## 1. The Standard View




The standard view among political theorists, such as Robert Audi,
Jurgen Habermas, Charles Larmore, Steven Macedo, Martha Nussbaum,
and John Rawls is that religious reasons can play only a limited role
in justifying coercive laws, as coercive laws that require a religious
rationale lack moral
 legitimacy.[2]
If the standard view is correct, there is
an important asymmetry between religious and secular reasons in the
following respect: some secular reasons can themselves justify state
coercion but no religious reason can. This asymmetry between the
justificatory potential of religious and secular reasons, it is further
claimed, should shape the political practice of religious
believers. According to advocates of the standard view, citizens
should not support coercive laws for which they believe there is no
plausible secular rationale, although they may support coercive laws
for which they believe there is only a secular rationale. (Note 
that not just any secular rationale counts.) We can refer
to this injunction to exercise restraint as *The Doctrine of
Religious Restraint* (or the DRR, for
 short).[3]
This abstract
characterization of the DRR will require some refinements, which we'll
provide in sections 2 and 3. For the time being, however, we can
get a better feel for the character of the DRR by considering the
following case.


## 2. The Doctrine of Religious Restraint




Rick is a politically engaged citizen who intends to vote in a
referendum on a measure that would criminalize homosexual
relations. As he evaluates the relevant considerations, he concludes
that the only persuasive rationale for that measure includes as a
crucial premise the claim that homosexual relations are contrary to a
God-established natural order. Although he finds that rationale
compelling, he realizes that many others do not. But because he takes
himself to have a general moral obligation to make those political
decisions that, as best he can tell, are both just and good, he
decides to vote in favor of criminalization. Moreover, he tries to
persuade his compatriots to vote with him. In so doing, he offers
relevantly different arguments to different audiences. He tries to
convince like-minded citizens by appealing to the theistic natural law
argument that he finds persuasive. But he realizes that many of his
fellow citizens are unpersuaded by the natural law argument that
convinces him. So he articulates a variety of other
arguments--some secular, some religious--that he hopes will
leverage those who don't share his natural law theism into supporting
his position. He does so even though he doubts that any of those
leveraging arguments are cogent, realizes that many of those to whom
he addresses them will have comparable doubts about their cogency, and
so believes that many coerced by the law he supports have no good
reason, from their perspective, to affirm that law.




 Advocates of the standard view will
be troubled by Rick's behavior. The relevantly troubling feature
of Rick's behavior is not primarily his decision to support this
particular policy. Rather, it is his decision to support a policy
that he believes others have no good reason, from their perspective, to
endorse. After all, Rick votes to enact a law that authorizes state coercion even
though he believes that the only plausible rationale for that decision
includes religious claims that many of his compatriots find utterly
unpersuasive. In so doing, Rick violates a normative constraint
at the heart of the standard view, viz., that citizens in a pluralistic
liberal democracy ought to refrain from using their political influence
to authorize coercive laws that, to the best of their knowledge, can be
justified only on religious grounds and so lack a plausible
secular
 rationale.[4]
Or, otherwise put, Rick violates the DRR. For the DRR tells us
that, if a citizen is trying to determine whether or not she should
support some coercive law, and if she believes that there is no
plausible secular rationale for that law, then she may not support
it.




 The DRR is a negative constraint; it
identifies a kind of reason that cannot itself justify a coercive law
and so a kind of reason on which citizens may not exclusively rely when
supporting a coercive law. But this negative constraint is typically conjoined with a
permission: although citizens may not support coercive laws for which
they believe themselves to have only a religious rationale, they may
support coercive laws for which they believe there is only a plausible
secular rationale. As we'll see in a moment, advocates of the DRR
furnish reasons to believe that religious and secular reasons have this
asymmetrical justificatory role.


### 2.1 Core Components of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint




The standard view has often been misunderstood, typically by
associating the DRR with claims its advocates are free to deny.
It will therefore be helpful to dissociate the DRR from various common
misunderstandings.




 First, the DRR is a moral constraint,
one that applies to people in virtue of the fact that they are citizens
of a liberal democracy. As such, it need not be encoded into law,
enforced by state coercion or social stigma, promoted in state
educational institutions, or in any other way policed by the powers
that be. Of course, advocates of restraint are free to argue that
the state should police violations of the DRR (see Habermas 2006,
 10).[5]
Perhaps some liberal democracies do police something like the
DRR. But advocates of the standard view needn't endorse
restrictions of this
 sort.[6]




 Second, the DRR does not
require a thorough-going privatization of religious commitment.
Indeed, the DRR permits religious considerations to
play a rather prominent role in a citizen's political practice:
citizens are permitted to vote for their favored coercive policies on
exclusively religious grounds as well as to advocate publicly for those
policies on religious grounds. What the DRR does require of
citizens is that they reasonably believe that they have some plausible
secular rationale for each of the coercive laws that they support,
which they are prepared to offer in political discussion.
In this respect, the present construal of the DRR is weaker than comparable
proposals, such as that developed by Robert Audi, which requires that
each citizen have and be motivated by some evidentially adequate
secular rationale for each of the coercive laws he or she supports (see
Audi 1997, 138 and Rawls 1997, 784ff).




 Third, the DRR places few restrictions on
the content of the secular reasons to which citizens can appeal when
supporting coercive laws. Although the required secular reasons
must be "plausible" (more on this in a moment), they 
may make essential reference to what Rawls
calls "comprehensive conceptions of the good," such as Platonism,
Kantianism, or
 utilitarianism.[7]
Accordingly, the standard view does not
commit itself to a position according to which secular reasons must be
included or otherwise grounded in a neutral source--a set of
principles regarding justice and the common good such that everybody
has good reason, apart from his own or any other religious or
philosophical perspective, to find acceptable. Somewhat more
specifically, advocates of the standard view needn't claim that
secular reasons must be found in what Rawls calls "public
reason," which (roughly speaking) is a fund of shared principles
about justice and the common good constructed from the shared
political culture of a liberal democracy. That having been said, it is
worth stressing that some prominent advocates of the standard view
adopt a broadly Rawlsian account of the DRR, according to which
coercive laws must be justified by appeal to public reason (see
Gutmann and Thompson 1996, Larmore 1987, Macedo 1990, and
Nussbaum 2008). We shall have more to say about this view in section
6.




 Fourth, the DRR itself has no determinate
policy implications; it is a constraint not on legislation itself, but
on the configuration of reasons to which agents may appeal when
supporting coercive legislation. So, for example, it forbids Rick
to support the criminalization of homosexuality when he believes that
there are no plausible secular reasons to criminalize it. As
such, the moral propriety of the DRR has nothing directly to do with
its usefulness in furthering, or discouraging, particular policy
aims.




 The DRR, then, is a norm that is
supposed to provide guidance for how citizens of a liberal democracy
should conduct themselves when deliberating about or deciding on the implementation of
coercive laws. For our purposes, it will be helpful to work with
a canonical formulation of it. Let us, then, formulate the DRR as
follows:



> 
> **The DRR**: a citizen of a liberal democracy may
> support the implementation of a coercive law L just in case he
> reasonably believes himself to have a plausible secular justification
> for L, which he is prepared to offer in political discussion.




About this formulation of the DRR, let us make two points.
First, in what follows, we will remain largely noncommittal about what
the qualifier "plausible" means, as advocates of the standard view
understand it in different ways. For present purposes, we will
simply assume that a plausible rationale is one that epistemically and
morally competent peers will take seriously as a basis for supporting a
coercive law. Second, according to this formulation of the DRR, a
citizen can comply with the DRR even if he himself is not persuaded to
support a coercive law for any secular reason. What matters is
that he believes that he has and can offer a secular rationale that his
secular cohorts can take seriously.




Suppose, then, we have an adequate working conception of the DRR. The
question naturally arises: Why do advocates of the standard view
maintain that we should conform to the DRR? For several reasons, most
prominent of which are the following three arguments. Of course,
there are many more arguments for the DRR than we can address here.
See, for example, Andrew Lister's appeal to the value of political
community (2013). 


## 3. Three Arguments for the Doctrine of Religious Restraint


### 3.1 The Argument from Religious Warfare




Advocates of the standard view sometimes commend the DRR on the
grounds that conforming to it will help prevent religious warfare and
civil strife. According to Robert Audi, for example, "if
religious considerations are not appropriately balanced with secular
ones in matters of coercion, there is a special problem: a clash of
Gods vying for social control. Such uncompromising absolutes easily
lead to destruction and death" (Audi 2000, 103). The concern
expressed here, presumably, is this: for all we reasonably believe,
citizens who are willing to coerce their compatriots for religious
reasons will use their political power to advance their sectarian
agenda--using the power of the state to persecute heretics,
impose orthodoxy, and enact stringent morals laws. In so doing, these
citizens will thereby provoke determined resistance and civil
conflict. Such a state of affairs, however, threatens the very
viability of a liberal democracy and, so, should be avoided at nearly
all costs. Accordingly, religious believers should exercise restraint
when deliberating about the implementation of coercive
laws. Exercising restraint, however, is best accomplished by adhering
to the DRR.




