In his first published treatment of public reason, “The Idea of Public Reason,” John Rawls defended an obligation of citizenship he called “the duty of civility.” This duty requires citizens to “be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason.” More recently, in the essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Rawls has qualified the duty with an addendum he refers to as “the proviso.” This “allows us to introduce into political discussion at any time our comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, provided that, in due course, we give properly public reasons to support the policies and principles our comprehensive doctrine is said to support.”

While the duty of civility and the proviso obviously raise a number of questions, Rawls's basic idea seems clear enough. Participants in public debate may publicly offer arguments for their political positions which are drawn from their comprehensive views. But in a pluralistic society, they should also be aware that not everyone will accept all their premises or regard their arguments as providing good reasons for the policies and principles they favor. They must therefore be ready to make good their religious arguments by supplementing them with what Rawls calls “properly public reasons.”

Rawls's view is a version of what I have been calling “the standard approach.”

It is time to take stock. I have introduced the notions of participation and full participation, argued that the status of full participation is highly valued and that the conditions of both participation and full participation are politically contested. I have used these notions to locate the contributions churches make to democracy. Churches contribute to their members' realization of citizenship, which is an important part of full participation. They also contribute to public political debate and public civic argument about the conditions of participation and full participation. Having used the notions of participation and full participation to locate the contributions of churches, I dropped the assumption of their importance. I argued that the contributions churches make to democracy should be valued by proponents of a number of democratic theories, none of which makes use of the concepts of participation, full participation or realized citizenship.

In chapter 5 I shall use the conclusion that churches contribute to democracy to argue for the claims about religion and democratic decision-making which I laid out in the introduction. Those claims are:

In the first chapter I introduced the notions of participation and full participation in liberal democratic society. These and the related concepts of participant and full participant are, I stressed, politically contested. Citizens of liberal democracies contest who should be accorded the status of full participant, what rights, privileges and responsibilities participation and full participation ought to confer, and which of these rights, privileges and responsibilities liberal democratic states should guarantee. I suggested a view of full participation according to which full participants should have and know they have certain realistically available opportunities for education, meaningful work, cultural enrichment and political participation. A particularly important element of full participation, I argued, is what I called “realized citizenship.” Someone realizes her citizenship when she has realistically available opportunities to take part in the political life of her society and effectively identifies with her citizenship.

I introduced the notions of participation, full participation and realized citizenship to set the stage for the arguments of this chapter. Here I will look at what empirical investigation shows about the role religion and religious institutions actually play in democracy. Focusing on the example of the United States, I will argue that they make valuable contributions to democracy. These contributions, I shall suggest, help to produce the religious political argument and activity with which I am concerned. While I shall mention a number of contributions, there are two sorts I shall highlight.

The principles I shall defend are:

As I indicated when I introduced them, these principles put me at odds with what I call the “standard approach” to questions about religion and political decision-making. Unlike proponents of the standard approach, I distinguish voting from advocacy in public political debate and impose a higher standard on the latter than the former. According to (5.1) and (5.2), someone offering a religious political argument in public must be prepared to indicate what she thinks would justify enactment of the measure she favors. Someone voting for a measure must believe that enacting it would be justified, but she need not be prepared to indicate what the justification is.

In this chapter I look at Robert Audi's arguments that citizens must qualify their use of religious claims in politics. Audi's view is one version of what I called “the standard approach” to questions about religion's place in democratic decision-making. In the fourth chapter I said that this family of approaches derives much of its plausibility from specifications of citizenship according to which citizens have especially urgent interests in some form of liberty. Their urgency is said to be such that infringements on liberty or its essential use require special justification. As we shall see, Audi's arguments for his principles depends upon the claim that citizens have an urgent interest in one particular form of freedom, autonomy of action. According to his version of the standard approach, it is because citizens have this interest that laws and policies which restrict liberty must be justified by “accessible” – or what Audi calls “intelligible” -reasons.

Unlike some proponents of the standard approach who assume that accessibility is self-explanatory, Audi lays down a condition of accessibility or intelligibility. Unlike other proponents of this approach, he lays down only a necessary condition: secularity. The standard approach requires citizens to offer or be ready to offer one another accessible reasons for the laws and policies they support. Since Audi thinks secularity is a condition of intelligibility, one of his principles – the Principle of Secular Rationale – demands, roughly, that citizens have and be ready to offer secular reasons for their political positions.

