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Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square (review)

In a 2006 address entitled “Call to Renewal,” then-senator Barack Obama called for a “serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.” Written from outside the discipline of rhetoric, J. Caleb Clanton’s Religion and Democratic Citizenship provides a fascinating window on that debate as it has unfolded among political philosophers. His book critiques two dominant proposals for “how religion should factor into the American public square” (9)—the reconstructionist and the separatist proposals—and offers what he calls “an open model of the democratic public square designed to accommodate as many democratically predisposed citizens as possible, religious or not” (10). Clanton begins by highlighting the tension between two dominant urges within U.S. political life: democracy and liberalism. Democracy holds that “citizens should be free to voice their concerns, beliefs, and preferences, as they understand them in the public sphere” (1). Liberalism prevents the tyranny of the majority by requiring that governmental action be justifi ed only on grounds that can be reasonably accepted by all of its citizens. That constraining impulse, however, poses a dilemma for people of faith. Can justifi cations rooted in religious convictions not shared by the entire citizenry ever play a legitimate role in public deliberation? In chapters 2 and 3, he examines the reconstructionist answer to that dilemma, embodied in the writings of Richard Rorty and Cornel West and rooted in the pragmatism of William James, which resolves the confl ict by “semantically recasting religion such that it meets the epistemic demands of the community” (15). For James, that meant reducing religious faith to its practical usefulness—to the “melioristic hope” that motivated its adherents to act for the good of themselves and others. (As Clanton rightly notes, of course, robbed of