Online research in philosophy

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics has become a religious obligation. For a new breed of religious nationalist the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. This essay seeks to accomplish four things. The first is to argue for an institutional approach to religious nationalism in order both to interpret and explain it. Second, I argue that religion and nationalism partake of a common symbolic order and that religious nationalism is therefore not an oxymoron. Third, the essay seeks to explain why religion has become such a potent political force in our time. And fourth-the task that will take up the bulk of the text-it seeks a principle of intelligibility in the semiotic order of religious nationalism that can comprehend its preoccupation with both women's erotic bodies and monies out of national control.

This article examines the historical experience of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Throughout the colonial and constitutional periods of the United States, the classical concept of an exclusive state church dominated the American image of an establishment of religion. A state preference of one denomination over others was what was primarily thought to be an establishment of religion, as the Framers did not want to duplicate the English experience with the established Anglican church. Late eighteenth century Americans agreed that government could provide special assistance to religion in general, as long as such assistance was given without any preference among sects. Both before and after the Revolution, Americans made a conscious distinction between two types of state action: the granting of exclusive privileges to one church, and a non-exclusive assistance to all churches. Only the former was considered to be an establishment of religion. The Framers' principal concern in drafting the Establishment Clause was to ensure equality among religions, not between religion and non-religion. In modern First Amendment doctrines, the single most influential concept regarding relations between church and state is Thomas Jefferson's wall of separation metaphor. The author contends that the misapplication of Jefferson's metaphor has led the Courts to create a confusing maze of case law restricting public expressions of religious belief, exactly contrary to the Framers' intent. He asserts that to the extent that the First Amendment requires separation, it does so as a way of preventing government intrusion on personal and institutional religious autonomy. The constitutional intent behind separation was as a means of protecting religion, not the secular state.

Recent discussions of religious, cultural, and/or moral diversity raise questions relevant to the descriptive and normative aims of students of religious ethics. In conversation with several illustrative works, the author takes up (1) issues of terminology, (2) explanations or classifications of types and origins of plurality and pluralism, (3) the relations between pluralism as a normative theory and the aims of a liberal state, and (4) the import of an emphasis on plurality or pluralism for the comparative study of religious ethics.

Critics of John Rawls' conception of a reasonable pluralism have raised the question of whether it is justified to demand that religious individuals should 'bracket' their essential, identity-constituting convictions when they enter a political discourse. I will argue that the criterion for religious beliefs of being justified as grounds for political decisions should be their ability of being 'translatable' in secular reasons for the very same decisions. This translation would demand 'epistemic abstinence' from religious believers only on the basis of a rigid distinction between the spheres of private opinions and public reasons. To give a more adequate account of the relation between religious beliefs and political reasons in a pluralistic society it seems to be helpful to make use of Niklas Luhmann's functionalistic theory of religion. Key Words: democracy and religious beliefs • philosophy of religion • pluralism • political liberalism • political theory.

Introduction -- Part I: Religion under secular statecraft -- Rationalist restrictions on public discourse -- Reasonable limits on religious freedom -- The hidden dangers of civil religion -- Part II: State/religion border control -- Religion-state relations in U.S. courts -- Rulings concerning religion-state relations -- Rulings on religion-state relations in education -- Alternative schooling in America -- Part III: Religious groups and the public sphere -- The political importance of interest groups -- The moral need for groups in a modern democracy -- Religious groups in the political process.

Elements of the relation between religion and politics are standard themes in political theory: toleration and free exercise rights; the parameters of separation of church and state; arguments for and against constraints imposed on religious discourse by philosophic norms of public reason. But religious parties and partisanship are no part of political theory, despite contemporary interest in value pluralism and in liberal democratic theory's capacity to address multicultural, religious, and ethnic group claims. This essay argues that religious parties are missing elements in discussions of identity politics. They play an important role not just in expressing but also in constructing and mobilizing religious political identity. Political activity linked to parties is a principal way of bringing diffuse, politically unorganized groups, whose leaders are self-appointed and not regularly accountable for the way they represent co-religionists in political life, into the democratic mainstream. With political organization and especially partisanship, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes.

In his essay Religion in the Public Sphere ,” Habermas joins the debate between liberals and critics of liberalism on the proper role of religion in the public sphere. His proposal focuses on what each side of the debate gets right: the liberal emphasis on the obligation to provide nonreligious reasons in support of coercive policies with which all citizens must comply, on one side, and the critic’s insistence on the right of religious citizens to adopt their religious stance in public deliberation about such policies, on the other. Habermas agrees with the liberal position in defending the separation of church and state, and thus the institutional priority of nonreligious reasons in politics. Consequently, he accepts the Rawlsian view that nonreligious reasons must be offered to justify coercive policies in political deliberation at the institutional level of parliaments, courts, ministries and administrations, that is, in the formal public sphere. But he proposes to eliminate this requirement in the informal public sphere. Religious citizens who participate in political advocacy in the informal public sphere can offer exclusively religious reasons in support of the policies they favor in the hope that they may be translated into nonreligious reasons. But the obligation of translation should not fall exclusively on the shoulders of religious citizens, as the Rawlsian approach suggests. According to Habermas, secular citizens must share the burden of translating religious into nonreligious reasons. In order to do so, they have to take religious reasons seriously and should not deny their possible truth from the outset.

Political philosophy has difficulties to cope with the complexity and variety of state-religions relations. Strict separationism is still the preferred option amongst liberals, deliberative and republican democrats, socialist and feminists. In this article, I develop a complex typology based on comparative history and sociology of religions. I summarize my reasons why institutional pluralist models like plural establishment or non-constitutional pluralism are attractive not only for religious minorities but for religiously deeply diverse societies in general. Most attention is paid defending associative democracy, the most flexible and open variety of institutional pluralism, against realist objections that group representation is incompatible with liberal democracy, that it leads to stigmatization and bureaucratization, that it strengthens undemocratic leaders, that it leads to an ossification of the status quo, and, most importantly, that it is inherently divisive undermining social cohesion and political unity. In my refutation of these objections I try to show that it helps to integrate minority religions into liberal democratic policies compatible with reasonable pluralism and to prevent religious and political fundamentalism.

Strict separation of church from a presumed 'religion-blind' and strictly 'neutral' state still is the preferred model in liberal, democratic, feminist, and socialist political theory. Focusing on the full, reciprocal relationships between society-culture-politics-nation-state and (organized) religions, this article makes a case in favor of 'nonconstitutional pluralism' in general, associative democracy in particular. Associative democracy recognizes religious diversity both individually and organizationally; it stimulates legitimate religious diversity; it prevents a hidden majority bias; and it provides a legitimate role for organized religions in the provision of a wide range of services, including education, on one hand, and in the political process, on the other hand. That organized religions should be informed, heard, and consulted in contested issues should be a crucial component of democratic participation. This also might help prevent the development of religious fundamentalism.