An old and established American bromide proclaims bluntly: Don't bring up religion or politics! Here I am treading where angels shy away, broaching both topics at once in a conversation about religion and public life. 1 Let me remind us at the beginning that the topic is about public life not politics. I think the major renewal of American citizenship will take place in civil society: 1 in its renewal as a free public space for social movements; 2 in vigorous but civil discourse; 3 in debate about policy and issues which will determine the quality of our public life together; and 4 in the generation of voluntary associations seeking not just to further self-interest narrowly construed (as with most PACS and lobby groups) but the kind of broader communitarian sense of a common good which Alexis de Tocqueville evoked in his classic, Democracy in America. 2 That same Tocqueville, we recall, spoke of churches as the first of America's political institutions (note the choice of the adjective, political instead of social), not because churches controlled political parties or the state-they should not, Tocqueville, a supporter of separation of church and state, thought. Rather churches were the first of political institutions because they engendered a mediating network of voluntary societies in the public interest and nurtured solid virtue in citizens, without which any republic would degenerate into a mere tyranny or a majoritarian despotic regime. 3 Civil society is, clearly, the rightful setting for public religion in a society, such as ours, which enshrines separation of church and state in its constitution. I recognize, of course, that there are swirling debates raging in our society, at present, about religion and public life. Harvard political philosopher, John Rawls, for example, in his most recent book, Political Liberalism, would seriously restrict the public role for religion. 4 Rawls fears some new sectarian wars of religion, if religion gets too public. He imagines that America might become another Bosnia. For Rawls, religion can properly flourish as some purely private association of individuals. But, on key public questions, Rawls argues, let our arguments and language and actions always remain secular, neutral to religious and non-religious alike. Rawls finds support for his argument in what many American commentators have referred to as the revved up cultural wars, on issues such as feminism, homosexuality, euthanasia, nuclear weapons, welfare, abortion, which some commentators feel are fed by religion. 5 As if many of these issues were not controversial enough, on their on merits, to swirl up fierce combat, even on secular grounds alone! Robert Audi, the University of Nebraska philosopher, echoes Rawls. 6 For Audi, religious people have to execute a self-imposed gag rule in public. They can not speak religious language in public discourse nor act, as citizens, on their religious motivation. As citizens, Audi argues, a rightful respect for the dignity of the other, especially those who are not believers, means that religious citizens must not act to impose policy or legislation-especially if it has a coercive intent or restricts another's freedoms-unless they act on purely secular motivation and make their case in public in purely secular language. Audi would not even let them, as citizens, vote their religious conscience in the privacy of the voting booth.
Others-I range myself on this side-feel that such gag rules on religious language in public are grossly undemocratic and unjust. They say to religious people: you must give up your deepest selves, motivations and language whenever you enter the common