2. Toleration: Liberalism’s Containment Strategy for Religious Diversity

Liberalism itself emerges historically, at least in part, as a response to pluralism, in particular the religious divisions and conflicts of post-Reformation Europe. My brief exploration here will focus on two of liberalism’s founding figures, Grotius (1583–1645) and Locke (1632–1704), who both advocated for the then novel idea that social stability in Europe could survive the toleration of sectarian religious diversity. Toleration, they argue, could dissuade European nations from concluding that it is necessary to impose religious uniformity upon society through the establishment of the majority religion via coercive and violent means. In his 1611 Meletius or Letter on the Points of Agreement Between Christians, Grotius laments the fact that, in his day, sectarian religious strife had taken on such violent proportions: “For not only indifference or rivalry, but also implacable hatred and anger, indeed — something almost unprecedented — wars are started under no other pretext than that of the very religion whose purpose is peace” (Grotius, Reference Grotius and Meyjes1988, pp. 103–104).

Nearly eight decades later, in his 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke would voice a similar concern about the coercive imposition of religious uniformity:

For Grotius and Locke, this potential for strife and violence does not simply stem from the fact of religious diversity itself, but from the entrenched cultural belief that such diversity could not be tolerated. The temptation to violence, they think, stems from the belief that it is necessary to impose uniformity through the establishment of one Christian sect over the others, because coercive means would be necessary to achieve that goal.

The origin story of liberalism as an attempt to counter religious violence and discord through peace and toleration can be overplayed; liberalism was equally concerned with the establishment of the concept of private property, for example.Footnote ⁴ Still, it is fair to say that these thinkers were, among other things, genuinely grasping for alternative ways to handle religiously motivated violence, which was a real source, if not the only one, of social strife in 16^th and 17^th century Europe.Footnote ⁵ Grotius himself lived through the beheading of his close friend, the preeminent Dutch statesman Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, who sided with the Arminian Remonstrants in their theological dispute with Orthodox Calvinists in the Netherlands. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment, although he managed to escape dramatically to Paris, hiding in a book chest, where he completed his most famous philosophical works (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 124). Roughly half a century later, Locke would find himself caught up in the struggle between Catholics and Anglicans in England, and, because of his association with members of an alleged plot to assassinate the Catholic King Charles II, felt it necessary to flee to the Netherlands in 1683, returning in 1688 in the same flotilla from which William of Orange inaugurated the so-called “Glorious Revolution.”

Whatever one may think about the stated pacific intentions of this early liberal argument for tolerance, we should still appreciate its historical novelty, the way it differs from previous attempts to enforce religious uniformity coercively. Perhaps the difference between the two approaches to religious diversity can be described as the difference between “imposing uniformity,” on the one hand, and “containing diversity,” on the other. Whereas one approach seeks to eliminate diversity altogether, the other seeks to minimize its perceived negative public effects. While these strategies differ in significant ways, it is important to keep in mind that both share the understanding that diversity is inherently problematic, and both seek a path toward commonality that would render religious diversity publicly inoperative. The liberal strategy of tolerance, then, might be seen as an attempt to defang this problematic diversity rather than simply subjugate or eradicate it.

Interestingly, both Grotius and Locke still appeal to Christian convictions in their attempts to outline an area of consensus that would deflate the perceived importance of other areas of religious disagreement. While I believe they authentically held such convictions, they also need to appeal to them to mitigate the perceived novelty and controversial nature of their recommendation for tolerance, an idea whose acceptance would have faced enormous conceptual barriers in 16^th and 17^th century Europe. In the case of Grotius, political philosopher Timothy Shah observes that the only way he could convince the variety of mutually hostile religious confessions of his day to accept the idea of tolerance was to help them see it “under a fresh, commonly accessible, and shared theological description” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 125). In other words, in order to convince his compatriots of even the possibility of accepting or tolerating the fact of religious diversity, he had to offer them a theologically informed alternative to the established theological view that such diversity was a great societal evil. He would not be able to make his case for toleration, then, “without undertaking to transform Christianity itself” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 126).

Grotius undertakes this effort to transform Christianity in his 1611 Meletius or Letter on the Points of Agreement Between Christians. Grotius’s primary move in this work is to divide Christian religion into two parts, the theoretical and the practical, or the doctrinal and the ethical, and then to minimize the theoretical and emphasize the practical (Grotius, Reference Grotius and Meyjes1988, p. 109). What motivates this division is Grotius’s conviction that the diverse sectarian interpretations of Christianity in his day shared much of the practical ground — that is, they shared a common core of ethical and moral precepts — while they disagreed on and fought over mainly theoretical or doctrinal matters. Grotius thus attempts to disabuse his Christian contemporaries of the need to inflate religion’s theoretical dimension, to proliferate ever finer points of creed and dogma that had, according to him, become occasions for needless controversy and hostility (Grotius, Reference Grotius and Meyjes1988, pp. 133–134). As Shah summarizes:

