CHURCH UNDER LEVIATHAN

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non‐democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism.     

Public discourse and the myth of religious speech

Critics of public religious speech have proposed various strategies for limiting the presence of religion in the public square, while proponents of public religious speech argue that such limitations constitute an infringement of the freedom of speech. For theoretical, practical, and ethical reasons, I argue for dismissing the category of ‘religious speech’, which rests on the erroneous assumption of a clear distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. ‘Religious speech’ should be regarded no differently from any other kind of speech; it therefore ought not to be subject to either special limitations or protections. Regarding religious speech as nothing other than free speech ensures the right of religious citizens publicly to express their views, while simultaneously preserving the right of other citizens to provide a critique to arguments that are framed in religious terms.     

POLITICAL LIBERALISM WITHOUT SCEPTICISM

Political liberalism famously requires that fundamental political matters should not be decided by reference to any controversial moral, religious or philosophical doctrines over which reasonable people disagree. This means we, as citizens, must abstain from relying on what we believe to be the whole truth when debating or voting on fundamental political matters. Many critics of political liberalism contend that this requirement to abstain from relying on our views about the good life commits political liberalism to a kind of scepticism: we should abstain from relying on our views about the good life because we should be uncertain about the truth of those views. But this kind of scepticism is itself a controversial epistemic position which many reasonable people reject, thus apparently making political liberalism internally incoherent. This is the sceptical critique of political liberalism. This paper shows the sceptical critique to be false. The paper argues that the epistemic restraint required of citizens in political liberalism does not assume or imply any version of scepticism about our ability to know the good life. Liberal neutrality is motivated not by scepticism about our own views, but rather by a desire to justify fundamental political principles to others. ¹ 1 I would like to thank Rebecca Stone, Steve De Wijze, and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The paper was completed while I was a visiting Faculty Fellow at The Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics & Public Affairs at Tulane University, and I gratefully acknowledge the Murphy Institute's support, as well as the generous support of Washington & Lee University, which housed the Center after hurricane Katrina.
     

Social,Political, and Institutional Constraints on Religious Pluralism in Central Asia

During the second half of the 1990s, many of the post-Soviet states, after a brief flirtation with a religious free market, began to approve laws that curtailed some of the freedoms acquired in the first flush of independence. The paper examines the ways in which the five Central Asian States have handled the issue of religious freedom. Although many of the initial demands for restrictions on religious pluralism came from leaders of 'traditional' religions, these arguments have been reinforced by other arguments. On the one hand, the urge to control religious diversity is a product of an old Soviet mentality, but it also reflects wider religious and political concerns. These encompass public anxieties about the activities of poorly understood religious movements, political manipulation of religious 'threats' to justify authoritarianism, and nationalist concerns about religious diversity as a threat to social stability and the nation-building process. This paper explores the growing pressures on religious pluralism in Central Asia (with special reference to the experience of Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) focusing on the social, political, and institutional constraints that appear to be driving the revitalisation of state control over religious life.     

GOD, WAR, AND CONSCIENCE

Many military officers believe that they morally ought to obey legal orders to fight even in unjust wars: they have a moral obligation to exercise indiscriminate obedience to legal orders to fight. I argue that officers should not be required to exercise indiscriminate obedience: certain theistic commitments to which many citizens and officers adhere prohibit indiscriminate obedience to legal orders to fight. This theistic argument constitutes adequate reason not to require officers to exercise indiscriminate obedience. However, this raises a further question: namely, whether it is appropriate to rely on such a theistic argument when shaping the moral requirements of military officership. I argue that citizens and officers have good reason to make public decisions solely on religious grounds and so are free to follow my theistic argument when shaping the requirements of military officership.     

Governing sporting brains: concussion,neuroscience, and the biopolitical regulation of sport

Abstract

Drawing on the recent concussion litigation from the United States’ National Football League (NFL), the paper examines the emergence of neuroscience knowledge as part of a defining rationale for the justification and rationalization of the lawsuit. The paper argues that neuroscience knowledge is best understood as a regulatory discourse that is attached to larger social, political, and economic realities that bring it into being as a legitimate type of knowledge. This larger socio-political governance logic is one that scholars call ‘biopolitical’ which emphasizes the protection of individual life over and above other ways of being. Risk discourses that frame risk-taking practices as immoral thus emerge within this biopolitical regime of governance that frame morality in terms of public health that individual citizens ought to pursue. With this in mind neuroscience knowledge plays an important role in concussion litigation. It emerges as a technology of biopolitical governance in that it is used to justify legal decisions on concussion. This is despite the fact that neuroscience knowledge remains nascent and even scientifically uncertain. Because of this, the paper argues that scholars ought to not only consider neuroscience research skeptically, but also ought to be aware of the dangers of neuroscience’s emergence as an ‘anticipatory discourse’ that has the potential to reduce human behavior to matters of the brain that thus transforms our very ontology of ourselves and the practices we perceive as ‘good’.     

