Religious Reasons in Public Deliberation

This chapter reviews the history of and analyzes current trends within normative debates about the role of religion in public deliberation. Starting with the idea of an “exclusivist” approach, we look at the status of religious reasons within the frameworks broadly inspired by Rawlsian and Habermasian theories of public reason and deliberation, and recount seven core arguments against excluding religious reasons from public deliberation. The second section reviews approaches which work from similar moral assumptions and principles to those of exclusivism, but take the critiques surrounding the status of religious reasons seriously, leading to the development of a wide variety of models that we refer to broadly as “liberal inclusivist.” In the final section, we treat models which seek to incorporate religious reasons by rejecting the standard assumptions of public reason and communicative action, sometimes in the process, also rethinking the fundamental goals and methods of deliberation as such.