Worried that he might further fan the flames of theological conflict, Grotius did not seek publication for the Meletius, but the position he developed in it would provide the theological foundation for his enormously influential 1627 On the Truth of the Christian Religion. In 1663–1664, a young John Locke would recommend this book to his students. In addition, Locke’s friend Philipp van Limborch, the Dutch Arminian theologian, possessed an unpublished copy of the Meletius. Through his many discussions with van Limborch during his exile in Holland — where he composed his Letter Concerning Toleration — Locke and van Limborch would have had ample opportunity to discuss the thesis of the Meletius, if not its precise contents. Whatever the case may be, Locke’s Letter bears many similarities to the Meletius. Like Grotius, Locke also attempts to re-describe Christianity as essentially peaceable, questioning whether Christianity itself is to blame for the religious tumult he observed in his day. If Christianity is to blame, he says, then Christianity would be the worst of all religions and should be rejected by everyone. Instead of blaming Christianity, though, he offers a rather Grotian re-description of it:

On the re-descriptions put forward by Grotius and Locke, this hard core of moral principles, revolving around what they take to be the essentially pacific nature of Christianity, forms an area of Christian consensus that, if given a certain priority over more contestable doctrinal matters, would steer society away from the rocks of religious discord. For Grotius, these principles should be given priority not only because of their superior moral quality, but also because of their superior epistemic quality. When he finds himself troubled by the doctrinal disturbances and conflicts of his day, he tells his reader that he finds solace and renewed strength by reflecting on:

This purported core of common ethical precepts, then, not only recommends itself for its superior moral qualities, but insofar as the precepts it contains are also “the most certain,” it also recommends itself for its superior epistemic qualities.

As an empiricist, Locke would amplify this focus on the role that epistemic superiority, or greater certainty, should play in determining the legitimacy of religious belief. In Locke’s 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he argues that the strength of one’s beliefs should be indexed to the level of empirical or evidential support they enjoy. The less evidence one can produce for a belief, the less firmly one should hold to it; the more supporting evidence a belief enjoys, the more certain one can be about it (Locke, Reference Locke and Nidditch1975, pp. 687–688). Locke also recommends that this epistemic litmus test be applied to contentious religious doctrines in order to temper the “enthusiasm” and “authoritarianism” he understands to be at the base of so much religious conflict. Locke’s Essay, according to historian Samuel C. Pearson:

For Locke, enthusiasm, the “assuming an authority of dictating to others,” or the readiness “to impose on another’s belief,” was the most heinous of intellectual sins. He saw it as giving entry to a form of domination that leads us “to run our selves into the most extravagant Errors and Miscarriages” (Locke, Reference Locke and Nidditch1975, p. 703).Footnote ⁶ He hoped his appeal to reason as cultural arbiter would steer society away from such errors and miscarriages, and thus in a more pacific direction.

Locke had hoped that his epistemic criticism of religious enthusiasm would encourage his fellow (Protestant) Christian compatriots to police themselves in the public sphere. In this vein, he welcomed dissent insofar as it presented an occasion for rational deliberation as an alternative to physical conflict. In the Letter, he suggests that dissention “unavoidably puts us upon a necessity of deliberating, and consequently allows a liberty of choosing that, which upon consideration, we prefer” (Locke, Reference Locke and Tully1983, p. 18). And, as I mentioned, for Locke, deliberation here primarily involves indexing intellectual assent to the available evidence. This empiricist epistemology lies, then, at the root of his classically liberal understanding of the relationship between faith and reason, which he puts forward in his Essay:

Since, according to Locke, the doctrinal niceties of faith enjoy little evidential warrant, they must be held less firmly than those beliefs that do. If his compatriots would come to see religious belief in this way, he thinks, they would be less tempted to enthusiasm, and thus less tempted to engage in the violent conflict he believes such enthusiasm encourages.

Yet notice that Locke’s entire strategy for achieving a peaceful accommodation of — a limited range of — religious differences hinges on the assumption that faith is little or nothing more than the donation of one’s intellectual assent to the truth of divinely revealed propositions. This move allows him to put the entire complex political matter of negotiating religious diversity in a pluralist society onto an epistemological or philosophical playing field, where a purportedly neutral reason can act as the unbiased referee of what does and does not count as a legitimate contribution to public discourse. By so reducing faith to belief, or intellectual assent, Locke also bolsters liberal individualism, fitting faith into a philosophical anthropology that emphasizes individual self-interest, rational agency, and freedom of conscience (“a liberty of choosing that, which upon consideration, we prefer”). In doing so, he portrays faith primarily as an individual, personal matter, an inner affair of the mind presided over by reason.

The problem with the liberal containment strategy that Grotius and Locke set in motion is that, while reducing Christianity to a non-metaphysical core of ethical precepts might arguably have succeeded in highlighting an overlapping consensus between various Christian sects, it could only do so at the price of levelling, rather than accommodating, these very religious differences. Noting how Grotius speculates that even atheists would be able to affirm the core ethical precepts of peace and love that he isolates, Shah suggests that, once confined within these Grotian bounds, “very little distinctively Christian remains of Christianity” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 128, my emphasis). Shah thus concludes that the ultimate effect of the liberal re-description of Christianity is to flatten genuine religious diversity in order to pave the way for the establishment of republican self-government, constitutionalism, and liberty of conscience (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, pp. 129–130). While we may debate the relative merits of these liberal political ideals — and I am not saying they are without merit — what we cannot do is assume that they are the religiously neutral remains of liberalism’s epistemic litmus test. As Shah observes, the “liberal tradition Grotius helped to found is not and has never been ‘neutral,’ but has always fought vociferously to make the world safe for a certain kind of morality, a certain kind of personality, a certain kind of society” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 136).