On Equal Citizenship and Public Reason: Reply to Critics

In writing Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, we aimed to show that political liberalism is a feminist liberalism. To that end, we develop and defend a particular understanding of the commitments of political liberalism. Then, we argue that certain laws and policies are needed to protect and secure the interests of persons as free and equal citizens. We focus on the laws and policies that we think are necessary for gender justice. In particular, we apply our view to the contexts of prostitution law, family and marriage law, state support for caregivers, and religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. In this article, we consider some of the challenges made by the thoughtful critics who are part of this symposium. In particular, we address: why the collective enterprise view of liberal democracy requires shared reasons for the justification of certain laws and policies; how we understand substantive equality and why our understanding of substantive equality does not commit us to a comprehensive doctrine; how we avoid defending a particular political conception of justice in showing that political liberalism is a feminist liberalism; and how it is that, given justice pluralism, public reasons can provide stability for the right reasons.     

THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY: ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING

Stanley Hauerwas and Gavin D'Costa develop theological arguments for inclusion of constructive theology in Universities' curricula; Andrew Shanks offers an equivalent. They share the conviction that the practice of theology cannot be separated from religious practices. Beyond that, however, their arguments scarcely intersect, in part because of differing analyses of the "secularity" that underwrites the academy's skepticism of theology as a "discipline." Hauerwas analyses secularity theologically; Shanks urges that even secular societies exhibit "will to Honesty" (think, perhaps, "ultimate concern") that is inherently religious and theological; D'Costa argues that central to secular liberalism is a commitment to genuine pluralism that ought to foster theologies in their particularities.     

Governing Through the Dao: A Non-Anarchistic Interpretation of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Laozi</Emphasis>

Within the literature, Daoist political philosophy has often been linked with anarchism. While some extended arguments have been offered in favor of this conclusion, I take this position to be tenuous and predicated on an assumption that coercive authority cannot be applied through wuwei. Focusing on the Laozi as the fundamental political text of classical Daoism, I lay out a general account of why one ought to be skeptical of classifying it as anarchistic. Keeping this skepticism in mind and recognizing the importance of wuwei in arguments for the anarchist conclusion, I provide a non-anarchistic interpretation of wuwei as a political technique that is consistent with the text of the Laozi. Having presented a plausible alternative to the anarchist understanding of wuwei, I close my discussion with a brief sketch of a positive account of the political theory of the Laozi.     

Defending a Law of Peoples: Political Liberalism and Decent Peoples

In this paper I reconstruct and defend John Rawls' The Law of Peoples, including the distinction between liberal and decent peoples. A “decent people” is defined as a people who possesses a comprehensive doctrine and uses that doctrine as the ground of political legitimacy, while liberal peoples do not possess a comprehensive doctrine. I argue that liberal and decent peoples are bound by the same normative requirements with the qualification that decent peoples accept the same normative demands when they are reasonably interpreted and from their comprehensive doctrine, not from political liberalism. Normative standards for peoples appear in a law of peoples in two places: as internal constraints carried forward from political liberalism which regulate domestic affairs and as principles derived from a second original position that provide the normative ground for a society of peoples. This first source of normative standards was unfortunately obscured in Rawls' account. I use this model to defeat the claim that Rawls has accommodated decent peoples without sufficient warrant and to argue that all reasonable citizens of both liberal and decent peoples would accept the political authority of the state as legitimate. Although my reconstruction differs from Rawls on key points, such as modifying the idea of decency and rejecting a place for decent peoples within a second original position, overall I defend the theoretical completeness of political liberalism and show how a law of peoples provides reasonable principles of international justice. This paper explores theoretical ideas I introduced in embryonic form in a paper presented at the International Conference on Human Rights: Theoretical Foundations of Human Rights, 17–18 May, 2003, Mofid University (Qom, Iran). That paper, “Political Liberalism and Religious Freedom: Asymmetrical Tolerance for Minority Comprehensive Doctrines” (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the conference), addressed specific issues related to religious toleration, but left unexplored theoretical questions regarding the status of decent peoples. I wish to thank participants in the conference for their helpful feedback on my interpretation of Rawls' international political theory, especially Jack Donnelly, Michael Freeman, Stephen Macedo, Samuel Fleishacker, Omar Dahbour, Yasien Ali Mohamed, and Saladin Meckled-Garcia. In addition, I wish to offer my sincere appreciation to the Executive Committee of the Conference and especially to Sayyed Masoud Moosavi Karimi, Nasser Elahi, and Mohammad Habibi Modjandeh.     