According to the liberal critics of the standard view, there are
several problems with this argument. First, the liberal critics
contend, while there may have been a genuine threat of confessional
warfare in 17th century Western Europe, there is little
reason to believe that there is any such threat in stable liberal
democracies such as the United States. Why not? Because confessional
conflict, the liberal critics continue, is typically rooted in
egregious violations of the right to religious freedom, when, for
example, people are jailed, tortured, or otherwise abused because of
their religious commitments. John Locke puts the point thus:



> 
> 
> it is not the diversity of Opinions (which cannot be avoided) but
> the refusal of Toleration to those that are of different Opinions
> (which might have been granted) that has produced all the Bustles and
> Wars, that have been in the Christian World, upon account of Religion.
> (Locke 1983, 155)


 If Locke is correct, then what we need to prevent confessional
conflict is not compliance with a norm such as the DRR, but firm
commitment to the right to religious freedom. A stable liberal
democracy such as the United States is, however, fully committed to
protecting the right to religious freedom--and will be for the
foreseeable future. True enough, there are passionately felt
disagreements about how to interpret the right to religious freedom:
witness recent conflicts as to whether or not the right to religious
freedom should be understood to include the right of religious
objectors to be exempted from generally justified state policies (See
Koppelman 2013; Leiter 2012). But it is difficult to see, the liberal
critics claim, that there is a realistic prospect of these
disagreements devolving into violent civil conflict.




 Second, even if there were a realistic prospect of religious
conflict, liberal critics claim that it is unclear that adhering to
the DRR would lower the probability that such a conflict would
occur. After all, the trigger for religious war--typically, the
violation of the right to religious freedom--is not always, or
even typically, justified by exclusively religious considerations. As
historian Michael Burleigh has argued, secularists have a long history
of hostility to the right to religious freedom and, presumably, that
hostility isn't at all grounded in religious considerations (Burleigh
2007, 135 and, more generally, Burleigh 2005).


 Third, the liberal critics maintain, when religious believers have
employed coercive power to violate the right to religious freedom,
they themselves rarely have done so in a way that violates the
DRR. Typically, when such rights have been violated, the
justifications offered, even by religious believers, appeal to alleged
requirements for social order, such as the need for uniformity of
belief on basic normative issues. One theological apologist for
religious repression, for example, writes this: "The king
punishes heretics as enemies, as extremely wicked rebels, who endanger
the peace of the kingdom, which cannot be maintained without the unity
of the faith. That is why they are burnt in Spain" (quoted in
Rivera, 1992, 50). Ordinarily, the kind of religious persecution that
engenders religious conflict is legitimated by appeal to secular
reasons of the sort mandated by the DRR. (This is the case even when
religious actors are the ones who appeal to those secular
reasons.)




 Finally, liberal critics point out that
some religious believers affirm the right to religious freedom on
religious grounds; they take themselves to have powerful religious
reason to affirm the right of each person to worship as she freely
chooses, absent state coercion. So, for example, the
4th century Nestorian Mar Aba: "I am a Christian. I
preach my faith and want every man to join it. But I want him to
join it of his own free will. I use force on no man" (quoted in
Moffett 1986, 216).
 [8]
A believer such as Mar Aba might be
willing to violate the DRR; however, his violation would, according to
the liberal critics, help not to cause religious war but to impede
it. For Mar Aba's 'sectarian rationale' supports not the violation of religious
freedom but its protection.


### 3.2 The Argument from Divisiveness




If the liberal critics are correct, one of the problems with the
argument from warfare is that there is no realistic prospect of
religious warfare breaking out in a stable liberal democracy such as
the United States. Still, there may be other evils that are more
likely to occur under current conditions, which compliance with the
DRR might help to prevent. For example, it is plausible to suppose
that the enactment of a coercive law that cannot be justified except
on religious grounds would engender much anger and frustration on the
part of those coerced: "when legislation is expressly based on
religious arguments, the legislation takes on a religious character,
to the frustration of those who don't share the relevant faith and who
therefore lack access to the normative predicate behind the law"
(Greene 1993, 1060). This in turn breeds division between
citizens--anger and distrust between citizens who have to find
some amicable way to make collective decisions about common
matters. This counts in favor of the DRR precisely because compliance
with the DRR diminishes the likelihood of our suffering from such bad
consequences.




To this argument, liberal critics offer a three-part reply. First,
suppose it is true that the implementation of coercive laws that can
be justified only on religious grounds often causes frustration and
anger among both secular and religious citizens. The liberal critics
maintain that there is reason to believe that compliance with the DRR
would also engender frustration and anger among other religious and
secular citizens. To this end, they point to the fact that many
religious believers believe that conforming to the DRR would
compromise their loyalty to God: if they were prohibited from
supporting coercive laws for which they take there to be strong but
exclusively religious reasons to support, they would naturally take
themselves to be prohibited from obeying God. But for many religious
believers this is distressing; they take themselves to have overriding
moral and religious obligations to obey God. Similarly, some secular
citizens will likely be frustrated by the requirement that the DRR
places on religious citizens. According to these secular citizens, all
citizens have the right to make political decisions as their
conscience dictates. And, on some occasions, these secular citizens
hold that exercising that right will lead religious citizens to
violate the DRR.[9]




If this is correct, for the argument from divisiveness to succeed, it
would have to provide reason to believe that the level of frustration
and anger that would be produced by violating the DRR would be greater
than that of conforming to the DRR. But, the liberal critics claim,
it is doubtful that we have any such reason: in a very religious
society such as the United States, it might be the case that
restrictions on the political practice of religious believers
engenders at least as much frustration as the alternative.




 Second, the liberal critics argue,
there is reason to believe that conformance to the DRR would only
marginally alleviate the frustration that some citizens feel when
confronted with religious reasons in public political debate. The
DRR, after all, does not forbid citizens from supporting coercive laws
on religious grounds, nor does it forbid citizens to articulate
religious arguments in public. Furthermore, complying with the
DRR does not prevent religious citizens from advocating their favored
laws in bigoted, inflammatory, or obnoxious manners; it has
nothing to say about political decorum. So, for example, because
the DRR doesn't forbid citizens from helping
themselves to inflammatory or demeaning rhetoric in political
argument, the anger and resentment engendered by such rhetoric does
not constitute evidence for (or against) the DRR.




 Third, the liberal critics contend that
because most of the laws that have a chance of enactment in a society
as pluralistic as the United States will have both religious and
secular grounds, it will almost never be the case that any of the
actual frustration caused by the public presence of religion supports
the DRR. Given that the DRR requires not a complete but only a
limited privatization of religious belief, very little of the
frustration and anger apparently engendered by the public presence of
religion counts in favor of the DRR. To which it is worth adding
the following point: advocates of the standard view could, with Rorty
(1995), adopt a more demanding conception of the DRR that requires the
complete privatization of religious belief. But, as many
advocates of the standard view itself maintain, it is doubtful that
this move improves the argument's prospects. The complete
privatization of religion is much more objectionable to religious
citizens and, thus, more likely to create social foment. (Rorty,
it should be noted, softened his approach on this issue. See Rorty
2003).




 There are no doubt other factors that need
to be taken into consideration in the calculation required to formulate
the argument from divisiveness. But, the liberal critics
maintain, it is unclear how those disparate factors would add up.
In particular, if the liberal critics are correct, it is not clear
whether requiring citizens to obey the DRR would result in less overall
frustration, anger, and division than would not requiring them to do
so. The issues at stake are empirical in character and the
relevant empirical facts are not known.


### 3.3 The Argument from Respect




The third and most prominent argument for the DRR is the argument
from respect. Here we focus on only one formulation of the
argument, which has affinities with a version of the argument offered by
Charles Larmore (see Larmore 1987).[10]




 The argument from respect runs as such:


1. Each citizen deserves to be respected as a person.
2. If each citizen deserves to be respected as a person, then there
is a powerful prima facie presumption against the permissibility of
state coercion. (On this basic claim, See Gaus, 2010, Gaus and Vallier, 2009.)
3. So, there is a powerful prima facie presumption against the
permissibility of state coercion.
4. If the presumption against state coercion is to be overcome (as
it sometimes must be), then state coercion must be justified to those
who are coerced.
5. If state coercion must be justified to those who are coerced,
then any coercive law that lacks a plausible secular rationale is
morally illegitimate (as there will be many to whom such coercion
cannot be justified).
6. If any coercive law that lacks a plausible secular rationale is
morally illegitimate, then a citizen ought not to support any law that
he believes to have only a religious rationale.




