The Way of Reason in Religion and Politics

Makes the case for the importance of metaphysics in democratic political philosophy.

This book challenges two common mistakes in our current political discourse: that religion is merely a private, individual matter or, conversely, that religion should dominate public discourse. Moving beyond these blind alleys requires emphasis on the way of reason in both politics and religion. Democracy itself, the book argues, depends on the way of reason, and contemporary attacks on reason and argument are therefore not unrelated to the recent rise in authoritarianism and other forms of antidemocratic thought. In its effort to secure a metaphysical basis for democratic political theory, the book concentrates on the thought of the philosopher and theologian Franklin I. Gamwell while also relying on Charles Hartshorne in theistic metaphysics and John Rawls in political philosophy. Classical theism is criticized as is relativistic misology, the latter of which conceals a universal claim that all knowledge claims are restricted to a particular lifeworld. Throughout the book there is an effort to understand the necessary and the contingent as they relate to the virtue of toleration of reasonable differences in both religion and politics.