Public Reason, Religious Restraint and Respect

In recent years liberals have had much to say about the kinds of reasons that citizens should offer one another when they engage in public political debates about existing or proposed laws. One of the more notable claims that has been made by a number of prominent liberals is that citizens should not rely on religious reasons alone when persuading one another to support or oppose a given law or policy. Unsurprisingly, this claim is rejected by many religious citizens, including those who are also committed to liberalism. In this paper I revisit that debate and ask whether liberal citizens have a moral obligation not to explain their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons alone. I suggest that for most (ordinary) citizens no such obligation exists and that individuals are entitled to explain their support for a specific law and to persuade others of the merits of that law on the basis of religious reasons alone (though there may be sound prudential reasons for not doing so). My argument is grounded in the claim that in most instances advocating laws on the basis of religious reasons alone is consistent with treating citizens with equal respect. However, I acknowledge an exception to that claim is to be found when using religious reasons to justify a law also implies that the state endorses those reasons. For this reason I argue that there is a moral obligation for some (publicly influential) citizens, and especially those who hold public office, to refrain from explaining their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons. I conclude by suggesting that this understanding of the role of religion in public political discourse and the obligations of liberal citizens is a better reflection of our experience of liberal citizenship than that given in some well-known accounts of liberalism.     

The Religious Dynamics of Decision Making on Gay Rights Issues in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1993–2002

In recent decades, homosexuality has emerged as a truly national political issue. As a result, the U.S. Congress is increasingly called upon to consider and set policy on an array of issues related to the status of gay men and lesbians. This article investigates legislator decision making pertaining to gay issues in the U.S. House of Representatives. Specifically, we examine the effect of several indicators on legislator support for progressive gay policies, including ideology, partisanship, and the characteristics of district religious affiliation. We use additive indices of legislator support for progressive gay policies, and use logit and ordered logit to derive estimates of influence. The findings indicate that even while legislator partisanship and ideology largely structure decision making, legislators are also highly responsive to the presence of conservative Protestants and (to a lesser extent) Roman Catholics in their constituency .     

Religion and Charitable Financial Giving to Religious and Secular Causes: Does Political Ideology Matter?

Previous research on charitable giving has identified a significant relationship between political conservatism and greater financial giving to charitable causes. Yet that research has not adequately explored the important role of religion in that relationship, nor differences in financial giving targets (i.e., religious congregations, noncongregational religious organizations, and nonreligious organizations). Support for competing theories concerning political ideology, religious practice, and charitable financial giving is assessed using data from the Panel Study on American Ethnicity and Religion (PS‐ARE). For both religious and nonreligious giving, the effect of political ideology is completely mediated by participation in religious and civic practices. These findings support recent arguments on “practice theory” in cultural sociology and suggest that it is less the effect of ideology than of active participation in religious, political, and community organizations that explains Americans’ financial giving to religious and nonreligious organizations.     

English,Christian or Muslim Law: Deconstructing Some Myths

Archbishop Rowan Williams's 2008 lecture, “Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective,” has become an historic reference point for discussions about relationships between Islam, religious law and English law. One of the Archbishop's heart-felt pleas was for “deconstruction” of myths about both Islam and the Enlightenment. Continued stereotypes perpetuated by the “Trojan Horse” debate over Birmingham schools and the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo event suggest the plea went unheard. This article aims to address factors that prevent objective assessment of the relationship between English law, religious laws, Islam and other faiths. It is hoped that this will help the deconstruction of myths by examining what the law says, the claims religious communities make and whether further change is needed. The relationship of religious laws, norms and courts to secular legal systems is a pertinent topic for Christian–Muslim dialogue to which it is hoped that this article might contribute. Amongst issues considered are the scope for more formal recognition or monitoring of religious laws that have an impact on the lives of some UK citizens, and arguments for recognition on the basis that a democracy should reflect all parties to its citizenship and protection of the most vulnerable. As calls for further recognition of religious laws arise, the deconstruction of myths can only smooth the way for their objective assessment.     

