Dennis Mueller's book is organized around two questions: what should be the place of religion in a (liberal) democracy and what should be the liberal democratic approach to citizenship? As the discussion below will show, this reviewer disagrees with many of Mueller's answers. But she also recognizes the importance, indeed the urgency, of his questions at a moment when democracies everywhere struggle to address the challenges of pluralism shaped by immigration and strong public religions. Mueller counters the assumptions that democratic societies ought to be defined by universal suffrage and be open to immigrants. He suggests instead that democracies are more successful if they are more homogenous and more selective in how they define voting rights. The Athenian democracy is a case in point: founded in the ideal of virtuous citizenship, it showed that the central features of a good government were the citizens who possessed knowledge, mental capacity, and the will to be active in public affairs. Similar principles shaped the successes of the West European city-states or the Dutch Republic. If one takes universal suffrage as central for defining what democracy is, Mueller maintains, neither the eighteenth-century United States nor the early twentieth-century Great Britain would be included. What is more, allowing everyone to participate in the political process can be counterproductive for democratic life: the expansion of franchise in the nineteenth-century Europe might have not caused World Wars I and II, but it opened the door for the victories of Populist parties. Hence, Mueller argues, aside from effective political institutions, constitutional rights, and impartial judiciary, what democracy needs the most is knowledgeable, informed, interested, and active citizenry. And, what it does not need are strong religions. This last point gestures toward the second major theme of Mueller's book: religions are linked to traditionalism, conservatism, and pessimism about the potential of human beings and, as such, opposed to the Enlightenment, progress, and modernity, and antithetical to (liberal) democracies. While Mueller's approach is utilitarian—he defines as successful those democracies able to satisfy citizens’ preferences—it is hardly value free.