Perhaps no less than the coercive imposition of religious uniformity it sought to displace, the liberal project as defined by Grotius and Locke also seeks a definitive, once and for all, solution to the potentially explosive tension that religious and other forms of cultural diversity present. But do we in fact require a final, definitive resolution of this tension, and is it the state’s job to provide one? Might it not be more just and less utopian to resist any such definitive resolution? “If that is our conclusion,” says Shah, “then our search will be for a politics that preserves, not resolves, the tension between political liberalism and religious pluralism in its various forms” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 137). Such a politics would lean less heavily on the difference-levelling authority that Grotius and Locke invest in philosophy, and instead more upon the latent if volatile energies of democracy proper, a politics that would admit all non-violent forms of political participation and all political participants who respect this minimal condition (see Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 137). Before delving into an exploration of these potential forms of collective democratic participation (Section 4), I will conclude my discussion of political liberalism with an examination of the way Rawls’s approach to religious diversity both continues and seeks to move beyond the liberal containment strategy.

3. John Rawls: Public Reason as a Strategy for Transcending Disagreement in Political Deliberation

In Political Liberalism, Rawls affirms the inevitability and legitimacy of moral and religious pluralism in any democratic society. He argues that political liberalism must concede “that there are many conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines with their conceptions of the good” (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, p. 135). Rawls defines a comprehensive doctrine, which can be religious or secular, as a conception of the good that informs judgements concerning:

Precisely because of this plurality of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, Rawls argues, no one comprehensive doctrine can “secure the basis of social unity, nor can it provide the content of public reason on fundamental political questions” (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, p. 134). That is, precisely because no comprehensive doctrine is universally shared can any one be used to inform a public reason that is accessible to all reasonable persons. At the same time, Rawls still thinks members of liberal democracies need to find some way to secure a basis for social unity amid this potentially divisive plurality. He thus introduces the idea of public reason, a form of democratic deliberation he considers to be sufficiently detached from any comprehensive doctrine, as a means for achieving political concord from out of this background of disagreement, if not discord.Footnote ⁷

As I alluded to in Section 1, Rawls limits the idea of public reason in terms of both content and scope. In terms of content, the idea of public reason only applies to political discussions of fundamental questions. Its subject is “the public good concerning questions of fundamental political justice,” which includes such “constitutional essentials” as political rights and liberties, as well as such “matters of basic justice” as the basic structure of society and the way that structure supports or erodes economic and social justice (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, p. 442). In terms of scope, Rawls limits the domain of public reason to “the public political forum,” which he divides into three parts:

In light of these limitations, Rawls clarifies that the responsibility to appeal to public reason in public discussion of political matters does not apply to the various communications and conversations that takes place in the “background culture” or “media of any kind” (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, p. 444).

Despite the limitations that Rawls places on his appeal to public reason, he still considers it to be an ideal whose normative force extends beyond these stated confines. When considering fundamental political matters, he says, citizens who are not government officials “are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most reasonable to enact” (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, pp. 444–445).Footnote ⁸ On this view, citizens are reasonable when:

Because he believes public reason prescinds from any comprehensive doctrine, Rawls considers it to be a means through which people holding different and even conflicting comprehensive doctrines might engage with one another in democratic deliberation, and in so doing take relative distance from their own perspectives, and in some cases even revise them:

What is more, Rawls also affirms that “reasonable comprehensive doctrines […] may be introduced in public political discussion at any time,” with the proviso that “in due course proper political reasons […] are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support” (Rawls, Reference Rawls2005, p. 462). Whatever one might think of Rawls’s proviso, he introduces additional “positive reasons” to explain why liberal democracy should welcome the introduction of comprehensive doctrines into public political discussion:

The preceding statement clearly demonstrates Rawls’s awareness that citizens’ political positions and arguments will always be rooted in their comprehensive doctrines. What is less clear, and the cause of no small amount of controversy, is the extent to which the proviso necessitates severing that connection once one enters the arena of public political deliberation, adhering in that space only to rational sources completely independent of one’s comprehensive doctrine (see, for example, Audi & Wolterstorff, Reference Audi and Wolterstorff1997). The question, then, is what room Rawls’s idea of public reason leaves for citizens possessed of different comprehensive doctrines to meet each other “where they are at,” or to speak from the deepest roots of their political motivations — a question to which I now turn.

In the essay “Against Public Reason,” David Enoch argues that Rawlsian public reason accounts of democratic deliberation cannot ultimately succeed, and therefore ought to be abandoned. All such accounts, Enoch insists, accept the idea that the legitimacy of any claim to political authority requires the justification of that claim to all those otherwise free and equal citizens who would be subject to it. This “justification-to” requirement is called for, then, to reconcile political authority with the liberal values of human freedom and equality. As the public reason story goes, if you are subject to a political authority whose justification for that authority you do not accept, you are not free, and any authority that has so imposed itself has considered its comprehensive doctrine to be weightier than yours, and so you are not equal (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, pp. 113–115).

