Excerpt from David Novak, In Defense of Religious Liberty (ISI Books, 2009).

Chapter Two: Religious Liberty as a Philosophical Claim

Morality and Religion

In the previous chapter on religious liberty and politics, we saw how the exercise of the right to religious liberty becomes publicly controversial when religious communities choose to make moral claims on the secular body politic. As for the cultic claims of these same communities, however, claims we would call strictly “religious,” such as claims to practice singular forms of worship, these are rarely controversial in a secular society. Instead, the strictly religious controversies involving these cultic matters are almost always confined to the cultural space of the religious community; they can only be made on their own members. Any faithful Jew, Christian, or Muslim can readily attest to the frequency of intrareligious controversies over these internal claims, especially in an age when traditions have had to be defended more frequently by their own adherents even within their own communities. [1] That is why secular courts are loathe to adjudicate intrareligious disputes. Only when certain civil aspects of such disputes are so pronounced that the line between the sacred and the profane is very much elided would a secular judge be civilly irresponsible to recuse himself from a case involving a dispute within a religious community. Nevertheless, as we shall see in a later chapter, secular courts are already intruding in the right of religious communities to make moral claims on their own members. [2]

Religious communities have a much bigger problem in publicly advocating what they take to be universal norms. That is not only their political problem; even more, it is their philosophical problem. Thus, religious people must be prepared to answer this question: How does one advocate a public moral position identifiable with one’s religious tradition in a society that does not look to any religious tradition for the justification of public morality? Surely, the political disestablishment of religion means that civil society may no longer look to any religious community for the authorization or justification of any public policy, let alone for any specific legal warrant.

How one justifies a public stance that is consistent with one’s theology without invoking that theology as its public authorization is a philosophical question. It requires a philosophical answer. Unfortunately, though, when it comes to raising this question, much less answering it cogently, religious communities have not been too articulate, let alone persuasive. And I suspect that their political ineptitude is largely because of their lack of philosophical clarity on this and other public claims of religious liberty they make in public. So let me be so bold as to try to help religious communities make at least a more plausible, if not more compelling, philosophical case for their public moral claims. I do this, of course, with a vested interest in the matter, myself being an active member of one such religious community—a community that could and should be more vociferous in its advocacy of certain public norms, norms that are not simply for the sake of its own particular political interests.

The philosophical problem of religious advocacy in a democracy is based on the following question: Must religious people derive their public morality from their theology? Or, does morality need a religious justification in order to be valid? If the answer is yes, then while the personal motives for what religious people advocate can be based on theology, or anything else for that matter, they cannot expect their fellow citizens to accept moral positions based on these same personal motives. More publicly acceptable reasons are required if there is to be even the possibility of rational assent from persons whose theologies are different, and even more so from those who have no theology at all. Not only may civil society not require commitment to some theology on the part of its citizens, it may not even require any theological commitment at all from them. That is because theologies as we know them conceptualize historical revelations, and in the deepest sense we citizens of a multicultural democracy do not share a common history, a history that is a “history of salvation.” We do not share a sacred history that extends from revelation to redemption, a history that gives us our true place in the order of the universe. That is why as citizens of a multicultural democracy, we are not a chosen people nor should we act as if we were.