However, on the assumption that the antecedent to premise (4) is
true--that there are cases in which the state must
coerce--it follows (given a few other assumptions) that:


7. The DRR is true.




That is, the DRR follows from a constraint on what makes for the moral
legitimacy of state coercion--viz., that a morally legitimate law
cannot be such that there are those to whom it cannot be
justified--and from the claim that citizens should not support
any law that they realize lacks moral legitimacy.




 The argument from respect has received its
fair share of criticism from liberal critics. Perhaps the most
troubling of these criticisms is that the argument undermines the
legitimacy of basic liberal commitments. To appreciate the thrust
of this objection, focus for a moment on the notion *being a
coercive law that is justified to an agent*, to which the argument
appeals. How should we understand this concept?
One natural suggestion is this:



> 
> 
> A coercive law is justified to an agent only if he is reasonable and
> has sufficient reasons from his own perspective to support
> it.




Now consider a coercive law that protects fundamental liberal
commitments, such as the right to exercise religious freedom. Is
this law justified to each citizen of a liberal democracy?
Liberal critics answer: no. For there appear to be reasonable
citizens who have no good reason from their own perspective to affirm
it. Consider, for example, a figure such as the Islamic
intellectual Sayyid Qutb. While in prison, Qutb wrote an
intelligent, informed, and morally serious commentary on the Koran in
which he laid the ills of modern society at the feet of Christianity
and liberal
 democracy.[11]
The only way to extricate ourselves
from the problems spawned by liberal democracy, Qutb argued, is to
implement shariah or Islamic legal code, which implies that the state
should not protect a robust right to religious freedom. In short, Qutb 
articulates what is, from his point of view, a
compelling theological rationale against any law that authorizes the
state to protect a robust right to religious freedom. If respect
for persons requires that each coercive law be justified to those
reasonable persons subject to that law, and if a person such as Qutb
were a citizen of a liberal democracy, then the argument from respect
implies that laws that protect the right to religious freedom are
morally illegitimate, as they lack moral justification--at least
for agents such as
 Qutb.[12]
And for a defender of the standard
view, this is certainly an unwelcome result.




 This kind of case leads liberal critics of
the standard view to deny the fourth premise of the argument from
respect. If they are correct, it is not the case that coercive
laws must be justified to those who must obey them (in the sense of
*justified to* introduced earlier). Although having a
persuasive justification would certainly be desirable and a significant
moral achievement, the liberal critics maintain that the moral
legitimacy of a law is not a function of whether it can be justified to
all citizens--not even to all reasonable citizens. Some
citizens are simply not in a strong epistemic position to recognize
that certain coercive laws are morally legitimate. In such cases,
liberal critics claim that we should do what we can to try to convince
these citizens that they have been misled. And we should
certainly do what we can to accommodate their concerns in ways that are
consistent with basic liberal commitments (see Swaine 2006). At
the end of the day, though, we may have no moral option but to coerce
reasonable and epistemically competent peers whom we recognize have no
reason from their perspective to recognize the legitimacy of the laws
to which they are subject. However, if a coercive law can be
morally legitimate even though some citizens are not in a strong
position to recognize that it is, then (in principle) a coercive law
can be justified even if it requires a religious rationale. After
all, if religious reasons can be adequate (a possibility that advocates
of the standard view do not typically deny), then they are just the
sort of reason that can be adequate without being recognized as such
even by our morally serious and epistemically competent
peers.




It should be conceded, however, that this objection to the argument
from respect relies on a particular understanding of what it is for a
coercive law to be justified to an agent. Is there another account of
this concept that would aid the advocates of the standard view?
Perhaps. Nearly all theorists have argued that a coercive law's being
justified to an agent does not require that that agent actually have
what he regards as an adequate reason to support it (see Gaus 1996,
Audi 1997, and Vallier 2014). "The question is not what people
do endorse but what people have reason to endorse" (Gaus 2010,
23). Better to understand the concept *being a coercive law that
is justified to an agent* along the following lines:



> 
> 
> A coercive law is justified to an agent only if, were he reasonable
> and adequately informed, then he would have a sufficient reason from
> his own perspective to support it.




Given this weaker, counterfactual construal of what makes for
morally permissible coercion, the argument from respect needn't
undermine the legitimacy of the state's using coercion to protect basic
liberal commitments. For we can always construe those
counterfactual conditions in such a way that those who in fact reject
basic liberal commitments would affirm them if they were more
reasonable and better informed. In that case, using coercion to
ensure that they comply with basic liberal commitments would not be to
disrespect them. If this is correct, the prospect of there being
figures such as Qutb, who reject the right to religious freedom, need
not undermine the legitimacy of the state's coercive enforcement of
that basic liberal commitment.




 Liberal critics find this response
unsatisfactory. After all, if this alternative construal of the
argument is to succeed, it must be the case not only that:



> 
> 
> Were an agent such as Qutb reasonable and adequately informed, he
> would have sufficient reason from his own perspective to support
> coercive laws that protect the right to religious liberty;




but also:



> 
> 
> Every coercive law that protects basic liberal commitments is such
> that adequately informed and reasonable secular citizens would have a
> sufficient secular reason to support it.




These two claims, however, are highly controversial. Let us
consider the first. Were we to ask Qutb whether he would have
reasons to support laws that protect a robust right to religious
freedom if he were adequately informed and reasonable, surely he would
say: no. Moreover, he would claim that his compatriots would
reject the liberal protection of such a right if *they* were
adequately informed about the divine authorship of the Quran and the
proper rules of its interpretation. While Qutb's say-so doesn't
settle the issue of who would believe what in improved conditions,
liberal critics maintain that his response indicates just how
complicated the issue under consideration is. Among other things,
to establish that Qutb is wrong it seems that one would have to deny
the truth of various theological claims on which Qutb relies when he
determines that he would reject the right to religious freedom were he
adequately informed and reasonable. That would require advocates
of the standard view to take a stand on contested religious
issues. However, liberal critics point out that defenders of the
standard view have been wary of explicitly denying the truth of
religious claims, especially those found within the major theistic
religions.




 Turn now to the second claim.
Some liberal critics of the standard view, such as Nicholas
Wolterstorff, maintain that at the heart of liberal democracy is the
claim that some coercive laws function to protect inherent human
rights. Wolterstorff further argues that attempts to ground these
rights in merely secular considerations fail. Only by appeal to
explicitly theistic assumptions, Wolterstorff argues, can we locate an
adequate justification for the ascription of these rights (see
Wolterstorff 2008, Pt. III as well as Perry 2003). What would
a reasonable and adequately informed secular citizen make of
Wolterstorff's arguments? Would he endorse them?




 It's difficult to say. Liberal
critics maintain that we are simply not in good epistemic position to
judge the reasons an agent would have to support laws that protect
basic liberal commitments were he better informed and more
reasonable. More exactly, liberal critics maintain that we are
not in a good epistemic position to determine whether a secular agent
who is reasonable and better informed would endorse or reject the type
of theistic commitments that philosophers such as Wolterstorff claim
justify the ascription of natural human rights. The problem is
that we don't really have any idea how radically a person would change
his views were he to occupy these conditions. The main, and still
unresolved, question for this version of the standard view, then, is
whether there is some coherent and non-arbitrary construal of the
relevant counterfactual conditions that is strong enough to prohibit
exclusive reliance on religious reasons but weak enough to allow for
the justification of basic liberal
commitments. (See Vallier 2014 for the most recent and sophisticated
 attempt to specify those counterfactual conditions.)


## 4. Liberal Critics of the Doctrine of Religious Restraint




In the last section, we considered three arguments for the DRR and
responses to them offered by the liberal critics. In the course of our
discussion, we began to see elements of the view that liberal critics
of the standard view--critics such as Christopher Eberle, Philip
Quinn, Jeffrey Stout, and Nicholas Wolterstorff--endorse. To get
a better feel for why these theorists reject the
DRR, it will be helpful to step back for a moment to consider some
important features of their view.