While remaining somewhat sympathetic to the liberal motivation of reconciling political authority with freedom and equality, Enoch nevertheless bridles at the sheer impossibility of any political authority justifying itself to everyone who is subject to it. He notes how public reason accounts also recognize this impossibility and attempt to mitigate it through such idealizations as restricting the justification-to requirement to the “reasonable,” or introducing hypothetical conditions in which, if those conditions were met, all citizens would consent to the legitimacy of liberal political authority. First, Enoch takes issue with the vacuity of the public reason theorist’s reliance on an undefined qualification like “reasonable,” demanding that it be defined in a way that doesn’t obviously exclude those who, on a natural language definition, would be considered reasonable — for example, those who suffer no cognitive impairment and are willing to listen to others in good faith (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, p. 122). But because most people would be considered reasonable on this kind of natural language definition, the justifiability-to requirement runs into the plurality problem again — the impossibility of justifying political authority to everyone within the vast array of different citizens and communities that make up any polity. Second, Enoch considers these idealizations and hypothetical conditions to be little more than epicyclic attempts to salvage a public reason account’s original intuitions about political legitimacy. The problem, however, is that each idealizing epicycle removes the theory ever farther from the non-ideal situation on the ground, rendering it unserviceable as a theory that is meant to help people navigate the differences and disagreements that occupy them there (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, pp. 123–129).

Enoch’s summary criticism of public reason accounts, then, is that they create too big a divide between political philosophy and politics. His articulation of this concern is worth quoting at length:

Enoch continues this line of argument insisting that respecting political actors engaged in public political debate as free and equal responsible adults requires “engaging them, not […] retreating from the arena, ‘attempting to occupy a noncontroversial high ground’” (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, p. 136).Footnote ¹⁰

So, what then does Enoch think makes for legitimate political authority, if he is right to say that no existing political authority can ever honour the justification-to requirement without idealizing, and thus must always to some extent exercise authority over those who do not recognize or otherwise consent to that authority — outside of any modus vivendi? While Enoch does not directly or unambiguously answer this question in the essay under consideration, his view seems to be that legitimate political authority will demonstrate “respectful engagement” with a diverse citizenry. That is, a legitimate political authority, itself an extension of the non-ideal pluralistic society on the ground, will take the substantive claims that constitute societal disagreement more seriously than does the public reason theorist. While the public reason theorist fixates upon the spectre of disagreement itself, and how to diffuse or contain it, Enoch calls for the political authority to engage the messy substance of the competing claims that characterize such disagreement. For example, with the citizenry, the government or political authority should seek answers to questions like “What should we do about the affordability crisis?” and not questions like “What should we do about the fact that citizens disagree about what we should do about the affordability crisis?”

In this way, a political authority will demonstrate its legitimacy by rolling up its sleeves and joining in the difficult, on-the-ground struggle for “everything that is just and good,” a struggle that Enoch reminds us “is itself sometimes constrained by substantive considerations” (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, p. 137).Footnote ¹¹ While such respectful engagement may include justification-to as one of the tools in its political toolbox, political legitimacy in Enoch’s opinion does not collapse simply because one can point to cases where such attempts at justification have not succeeded. He still thinks such justification is a good thing to try:

In Enoch’s view, then, there is only the political arena, and no neutral, transcendent perch to which the political philosopher might ascend and dispassionately observe its machinations. The political philosopher, along with government officials and the rest of the citizenry, enters this arena “armed with the list of desiderata on which justifiability-to is another item, to fight, shoulder to shoulder with non-philosophers, for everything that is just and good” (Enoch, Reference Enoch, Sobel, Vallentyne and Wall2015, p. 139). One almost hears Enoch echoing Ludwig Wittgenstein here, calling everyone “back to the rough ground!” (see Wittgenstein, Reference Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Hacker and Schulte2009, Section 107).

To reconceive of legitimate political authority along the lines Enoch recommends, my sense is that we need to take into deeper consideration the efforts of grassroots democratic organizing that take place outside of what Rawls calls the “public political forum,” forms of organizing that seek to hold the political authorities operating in this forum accountable to the people they are meant to serve. I say this because Enoch’s view encourages us to link legitimacy to the responsiveness that democratic governments display to these grassroots initiatives. Also, in this arena of collective political action, we can see how, absent any proviso, rootedness in comprehensive doctrines, including religious ones, can motivate people to engage one another in and through their deep differences to address the problems and concerns they otherwise share.