Political Liberalism and Male Supremacy

In Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, Watson and Hartley dispute the claim that Rawls’s doctrine of political liberalism must tolerate gender hierarchy because it counts conservative and orthodox religions as reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I argue that their defense in fact contains two arguments, both of which fail. The first, which I call the ‘Deliberative Equality Argument’, fails because it does not establish conclusively that political liberalism’s demand for equal citizenship forbids social practices of domination, as the authors contend. The second, which I call the ‘Equal Liberties Argument’, fails because it supports a particular version of political liberalism and not the doctrine itself.     

Fake religions,politics and ironic fandom: the Church of the SubGenius,Zontar and American televangelism

This paper challenges recent arguments that the Church of the SubGenius (COSG) is a ‘real’ religious organization, in that it purportedly provides a path to spiritual enlightenment. Besides downplaying the COSG’s comedic aspects, these essentialist approaches have largely ignored its historical development within the American ‘alternative’ underground of the 1980s and early-1990s. Drawing on interviews and the analysis of participatory media, this paper examines the COSG alongside Zontar, a stridently political zine named in honour of a B-movie monster that its founders claimed to worship. It is demonstrated that these interrelated, intentionally ‘fake’ religions emerged in the context of a turbulent American culture war, and confronted a conservative evangelicalism perceived to be a political threat. While the founders of the COSG and Zontar accordingly attacked and satirised politically engaged television preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, their approaches to certain less explicitly political televangelists can be considered examples of ironic fandom, shot through with flashes of genuine admiration. In all of these activities, the founders of these fake faiths participated in a cultural discussion about authentic Christianity in America – playful religious work more indicative of the COSG’s cultural significance than its alleged status as an ‘authentic’ religion.     

Self‐legislation,Respect and the Reconciliation of Minority Claims

It is a widely supported claim that liberal democratic institutions should treat citizens with equal respect. I neither dispute nor champion this claim, but investigate how it could be fulfilled. I do this by asking, as a sort of litmus test, how liberal democratic institutions should treat with respect citizens holding minority convictions, and thereby dissenting from a deliberative output. The first step of my argument consists in clarifying the sense in which liberal democracies have a primary concern for the respectful treatment of citizens qua self‐legislating persons. Taking the second step, I address critically the common tendency in the literature to concentrate on what I have termed the ex ante legem phase, focusing solely on the structure of institutionalized decision‐making processes. I submit, rather, that the principle of equal respect for persons demands more of liberal democratic institutions to enhance citizens' chances to give voice to their consciences and influence, on that ground, the formulation of the rules to which they should conform. Fulfilling this commitment requires democratic theorizing to go beyond the ex ante legem phase and regard forms of ex post legem contestation as an extension of citizens' right to political participation. Against this backdrop, I take the third and last step and argue that a promising way forward consists in the adoption of an ex post legem version of conscientious exemptionism, granting citizens a conditional moral right to request exemptions on the grounds of conscience from certain controversial legal and political provisions.     

Rawlsian Civic Education: Political not Minimal

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal.     

Salvaging and secularizing the semantic contents of religion: the limitations of Habermas’s postmetaphysical proposal

The article considers Jürgen Habermas’s views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas’s shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: (a) the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and (b) the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to (a), it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to (b), it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful.     

A critical appraisal of heterosexism in Zambia

On 24 February 2012, then United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Zambia for three days. His call to respect human rights and give protection to all people regardless of sexual orientation was received mostly with hostility by the Zambian public. The media was inundated with opposing press statements from both government and civil society persons and entities. Politicians, church leaders, and the public widely condemned Ban's advocacy for “gay rights”. Although the debate on homosexuality is not new in Zambia, there is a dearth of research on the subject. This paper seeks, modestly, to re-examine popular rationale for heterosexism to contribute to the resolution of one of the perennial problems colouring African political, social, and cultural discourse. By deconstructing the popular views and systematising the debate, the paper aims at providing a baseline and guideline for addressing the problem of heterosexism in Zambia. Without suggesting that Africa is homogenous, what happened in Zambia following Ban's visit could have predictably happened in many African countries, notably Uganda and Nigeria. This paper, however, uses Zambia as a point of reference. The paper relies on views indicating negative attitudes and beliefs that legislators, and policy makers, church leaders and ordinary citizens have toward homosexuality. These positions have been thematised into six major grounds for the sexual prejudices against homosexuality. These are subjected to logical and epistemic scrutiny. Ultimately, the arguments in support of heterosexism are shown to be untenable.