Religious Traditions and Health Care Policy: Potential for Democratic Discourse?

Abstract

Political participation empowers and transforms citizens. To par ticipate in the public affairs of one's community is to call upon and to develop personal capabilities for speaking, taking responsibility, carry ing through projects, and working with others. To participate is to be an autonomous citizen rather than a subject, an actor rather than a specta tor.1 So say advocates of such participation. Moreover, they argue that deliberation responds to the deepening pluralism and the larger scale of complex, post-industrial democratic polities.2 In such societies, every area of life becomes politicized; that is, the norms recognized legit imate (in family, church, workplace, gender roles, for example) must increasingly be negotiated, rather than taken for granted. As society becomes more differentiated, politics also becomes less state-centered. Therefore, citizens must learn the political skills of negotiation, discus sion, argument, persuasion, mediation, and compromise in order to function in most areas of life. It is possible then to think of democracy as a distribution of empowerments and protections that enable and protect discursive negotiations of conflicts within and between institu