4. Democracy Beyond the State

Any discussion of the liberal tradition’s handling of religious diversity must not forget that liberalism itself plays a key historical role in the gradual centralization of political power in the hands of the sovereign nation-state. According to political theologian William Cavanaugh, this centralization of power goes hand in hand with “an enfeebling of local common spaces” (Cavanaugh, Reference Cavanaugh2011, p. 19). Through this centralization of power, the state attempts to replace a prior complex arrangement of local common spaces with an amorphous, supposedly uniform “society.” In this sense, Cavanaugh argues, the state actually creates society. In saying this, he does not mean to deny that families, guilds, clans, and other social groups existed prior to the emergence of the state. Rather, he says: “the state ‘creates’ society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances” (Cavanaugh, Reference Cavanaugh2011, p. 19). On this construal, the state ultimately serves to flatten social space, treating it as a uniform plane populated by equal yet indistinct individuals. This oversimplification of public space is a problem for democracy precisely because it fails to appreciate the diverse identities and loyalties of all potential political actors, and therefore it fails to honour the ongoing need to foster an intercultural dialogue that admits, recognizes, and engages culturally distinct ways of speaking and acting (Tully, Reference Tully1995, p. 29). We therefore need to conceive of forms of democratic participation that invite cultural difference, including religious difference, rather than forms that seek to contain this difference for the sake of an elusive, if not illusory, effort to secure social unity by restricting democratic deliberation within the confines of public reason.

In this vein, late political philosopher Sheldon Wolin defines democracy as “a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them” (Wolin, Reference Wolin1994, p. 11). Importantly, Wolin does not restrict these modes of political action to those activities that seek to control or influence the state. Instead, Wolin has his eye on those spontaneous moments of grassroots political organizing, which he describes as “fugitive” and “episodic,” that erupt whenever people in their full plurality and difference come together and hammer out a common course of action intended for the good of all. According to him:

Wolin here suggests that, when it comes to political action, we should not limit our imagination solely to attempts to control or influence the state. We should instead imagine democratic possibilities for renewal through the creation of civil associations, however fleeting or temporary, that take place beyond both the voting booth and the state apparatus.

To help us imagine this alternative kind of democratic politics, Wolin argues that we must conceive of democracy as something other than a form of government. We should instead conceive of it as an eruption, from below, of what he calls the “political,” as opposed to “politics,” which he defines as “the legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal social powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity” (Wolin, Reference Wolin1994, p. 11). In distinction from the “continuous, ceaseless, and endless” activity of such state-centred politics, the “political” names “the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the wellbeing of the collectivity” (Wolin, Reference Wolin1994, p. 11). Instead of understanding democracy in terms of “politics,” then, Wolin argues that we should see it as the rare and episodic outbreak of the “political.” On this account, democracy is “a mode of being which is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives” (Wolin, Reference Wolin1994, p. 23). For Wolin, democracy in this non-governmental sense is “the political moment” of renewal when the political itself is remembered and recreated.

This ever-present democratic possibility of renewal, he says, draws on one simple fact:

So, while Wolin also stresses the importance of commonality and concerted effort, including the deliberation and consensus needed to achieve it, the major difference between his understanding of democracy and the liberal understanding is that, as I just mentioned, he views commonality as something always yet to be achieved in practice, rather than something that must be secured in advance through the containment or transcendence of disagreement before any concerted efforts can begin. One implication of Wolin’s view of democracy as episodic is that it leaves more room for the accommodation and negotiation of culturally and religiously distinct ways of speaking and acting. That is, participation in the collective emergence of such episodic democratic moments does not require one to suspend one’s distinct cultural or religious identity or otherwise fulfill any Rawlsian proviso — which, I admit, Rawls might be open to, given that this kind of political activity takes place in what he calls “the background culture.”

While I appreciate Wolin’s emphasis on the grassroots democratic organizing that takes place outside of what Rawls calls the “public political forum,” and the way such efforts reveal the political capacities of human beings, his understanding of democracy as fugitive and episodic avoids or finds it no longer meaningful to ask the question of what makes for legitimate political authority. While the state as a form of political organization may have flattened social space, its control over public resources makes it a key partner in any effort to, in Enoch’s idiom, fight for everything that is good and just. In a sensitive interpretation of Wolin’s position, Jeffrey Stout reminds us that we still have an interest in ensuring that the public political forum “survive as a significant institutional repository of practical wisdom” and that we not “abandon the mechanisms of government to the interests of empire and capital” (Stout, Reference Stout2010, p. 256). Stout reminds us that even fugitive democracy depends on such constitutional provisions as the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and the right to assembly, and thus concludes that “a strictly fugitive democracy, as a politics that has lost all hope in the representative function of government as a means for holding rulers accountable, is self-defeating in practice” (Stout, Reference Stout2010, p. 256). There is still a vital need, then, to assess the legitimacy of democratic government by assessing the seriousness with which it responds to and engages with those grassroots democratic efforts that seek to hold it accountable.

Notwithstanding Stout’s critical reservations about Wolin’s understanding of fugitive democracy, any serious study of grassroots democratic organizing reveals how the unique cultural markers that differentiate citizens from one another can be potential resources for democratically strengthening the social fabric, and thus not only potential threats to social stability (Nedelsky, Reference Nedelsky, Bauman and Kahana2006, pp. 99–105). And ironically enough, an open democratic politics that would engage such cultural and religious difference can even, on a certain definition, be described as more “liberal.” In Shah’s words:

In religiously diverse societies, he says, an open democratic politics that “makes as much room as possible for democratic bargaining as against the limited discourse of liberal arguing is in fact more likely to capture the properly liberal spirit: generosity” (Shah, Reference Shah, Marquand and Nettler2000, p. 138, my emphasis).

