Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part VI

In my last posts, beginning Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part I, I set out the doctrine of religious restraint and critiqued some of the key arguments in support of it. I looked at the objection that the argument from respect is too thin, that applied consistently it excludes too much and Audi’s response to this. I examined and critiqued Gerald Gaus’ attempt to salvage the argument from epistemic inaccessibility and his idea of open justification. In this post I will look at the dangers of religion as a justification for its asymmetrical treatment within the DRR and conclude the series.

B The Dangers of Religion

One explanation as to why this asymmetry is applied to religious reasons is offered by Quinn; “Some people fear that religious argument is apt to be dangerously divisive.”[82] Audi concurs, “[religious reasons] are special in relation to liberal democracy even by contrast with [secular reasons] … that are not accessible to any normal adult.” [83] He gives five “salient points” to support his case, all based on the idea that religious reasons are dangerous to society. [84]

First Audi claims that religious reasons are often “directly or indirectly taken to represent an infallible authority”.[85] The second point is that religious people often “believe that anyone who does not identify with [the ultimate divine source] is forsaken, damned, or in some other way fundamentally deficient.”[86] Third, “religious reasons often dictate practices that are distinctively religious in content (such as prayer) or intent (such as preserving the fetus on the ground that it is a gift from God)”.[87] Fourth, with many religious leaders, especially leaders of cults, there is a risk that they are “cloaking their prejudices with absolute authority.”[88] Finally, Audi contends that religious people tend to be “highly and stubbornly passionate about the importance of everyone’s acting in accordance with religious reasons”.[89]

Again these features are not unique to religion. As McGrew argues, all these features can be equally present in secular people and movements;[90]

It is sadly amusing to read this list and to consider how well its negative aspects apply to secular people and movements. Communism, for example, is as fanatical as any conventional religion and demands group-think on an unrivaled scale. Contemporary feminism aspires to control worldview, language, and behavior. The New Atheists are exceedingly passionate about making people behave in accordance with their own beliefs (making sure children are taught Darwinism as unquestioned fact, for example), and Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers have an inflated sense of self-importance that would make many a Christian megachurch pastor look modest by comparison. Dawkins is infamous for having repeatedly and insistently called a religious upbringing “child abuse,” and while Dawkins has shied away from the obvious legal implications of this accusation, not everyone who thinks as he does is so cautious. Other secularists, self-styled “comprehensive liberals,” have expressly advocated the use of the power of the state to monitor and limit parents’ ability to transmit their religion to their children (see Hitchcock, 2004). As for the vicious condemnation of children who do not fully conform to their parents’ secular ideology, a good example of this phenomenon is the strange story of Rebecca Walker, daughter of feminist icon Alice Walker. And, on the other hand, there are plenty of religious people who do not display such negative characteristics. It simply does not appear to be true that we reduce fanaticism, self-important leadership, attempts at thought control, and the like in society by reducing the role of religion in public life.

McGrew suggests there are secular analogues of even Audi’s third reason, that religious reasons often dictate practices that are distinctively religious in content or intent;[91]

It would certainly be undesirable if people were being coerced to pray to any God, even the true God. But then, secular ideology can and sometimes does demand that we do homage to itself—in the form of changing our language to make it politically correct, for example, or treating two men or two women as “married” in all of our business activities. The problem with forcing people to pray to the true God is that the true God is not truly worshiped in that fashion. The problem with forcing people to pray to false gods and to pledge allegiance to false ideologies is that they are false. You will not avoid the problem of the coercion of conscience by limiting the role of religion in public life. You will only shift that problem so that the unreasonable coercion comes from some quarters rather than others.

Audi’s first point invites a parallel rejoinder. He defines infallible propositions as those that are “impossible that they be both endorsed or accepted by God and false”.[92] On this definition of infallibility every proposition is infallible. God, as Audi understands him, is omniscient. God only believes true propositions. It follows then that any proposition God accepts cannot be false; this is true whether it is a religious proposition or a secular one.

Audi’s main concern is that a person who believes an action is commanded by God believes that an omniscient, infallible being has endorsed that action. Appeals to purported divine commands are therefore problematic. However, some secular ethical theories face precisely the same problem. One of the most influential secular theories, endorsed by ethicists as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Sidgwick, Richard Hare, Roderick Firth, John Stuart Mill, Tom Regan, Richard Brandt, Immanuel Kant and others, is the ideal observer theory. On this theory an action is wrong, if and only if, it would be proscribed by an ideal observer, by a person who is perfectly impartial and perfectly informed on all the relevant facts. A hypothetical ideal observer is no less infallible than religious believers take God to be. It is hard to see how invoking religious reasons is not acceptable but invoking the secular reasons is.[93]

C Argument from Religious Wars
A more forcible danger of religion argument invokes the spectre of religious wars. Audi states “if religious considerations are not appropriately balanced with secular ones in matters of coercion, there is a special problem: a clash of Gods vying for social control. Such uncompromising absolutes easily lead to destruction and death”[94] Wolterstorff articulates the concern;[95]

One reason which liberals have offered ever since the emergence of liberalism in the seventeenth century is that it’s just too dangerous to let religious people debate political issues outside of their own confessional circles, and to act politically, on the basis of their religious views. The only way to forestall religious wars is to get people to stop invoking God and to stop invoking canonical scriptures when arguing and determining politics.

