CAN THERE BE GENUINE DIALOGUE BETWEEN RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY?
Keywords:
Christianity, Democracy, Dialogue, Religion, ValuesAbstract
The aim of this paper is to provide clarity on some of the relations between religion and democracy, in order to address the more general issue of dialogue between the two. After a brief discussion of some of the values characteristic of democracy and religion, I consider the place of religion within the traditions that have given rise to the contemporary understanding of democracy. Next, I briefly consider to what extent democratic values and institutions exist within, or are compatible with some of the major religious traditions. This will allow the reader to see better what is involved in the issue of dialogue between religion and democracy.
References
Abdolkarim Soroush’s Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Larry Diamond, Marc F. Platter and Philip J. Costopoulos, eds., World Religions and Democracy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Graham Maddox, Religion and the Rise of Democracy, London: Routledge, 1996.
John De Gruchy, Christianity and Democracy, Cambridge: CUP, 1995.
Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. S. Shute and S. Hurley, New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Paul Groarke, “Law and Freedom of Religion,” in Freedom of Religion, ed. W. Sweet, Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2010.
Fred D. Miller Jr., “Aristotle and the Origins of Natural Rights,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 49 (1996); cf. Politics, Bk 6, Ch. 2.
Chad C. Pecknold, “Augustine’s Readable City: Beyond the Politics of Empire,” The Journal of Scriptural Reading, 6 (2006).
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The Politics of Hope: an interview with Jean Bethke Elshtain,” The Civic Arts Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer-Fall 1997).
Aquinas’s Commentary on the Politics, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, tr. Ernest L. Fortin and Peter D. O’Neill, eds. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963.
Aquinas, On the Governance of Rulers (De regimine principum), tr. Gerald B. Phelan, Toronto: St. Michael’s College, 1935.
Christopher Gray, “Democracy in Thomas Aquinas,” in Before and After Democracy: Philosophy, Religion, and Politics, ed. William Sweet, Leuven: Peeters, 2018.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960, Vol 2, 20.9.
W. Stanford Reid, “John Calvin: One of the Fathers of Modern Democracy,” Christian History, Vol. 12 (1986).
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689).
Kim Parker, The Biblical Politics of John Locke, Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004 and “Unalienable Rights, the Creator, and the Genesis of John Locke’s Liberalism,” in Before and After Democracy, ed. Sweet.
Marcello Pera, “Kant on Politics, Religion, and Secularism,” in Universal Rights in a World of Diversity. The Case of Religious Freedom, Pontifical Academy of Social Science, Acta 17 (2012) <http://www.pass.va/content/dam/scienzesociali/pdf/acta17/acta17pera.pdf> (6 March 2017).
Joe Knippenberg, “Liberalism and Religion: The Case of Kant,” in Before and After Democracy, ed. Sweet.
Hegel’s views are most extensively detailed in The Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942. But note, also, his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837). A recent discussion is Karla M. O’Regan and Joseph Masciulli, “Hegel’s Hierarchical Political-Ethical Communitarianism,” in Before and After Democracy, ed. Sweet.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, in Hegel: Selections, ed. Jacob Loewenberg, New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1929, 388-89.
Rawls, Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971; also Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
See here, John Rawls and Bernard G. Prusak, “Politics, Religion & the Public Good: An interview with Philosopher John Rawls,” Commonweal, 9/25/1998.
Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, 159.
Maritain, Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle, New York : Editions de la Maison Française, 1942, 84.
Maritain, Man and the State, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 127.
“Freedom of Religion: From Toleration to Human Right,” in Freedom of Religion, ed. W. Sweet. Bangalore: Dharmaram Publications, 2010.
Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, trans. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Sources of Indian Traditions: Modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, 3rd ed., Rachel Fell McDermott, et alii, eds., New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 532.
Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Buddhism and the Idea of Human Rights: Resonances and Dissonances,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 26, (2006): 33-49.
Damien Keown, “Are there “Human Rights” in Buddhism?,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 2 (1995): 3-27, 2.
Lhamo Dondrub [XIV Dalai Lama], “Buddhism, Asian Values, and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1999).
Mettanando Bhikkhu, “Buddhism and Democracy: A Theravada Buddhist Approach,” in Before and After Democracy, ed. W. Sweet.
Vincent Shen, Generosity to the Other: Chinese Culture, Christianity and Strangification [in Chinese], Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004.
Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984.
Jonathan Chaplin’s argument in “Christian Theories of Democracy: The Contemporary Relevance of a Neglected Legacy,” in Before and After Democracy, ed. Sweet. See also “How Much Cultural and Religious Pluralism Can Liberalism Tolerate?” in Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration, ed. J. Horton, London: Macmillan, 1993, 32-49.
