Faith in Politics: Religion and Liberal Democracy. By Bryan T. McGraw

Abstract

In political philosophy, highly stylized accounts of the religious and dynastic wars of early modern Europe cast a long shadow over contemporary debates about the place of religion in democratic public life. They paint a high-contrast picture of a civilizational struggle between theocratic forces bent on using state power to achieve confessional hegemony and secular intellectuals propounding doctrines of religious toleration. The outcome of this struggle, these stories tell us, was a “great separation” between matters religious and political that has come to define modern democratic politics and which ought to guide us in our reflections on the roles of religious reasons in public argument. As an empirical matter, this narrative is one for which other branches of the humanities and social sciences have justifiably shown little patience. Versions of secularization theory that predicted the decline of religious influences on politics are held in increasing disrepute. This development in the sociology of religion has affinities with historical scholarship emphasizing the roles played by religious vocabularies in the development of toleration doctrines, the complex mutual entanglements of dynastic and confessional rivalries, and the roots of modern democratic practices in sources as varied as Roman Catholic conciliarism, Protestant resistance theories, and Puritan ecclesiology.