At the Limits of God-Talk: Publics, Politics, Conversation

Religion plays an influential role in American politics and public life. It tends to evoke disagreement and contentious debate about religious claims, practices and figures. Public religious leaders often presume their doctrinal commitments and theological referents to be unobjectionable. The social value of the aims of practices like prayer and penance are also presumed to be largely intolerant. Such claims and practices are often caricatured as the source or symptom of the vitality of public conversation. Theorists of public conversation obsess over how to address presumably unobjectionable ideas and intolerant practices that threaten the vitality of public conversation. Theologians and philosophers who would rather not engage in public conversation offer various reasons for arguing that religious enthusiasts should be prevented from participating in public conversation. By looking at Stanley Hauerwas's and Richard Rorty reasons for commending separation and privatization, respectively, this dissertation discovers similarities in their methods. By discerning conditions for dialogue and avoiding their methodological demands, this work turns discussions about America's civil religion to racial and cultural considerations. I assess the good of religion in politics by examining the place of limit-questions in public theology, in the first part of the project, and neopragmatic philosophy of religion, in the second part. I describe a practice of asking limit-questions called "inquisitive prayer" that can have devotional and social value. After redescribing Hauerwas's reasoning and rationally reconstructing Rorty's reasoning, those who commend privatization or separation from public conversation can see the value in the ways this protest practice expands what counts as normative in secular and religious contexts. Such an expansion is merited when conditions of dialogue are disclosed in ways that arguments for privatization and separation need not dismiss.