The adequacy of this argument can be contested on several grounds. First, Quinn, Greenwald and Wolterstorff note that while it was true of 17^th century England, “social peace did depend on getting citizens to stop invoking God, canonical scriptures, and religious authorities when discussing politics in public”,[96] it is not plausible that such a danger exists in 21^st century Western countries like New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Quinn notes, “current political debate in the United States exhibits failure to comply with Audi’s principles on a massive scale and yet shows no tendency to reignite the Wars of Religion of the early modern era.”[97]

Wolterstorff makes two other related points. He notes that “the slaughter, torture, and generalised brutality of our century has mainly been conducted in the name of one or another secular cause–nationalism of many sorts, communism, fascism, patriotisms of various kinds, economic hegemony.”[98] Second, he notes that “many of the social movements in the modern world that have moved societies in the direction of liberal democracy have been deeply and explicitly religious in their orientation”[99] He cites the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement and movements resisting communism, facism and apartheid as examples. The invocation of religious reasons risks war and civil strife when certain types of religious reasons are invoked in particular socio-political contexts. This is equally true of secular reasons; certain types of secular reasons can be dangerously incendiary in particular socio-political contexts. There seems no basis for an asymmetry between secular and religious reasons on these grounds.

Eberle and Cuneo add that 17^th century “confessional conflict … [was] typically rooted in egregious violations of the right to religious freedom, when, for example, people are jailed, tortured, or otherwise abused because of their religious commitments.”[100] Given that few, if any, who appeal to religious reasons advocate such violations or could plausibly bring them about, such appeals are unlikely to have tumultuous effects.

In terms of protecting freedom of religion from these kinds of abuses it is not obvious that secular reasons fare any better, “secularists have a long history of hostility to the right to religious freedom and, presumably, that hostility isn’t at all grounded in religious considerations”.[101] Moreover when[102]

religious believers have employed coercive power to violate the right to religious freedom, they themselves rarely have done so in a way that violates the DRR … when such rights have been violated, the justifications offered, even by religious believers, appeal to alleged requirements for social order, such as the need for uniformity of belief on basic normative issues. One theological apologist for religious repression, for example, writes this: ‘The king punishes heretics as enemies, as extremely wicked rebels, who endanger the peace of the kingdom, which cannot be maintained without the unity of the faith. That is why they are burnt in Spain’.

Similarly, Aquinas, in a Rawlsian vein, famously justified the suppression of heretics by appealing to the accepted political culture of his day which required that counterfeiters be executed.

Consequently, the religious wars of the 17^th century were caused, not by the appeal to religious reasons per se but rather by the violation of religious freedom; this violation has often been defended on secular grounds. It is unlikely that the DRR provides a bulwark against such abuses.

III Conclusion

On examining the DRR it appears that there is no good reason for singling out religious reasons for a particular restraint and limiting discourse to secular reasons. The grounds offered for doing so, the golden rule, the epistemic accessibility of religious premises, the dangers of religion and the potential for religious wars all apply with equal force to secular beliefs. Hence, the restriction appears arbitrary. Moreover, as applied, the DRR is often incoherent and if applied consistently would render most substantive coercive laws unjustified. The current practice of equating secularism with neutrality is flawed.

As Carter eloquently puts it,[103]

What is needed is not a requirement that the religiously devout choose a form of dialogue that liberalism accepts, but that liberalism develop a politics that accepts whatever form of dialogue a member of the public offers. Epistemic diversity, like diversity of other kinds, should be cherished, not ignored, and certainly not abolished. What is needed, then, is a willingness to listen, not because the speaker has the right voice but because the speaker has the right to speak. Moreover, the willingness to listen must hold out the possibility that the speaker is saying something worth listening to; to do less is to trivialize the forces that shape the moral convictions of tens of millions of Americans.

This series was written as a supervised research paper in pursuit of my LLB.

[82] Phillip Quinn “Political Liberalisms and Their Exclusions of the Religious” (1995) 69:2 Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 35, 143.
[83] Robert Audi “Liberal Democracy and the Place of Religion in Politics” in Nicholas Wolterstorff & Robert Audi (eds) Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, Lanham Md, 1997) 1-66, 31.
[84] Ibid 31-32.
[85] Ibid 31.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Ibid 31-32.
[89] Ibid 32.
[90] Lydia McGrew “The Irrational Faith of the Naked Public Square” (2008) 1 The Christendom Review (at 2 October 2009).
[91] Ibid.
[92] Audi, above n83, 63.
[93] I am grateful to Matthew Flannagan for the development of this point.
[94] Robert Audi Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2000) 103.
[95] Nicholas Wolterstorff “Why we should Reject what Liberalism tells us About Speaking and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons” in Paul Weithman (ed) Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN, 1997) 167.
[96] Nicholas Wolterstorff “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues” in Nicholas Wolterstorff & Robert Audi (eds) Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, Lanham Md, 1997) 67-120, 79.
[97] Quinn, above n82, 39.
[98] Wolterstorff, above n96, 80.
[99] Christopher J. Eberle and Terence Cuneo “Religion and Political Theory” (2008) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (at 9 August 2009).
[100] Ibid.
[101] Ibid.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Stephen Carter The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialise Religious Devotion (Basic Books, New York, 1993) 230.