 Earlier we indicated that liberal critics
of the standard view offer detailed replies to both the Argument from
Religious Warfare and the Argument from Divisiveness. Still,
friends of the standard view may worry that there is something deeply
problematic about these replies. For by allowing citizens to
support coercive laws on purely religious grounds, they permit
majorities to impose their religious views on others and restrict the
liberties of their fellow citizens. But it is important to see
that no liberal critic of the standard position adopts an "anything
goes" policy toward the justification of state coercion.
Citizens, according to these thinkers, should adhere to several
constraints on the manner in which they support coercive laws,
including the following.




 First, liberal critics of the
standard view assume that citizens should support basic liberal
commitments such as the rights to religious freedom, equality before
the law, and private property. Michael Perry argues, for example,
"that the foundational moral commitment of liberal democracy is to the
true and full humanity of *ever*y person--and therefore,
to the inviolability of *every* person--without regard to
race, sex, religion... ." This commitment, Perry continues,
is "the principal ground of liberal democracy's further commitment to
certain basic human freedoms" that are protected by law (Perry
2003,
 36).[13]
More generally, liberal critics maintain that citizens should support
only those coercive laws that they reasonably believe further the
common good and are consistent with the demands of justice. These
commitments, they add, are not in tension with the claim that citizens
may support coercive laws that they believe to lack a plausible secular
rationale. So long as a citizen is firmly committed to
basic liberal rights, she may coherently and without impropriety do so
even though she regards these laws as having no plausible secular
justification. More generally, liberal critics of the DRR
maintain that a citizen may rely on her religious convictions to
determine which policies further the cause of justice and the common
good and may support coercive laws even if she regards them as having
no plausible secular rationale.




 Second, liberal critics of the
standard view lay down constraints on the *manner* in which
citizens arrive at their political commitments (see Eberle 2002,
Weithman 2002, and Wolterstorff 1997, 2012a). So, for example, each
citizen should abide by certain epistemic requirements: precisely
because they ought not to support coercive laws that violate the
requirements of justice and the common good, citizens should take
feasible measures to determine whether the laws they support are
actually just and good. In order to achieve that aim, citizens
should search for considerations relevant to the normative propriety of
their favored laws, weigh those considerations judiciously, listen
carefully to the criticisms of those who reject their normative
commitments, and be willing to change their political commitments
should the balance of relevant considerations require them to do
so. Again, liberal critics deny that even the most conscientious
and assiduous adherence to such constraints precludes citizens from
supporting coercive laws that require a religious rationale. No
doubt, those who support coercive laws that require a religious
rationale *might* do so in an insular, intransigent, irrational,
or otherwise defective manner. But they
need not do so and, thus, their religiously-grounded support for
coercive laws need not be defective.




 Third, critics of the standard view
need have no aversion to secular justification and so need not object
to a state of affairs in which each person, secular or religious, has
what he or she regards as a compelling reason to endorse coercive laws
of various sorts. (Indeed, they claim that such a state of
affairs would arguably be a significant moral achievement--a
good for all concerned.) According to the liberal critics,
however, what is most important is that parity reigns: *any*
normative constraint that applies to the reasons on the basis of which
citizens make political decisions must apply impartially to both
religious and secular reasons. Many secular reasons employed to
justify coercion--ones that appeal to comprehensive perspectives
such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, for example--are highly
controversial; in this sense, they are very similar to religious
reasons. For this reason, some advocate for a cousin --more or
less distant, depending on the formulation--of the DRR, namely, one
that lays down restrictions on all religious reasons and on some
particularly controversial secular reasons. (See section 6 below.)
Moreover, the normative issues implicated by certain coercive laws are
so complex and contentious that *any* rationale for or against
these laws will include claims that can be reasonably
rejected--secular or religious as the case might be.




 If this is right, according to the liberal
critics, equal treatment of religious and secular reasons is the order
of the day: religious believers have no more, and no less, a
responsibility to aspire to persuade their secular compatriots by
appeal to secular reasons than secularists have an obligation to aspire
to persuade their religious compatriots by appeal to religious
reasons. Otherwise put, according to the liberal critics, if we
accept the claim that:



> 
> 
> If a religious citizen finds herself in a position in which she has
> excellent reason to believe that she cannot convince a fellow secular
> citizen to support a coercive law that she deems just by appeal to
> religious reasons, then she should do her best to appeal to secular
> reasons--reasons that her cohort may find persuasive;




we should also accept:



> 
> 
> If a secular citizen finds herself in a position in which she has
> excellent reason to believe that she cannot convince a fellow religious
> citizen to support a coercive law that she deems just by appeal to
> secular reasons, then she should do her best to appeal to religious
> reasons--reasons that her cohort may find persuasive.




Recognizing parity of this sort, according to the liberal critics,
lies at the heart of what it is to be a good citizen of a liberal
democracy. For being a good citizen involves respecting one's
fellow citizens, even when one disagrees with them. In a wide
range of cases, however, an agent exercises respect not by treating her
interlocutor as a generic human being or a generic citizen of a liberal
democracy, but by treating her as a person who has a particular
narrative identity and life history, say, as an African American, a
Russian immigrant, or a Muslim citizen. But doing this
often requires pursuing and appealing to considerations that it is
likely that one's interlocutors with their own particular narrative
identity will find persuasive. And depending on the case, these
reasons may be exclusively religious.




To this we should add a clarification: strictly speaking, the liberal
critics' insistence on parity between the *pursuit* of secular
and religious reasons is consistent with the DRR. For, as we have
construed it, the DRR allows that religious citizens may support
coercive laws for religious reasons (so long as they have and are
prepared to provide a plausible secular justification for these
laws). And while its advocates do not typically emphasize the point,
the DRR permits secular citizens to articulate religious reasons that
will persuade religious believers to accept the secular citizens'
favored coercive laws (for reservations about this practice, see Audi
1997, 135-37 on "leveraging reasons". See also
Schwartzman 2014). Still, the DRR implies that there is an important
asymmetry between the justificatory role played by religious and
secular reasons. To this issue we now turn.


## 5. The Primary Concern Regarding the Doctrine of Religious Restraint




Assume that, in religiously pluralistic conditions, religious citizens
have good moral reason--perhaps even a moral obligation--to
pursue secular reasons for their favored coercive laws. Assume as well
that secular citizens have good reason to pursue religious reasons for
their favored coercive policies (if only because, with respect to some
coercive laws, some of their fellow citizens find only religious
reasons to support them). What should citizens do, religious or
secular, when they cannot identify these reasons?




 According to advocates of the standard
view, if a religious citizen fails in his pursuit of secular reasons
that support a given coercive law, then he is morally required to
exercise restraint. After all, if his pursuit of these reasons
fails, then he does not have any secular reason to offer in favor of
that law. Liberal critics of the standard view, by contrast, deny
that citizens so circumstanced are morally required to exercise
restraint. They claim that from the fact that religious citizens
are morally required to *pursue* secular reasons for their
favored coercive laws (when that is necessary for persuasion), it does
not follow that they should *refrain* from supporting coercive
laws if their pursuit of secular reasons fails. Because our
having an obligation to try to bring about some state of affairs tells
us nothing about what we ought to do if we cannot bring it about,
nothing like the DRR follows from the claim that citizens should pursue
secular reasons for their favored coercive laws. According to the
liberal critics, a parallel position applies to non-religious citizens:
from the fact that non-religious citizens are morally required to
pursue religious reasons for their favored laws (when that is necessary
for persuasion), it doesn't follow that they should refrain from
supporting coercive laws if their pursuit of religious reasons
fails. For the liberal critics, parity between the religious and
the secular obtains both with respect to the obligation to pursue
justifying reasons and with respect to the permission not to exercise
restraint when that pursuit fails.




Have we identified a genuine point of disagreement between the liberal
critics and advocates of the standard view? It seems so. If the
liberal critics are correct, all that can be reasonably asked of
religious citizens is that, in a pluralistic liberal democracy, they
competently pursue secular reasons for the coercive laws they
support. If the pursuit fails, then they may support these laws for
exclusively religious reasons. Proponents of the standard view
disagree, maintaining that if the pursuit fails, these citizens must
exercise restraint. This disagreement is rooted in differing
convictions about the justificatory role that religious reasons can
play. Once again, advocates of the standard view maintain that
religious reasons can play only a limited justificatory role: citizens
must have and be prepared to offer (at least certain kinds of) secular
reasons for any coercive law that they support, as religious reasons
are not enough. The liberal critics deny this, maintaining that no
persuasive arguments have been offered to believe this. The DRR
highlights this disagreement, as it incorporates an assumption that
religious and secular reasons play asymmetrical roles in justifying
coercive laws.[14]





As we have explicated the view of the liberal critics, religious
citizens are (in a wide range of cases) morally required to pursue
secular reasons for their favored coercive laws, but they needn't
exercise restraint if they fail in their pursuit. But this position
raises a question: What's so bad about requiring citizens to exercise
restraint? Why should liberal critics object to this?




