Abstract

It is often said that a central project of liberalism in the Western political tradition, and particularly in the American tradition, has been the "privatizing" of religion. A growing number of contemporary philosophical, legal, and political theorists have begun to associate the alleged privacy of religion with the fact that no particular faith is endorsed by all reasonable citizens in a pluralistic liberal democracy. This body of work, influenced heavily by the "political liberalism" of the later John Rawls, links liberalism closely with an ideal or principle of public reason. The ideal of public reason is that political discourse will be carried out without recourse to private reasons, including, in many cases, religious reasons. This essay argues on philosophical and pragmatic grounds against the use of the private-public dichotomy as the framework for talking about the proper place of religious reasons in politics. In place of the taxonomy of private and public reasons, the essay sketches and defends an alternative taxonomy, which uses the notion of political defeat, rather than privacy, as a basic notion with which to analyze what, if anything, is problematic about the use of religious reasons in politics. A chief advantage of the alternative account is that it provides a way to talk about the possible exclusion of certain religious reasons from politics without denying their political dimensions