RELIGION IN POLITICS: CONSTITUTIONAL AND MORAL PERSPECTIVES.
HOOPER, J. LEON
RELIGION IN POLITICS: CONSTITUTIONAL AND MORAL PERSPECTIVES. By
Michael J. Perry. New York: Oxford University, 1997. Pp. viii + 168.
$29.95.
Perry addresses the constitutional norms, moral foundations, and
moral limits that should govern religious voices in public-policy
determinations. Concluding that both the free-exercise and the
non-establishment clauses of the First Amendment are
(noncontroversially) antidiscrimination injunctions, he argues further
for an "accommodationist" insistence that, in any restriction
of religiously grounded behavior, the state demonstrate a seriously
compromised public interest and least restrictive means (consistent with
the now defunct Religious Freedom Restoration Act). Constitutionally,
however, this special freedom must be extended to the protection of all
acts of conscience.
Correcting Greenwalt and Rawls, public-policy debates should
include religiously explicit moral arguments. Pragmatically, since
religious justifications are inseparable from policy determinations,
voters had best be informed of the religious groundings of a
legislator's recommendations. Socially, given the
"underdetermination" (lack of consensual clarity) within
general society concerning issues such as abortion, religious voices can
and ought to be advanced for the sake of moral and value clarification
and, importantly, mutual correction.
Finally, religiously grounded policy recommendations ought to be
accompanied by what the legislator finds to be a plausible secular
argument. Pragmatically, purely religious arguments are simply divisive.
Theologically, P. claims within the norm of the compatibility of natural
and revealed knowledge, a lack of a correlative secular grounding for
religiously based policies strongly suggests inadequate, even false,
theological justifications. One exception to this correlative secular
rule are religious arguments for the sacredness of all human life. P.
judges that the abortion arguments by the U.S. Bishops' Conference
properly balance religiously grounded sacredness claims with secular
appeals concerning the protection of fetal life, while Finnis's
argument for juridical restrictions against homosexual or
"deliberatively contraceptive" heterosexual sexual involvement
violates the norm of correlative, plausible secular argument.
J. LEON HOOPER
Woodstock Theological Center, D.C.