 According to the liberal critics, one of
the core commitments of a liberal democracy is a commitment to
religious freedom and its natural extension, the right to freedom of
conscience. When citizens use the modicum of political influence
at their disposal, liberal critics claim that we should want them to do
so in a way that furthers the cause of justice and the common
good. So, for example, when a citizen deliberates about whether
he should, say, support the invasion of Afghanistan by the United
States and its NATO allies, we want him to determine, as best he can,
whether the invasion of Afghanistan is actually morally
appropriate. In order to determine that, he should be as
conscientious as he can in his collection and evaluation of the
relevant evidence, reach whatever conclusions seem reasonable to him on
the available evidence, and act accordingly. If he concludes that
invading Afghanistan would be unjust, then he should oppose it.
That he does so is not only his right but also morally excellent, as
acting in accord with responsibly held normative commitments is an
important moral and civic good.




 This, the liberal critics maintain,
suggests a general claim. Whatever the policy and whatever the
reasons--whether religious or secular--we have powerful
reason to want citizens to support the coercive policies that they
believe, in good conscience, to be morally appropriate. But that
general claim has direct application to the issue at hand. It is
possible, the liberal critics claim, for a morally sensitive and
epistemically competent citizen to regard only certain religious
considerations as providing decisive support for a given coercive
law. Nicholas Wolterstorff, to return to an earlier example,
maintains that only theistic considerations can ground the ascription
of inherent human rights, some of which are protected by coercive
law. Arguably, were a citizen to find a position such as
Wolterstorff's persuasive, then he should appeal to those
considerations that he actually believes to further the cause of
justice and the common good. And this should lead us to want him
to support that law, even though he does so solely on religious
grounds, even if he regards that law as having no plausible secular
justification. Good citizenship in a pluralistic liberal
democracy unavoidably requires citizens to make political commitments
that they know their moral and epistemic peers reject but that they
nevertheless believe, with due humility, to be morally required.
This ideal of good citizenship, so the liberal critics claim, applies
to religious and secular citizens alike.


## 6. Rawls




The portrait that we have offered of the standard view (and that of
its liberal critics) is a composite, one which blends together various
claims that its advocates make about the relation between coercive law
and religious reasons. Because of this approach we have made relatively
little explicit mention of particular advocates of the standard view,
such as that towering figure of contemporary political philosophy, John
Rawls. Of all the contemporary figures who have shaped the debate we
are considering, however, none has exercised more influence than Rawls.
It is natural to wonder, then, whether we've presented the standard
view in its most powerful form and, thus, whether we've omitted a
crucial dimension of the debate between the standard view and its
liberal critics. We believe not. The version of the standard view that
we have considered is one that borrows liberally from Rawls' thought,
albeit softened and modified in certain ways. Still, before moving
forward, it will be helpful to say something more about Rawls' view. We
limit ourselves to the following three observations.




First, Rawls' own position about the relation between coercive law
and religious reasons has shifted. In *Political Liberalism*,
Rawls admits that at one point he inclined toward accepting an
ambitious version of the DRR according to which each citizen of a
liberal democracy ought not to appeal to religious reasons when
deliberating about matters of basic justice and constitutional
essentials (see Rawls 1993, 247 n.36). In the face of criticism, Rawls
modified his position, arriving at a close relative of the DRR, viz.,
that while an agent may appeal to religious reasons to justify coercive
law, he may not appeal solely to these reasons. Secular reasons must be
forthcoming (see Rawls 1997).[15]




Second, Rawls places significant restrictions on the content of the
secular reasons to which an agent may appeal. To advert to a point made
earlier, Rawls argues that when deliberating about matters of basic
justice and constitutional essentials, citizens should appeal to
"public reason," which (roughly speaking) is a fund of
shared principles about justice and the common good that is constructed
from the shared political culture of a liberal
democracy--principles that concern, for example, the equality of
citizens before the law and their right to a fair system of
cooperation. In Rawls' view, when deliberating about these matters,
appealing solely to secular comprehensive accounts of the good such as
Aristotelianism or utilitarianism is no more legitimate than appealing
solely to religious reasons. For all of these comprehensive doctrines
will be alien to some of one's reasonable compatriots.




As will have been evident, in our presentation of the DRR, we have
relaxed Rawls' stipulation, allowing for the legitimacy of appealing to
only secular reasons that have their home in one or another
comprehensive conception of the good. This might render the DRR
vulnerable to the criticism that it invidiously and arbitrarily
discriminates against religion. But the Rawlsian 'public reason'
alternative is also vulnerable to criticism. It is not clear, for one
thing, that the content of public reason will be rich enough to
provide compelling reasons to support genuinely informative positions
on matters of basic justice or constitutional essentials. Perhaps, for
example, the claims that belong to public reason are only fairly
sweeping ones that ascribe basic rights of various sorts but offer no
guidance about how they should be weighed (see Quinn 1997,
149-52). Furthermore, it is unclear that appealing to public reason is
the best way to respect one's fellow citizens. Perhaps, as
Wolterstorff and Stout have argued, respect is better served both by
explicitly disclosing to one's interlocutors the reasons one finds
most persuasive (whatever they may be) and appealing to reasons that
they might most find most persuasive, given their own commitments to
one or another comprehensive perspective (see Wolterstorff 1997 and
Stout 2004, Chs. 2-4).




In fact, Wolterstorff has argued that, ironically, Rawls'
methodology has the implication that appealing to public reason would
be to treat others with profound disrespect. For note that when Rawls
formulates his version of public reason, he claims that it will
incorporate the idea that liberal democracy is a society with a system
of fair cooperation over time. How do we identify such a system? Rawls
maintains that doing so requires that we set off to the side those who
are "unreasonable" - these being those who are "unwilling to
honor, or even to propose ... fair terms of cooperation" (Rawls
1993, 51). But, as Wolterstorff contends, there are many who do not
satisfy Rawls' account of reasonability, including those who think of
politics not in terms of distributive justice but other categories such
as preserving individual liberty, protecting small government,
maximizing their own wealth, and so on. The implication of setting
these people off to the side is that, when engaging in public political
deliberation about some issue of basic justice, the "reasonable"
citizens are free to ignore the views of their "unreasonable"
compatriots. This, however, raises the concern that far from advocating
a system in which all other citizens are respected as free and equal,
Rawls' view has the paradoxical implication that "to follow the duty of
civility is perforce to perpetrate injustice" by Rawls' own lights
(Wolterstorff 2012, 121).




Third, as Paul Weithman points out (in Weithman 2007), there are
really two types of argument that Rawls provides in favor of his
position. The first is a variant of the argument from respect. More
specifically, it is a relative to the first version of the argument
from respect that we considered earlier, which maintains that coercive
laws are morally legitimate only if they can be justified to citizens
of a liberal democracy with their actual commitments and beliefs. This
argument, if the liberal critics are correct, is subject to some
fairly powerful replies, among which is that, given the fact that
there is widespread pluralism about God and the good among the
citizens of liberal democracies, it is impossible for coercive laws
that protect basic liberal commitments to be justified to them. The
second type of argument that Rawls provides in favor of his favored
restrictions on religious reasons, however, appeals not to the claim
that justifying coercion on the basis of alien reasons disrespects our
compatriots, but to the idea that the reasons on which we rely must be
ones that others can endorse as autonomous agents. In Kantian
categories, this second line of argument singles out not the evil of
heteronomous considerations, but the goodness of considerations that
autonomous and reasonable agents could accept as an appropriate basis
for settling fundamental political questions.




It is difficult to see, however, that this latter argument genuinely
moves beyond the argument from respect. The problem is that it is not
evident that the content of what Rawls terms public reason is that to
which reasonable and autonomous agents would primarily appeal when
attempting to settle fundamental political questions. Once again, the
content of public reason may be too thin to settle anything of
importance. Moreover, it is unclear that reasonable and autonomous
agents would regard as inappropriate a democratic system in which
agents bring to the table whatever reasons that seem best to them and
vote solely on their basis.




