Religion & Democracy: Interactions, Tensions, Possibilities

Much of the world is seeing conflict between people whose views per mit basing political actions and lawmaking on religious convictions and people whose democratic values oppose this. Democratic societ ies are in principle open to the free exercise of religion and, in constitution, they are characteristically pluralistic in both culture and religion. Religions are highly variable in their stance toward government, but many of the world’s most popu lous religions, including Christianity and Islam, are commonly taken to embody standards of conduct, such as certain prohibitions, that cannot be endorsed by democratic governments committed to preserving liberty for the religious and the nonreligious alike. The present age is seeing much discussion of just how far re ligious liberty should extend in democratic societies and just what role religion should play in the conduct of citizens. The most prominent range of problems concerning the tensions between re ligion–or certain religions or interpretations thereof–and democracy are insti tutional. They concern the relations that do or should obtain between “church” and state: between religious institutions or organized religious groups and govern ment or its agencies. Institutional matters, however, are not the only ones impor tant for understanding the relation between religion and democracy. Ethics and po litical theory also extend to standards appropriate to the conduct of individual cit izens. Here the ethics of citizenship, as it is now sometimes called, focuses on how individual citizens should understand the role, in civic affairs, of religious convic tions, especially their own convictions about how human life should be lived. This concerns not only deciding what to support by one’s votes and public advocacy, but also how to conduct civic discourse. The essays in this issue of Dædalus–most of them based on contributions to a seminar sponsored by the Australian Catholic University in March of 2019–address both institutional questions concerning re ligion and democracy and the ethics of citizenship as bearing on how individuals, religious or not, may best regard their role in the political system in which they live.