{"id":1144,"date":"2005-02-07T20:11:43","date_gmt":"2005-02-08T00:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2005\/02\/07\/soul-of-the-secular-state\/"},"modified":"2005-02-07T20:11:43","modified_gmt":"2005-02-08T00:11:43","slug":"soul-of-the-secular-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2005\/02\/07\/soul-of-the-secular-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Soul of the secular state"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday’s NYT has a review<\/a> of Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics<\/a>.  Short.<\/p>\n

But Ryan Lizza, of The New Republic<\/a>, points out the following:<\/p>\n

And to liberals wary of any prescription that includes more religion in
\npolitics, and to those worried that his evangelical Christianity is not
\necumenical, Wallis makes an important point rarely heard on the
\nreligious right. ”We bring faith into the public square when our moral
\nconvictions demand it,” he writes. ”But to influence a democratic
\nsociety, you must win the public debate about why the policies you
\nadvocate are better for the common good. That’s the democratic
\ndiscipline religion has to be under when it brings its faith to the
\npublic square.” It is a reminder that Martin Luther King may have had
\na Bible in one hand, but he had the Constitution in the other.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Winning the public debate by appealing to and persuading via the public
\ngood.  This is the essence of liberalism and the tolerant
\nsecularism that it demands.  Funny that it takes an evangelical
\npreacher, arguing for the re-emergence of a religious progressivism in
\nour contemporary politics, to remind us  what the soul of the
\nsecular compromise is.  What the religious and the “secular”
\n(let’s call them the non-religious) have both forgotten is that
\nsecularism
\ndemands that we make arguments about how to live our common life on the
\nbasis of appeals accessible in common.  <\/p>\n

Religion cannot make an appeal to the common, except perhaps in a
\ntheocracy.  So it cannot be the basis for an argument as to why we
\nshould or should not pursue a policy.<\/p>\n

Similarly, secularism does not require that we never make mention of
\nfactors and forces like religion in public.  In fact, it’s
\nperfectly acceptable to do so.  It might even be desireable to
\nunderstand the motivations that religion provides.  But secularism
\ncannot require the shut-down of all talk of religion, for that’s a
\nsimilar problem.  Areligiosity cannot make an appeal to the common
\neither.<\/p>\n

The original toleration thinkers (I especially mean Locke and Mill)
\nthought that Reason would provide the basis by which people of varying
\nviewpoints and beliefs could talk together in public.  I’m not so
\nsure that such would work today (as there are plenty of signs that
\nreason does not dominate our ways of thinking in public), but there has
\nto be a middle ground, wherein we can acknowledge differences in
\nbeliefs without allowing them to be publicly determinative personally
\nor politically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s NYT has a review of Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics.  Short. But Ryan Lizza, of The New Republic, points out the following: And to liberals wary of any prescription that includes more religion in politics, and to those worried that his evangelical Christianity is not ecumenical, Wallis makes an important point rarely heard on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-is","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}