Canadian public theologian Thomas Reynolds captures this spirit of generosity well when he suggests that democratic participation in a pluralistic society can connect us in our difference. Democratic politics, he suggests, places us within a “complex field of interaction joining groups and persons in forms of dissent and contestation as well as agreement and consensus, all of which in the end create new means of belonging together, new modes of intercultural and inter-religious connectivity” (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2009, p. 250). Like Wolin, Reynolds views intercultural connectivity and solidarity as a potential waiting to be achieved, a potential that, moreover, does not require us to abstract ourselves from those identity markers that differentiate us from those with whom we hope to collaborate.

To this point, I have argued that the liberal strategy for containing or transcending religious difference, whether in its classical or contemporary forms, dampens the democratic potential that a deeper and more generous engagement with religious and cultural pluralism might untap. In Section 5, I will explore in more detail the responsibilities such an affirmation places upon the shoulders of religious citizens — like all citizens. As we know all too well, Canada’s Christian churches played a key role in carrying out the Canadian government’s genocidal policy of cultural assimilation of the Indigenous inhabitants of this land, a form of public acting that refused, rather than welcomed, the human condition of plurality and the different ways that we find ourselves given to one another.

5. Religion, Generosity, and the Revitalization of Democratic Public Life in Canada

In general agreement with Shah’s assessment of the democratic insufficiency of mere “liberal arguing,” eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor expresses concern that such a formal and abstract way of negotiating cultural and religious diversity has done more to alienate significant segments of society than unite them. According to him, “the hold of unreal and ahistorical solutions over our minds and imagination is still crippling our efforts to deal with the growing conflicts that arise from it” (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Cairns, Courtney, MacKinnon, Michelmann and Smith1999, p. 286). The question we need to ask ourselves today, he says, is “whether our liberalism approaches perfection the more we can treat people in ways that abstract from what they stand for and others do not” (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Cairns, Courtney, MacKinnon, Michelmann and Smith1999, p. 284). Taylor takes issue with this approach, and instead urges us to travel a different route, away from abstraction and toward embracing what he describes as “the need to share identity space” (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Cairns, Courtney, MacKinnon, Michelmann and Smith1999, p. 285). Such sharing of identity space requires a greater effort both to listen to and learn from the substantively different personal or group identities of citizens who constitute the same polity. In order to be genuine, says Taylor, these complex cultural dialogues must include “opportunity for people on each side to look into the substance of the other’s case” (Taylor, Reference Taylor, Cairns, Courtney, MacKinnon, Michelmann and Smith1999, p. 285). In a similar vein, Reynolds urges us to find “fallible ways of sharing space by infusing the public discourse of civil society with novel meanings” (Reynolds, Reference Reynolds2009, p. 251). Needless to say, none of us can explore the particular substance of another group’s religious or existential orientation, including the perhaps novel meanings and values expressed through it, if we constantly insist on abstracting from such cultural particularity in order to ascend to an alleged common plane where we are somehow all the same or can access the same abstract reasons. Such abstraction is no basis for true relation.

Pressing a similar argument from the secular or non-religious side, Jürgen Habermas agrees that liberal democracies need to be much more generous in recognizing their own internal cultural and religious diversity. He in fact thinks that the state has purely “functional reasons” for maintaining rather than reducing what he describes as “the polyphonic complexity of public voices” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2008, p. 131). For the state to function as it should, it ought to encourage both the free expression of religious voices in the public arena as well as the political participation of religious organizations as such. When the state excludes this form of participation, he says, secular liberal society risks cutting itself off from “key resources for the creation of meaning and identity” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2008, p. 131). Included among these resources, he says, is the fact that “[r]eligious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2008, p. 131). For the sake of protecting these vulnerable forms of human life, then, Habermas calls secular or non-religious citizens of liberal democracies to “a self-reflexive overcoming of a rigid and exclusive secularist self-understanding of modernity” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2008, p. 138). That is, Habermas thinks non-religious citizens must do more than simply tolerate the existence of religion and religious diversity, but also become open to the fact that religious traditions remain sources of unique meaning and insight from which everyone might learn — especially, he says, when it comes to protecting the vulnerable from currently existing and new forms of political domination.Footnote ¹²

While this recent call for greater generosity and openness emanating from within the camp of liberal, albeit post-secular, political philosophers is all well and good, we do even better to remember that, despite liberalism’s more and less gentle containment attempts, religious groups and individuals, qua religious, have never really abandoned political participation in our public life in the first place. When Stout set out on an ethnographic survey of the United States in search of surviving remnants of grassroots democratic organizing for social change, he had little trouble finding religiously motivated participants in political efforts to hold elected representatives accountable to the needs of the vulnerable and marginalized (Stout, Reference Stout2010). Often, this work took the form of interfaith coalitions, or simply religious folks joining variously constituted citizen’s associations focusing on particular issues such as poverty and homelessness. Moreover, the efforts at grassroots political organizing that Stout surveyed were not the kind of (toxic) charitable, band-aid responses to human need that one commonly associates with religious interventions in social crises. Instead, Stout focused on grassroots efforts to organize and mobilize those who suffered under various forms of domination at the hands of economic and political elites, in ways that enabled the oppressed themselves to apply effective pressure on public officials to enact systemic change (Stout, Reference Stout2010, pp. 91–92). These efforts at grassroots democratic organizing, Stout noticed, would have been severely weakened if for whatever reason religiously motivated individuals were discouraged from participating in them because of some abstract requirement to suspend reference to the comprehensive views that articulate such motivation (Stout, Reference Stout2010, p. 202).

