Bryan McGraw's very fine book begins by distinguishing two kinds of religious believers who may pose a challenge to liberal democracy: theocrats, who believe that state power may be used to coerce citizens into particular faith practices, and what McGraw calls integrationists, who believe such coercion would be an inappropriate use of state power, but who nonetheless hold that all parts of life, including politics, should be organized around and influenced by faith. This latter category, which in the United States today would include many Protestant evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons, is McGraw's focus as he deftly probes the theoretical problems and questions in the now extensive literature on religion and liberal democracy. This focus and McGraw's clear and careful scholarship make this book a unique and important contribution to these debates.

McGraw contends that when liberal theorists consider religion, their frame of reference remains the early modern wars of religion. He wants to provide an alternative point of reference, the political activities of integrationists in four European democracies from about 1870 to 1930, each of which had a dominant political party organized around a religious identity: the Catholic Party in Belgium, the Anti-Revolutionary Party in Holland, the Christian Social Party in Austria, and the Center Party in Germany. In Belgium and Holland, the political mobilization of religion did not undermine democratic order but instead worked toward its consolidation and legitimacy. In Austria and Germany, in contrast, the religious parties eventually found themselves unable or unwilling to cooperate with opponents and, thus, contributed toward the erosion of democratic legitimacy. In the successful cases, McGraw claims, the solid religious identity of the parties allowed their membership to cross class differences, thereby pluralizing some of their interests and moderating their demands. In addition, a strong network of institutions — churches, schools, newspapers, business associations, and trade unions — allowed their political elites a degree of autonomy in seeking more narrowly political goals and in working with political opponents. McGraw argues that these factors helped foster a commitment among religious believers to democratic processes and institutions.

According to McGraw, these cases show that religious integrationists need not be bad liberal democratic citizens, even if their civic activities fail to meet the stringent standards of public and/or secular reason; rather, under the right circumstances they can be what we might call good-enough citizens. He uses the cases to probe the problematic assumptions about religion and secularization in the approaches of Robert Audi, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls, and he offers a revised version of Rawls' approach in which an overlapping consensus is replaced by a more minimal constitutional consensus, and in which the strictures of public reason are relaxed. While not required to prioritize nonreligious over religious reasons, religious integrationists may not ignore nonreligious reasons and must approach their opponents as also legitimately seeking the public good. McGraw's discussions here are eminently fair and comprehensive, and he makes a measured, compelling case for his relaxed standards of deliberative restraint.

Although McGraw's case studies nicely show that religio-political participation can take other forms than those presumed by public reason theorists, it is less clear how these cases more directly relate to contemporary politics. All of them were operating within what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls a neo-Durkheimian matrix, in which competing Christian denominations with mutually exclusive theological claims were nonetheless viewed as part of a larger (while bounded) group working toward the public good. Christianity was seen by most as essential to the maintenance of civilized order. Taylor suggests, however, that we have moved into a post-Durkheimian era, in which religious beliefs and practices are not merely one's choice, as in choosing a denomination, but must also make sense in terms of one's own unique spiritual development. In this context, denominations and other formal religious organizations are less relevant, and thus no longer play the role that they did in the case studies McGraw gives us. Moreover, the claim that religion is necessary for civilized order is itself contested, in part through politics.

Another way to say this is that McGraw's case studies are drawn from a confessional age, when we are now in a post-confessional age. Religion has not disappeared nor declined in importance, but its forms are different than in the period he studies. McGraw briefly hints at this in his conclusion, and one hopes that his future work takes up this question more directly and at more length. Particularly important is his argument that the solid confessional core of the earlier movements freed their leaders to pursue public and political goals. Today it seems that rather than an institutional or confessional core, what often unites integrationists in the United States are specific religio-political positions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage rights. The distance, as it were, between theology and a theologically-informed theory of public justice, exemplified by earlier political leaders like Holland's Abraham Kuyper, seems to be collapsing. If this is the case and if McGraw's argument is correct, it may bode ill for democratic legitimacy in the United States. Rather than simply reassure us that religious integrationists can be good-enough citizens, then, McGraw's book may also serve as a warning about the future challenges facing American democracy.