‘Religious citizens’ in Post-secular democracies

Abstract

For the past two decades, philosophers of religion have paid close attention to the debates on public reason taking place within the context of political philosophy. Some thinkers claim that religious arguments should play a very limited role in political discourse, as this would amount to a politically sanctioned imposition of religious beliefs on people with different religious or non-religious worldviews. Others claim that excluding religious reasons would lead to an unfair exclusion of religious citizens from democratic processes. Underlying these positions is a highly problematic idea of what it means to be a religious citizen. On the one hand, religious citizens are conceptualized as highly self-reflective theologians. Others instead imagine religious citizens to be wholly incapable of such self-reflection and of distinguishing between public and non-public spheres. In my article I attempt to criticize these underlying assumptions and point towards a more nuanced conception of the religious citizen.