In Canada, one notices how the Syrian refugee crisis sparked the formation of several new interfaith partnerships between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and people of other faiths (Chowdhry, Reference Chowdhry2015). While these coalitions for sponsoring refugees are not specifically aimed at politically organizing those who have been oppressed and dominated, they still represent religiously funded efforts to strengthen our social fabric and respond to human suffering in a way that empowers those benefitting from the help.

Another important, relatively recent, example of edifying religious public acting can be seen in the advocacy efforts of faculty and students at King’s University in Edmonton to address the moral and legal dilemmas of Canadian-born child soldier Omar Khadr after the Canadian government of the day abandoned him to his fate at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Led by English professor Arlette Zinck, the group provided education to Khadr while in prison, advocated for his just and lawful treatment at the hands of both the American and Canadian governments, and helped him establish himself upon his release from Canadian prison in May 2015 (Wilhelm, Reference Wilhelm2014). Commenting on the role that her faith played in motivating her and helping her persevere through this effort, Zinck had this to say: “Without my own vibrant, personal faith, the pain of caring in a context where so, so, so many are ambivalent or opposed might be more than I can bear” (Wilhelm, Reference Wilhelm2014).

Of course, these examples are anecdotal, but nonetheless they are all salient instances of religiously funded public acting that aim to make visible the plight of the most vulnerable, and thereby encourage us to recognize the rightful place of these marginalized citizens at our common political table. While public reason accounts do not necessarily seek to ban such religiously motivated speech and action, they do little to encourage them insofar as they refuse to engage them on their own terms. Here it is important to understand that including and engaging what Rawls calls “comprehensive doctrines” need not infringe on the liberal values of freedom and equality either, because these religiously inspired public contributions are not bids for political authority that give more weight to their own particular comprehensive view by seeking to impose it on others. In a discussion of a social audit produced by the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition in Ontario (see MacAdam, Reference MacAdam2004), Canadian political philosopher Jennifer Nedelsky notes the following about the faith-based language reproduced in their social audit:

Nedelsky here points to the way that sharing faith perspectives in public contexts is not always, or even mostly, an attempt to establish these perspectives as politically authoritative by convincing others of the truth of one’s comprehensive doctrine. Instead, such witness can be offered in the spirit of educating one’s political community about the spiritual motivation informing the particular public policy stance one is advocating and encourage other members of that community to share their motivations.

Canadian political philosopher James Tully describes these and other forms of “deep listening” with the phrase “dialogues of reciprocal elucidation” (Tully, Reference Tully2020, p. 39). In a way reminiscent of Rawls’s recommendation of welcoming the expression of comprehensive doctrines in public discourse, but without any attached proviso, Tully suggests that these dialogues bring into focus the central feature of human interdependency:

Like Nedelsky, Tully advocates for deeper dialogical engagement between adherents of diverse moral and religious traditions because of the potential such engagement has for enlarging the imagination and sympathy of its participants.

Tully’s work on the composition of constitutional democracy provides additional compelling suggestions concerning how responsible citizens of pluralistic democracies — including religious citizens — might inhabit shared political space. Instead of understanding any particular state’s constitution as an original founding moment in the past — in, say, 1776, or 1867 — one that somehow establishes a mythic, unitary “people,” Tully encourages us to see democratic constitutionalism as an unending process or dialogue (see Tully, Reference Tully1995). In this sense, the conversation about what Canada as a country is and what it might yet become should never end, but instead be understood as something that all citizens are called to continually achieve, remaining ever vigilant about the incompleteness and provisionality of any historical version. In this light, we should perhaps view Canada’s “founding” in 1867 as but a moment in this ongoing journey. A journey that, for better, and in many cases for worse, includes, among many other things: the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples; the often dishonoured treaties by which these parties first agreed to share the land; the recognition of French-Canadians as a distinct nation within confederation; Ottawa’s refusal to recognize the democratic political organization of the Red River Settlement by Louis Riel and his neighbours, and 20 years later the same government’s crushing of the Northwest Rebellion in Batoche; the enfranchisement of women and their legal recognition as persons; the Indian Act, residential schools, and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If we view our constitution in this way, as an ongoing dialogue or journey, with both high and low points, we can easily see that it has not always been a simple or fully inclusive conversation, free from undemocratic forms of domination and even ruthless oppression. While the high points of this story indicate that it is not entirely vicious, to say that there is still much work for us to do to become a fully just and inclusive polity would be an enormous understatement.