In the previous chapter I adduced evidence that churches perform a number of activities which contribute to the democratic character of American politics. These activities foster or consist in just the forms of religiously motivated political behavior and religious political argument which some philosophers think should be subject to moral restrictions. The observance of such restrictions is typically said to promote liberal democratic values. I suggested that this claim needs to be rethought in light of the conditions that produce this behavior and argument, and the contributions churches make to democracy. This suggestion can be made good only by identifying the features of political processes that make them democratic. The suggestion also seems to depend upon the claim that political processes can be more or less democratic in character. In what follows I shall assume that this is so. I shall assume, that is, that “democratic” is a degree concept and that political processes can be more or less democratic. The degree to which they are so will then depend in some way upon how they exhibit and combine what might be called their “democracy-conducing” features.

This last conclusion points to a host of complex and intriguing philosophical questions. It could be, at least in theory, that there is no limit to the degree to which political processes can be or become democratic.

I have argued that what I have called “the standard approach” to questions about religion and liberal democratic decision-making does not ground the obligations of citizenship that its proponents put forward. This approach fails because it does not take adequate account of the fact that citizenship is an achievement, nor does it take adequate account of the ways that achievement is won. Once we attend to the role of civil society in bringing about the realization of citizenship and to the important contributions it makes to civic argument and public political debate, it becomes clear that citizens have deep but reasonable disagreements about which specification of liberal democratic citizenship is the right one. The upshot is that liberal democracies with vital and politically active secondary associations are likely to be characterized by deep but reasonable disagreement about what reasons and arguments citizens owe one another when they debate and vote on important political questions. I argued in chapter 5 that citizens may rely on religious arguments and vote their religious convictions even if they are not prepared to make good their arguments or justify their votes by appeal to reasons of other kinds.

The obligations of citizenship that I have defended do not allow citizens to vote and argue on any conscientiously chosen basis whatever. To honor their obligations, citizens must have and be ready to apply standards to their own reasons for voting and to their own political arguments.

Religion is one of the most potent political forces in the contemporary world. The recent emergence of religious fundamentalism in many parts of the globe and the rise of religious conservatism in America are developments the political significance of which can hardly be exaggerated. Religion's power to stir passions, nourish social ideals and sustain mass movements makes it of obvious interest to students of politics. My concern is with contemporary liberal democracies and with the many questions we can ask about what role religion may play in their citizens' political decision-making. These are moral questions. The task of answering them falls to political philosophy.

These questions get their purchase because a society's commitment to liberal democracy entails certain moral commitments, commitments which are in some way normative for its citizens. Among the most important of these are commitments to liberty and equality, religious toleration, self-government, majoritarianism, the rule of law, and some measure of church–state separation. The precise content and implications of these commitments are matters of disagreement. Still, I shall assume they are clear and familiar enough that we can see how moral questions about religion and democracy arise, and compelling enough that we do not dismiss the questions out of hand.

Questions about the proper role of religion in liberal democratic decision-making fall into two broad categories. Some seize on the effect religion may have on political outcomes and ask how those outcomes square with the commitments of liberal democracy.

Aristotle offered the most famous definition of citizenship when he defined a citizen as someone who takes part in ruling and being ruled. Since my target is the ethics of political participation, Aristotle's definition is the natural place to begin. Thus I use the term “citizen” to denote someone who is both affected by political outcomes and who is entitled to take part in bringing them about. In modern liberal democracies, the citizen's entitlement is a legal one. That entitlement can exist merely in law. Alternatively, someone who is a citizen can have real opportunities to participate in political decision-making by affecting political outcomes. She need not have the opportunity to seek high office. But if she has the real opportunity to take part in decision-making, she must have real opportunities to vote, to inform herself about public affairs, to express her political opinions, to petition her representatives without reprisal, and to join with others in holding them accountable. The provision of these opportunities to all those who are legally entitled to take part in decision-making is a great achievement for a liberal democracy. But in calling citizenship an achievement, I have something more in mind. Citizenship is a social role. The achievement of citizenship requires that those who are entitled to play it be equipped to do so.

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.