Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. . . . Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.”
“This sort of translation, however, is no easy feat. If one maintains that his religion is universal, he may not see how his values are to be regarded as merely ‘religion-specific.’ How do you translate into secular terms religious truths that are not accessible to unassisted or unreformed human reason? If faith has the transformative effect that Obama and others claim that it does, wouldn’t some reasons be opaque to those whose hearts have not yet been turned? Who determines the ‘common reality’ that we all share? Indeed, the very notion of a ‘religiously neutral’ common reality is subject to serious contention.”