Imagine, for example, a scenario in which citizens of a liberal
democracy such as ours must deliberate on an issue of basic justice
such as health care reform. One approach these citizens might take is
Rawls': they appeal primarily to public reason. Another approach is
that they try to forge a consensus about the issue that incorporates
features that belong to rather different comprehensive perspectives.
According to this latter approach, Jews, Christians, Kantians,
Buddhists, and Aristotelians all offer each other the reasons from
their own comprehensive perspectives that seem to support health care
reform, pointing out to each other the degree to which their reasons
overlap. No public reasons are offered, only a plethora of
particularistic reasons each of which is reasonably rejected by some
citizens. Then the matter is put to a vote. Would an agent who is
reasonable and autonomous reject this procedure in favor of appealing
to public reason? According to the liberal critics, it is difficult to
see why we should believe he would. If so, the connection that Rawls
attempts to forge between the exercise of autonomy and public reason is
too tight. (In the next section, we discuss a version of
'public reason liberalism' that incorporates the basic idea
that respect for persons is compatible with each citizen's
offering to one non-shared, non-public reasons for state coercion.)




A final concern is worth airing. Figures such as Philip Quinn,
Jeffrey Stout, and Nicholas Wolterstorff interpret Rawls as addressing
the issue of how citizens in actual liberal democracies ought to
conduct themselves when debating matters of justice and the common
good. But there is evidence that Rawls' texts ought not to be read in
this way. For, as Rawls indicates at various places, he takes himself
to be discussing *well-ordered* societies. A well-ordered
society is such that it contains no egoists, everyone complies with the
principles of justice, everyone wants to participate in forms of social
life that call forth their own and others' natural talents, treachery
and betrayal are absent, and its members want to cooperate with others
on terms that are mutually justifiable and affirm only reasonable
comprehensive doctrines (Weithman 2012, 65, 162, 169, 310). In short, a
well-ordered society is nothing like the actual world but is something
approximating a political Utopia.




Suppose Rawls were to establish that in a well-ordered society agents
would conform to his favored version of the restrictions on religious
reasons. This would not imply that, in those circumstances in which we
actually find ourselves, citizens should appeal to his version,
thinking of it as a regulatory ideal in their political thinking. Not
all ideals, after all, are worth pursuing. It might be, for example,
that pursuing the Rawlsian ideal would make it much more difficult for
citizens to employ other approaches to political deliberation that
would result in a liberal democracy being sufficiently stable for the
right reasons, which, says Rawls, should be a primary objective of any
liberal democracy. If this were correct, then Rawls's project would
have very modest implications for how to think about the relation
between religion and public reason, since it would provide little or
no guidance for how citizens ought to conduct their behavior (see
Cuneo 2013).


## 7. A Convergent Alternative




Liberal critics of the standard view have not been free of their own
critics. We conclude this part of our discussion by articulating
one important response.




At the heart of the liberal critics' conception of religion
and public life is a commitment to parity between the religious and the
secular: because there are no morally, sociologically, or epistemically
relevant differences between religious and secular reasons, religious
and secular reasons may play exactly the same role in a citizen's
deliberations or decision-making regarding state coercion. This
parity claim seems flatly inconsistent with the DRR - which
singles out religious reasons for special, discriminatory
treatment. But some theorists have argued that the parity claim,
which is so important to the liberal critics, is in fact consistent
with a version of the DRR. An argument of this sort has been
articulated by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier (Gaus 2012, Gaus and
Vallier, 2009, Vallier, 2014). 




Gaus and Vallier's argument rests on two central claims. First,
state coercion is presumptively wrong; each and every coercive state
enactment must be justified by each and every citizen subject to it. By
contrast, the lack of any state policy is not presumptively wrong, and
so need not be justified - even to citizens whose well-being is
affected by the lack of state activity. Second, the reasons by
which state coercion is justified need not be shared by (or be
accessible to) the citizens who are subject to a given coercive
measure. What matters for purposes of the justification of coercion is
that each citizen has sufficient reason, as judged from his or her
particular perspective, to endorse state coercion. Since this view
places no restrictions on the reasons to which an agent might appeal,
religious and secular reasons can play exactly the same justificatory
role, namely, to defeat what would, in the absence of contrary reasons,
be permissible acts of state coercion. 




Gaus and Vallier, then, have defended a *convergence* rather
than a *consensus* account of the standard view. If this
account is correct, state coercion must be justifiable to religious
citizens *as religious believers* and when it is not, then state
coercion lacks moral legitimacy. The same holds true for non-religious
citizens. Although the convergent conception of the standard view
accords religious reasons a potentially decisive role in defeating
state coercion, and so accords religious reasons a much more prominent
role in the justification of state coercion than religious reasons have
on most alternative formulations of the standard view, it is also
consistent with the DRR. How so? 




In any liberal polity, there will inevitably be some secular
citizens. If there is nothing to be said from any secular
perspective that decisively justifies some coercive measure, and if the
only plausible rationale for that coercive measure is a religious
rationale, then there will inevitably be some citizens to whom that
coercive measure cannot be justified. According to the view under
consideration, such a coercive measure would be disrespectful and so
illegitimate. So the convergent variation on the standard view
maintains the core conviction that religious considerations cannot
decisively justify state coercion in pluralistic liberal
politics. The implications for the duties of religious citizens
seem direct: they ought to restrain themselves from supporting any act
of state coercion that they know cannot be justified other than by
religious reasons. That is, they must comply with the DRR. If
Gaus and Vallier are correct, then, commitment to equal treatment of
religion is entirely consistent with a version of the DRR. (Gaus and
Vallier, it is worth noting, reject the DRR as an account of the duties
of citizens, accepting only a milder version that applies to certain
public officials in certain circumstances.) 




Although the convergent variation of the standard view will likely
be more attractive to liberal critics than familiar alternatives, they
still have reason to be skeptical. The convergent conception of the
standard view is, after all, demanding: state coercion must pass muster
before the bar of religious and secular reasons. However, many citizens
will have compelling reasons to reject core liberal commitments. It
follows that, according to the convergence view, those liberal
commitments will lack justification. If so, liberal critics have reason
to reject the convergent view, not because of its implications for
religion but for liberalism. Consider in this regard the case of Qtub
treated earlier. Qtub seems to have articulated compelling theological
objections to the right to religious freedom, and thus articulated
compelling theological reasons to deny that the state may coercively
enforce that right. In this case, the state's enforcement of the right
to religious freedom seems, according to the convergent conception, to
lack legitimacy.


## 8. The New Traditionalism




To this point, we have been primarily concerned to articulate the
standard view and lay out the response offered to it by its liberal
critics. We have emphasized that there are important differences
between these two views. While not trivial, these differences should
not be exaggerated, however. Both views are deeply committed to the
core components of liberal democracy, including the protection of
basic freedoms such as the freedom to practice religion as one sees
fit. Furthermore, both views recognize the legitimacy of religious
reasons in political deliberation, noting the role of such reasons in
important social movements such as the civil rights movement. The main
difference between advocates of the standard view and their liberal
critics, we've contended, is how they view the
justificatory *role* of these reasons. That said, the liberal
critics are not the only or even the most influential critics of the
standard view. Indeed, if the central argument of Jeffrey Stout's
book *Democracy and Tradition* is correct, the standard view
has generated a worrisome backlash among prominent Christian
theologians and political theorists. These theologians and political
theorists, who Stout labels the *New Traditionalists*, reject
not only the standard view, but also liberal democracy as
such--their assumption being that the standard view is a more or
less inevitable outgrowth of liberal democracy. In spite of their
fairly radical position, Stout contends that these thinkers need to be
taken seriously by the friends of democracy, as they exercise
considerable influence in certain sectors of the academy and the
culture at large.




 Suppose Stout is right to say that
New Traditionalists such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and
Stanley Hauerwas are widely influential in the academy and
elsewhere. Should they be taken seriously by political
philosophers? That depends on what one understands the role of
political philosophers to be. Suppose, however, we assume that
political philosophers should be multidisciplinary in orientation,
engaging with what sociologists, psychologists, and theologians write
and say. If we assume this, then taking a multidisciplinary
approach in this case seems to make sense. The topic under
consideration, after all, is the relation between religion and
politics, and theologians have had much to say about their
interrelations. Furthermore, while the approach that the New
Traditionalists take to our topic is different from that taken by the
advocates of the standard view--the New Traditionalists tell a
historical narrative about the ills of liberal democracy--the
narrative that they tell is a philosophical one. Indeed, it is a
narrative whose main lines will be familiar to most philosophers
working in ethics and political philosophy. It is natural to want
to know whether this historical-philosophical narrative survives
philosophical scrutiny. We shall close, then, by considering the
narrative that the New Traditionalists tell about the emergence of
modern liberal democracies, highlighting the response offered to it by
the liberal critics.


### 8.1 The Declinist Narrative of the New Traditionalism




Those familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre will immediately
recognize the New Traditionalists' narrative. For in its broad
structure, it bears a close resemblance to the one that MacIntyre tells
in his three books *After Virtue*, *Whose Justice? Which
Rationality?* and *Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry*
(MacIntyre 1984, 1988, and 1990,
 respectively).[16]
The MacIntyrean
narrative is broadly declinist in character, depicting the degeneration
of Western moral and political thought in the following four
stages.




