The operative principles of liberal democracy are themselves the source of religiously inspired social and political whirlwinds that periodically sweep through and destabilize these regimes. Throughout the world, the religious energies encouraged by liberal democracy are spilling into the public square, creating political movements that seek to capture the state, impose or privilege particular religious values, and thereby subvert the very principles that constitute liberal democratic states. Paradoxically, the imperative that religious pluralism is encouraged “stipulates that religious pluralism ought to be restrained” (4) by the state. Even in America, Pottenger thinks that “evangelical Christian and Mormon political activism [has pushed] liberal democratic institutions to their constitutional limits” (128).

This is an interesting book. Its internal logic rests on the following propositions: liberal politics, begun in the scientific and religious revolutions of sixteenth-century Europe, ushered in a new “axial period in history” (45). Consisting respectively of epistemological, axiological, and political elements, modernity requires three commitments: to reason and empiricism, to individual conscience and personal ethics, and to religious liberty over religious toleration. Like an equilateral triangle, these three walls not only “give the axis its philosophical resilience” (91), but the breach of one causes the collapse of all. Whether this collapse is in logic, in a true understanding of liberal democratic constitutionalism, or in actual legal, political and social structures of historically existing societies is never made clear. In any event, once these values become “axial” they are lifted outside of the contingencies of historical origins and experiences to become the objective truths of modernity. What follows, then, is an epistemological argument serving as a template for judging the proper and improper roles that religion plays in the politics of contemporary states.

Although the book does not draw upon the lively discussion about “constrained public discourse” in democratic theory, it clearly sides with the constrainers. This works as follows: any attempt to take religious arguments valid in the private institutions of civil society into the public square must meet certain validity tests. First, all arguments from history alone used to justify particular religious values and practices in public policy must be rejected outright. This is because all historical/empirical arguments rest on a “genetic fallacy,” for example, “Christianity formed the original basis of American culture” therefore “American law ought to reflect Christianity” (37). The only way to make this argument epistemologically acceptable in the public square is to insert a second premise, for example, “American law ought to reflect the original basis of American culture” (39). But this required second premise “challenges the logic of the liberal democratic state regarding the religious question” (33) and must be excluded from public discourse. Even the argument that “moral values are directly related to natural rights, and that both originated with God” must be rejected because such a supposition is “nonrational” (251). Religious and secular epistemologies are “fundamentally incompatible” (25).

Between the initial set of arguments and the conclusion, Pottenger inserts four historical studies illustrative of religious challenges to liberal democracy. Two are American: Mormons and Evangelicals and Christian Reconstructionism. Another addresses liberation theology in Brazil and a fourth, the reintroduction of Islam in the Uzbekistan state. Applying the axiological template of liberal democracy has the effect of saying that all three countries were “always already” secular liberal democracies (never mind their actual histories) and that various religious movements are now undermining those foundations. Factors such as personality cults, corruption, military dictatorship, or, in the American case, massive shifts of power from local democracy to the national state and from political parties and legislatures to executives, administrators, and judges, are somehow irrelevant both to issues of political legitimacy and to the formation of political and social movements. The distortion in the American case is particularly egregious because it assumes that the federal constitution empowers a plenary sovereignty rather than serving as a thin and liberal container of vibrant democratic republics — republics that were routinely expected to express local religious and moral values in the exercise of their extensive regulatory powers. And it discounts the entire common law tradition whose methodology incorporates the “genetic fallacy” in its use of precedent.

Absent in Pottenger's argument, which otherwise tracks so closely contemporary theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls, is consideration of the many critics of this sort of imperial liberalism, for example, Charles Taylor, John Gray, and William Connolly. He seems quite willing to create what Stanley Fish termed an “epistemological criminal class” of those who carry their religious convictions into democratic politics. Like John Tomasi's Liberalism Beyond Justice (2001), which creates a hierarchy of citizens — or Lucas Swaine's The Liberal Conscience (2006), which consigns American “theocrats” to reservations, or Amy Gutmann's Identity and Democracy (2003), which envisions a class of quasi-colonial liberal administrators manipulating the “tribes” of America submerged in irrational religious beliefs or ascriptive identities in order to achieve universal justice — Pottenger's study places little trust in the rough and tumble of democratic politics and the pragmatic accommodations that result.