| In this dissertation, I examine several proposals to deal with the apparent tension between religious conviction/belief and democratic citizenship. Rawlsian liberals argue that citizens have the responsibility to bracket their religion when they participate in the activities of the political sphere, from deliberation to voting. I show that this argument fails from within the liberal framework. I also show that various attempts within the American pragmatist and neo-pragmatist tradition to resolve the tension between religion and the political domain by means of the reconstruction of the religion in question must fail for roughly pragmatic reasons. Ultimately, given the failure of both these approaches to thinking about this issue, I try to sketch a model of the democratic public square designed to accommodate as many democratically predisposed citizens as possible, religious or not. I argue that, if a religious citizen holds his/her religious lines of reasoning with respect to particular political matters in a manner that recognizes the risk of deliberative defeat and is thus open to inquiry and deliberation, then that citizen has thereby meet the minimal requirements of deliberative democracy. Thus, if a religious citizen can meet this inquirational requirement, the duties of democratic citizenship do not require that religious citizen to bracket his/her religious lines of reasoning. I try to map out several strategies for a religious citizen in the face of deliberative defeat. Also, I attempt to sketch out a strategy for orchestrating temporary modus vivendi arrangements in the face of what I call act-now deliberative stalemates. |
