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Being a Progressive in Divinitia
Being a Progressive in Divinitia

Author(s): Sebastián Rudas
Subject(s): Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Politics and religion
Published by: KruZak
Keywords: Secularism; religion; church-state separation; liberalism; conservative majorities;

Summary/Abstract: In Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde defends a theory of liberal secularism that is compatible with a minimal separation of religion and politics. According to her view, liberal state—she calls it Divinitia—that symbolically establishes the historic majority’s religious doctrine and inspires some of its legislation on a conservative interpretation of such religious tradition can be legitimate. In this article I analyse how is it like to belong to the minority of liberal progressive citizens in a country like Divinitia. I argue that their political activism will be defeated by Divinitia’s status quo on at least four different grounds. First, in virtue of being a minority, liberal progressive citizens would rarely obtain democratic victories; second, the conservative majority could rightly argue that they do not have reasons to compromise their views in order to accommodate progressives’; third, the conservative majority can rightly complain that counter-majoritarian initiatives advanced by progressives are unfair; and four, Divinitia’s public reason reproduces an asymmetry, for religiously inspired reasons can be accessible and therefore justificatory in politics, while the reasons progressives would desire to present in public deliberation would not be accessible to their conservative fellow citizens.

  • Issue Year: XIX/2019
  • Issue No: 55
  • Page Range: 37-53
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: English