 In the first stage, the New Traditionalists
maintain that the late ancient and the high medieval thinkers of the
west embraced a unified philosophical vision that includes three
fundamental components. The first component is a commitment to a
"thick" teleological account of the human good, according to which
human beings have rational natures that can be perfected. The
second component is a commitment to the claim that virtue consists in
the perfection of our rational nature in both its practical and
theoretical dimensions. Practical reason, according to the
vision, can ascertain not merely the means to achieve one's ends, but
also the very telos or end for human beings. And theoretical
reason, so the vision has it, can gain genuine insight into the world
by viewing the entire created order as participating in or resembling
the divine nature. The third component of the vision is that
moral thought and discourse should be framed primarily in terms of the
virtues--the virtues providing the dominant conceptuality in
terms of which we conduct moral reasoning. To which it is worth
adding the following point: advocates of the MacIntyrean narrative do
not deny that pre-modern societies had their share of moral, religious,
and political problems. Their claim is merely that these
societies enjoyed (at least in principle) the shared conceptual
resources with which they could coherently address and remedy
them.




 In the second stage of the narrative, there
is a fall into our current fragmented moral and religious
condition. Although the New Traditionalists regard different
movements and figures as responsible for the fall, they agree on this
much: the philosophical vision that unified the societies of
pre-modernity fell apart. The teleological worldview was replaced
by a nominalist and mechanistic one. Practical reason became
instrumentalized--viewed as merely a "slave of the passions," to
use Hume's phrase. And theoretical reason was conceived of as
working in a perfectly adequate fashion apart from any commitment to
there being a divinely-ordered reality. Furthermore, the language
of justice and individual rights supplanted that of virtue. As a
result, the state that we now occupy is one in which we no longer enjoy
a shared conception of the good, and politics has become--to use
MacIntyre's memorable phrase--"civil war by other means."
Without such a conception of the good, we now face all manner of moral,
religious, and political problems that we lack the conceptual resources
to resolve or even properly understand.




 In the third stage of the narrative, New
Traditionalists maintain that liberal democracy emerges as the more or
less natural political consequence of the fall from the pre-modern
state. Liberal democracy, according to the New Traditionalists,
is not only a political structure that protects putative
individual rights (such as to religious freedom), but is also committed
to a broad thesis of *neutrality* with respect to notions of God
and the good. According to this understanding of liberal
democracy, the state should not enact laws that require a religious
rationale and citizens should therefore comply with the DRR.
Given its commitment to neutrality and the DRR, the New Traditionalists
claim that liberal democracy is a mode of governance that is
fundamentally at odds with the type of traditional religious way of
life that informed society during its pre-modern state.




 In the final stage of the narrative, New
Traditionalists offer proposals of various sorts for how traditionally
religious believers should cope with being citizens of a political
system whose fundamental commitments are at odds with their own.
The proposals are generally not injunctions to transform the liberal
state. Rather, they are broadly separatist in nature, exhorting
traditional believers to distance themselves from the liberal state,
say, by living in small religious communities, which owe their ultimate
allegiance to the church or some larger religious tradition. If
they are correct, the DRR is both crucial to liberal democracy and an
important reason for traditional believers to reject it.


### 8.2 Two concerns about the narrative




The MacIntyrean narrative is intriguing but highly
controversial. Liberal critics have raised the following two
objections to it.




 The first feature of the narrative to which
liberal critics have drawn attention is its highly intellectualized
character. If John Milbank and MacIntyre are correct, for
example, the fall into secularist liberalism is driven by the influence
of some fairly abstract philosophical claims about the nature of reason
and existence, which were defended by the medieval philosopher Duns
Scotus. By rejecting the broadly Augustinian/Thomistic picture of
reason and existence, the New Traditionalists claim, Scotus paved the
way for the rise of secularism, which is endemic to contemporary
liberal democracies (see Milbank 1990 and MacIntyre 1990, Ch.
7).




 Liberal critics maintain that, as a matter
of intellectual history, this is not correct. Proponents of
broadly Scotistic or anti-theistic views, according to thinkers such as
Stout, never had the numbers or clout to change the world as
dramatically as New Traditionalists claim. In fact, if Stout is
correct, there is a counter-narrative to tell that is at least as
plausible as the one that New Traditionalists champion. According
to this counter-narrative, we should distinguish two types of
secularism: on the one hand, there is secularism as understood by the
standard view, which tells us that appeal to religious reasons in
public political discourse is insufficient to justify coercive
laws. On the other, there is broadly pluralistic secularism,
which tells us merely that participants in public political discourse
are not in a position to assume that their interlocutors are making the
same religious assumptions that they are. Stout maintains that
liberal democracy is committed only to secularism of the second
sort. Indeed, even critics of the standard view who affirm
liberal democracy on religious grounds, such as Wolterstorff, grant
that liberal democracy is secular in Stout's second, pluralistic
sense. Certainly, the liberal critics maintain, there is nothing
about liberalism that commits it to a version of secularism in which
the liberal state is an anti-Christian ecclesia or an alternate vehicle
for salvation, as some New Traditionalists have claimed (see, for
example, Milbank, et al. 1999, 192).




 Suppose that the liberal critics are
correct in their contention that liberal democracy is committed only to
pluralistic secularism. Is this commitment the upshot of a broadly
Scotistic view about reason and existence having taken root in
modernity? If thinkers such as Stout and Wolterstorff are
correct, the answer to this question is also: no. Rather, both
Stout and Wolterstorff suggest that liberal democracy's commitment to
secularism is the result of Christians themselves recognizing that
post-Reformation Christianity itself had become so fragmented that
Christians could no longer appeal to scripture and tradition in public
discourse under the assumption that their interlocutors would share
their views regarding scripture and tradition (see Zagorin
2003).




 In support of this contention, Stout
appeals to the historian Christopher Hill who maintains that in
17th century English parliamentary politics, one
increasingly finds members of parliament appealing rather less to
scripture when engaging in public political discourse and rather more
to considerations upon which they and their interlocutors could
agree. According to this counter-narrative, "secularization was
not primarily brought about by the triumph of a secularist
ideology....What drove the secularization of political discourse
forward was the increasing need to cope with religious plurality
discursively on a daily basis under circumstances where improved
transportation and communication were changing the political and
economic landscape" (Stout 2004, 102). To which Stout adds that
secularization (in the second, pluralistic sense specified earlier)
thus understood doesn't morally or pragmatically preclude citizens from
voicing their religious convictions in the public square. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s appeals to religious considerations, for example,
were highly politically effective.




 The first worry regarding the New
Traditionalists' declinist narrative, then, is that it is overly
intellectualized, portraying the rise of secularism as owing primarily
to the influence of philosophical ideas and not to more mundane
sociological facts, such as the need to cope with increasing religious
pluralism. The second worry about the narrative is that the New
Traditionalists misdiagnose the character of liberal democracy,
attributing to its advocates commitments that they needn't
accept. To better understand this worry, recall the pattern of
argument that the New Traditionalists employ, which is roughly the
following:



> 
> 
> Liberalism is committed to various philosophical claims and
> practices that are incompatible with orthodox theism (or at least
> orthodox theism in its best forms, such as Thomism).



> 
> 
> So, orthodox theists should reject liberalism.




What are some of the claims and practices that fit poorly with
orthodox theism and to which liberalism is committed? If the New
Traditionalists are correct, at least these two: first, liberalism
tells us that political systems should be neutral regarding various
notions of God and the good; they should not operate with an account of
an overriding good for human beings in whose light subsidiary goods can
be ordered. Second, liberalism is committed to the claim that
moral and political discourse should be couched not primarily in terms
of the virtues, but individual rights. This, say the New
Traditionalists has rendered liberal democracies a breeding ground for
citizens who are individualistic, self-focused, and whose views and
behavior are destructive of community. According to the New
Traditionalists, these two claims are connected. It is because
liberal democracies do not operate with a thick notion of the good that
the language of rights has supplanted that of virtue. For in
order for the language of the virtues to be intelligible, it must be
grounded in a thick account of the good.




 When properly qualified, liberal critics
such as Stout are willing to grant the first of these claims:
liberalism does not in fact operate with a thick notion of the
good. But they reject the further claim that this has rendered
appeal to the virtues in a liberal democracy irrelevant or somehow
deeply conceptually confused. For consider, Stout argues,
champions of liberalism within the broadly pragmatist tradition, such
as Walt Whitman and John Dewey. These thinkers do not fit well
into the MacIntyrean paradigm. At their best, Stout maintains,
Whitman and Dewey consciously theorize from the perspective of a
broadly pragmatic tradition that is committed to the centrality of the
virtues, albeit within a society characterized by competing and rival
conceptions of God and the good.




