In the United States, we see a great amount of distrust between people of different political and religious allegiances as our nation tries to move forward in its project of democratic debate and decision-making. Republicans and Democrats don’t trust each other. Even greater distrust seems to exist between people of different religions or no religion at all. I want to address the issue of religion’s place in making democratic decisions. I have been reading Jeffrey Stout’s fascinating work, Democracy and Tradition, with others at my church and it is proving to be rather influential in my thought. While Stout ventures into the practical, he generally deals with the theory of democracy. I would like to make an attempt of having that thought interact with the current political-religious discussion in the U. S.

Illinois Senator Barak Obama gave the keynote address to the 2006 Call to Renewal gathering (you can find the full text here, free registration is required). It was a speech that addressed the important role of religion in America and its politics and it sought to make room for religious expression in the public square. The speech offered a refreshing rhetoric in contrast to the vitriolic rhetoric that we find from some religious and secularist pundits. Obama exhorted both religious and secular citizens to trust each other, to respect the intentionally pluralistic character of the United States, and he offered some ideas on how we can go about being a democratic society given the fact that as communities and individuals, we have many differing sets of values. Obama said,

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

On face value, I agree with Obama’s statement, but then I begin to wonder what are those “universal…values” he mentions? The distrust he sees in America can mean a couple of things. First, the distrust between religious and non-religious citizens could mean that we are not being true to maintaining debate within the confines of the universal values. Second, it could mean that the universal values he espouses are not universal. Obama’s statement seems in line with what Stout claims social contractarians like John Rawls hold: that religious reasoning is too specific and not universal enough within the democratic square, or at least, is incomplete—people may use religious values to shape their views, but the real work of democracy is not finished until we can express our views in terms to which all have agreed. Stout writes, “The amended Rawlsian view is that religious reasons are to contractarian reasons as IOUs are to legal tender.” (69) (I should note that I have never read any Rawls, so I cannot evaluate whether Stout’s critique is accurate; I am merely reporting what Stout has to say about Rawls.) A problem with the contractarian model, as Stout sees it, is that some of the greatest developments within democratic thinking that has emerged in the U. S. has been deeply religious, namely Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, Abolitionist preaching and speeches, and the speeches and preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr. These public addresses dripped of religious reasoning and religious language, yet they also appealed to and worked in terms a general democratic audience could accept as reasonable.

It is difficult if not impossible for people to entirely put their religious commitments on hold in order to move forward in a democratic way. Stout, an atheist with a great appreciation of religion, cites the move of some Traditionalist thinkers such as Stanley Hauerwas and Alisdair MacIntyre to reject the contractarian view of democracy. These thinkers see the restrictions that liberalism (the political theory) places on religious rhetoric in the public square as “a discriminatory program for policing what religious people can say in public.” (76) Stout will critique the Traditionalists as well as he views them leaving the democratic dialogue almost altogether, but he is sympathetic to their concerns about leaving our religious convictions outside the town hall. In a wonderful passage, Stout claims,

The free expression of religious premises is morally underwritten not only by the value we assign to the freedom of religion, but also by the value we assign to free expression, generally. All citizens of a constitutional democracy possess not only the right to make up their minds as they see fit but also the right to express their reasoning freely, whatever that reasoning may be. (63-64)

The quotation above reminds me of what author and atheist Salman Rushdie said in an interview with Bill Moyers, “It’s no accident I think that freedom of religious observance and freedom of speech are jointly protected by the First Amendment, you know. It’s as important to have one as to have the other. And indeed in my view you can’t have one without the other.”

By expressing the religious and philosophical roots of our political claims in public, we open the total of our claims to critical examination and learning. But how then do we move forward in a pluralistic society? Stout rightly claims that there will be times for all of us to shelve some convictions—whether they are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Empiricist—for the good of debate. What is more needed, however, is an ability to engage others where they are at, in language that respects their commitments and makes sense to those commitments. This would be a far more deliberate method of public discourse and decision-making, but it seems to me to be more descriptively accurate of how people think about life and is more respectful of their values. By opening ourselves to using different reasons for different audiences that are relevant to them, we learn about their commitments, see their values, and have a better means of developing a real and lasting consensus on the issues at hand, though we may never agree about the philosophical roots of our thinking.

Stout aligns himself with Hegel over and against the contractarian view of Kant. Following Hegel’s expressivist conceptions of epistemology and freedom, Stout still has room for restraint in the form of norms, but those norms are dynamic, not static. This again seems descriptively accurate. Democracy has been and continues to be an experiment. Norms change. Refusing women suffrage was a given two centuries ago. Several decades later people began to openly challenge and critique the exclusion of women from voting (beginning from very religious perspectives, though also put into terms that made sense to various audiences). Finally, the U. S. extended suffrage to its female citizens a little less than a century ago.

Putting everything on the table in dialogue offers all of us, and democracy itself, a chance to grow. Stout claims,

The point of the contractarian program of restraint was to provide us with security against illegitimate forms of coercive interference on the part of rulers and fellow citizens. This is a matter of negative freedom, freedom from something. We still have ample reason to concern ourselves with this sort of freedom when assessing the political arrangements that are open to us. But there is also another sort of freedom to nurture and protect, namely, expressive freedom. And this ought to make us hesitant to embark on a Rawlsian program of restraint. Expressive freedom is positive, the freedom to transform both oneself and one’s social practices through a dialectical progression of novel performances and their consequences. (80, emphasis in the original)

Obama was correct in his 2006 speech that we need to tone down the fearful rhetoric surrounding the role of religion in America and while I have spent my time in this post criticizing one point of his speech, as a whole, I think it is wonderful and recommend it as a high point in recent political discourse. We religious folk need not make strident, angry demands for our ideals to have the central seat of power, nor should we take our ball from the court and go home. We need to engage, bringing our whole selves, with all our important commitments to the public square. For my secular co-citizens, please see that religion is not a threat to reason or that any appeal to religion or God in democratic reasoning is an attempt to establish a theocracy. None of us should be in the business of alienating others or ourselves from the democratic dialogue. We all need to learn about the various traditions in our nation as well as learn to speak the language of these traditions. This is not an appeal to vague universal values as Obama mentioned, but we need to be honest about the roots of our positions and learn to speak to the commitments and values of others. Staying within the confines of those universal values is at least conceptually neater and more efficient than what I (borrowing from Stout) proclaim here. But I do not think those universal values are all that universal and are more of a fantasy than a reality. Rather, let us deal with the concrete particulars that each of us expresses, putting these values and commitments up to the light of respectful public discourse. We must understand that a pluralistic democracy creates a forum to struggle with each other in a civil manner. Indeed, without the struggle, democracy falters. With reverent, honest, and humble struggling, we grow as a people.