religious citizens gain a realistic sense of how rationally defensible various theological positions genuinely are. At present, the fact that none of these positions is allowed to be presented and discussed leaves some people with the impression that a number of them are stronger than they actually are, and that these could easily withstand critical scrutiny if given a chance to do so. At the same time, the prevalence of a public commitment to neutrality has led many conservative critics to think of their favored religious and moral views as a bulwark against an allegedly pervasive relativism. Sweetman makes this charge in the course of a critique of liberalism (Sweetman Reference Sweetman2006, 223); Roger Trigg does so against multiculturalism (Trigg Reference Trigg2007, 108). These authors represent comparatively sophisticated instances of a stance that is often adopted in a much cruder form. To cite Chris Hedges: “The Christian Right attacks ‘cultural relativism,’ the creed that there is no absolute good and that all value systems have equal merit — even as it benefits, in a final irony, form the passivity of people who tolerate it in the name of cultural relativism” (Hedges Reference Hedges2006, 34). What is needed, in this context, are public critiques, from religious and other moral perspectives, of the substance of the views at issue, not more stringent measures (probably doomed to failure, in any case) designed to banish religion yet more firmly from public life. In the words of Jim Wallis, “the answer to bad religion isn't secularism or withdrawal, but better religion — both personal and public” (Wallis Reference Wallis2008, 7).

Furthermore, the fact that refusal of critical reflection altogether is still an option for religious believers, as it is for everyone else, and that a few may raise their voices without conforming to conditions of publicity, does not constitute a good reason for excluding religion from public debate. If the concern is that because some religious people will not be convinced by any kind of substantive argument, it is better to exclude such arguments altogether from public reasoning, it should be pointed out that the people about whom one has this concern are equally unlikely to be convinced by liberal arguments. In evaluating the potential for generating irresolvable conflict, the bar should not be set higher for a more broadly deliberative model of public reason than for a neutral one. It is highly improbable that radical religious fundamentalists living in liberal societies accept that they should be respectful of the beliefs of those who disagree with them, or that the best society is one in which a government does not favor any particular world view or set of values. If they are nonetheless generally peaceful and law-abiding (and only a very few are not), that is because they are quite definitely in a minority and unable to make their views prevail.Footnote ²¹ In other words, their acceptance of the political system in which they live is pragmatic rather than principled, and there is no reason to think they would give up this practical agreement to a certain modus vivendi if substantive moral arguments, including ones involving religious theses, were more widely permitted in public debate. Some people will not be convinced, just as they are not convinced now, but at least they will be exposed to challenge in a public culture of debate that includes rather than brackets the beliefs that are central to their lives.

We should also not assume that if the rules excluding religion from public discussion were to be relaxed, we would then be left with no principles governing and limiting what may be said, and how. Social sanctions against inflammatory or bigoted speech do not per se depend upon liberal or multicultural political premises, nor does a commitment to non-violence, or the sensible prescription to pay courteous attention to varying viewpoints and to suspend making judgments based on ignorance and prejudice. These values are already an integral part of the social fabric of Canada and the United States. They can be promoted without bracketing the content of religious beliefs, as can the ideal of trying to see beyond differences to what religious citizens have in common as members of different faiths, and what all citizens have in common as human beings. In fact, allowing substantive religious arguments into public debate can help to strengthen such values, as it permits speakers to draw on specifically religious sources in their defense. “Why not let people say what they want,” as Wolterstorff proposes, “but insist that they say it with civility? Why not concern ourselves with the virtues of the conduct of the debate rather than with the content of the positions staked out in the debate” (Wolterstorff Reference Wolsterstoff and Weithman1997, 180; cf. also Audi and Wolterstoff Reference Audi and Wolterstoff1997, 112)?

