Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square (review)

In a 2006 address entitled "Call to Renewal," then-senator Barack Obama called for a "serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy." Written from outside the discipline of rhetoric, J. Caleb Clanton's Religion and Democratic Citizenship provides a fascinating window on that debate as it has unfolded among political philosophers. His book critiques two dominant proposals for "how religion should factor into the American public square" (9)—the reconstructionist and the separatist proposals—and offers what he calls "an open model of the democratic public square designed to accommodate as many democratically predisposed citizens as possible, religious or not" (10).

Clanton begins by highlighting the tension between two dominant urges within U.S. political life: democracy and liberalism. Democracy holds that "citizens should be free to voice their concerns, beliefs, and preferences, as they understand them in the public sphere" (1). Liberalism prevents the tyranny of the majority by requiring that governmental action be justified only on grounds that can be reasonably accepted by all of its citizens. That constraining impulse, however, poses a dilemma for people of faith. Can justifications rooted in religious convictions not shared by the entire citizenry ever play a legitimate role in public deliberation?

In chapters 2 and 3, he examines the reconstructionist answer to that dilemma, embodied in the writings of Richard Rorty and Cornel West and rooted in the pragmatism of William James, which resolves the conflict by "semantically recasting religion such that it meets the epistemic demands of the community" (15). For James, that meant reducing religious faith to its practical usefulness—to the "melioristic hope" that motivated its adherents to act for the good of themselves and others. (As Clanton rightly notes, of course, robbed of its metaphysical content, such "faith" bears little resemblance to the "old time religion" held by most believers.) Following James, Rorty argued that because it is a "conversation stopper," religious discourse must be interpreted symbolically in a way that makes its propositions palatable to nonreligious people. In response, Clanton questions whether "stopping the conversation as it stands" is necessarily a bad thing, since doing so may introduce into the public forum a "conversation of a different variety" (47). Indeed, he continues, "it may be the case that religious premises act to broaden the terms of the deliberation precisely by promoting deliberation—that is, another conversation—to be held about the parameters of deliberation itself" (48).

West, by contrast, sees "enormous pragmatic potential" for religion in the public square, particularly in the voices of "prophetic Christianity" that bring an "urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day" (49– 50). Before such voices can be heard, however, religion must be demythologized to make it ready for "political engagement" (50). West's religion thus provides not "theology or metaphysics" but merely "motivational potential" (51). Indeed, Clanton wonders whether West himself might be engaging in the ethically questionable practice of exploiting "the religious language of traditional believers for political purposes" (55).

In chapters 4 through 6, Clanton examines the separatist response to the question of religion and the public square, represented in the political theory of John Rawls. Rawls holds that people may legitimately engage in public deliberation only in the role of "citizens" (not as "Christians"), only on matters that rightly belong to the public sphere, and most importantly, appealing only to public reasons, that is, to those "one can reasonably expect others to endorse as reasons" (68–69). The implication for religion is clear: "Religion ought to be bracketed before citizens enter the public square" (71).

In response, Clanton questions not only whether such neutrality is possible within a "shared political culture [that] is struck through with disagreement" (93), but more importantly, whether it is even preferable as a regulative ideal, for four reasons. First, by demanding that religious citizens bracket their convictions before entering the public square, Rawls...