 More specifically, Stout maintains that
according to pragmatist liberals such as Dewey, good citizens of a
liberal democracy aspire to express not only civility and respect in
public political discourse, but also to accept some measure of
responsibility for the conditions of society and the political
arrangements it makes for itself. And to do this, citizens must
reason with one another about the ethical issues that divide them and
hold each other responsible, in ways that are decent and fair, for what
is done and said. If the pragmatist liberals are right, reasoning
of this sort requires that citizens of liberal democracies display
virtues of various sorts, such as openness to the views of others,
proper respect for their positions, and so forth. In an inversion
of the MacIntyrean position, Stout contends that it is at least in part
because liberal democracies do not espouse some overarching, thick
conception of the good that virtues such as civility and respect are
especially called for. And, particularly important for our
discussion is Stout's further claim that pragmatism of this variety
needn't lend any support to the standard view. Expressing the
virtues of civility and respect is perfectly compatible with appealing
only to religious considerations when making and supporting political
decisions.




So, if the liberal critics are correct, one place to press the New
Traditionalists' narrative is its claim that only within a thick,
overarching account of the human good are the virtues
intelligible. There is, however, a second place to press the
narrative, which is its skepticism about rights. As intimated
earlier, MacIntyre and the New Traditionalists portray individual
rights claims as both false and dangerous, indeed, as the upshot of an
Enlightenment conception of morality that is inimical to a properly
religious way of life (see MacIntyre 1984 and 1983).
MacIntyre, for example, writes that not only are rights claims on par
with belief in "witches and unicorns," but also that:



> 
> 
> there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly
> translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the
> middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew,
> Greek, Latin, or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let
> alone in Old English or Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth
> century. (MacIntyre 1984, 69)




In reply, the liberal critics make two points. First, as a
matter of historical fact, it is simply false that rights claims have
their conceptual roots in the soil of late medieval nominalism and
Enlightenment morality, as MacIntyre claims. Rather, as
Wolterstorff argues, appeals to rights are ubiquitous throughout
history. One can find them, for example, in the ancient Romans
juridical documents such as Justinian's *Digest*, the writings
of the church fathers, and the work of the medieval canon
 lawyers.[17]
Indeed,
according to Wolterstorff, appeals to what we call inherent or natural
human rights can be traced back to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures
(see Wolterstorff 2008, Pts. I-II). If Wolterstorff is correct,
the scriptural tradition not only birthed our conception of inherent
human rights, but also provides the conceptual soil most conducive to
its survival, for it offers the most cogent account of the worth of
human beings. If this is true, according to Wolterstorff, there
is no incompatibility between the liberal tradition's reliance on
rights and a commitment to orthodox theism. To reject liberalism
because it is committed to and relies heavily on the notion of rights
would be a mistake.




Second, the liberal critics contend that any connection between the
appeals to rights in liberalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward
individualism in its citizens, on the other, is highly
contingent. Perhaps it is true that contemporary liberal
democracies have in fact had a strong tendency to promote
individualism, where this is understood as a person's having a
distorted focus on *her* rights to the exclusion of her
obligations and responsibilities to others. But if we construe a
liberal democracy minimally, as a political structure that effectively
protects a certain schedule of individual rights (to religious freedom,
speech, due process, and the like), it is plausible to suppose that
exclusive focus on individual rights is itself a betrayal of
liberalism. After all, claim-rights almost always have
correlative obligations: if *you* have a right to religious
freedom, then *I* have an obligation not to violate that
right. Furthermore, I also have an obligation to take feasible
measures to support political institutions that protect that
right. Any understanding of a liberal democracy according to
which citizens may insist on their rights without due regard for the
obligations they bear to others and social institutions that protect
these rights is arguably both incoherent and a betrayal of basic
liberal commitments. Thinkers such as Wolterstorff add that for
theists who affirm liberal democracy, it is natural to suppose that
citizens who ignore their obligations to respect the rights of their
compatriots thereby also violate *God's* rights. For,
according to these thinkers, God has a right to be obeyed, and God
demands that we respect the worth of each human being. If the
liberal critics are correct, then, any individualism that attends
liberal democracy is a corruption. Perhaps it is a corruption to
which liberal democracies are prone; but individualism is neither a
liberal commitment nor, if thinkers such as Stout and Wolterstorff are
correct, an inevitable manifestation of liberal commitments.




 The liberal critics, then, are highly
suspicious of the New Traditionalists' narrative and the philosophical
lessons they glean from it. But suppose, for argument's sake,
that the narrative is largely compelling. Even if it is
compelling, the liberal critics insist that the New Traditionalists
have ignored an important option, viz., a minimalist account of liberal
democracy. According to this position, liberalism is committed to
the following pair of theses. First, the state is to be neutral
with respect to different conceptions of the good. The neutrality
in question, however, is inclusive in nature. It does not rule
out the appeal to comprehensive conceptions of the good when making
fundamental political decisions. Rather, it only rules out the
claim that the state is committed to promoting one such
conception. Second, the state is to protect a schedule of basic
rights and liberties enjoyed by all its citizens. Its role is to
ensure that its citizens can enjoy such goods as freedom of religion,
freedom of conscience, and equality before the law.




 The liberal critics maintain that a view
such as this deserves serious consideration by both defenders of the
standard view and orthodox religious believers. The challenge
that liberal critics such as Stout and Wolterstorff pose to New
Traditionalists in particular is this: Given that moral and religious
pluralism are here to stay, why would Christians and other people of
faith want to reject minimal liberal democracy--liberal
democracy shorn of its commitment to the standard view? What
morally feasible alternative is there to a political order in which the
state employs its coercive powers to protect the rights of each of its
citizens?




 Proponents of the New Traditionalism
find this attempt on the part of the liberal critics to marry liberal
democracy with traditional religious belief naive. If they
are right, any political system that professes neutrality with respect
to conceptions of God and the good is unacceptable. At best, it
will be inhospitable soil for a genuinely virtuous and religious way of
life. At worst, any such system will be an attempt to conceal the
fact that the deep structure of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on
personal freedoms and procedural justice, fits poorly with the thick
account of the good that orthodox religious believers endorse.
According to these thinkers, the conflict between liberal democracy and
traditional religion runs too deep for appeals to minimalist accounts
of liberalism to be effective.


## 9. Summary




The theologico-political problem is one that concerns the problem of
political authority. In its contemporary form, it primarily
concerns the justification of authoritative political acts, such as the
implementation of coercive laws. Can religious reasons justify
the implementation of such laws? This is the central question
with which political philosophers have been concerned. The
standard view tells us that religious reasons are never sufficient to
justify coercive law. It therefore champions the DRR, or the
claim that, if a citizen is trying to determine whether or not she
should support some coercive law, and if she believes that there is no
plausible secular rationale for it, then it is impermissible for her to
support that law. The main responses to the standard view divides
into two types. Liberal critics of the view hold fast to the
principles of liberal democracy but reject the DRR--in part for
the reason that the DRR is illiberal. New Traditionalists, by
contrast, reject both liberal democracy itself and the DRR, viewing the
latter as more or less a component of the former. (On this latter
point, they agree with advocates of the standard view.)




 Is there likely to be any sort of
rapprochement between these views? It is difficult to know.
Sometimes, however, positions that occupy the conceptual middle-ground
in a debate are the best candidates for unifying what can appear to be
irreconcilable positions. In the case at hand, the liberal
critics appear to occupy this conceptual middle-ground, straddling the
standard view and the New Traditionalism. On the one hand, the
liberal critics find themselves sympathetic with the political
commitments of the standard view but not with the wariness about
religion that often animates this position. On the other hand,
the liberal critics find themselves sympathetic with some of the
religious commitments embraced by the New Traditionalists but not with
their suspicion of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the liberal
critics are vulnerable to criticisms from both sides. Advocates
of the standard view will charge that they do not take seriously enough
the destructive and divisive effects of religion, hard to quantify as
they might be. And friends of the New Traditionalism will
maintain that they fail to recognize the corrosive effects of liberal
democracy on traditional religious ways of life. These are
important criticisms, married to passions that deeply divide the
proponents of these views. Still, members of all parties to the
debate agree that the task at hand is to articulate ways in which
citizens of a deeply pluralistic liberal democracy can conduct their
behavior in manners that are not only faithful to whatever religious
identities they may have, but are also just and contribute to the
common good.