Another objection could be that matters of religious doctrine are extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible, to resolve even when people are willing to enter into thoughtful critical debate. That is precisely why we need to be reasonable pluralists about such doctrines, one might suppose, following Rawls, while seeking an overlapping consensus on fundamental legal and political principles. Certainly, in a diverse society, one comprised of groups and individuals with differing philosophical, ethical, and religious perspectives, we will need to arrive at a measure of agreement that cuts across these differences. Requiring citizens to suspend these perspectives when engaging in public political debate is not the only strategy, however, for achieving such agreement. An overlapping consensus can also be the product of a less restrictive dialogue between the members of a plural polity, in which people are permitted to present the full panoply of reasons behind their position on a given subject. In the course of such a dialogue, they can still discover, along the way, that they do in fact agree on certain principles — that the killing of innocent human beings is wrong, for instance, or that all people are equal before the law — although they justify these principles by appeal to varying theses about humanity, nature, and God.

Charles Taylor makes a similar point when he claims, in Modes of Secularism, that “it is essential to the overlapping consensus that it be generally understood that there is more than one set of valid reasons for signing on to it” (Bhargava Reference Bhargava1998, 49). But the slogan should not therefore be: “Let people subscribe for whatever reasons they find compelling, only let them subscribe” (Bhargava Reference Bhargava1998, 51), for discussion about these “reasons” needs to be welcomed as part of the conversation. Otherwise, we again end up positing, for the purposes of public debate, a strong distinction between assertions that can be challenged and a background framework of beliefs that cannot. Maintaining this distinction has the negative social effect of discouraging reflection and dialogue on the beliefs that are supposed to be “background,” including fundamental religious beliefs. Taylor himself notes the importance of such dialogue,Footnote ²² but I would re-emphasize my point that, if a certain model of public reason, whether liberal or multiculturalist, has the spillover effect of legitimizing the idea that religious beliefs are out of bounds, it is not enough to add the proviso that respectful debate on this subject should nonetheless continue in this or that arena. Within the public culture of a diverse society, one needs to avoid designating any set of beliefs as being completely out of bounds in the first place, and it is then important not to draw too strong a divide between “convergent principles” and “underlying reasons” for signing on to them (Bhargava Reference Bhargava1998, 51). Doing so sends the message that the “underlying reasons” constitute some kind of immovable bedrock, a perception that risk creating its own reality. Also, if humanists, Buddhists, Jews, and Christians can converge upon, for example, a right to life (Bhargava Reference Bhargava1998, 49) that might be because the different discourses upon which they base this convergence actually articulate some shared intuitions and convictions. Only a conversation about “underlying reasons” can ascertain whether this is so, and locating such deeper commonalities among seemingly disparate world views establishes a firmer and more stable basis for social agreement than does procuring assent to the same principle albeit on different grounds.

When assent cannot be procured and a decision nonetheless must be made, moreover, we should be honest about the grounds on which it is made. The matter of gay and lesbian rights once more provides a telling example. In Canada, liberal political discourse casts this matter as an issue of equality. At the level of legal reasoning, the claim on behalf of gay rights is that barring persons from social institutions because of their sexual orientation is a form of illegitimate discrimination. Disallowing same-sex marriage then amounts to discriminating against couples purely on the basis of their homosexuality. Upon closer analysis, however, we should see that this latter claim is only convincing if one has already reached a certain judgement about same-sex relations. Only if we are antecedently convinced that gay and lesbian couples are capable of forming relationships which are, in the relevant respects, just like those of heterosexual couples can this become an issue of “equality.” It will not be regarded in that way by someone who thinks, on religious or other grounds, that homosexuality is a moral wrong, a perversion, or a sin. No one, after all, is asking for recognition of incestuous marriages, or complaining about discrimination against people who want to have sexual relations with members of other species. The fact of the matter is that, in Canada, a substantive social decision has been made about the nature and value of gay and lesbian relations. It has been decided, although the verdict is far from unanimous, that there is nothing morally wrong with such relations, that homosexuality is a natural sexual orientation for a significant minority of persons, and that these persons are capable of entering into committed relationships which meet the criteria for marriage, and deserve to be recognized as such by the state. A majority, albeit as yet a slim one, of Canadian citizens, politicians, lawmakers, and judges believe this to be so. If they did not, as in fact they did not 20 years ago; the issue could not be cast in the language of equality and anti-discrimination, and adjudicated through appeals to the Charter of Rights.

