Philosophical problems about the proper role of religion in democratic decision-making are problems I have been thinking about for a long time. I wrote this book because I became interested in rethinking them by asking questions which I believed philosophers had not investigated sufficiently: questions about the role churches actually play in preparing people for citizenship and in furnishing them with religiously based political arguments and religious reasons for political action. It is surprising that philosophers have not attended more closely to these questions. Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in civil society across the disciplines. They have also seen a great deal of interesting philosophical work on the formation of citizens by other institutions, most notably public schools and, thanks to feminist critics of liberalism, the family. Contemporary political philosophy is deeply indebted to those who have produced this work. They have reminded us that citizens are made not born and that how they are made is of great philosophical interest. This book would not have been possible without those compelling reminders.

I began this book hoping to make room in the theory of liberal democratic citizenship for saints and heroes of the religious left, such as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. I was troubled by theories which seemed to imply that such people violate their civic duties by engaging in religiously motivated activism or by putting forward exclusively religious arguments.