To help us gain orientation amid what seems like such a formidable task, Tully asks us to consider Bill Reid’s sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, which sits in the courtyard of the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C., and whose image adorns Canadian $20 bills issued between 2004 and 2012. Many of us may have seen its jade replica in Vancouver’s International Airport. The sculpture is a black-bronze canoe, roughly six metres in length, three and a half metres wide, and slightly higher than that width. It contains 13 passengers from Haida mythology. The scene in the canoe is anything but pacific, although it does not entirely lack any sense of mutuality and cooperation either. Speaking as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) man, whose privilege derives in no small part from centuries of appropriation and destruction of Indigenous cultures, I, like Tully, hesitate to interpret or explain this sculpture in terms inherited from that colonial past. Yet, while recognizing that we must understand this work as both grounded in and a celebration of Reid’s own Haida and Scottish cultures, Tully maintains that it may still serve as “an ecumenical symbol for the mutual recognition and affirmation of all cultures that respect other cultures and the earth” (Tully, Reference Tully1995, p. 21).

Approaching the sculpture in this spirit, we must pause before its strangeness and unfamiliarity, and avoid seeing it as something already familiar to us, readily explainable in terms drawn from Western traditions of thought. To do so is itself an act of deep listening to unfamiliar voices, an act that is part and parcel of the kind of just, constitutional dialogue for which Tully advocates. If we come before the sculpture with this listening posture, he says, we may begin to hear the message it imparts to us:

Our constitutional dialogue, then, must become more generous than it has been, especially if it wishes to do justice to all of those who currently inhabit the land. While the kind of dialogue Tully recommends is difficult to pursue, and is not without risk of courting agony, its potential rewards in terms of greater inclusion and increased social justice make it preferable to those liberal strategies that refuse such deep listening and engagement in attempts to prevent the potential for strife that the plurality of the human condition harbours.

While achieving such a high level of mutual recognition and engagement is vastly more difficult than the liberal strategy of containment through abstraction, we should not confuse difficulty with impossibility, and thereby conclude that such a dialogue is not worth trying. The difficulty of the task presents itself once we slowly begin to gain greater appreciation for the “strange multiplicity” of the inhabitants in our canoe — the way they quarrel and vie for recognition in their culturally distinct ways, but also row together toward a common destination — and that there is no transcendental vantage point or meta-language that can set the terms of the constitutional discussion once and for all (Tully, Reference Tully1995, p. 24). This lack of transcendent vantage point teaches us of the need to engage in a patient, strenuous effort to imaginatively inhabit perspectives that are not our own. Doing this, Tully says, requires attentive participation in the intercultural dialogue itself: “By listening to the different stories others tell, and giving their own in exchange, the participants come to see their common and interwoven histories together from a multiplicity of paths” (Tully, Reference Tully1995, pp. 25–26). The resulting tapestry, which is not the achievement of any one but rather the achievement of all, and which in any case must always remain open to further reweaving, is, says Tully, “a thing of justice and beauty, analogous to ecological diversity and just as important for living and living well on this planet” (Tully, Reference Tully1995, p. 26).

This strange yet beautiful mosaic may never be completely harmonious, and we have more than enough historical reason to mistrust any imposition of harmony from above. While the inhabitants of the canoe can never be certain that their current arrangement is equitable and just, and they will likely have many reasons to doubt it, they can be confident that they are tracking justice, says Tully, as long as they “are always willing to listen to the voices of doubt and dissent within and reconsider their present arrangement, just as The Spirit of Haida Gwaii asks us to listen to the voices of cultural dissent around the world” (Tully, Reference Tully1995, p. 27). Peace, as Cavanaugh, the political theologian I introduced in Section 4, reminds us, is not a final state, but rather “a peacemaking in and as conflict and tension, forged in generous reciprocity” (Cavanaugh, Reference Cavanaugh2011, p. 193).

Canada’s ongoing constitutional dialogue shows faltering signs of finally awakening from a particularly nightmarish form of religious public acting, namely the way Canada’s mainline Christian denominations marched in lock step with Canada’s policy of cultural genocide against members of our Indigenous communities, primarily by supporting and running the residential schools that uprooted so many children from their families and from the spiritual and communal resources of their unique cultures. It is chilling to think that Canada did not have to establish any particular religious denomination in order for the churches to have had this baleful effect. It was as if a few of the creatures in the canoe simply concluded that it was their place to say who did and did not belong on the journey and based on this hubris decided to toss several of their fellow travellers overboard. As I hope I have by now made clear, this kind of public acting goes farther than participating in the kinds of conflicts and tensions that occur when different groups within a culturally diverse society vie for acceptance and recognition, and instead crosses over into a rejection of the human condition of plurality itself. In a diverse and plural society, gaining respect and recognition for one’s own religious culture requires showing respect for all others, not to mention recognizing their very right to exist. In whatever ways religious people might come to imagine their future contributions to public life in Canada, we must all completely abjure the colonizing mentality that fails to respect human plurality, and instead join heartily in the task of telling the truth and thereby reconciling ourselves to each other.Footnote ¹³