Thus, while the language of these appeals gives the deliberation about gay and lesbian rights an air of neutrality, as if it were just a matter of balancing the rights of one group against another, in truth, a decision has been made about who is correct on this issue. And this decision has been made through a process of democratic deliberation in which a majority has been persuaded of a truth, not through any neutral reasoning about rights, and also not, I believe, in this case, through judicial reliance on constitutional principles as opposed to majority opinion. There are, as Sandel points out, a number of political issues which simply cannot be decided without making substantive judgments (Sandel Reference Sandel2006, 225–229), and refusing to admit this — hiding behind a false mask of neutrality — “insults rather than respects those who disagree” with the decision that is finally reached.Footnote ²³ In addition, those who disagree frequently see through the mask, and are angered by the hypocrisy of the reasoning being offered. They then complain, for example, that their “Christian rights” are being violated, as their wish to act upon their deeply held religious beliefs is not being given equal weight in certain decisions about social policy and law. The complaint is a legitimate one, as the truth is that elements of those beliefs have been judged, by parties involved in making the decisions in question, to be morally or factually mistaken, and this judgement has played a role in determining the outcome.

It does not follow from my analysis that substantive critical debate about religious views should occur at all political levels. There are good reasons for preserving liberal and multicultural constraints within governmental institutions; we might not want judges to base legal decisions on assessments of religious doctrines, and no one, I suspect, wants to introduce lengthy theological debates into houses of parliament. My argument is not directed against the separation of church and state, but against the exclusion of religious viewpoints from civil society. It stems from the worry that liberal and multicultural modes of reasoning, which do have their proper domains of application, have started to pervade the entirety of the public sphere, and that by positing a strong distinction between what can be publicly debated and what cannot, these modes incline people to cordon off a critically important subset of their beliefs, and to treat this subset as an inflexible thing or a matter of purely private faith. In relation to the liberal paradigm, I agreed earlier with Tomasi's claim that liberal public reason affects the general moral outlook of citizens in a liberal society. Citing Rawls, Tomasi acknowledges that liberal principles of justice are not intended to apply “directly to the internal life of nonpublic social structures” (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 41), but he rightly argues that this response does little to address the worry that liberal public norms may unintentionally affect the forms of reasoning citizens employ in nonpublic domains, a worry articulated by Sandel, among others (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 41–42). Since the effects being diagnosed in this article are very different from the ones Tomasi locates, however, the remedy for them will also have to be different. While Tomasi offers, as a proposed solution, an account of “liberal nonpublic reason” (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 42; my italics), I am proposing, in agreement with Sandel, that we need to make room for a greater degree of nonliberal public reason, by relaxing liberal restrictions on discussions about the true and the good within non-governmental public and political spaces.

RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

So far, I have been arguing for lifting the liberal “gag order” on religion within public debate, on the grounds that the excessive privatization of religion, working together with multicultural “recognition” of it, discourages religious reasoning. In relation to public institutions, recommending further concrete solutions to the problem I have highlighted would require a careful, case by case, analysis of specific arenas of public and political discourse. An example of such analysis is provided by Greenawalt (Reference Greenawalt1995, 180), who steers a complex route between blanket exclusion rules and no principles of restraint whatsoever. While I cannot offer a similarly detailed analysis within the scope of this article, I do want to make one proposal on this point: namely, that education about religion should be included in publicly-funded schools, and in a manner that would both inform and encourage critical reflection. Here, I agree with Bhikhu Parekh, who argues, with specific reference to the United States, that the exclusion of education about religion from schools has negative effects on both religious and non-religious citizens:

Tomasi also argues, from a liberal perspective and on different grounds, for education about religion in publicly-funded schools. His argument addresses the concern that the omission of any discussion of religious perspectives and attitudes within schools can give students the impression that religion is outmoded and irrelevant in the world for which the state is preparing them (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 89). Under the guise of secular neutrality, Tomasi suggests, this omission actually inculcates a certain view of religion, one that, in its effects although not in its intentions, undercuts the religious world views that many politically reasonable citizens hold dear (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 91). As a solution, Tomasi proposes adopting an approach “that educates students honestly into the role of religious belief in their society's history and culture and yet does so without falling into proselytization” (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 90). This approach, he says, “could include exercises that encouraged students to consider what attitudes, beliefs, and even what forms of reasoning might be most appropriate for them, given their own histories and expectations” (95). The goal here is to construct the kind of school system required by political liberalism, a system that “must prepare children for the roles they will play in a society where citizens not only respect one another as free and equal but do so while continuing to affirm a diverse and irreconcilable range of views — religious, moral and philosophical — as true” (Tomasi Reference Tomasi2001, 98).

My concern, however, as applied to the exclusion of religion from schools, would not be that students are given the impression that religion is dead, although this may be true for those students whose familial context reinforces such a view. I have been pointing to a different kind of problem with liberal discourse, the problem of inadvertently encouraging an unreflective and uncritical relationship to certain sets of beliefs, primarily those belonging to the category of religion, although a similar case could be made for the overlapping category of culture. In the context of education within the public secular school system, this concern applies especially to students whose nonpublic associations are religious, and who then receive no instruction about religion outside of these associations. When the latter are narrowly dogmatic, communicating a fixed set of beliefs that are supposed to be definitive of a certain religious community, and when students are at the same time sent the message through schools, as well as though other liberal institutions, that religious beliefs are “private,” from where will they obtain the resources and motivation to subject these beliefs to critical scrutiny? Introducing education about religion in schools is indeed part of the solution, but not in the manner that Tomasi suggests, where students are supposed to learn which world view is appropriate for them, while respecting others who hold a different, and perhaps incompatible one. My analysis calls into question precisely this mode of approaching one's own beliefs and those of others. The solution, in that case, is not a further extension of liberal reasoning into schools, but the encouragement of substantive discussion. This would require school-level education about religion to send the message that religious beliefs are beliefs. They assert that something is the case, and while there are very good grounds for a measure of religious pluralism, because of the limitations of the human intellect and the role of culturally variable factors like symbol and myth in the articulation of religious understanding, in principle such assertions can be either true or false. The goal here is not merely to learn about religious systems of belief, whether one's own or those of others, nor is it to learn that people with mutually irreconcilable views on this subject can nonetheless get along within the same political system. It is, rather, to develop the skills and habits of thought required for reflective deliberation about the content of religious beliefs.

Here, I would go further than many authors — including Tomasi (Reference Tomasi2001, 90–98), Greenawalt (Reference Greenawalt2005), and Parekh (Reference Parekh2006, 332) — in arguing for the inclusion of critical deliberation about religious theses within schools, at higher grade levels and at least as an optional component.Footnote ²⁵ While Greenawalt (Reference Greenawalt2005, 131–32) fairly notes the risks of critical discussion about religion in classrooms, these risks can be averted by a teacher's presenting possible arguments without taking a stand, and focusing on broad issues central to many of the world's religions (e.g., the existence of God, the possibility of immortality, the problem of evil, the status of revelation and faith), while not engaging in wholesale comparative evaluation of different religions. The latter, I agree, is too fraught with potential pitfalls. If no critical discussion about religious claims is included within schools, however, students will not be given an opportunity to develop the skills and habits of thought required for reflective deliberation about the content of religious beliefs. The development of these capacities is crucial to addressing the problem of forms of religious dogmatism that are fostered by a public culture in which religious claims are habitually excluded from substantive debate.Footnote ²⁶