Reasoning Between Athens and Jerusalem

.
Polity Volume 47, Number 1 January 2015

2015 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/15
www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/
Reasoning between Athens and

Jerusalem
Mark Redhead
California State University
Jrgen Habermas, in his recent work on post-secular public reasoning, attempts to
craft a model of democratic deliberation in which theistic and non-theistic selves can
learn from each other and develop bonds of democratic solidarity. His proposed
model raises questions about the abilities of democratically oriented individuals in the
twenty-first century to reflect critically upon their own cherished beliefs, to comprehend the beliefs of others, and then to engage critically with the beliefs of others during deliberations about matters of common concern. I argue that these questions are
best addressed by focusing on how individuals reason from within and through
(rather than independently of) the cultural and ethical forces that make the subjects
what they are. The work of many grassroots organizers today illustrates this lesson.
Polity (2015) 47, 84113. doi:10.1057/pol.2014.29
Keywords public reason; deliberative democracy; secularity; Jrgen Habermas;

identity; grassroots organizing
Over the past decade, a number of Western-based political theorists have urged
their colleagues to open their eyes to the difficulties of distinguishing faith discourses
from those of public reason. One such thinker is Jrgen Habermas. He has recently
promoted what he calls a post-secular1 brand of public reasoning, in which nontheistic and theistic citizenssuch as those he describes as adherents of the tradition
of reason that originated in Athens, and those whose theistic traditions he says
originated in Jerusalemcan debate matters of common concern in a manner that
allows each camp to be receptive to and learn from the ethical impulses of the other
camps. Habermas hopes that such deliberations will nourish the slender bonds of
democratic solidarity that democratic practices, such as his model of a global
domestic politics, require.
Habermass work on post-secular public reasoning is interesting not only
because he attempts to craft a model of public reasoning in which theistic and
1. Habermas uses the term post-secular to depict a collective shift in consciousness in largely
secularized or unchurched societies that by now have come to terms with the continued existence of
religious communities, and with the influence of religious voices both in the national public sphere and on
the global political stage. Jrgen Habermas, Reply to My Critics, in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig
Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (London: Polity Press, 2013), 348.
Mark Redhead
85
non-theistic selves can learn from each other and develop bonds of solidarity. It is
also interesting because his thinking alludes to but leaves unfulfilled numerous
questions and conceptual tasks. These include the asymmetrical obligations
placed on theistic as opposed to non-theistic citizens, the limits of translatability
of religious reasons into secular reasons, and the limited senses of learning
undertaken by secular citizens. These dilemmas belie deeper issues about the
abilities of twenty-first-century democratically oriented individuals to reflect
critically upon their own cherished beliefs, to comprehend the beliefs of other
democratically oriented citizens, and then to engage with others within deliberations about matters of common concern.
In this article, I will argue that these problems are best addressed by focusing on
how individuals reason from within and through (rather than independently of)
the cultural and ethical forces that make subjects what they are. I first will work
through Habermass ideal of post-secular public reasoning and the problems that
befall it. I then will introduce the concept of reasoning through baggage and will
highlight some of its virtues. To illustrate the practice of reasoning through
baggage, I will turn to recent writings by Jeffrey Stout and other observers on
grassroots organizing in the United States. Stouts work, in particular, offers several
lessons on how individuals can reason through their fundamental beliefs while
engaging in political deliberation with others and can, thereby, cultivate the
slender bonds of solidarity Habermas craves. Reasoning through baggage thus can
provide one manner of keeping liberal democratic thinking relevant in the early
twenty-first century.
Cultivating Post-Secular Bonds of Solidarity

Habermass thoughts on post-secular public reasoning are linked to his proposals
for democratic global governance, or what he sometimes refers to as a global
domestic politics. His vision might serve as a counter-weight to Hobbesian/
Schmittian forms of political theology, which are increasingly popular within the
academy and with not-so-democratic actors, and to versions of global politics that
are driven by the dictates of neo-liberalism. Contra Schmitt, Habermas contends
that the ideal of an impersonal democratic process has become the modern form
of the political and, like earlier versions of the political, religion still has a place.
At its core, a democratic process involves a mutual learning process on behalf of
citizens. He writes:
Any democratic constitution is and remains a project: Within the framework of
the nation-state, it is oriented to the ever more thorough exhaustion of the
normative substance of constitutional principles under changing historic
conditions. And, at the global level, the universalistic meaning of human rights
86
REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM
reminds us of the need to develop a constitutional frame for an emerging

multicultural society.2
Habermas spells out some features of the global constitutional frame that he
proposes. His ideal of a global democratic politics is built upon a compulsory
cosmopolitan solidarity that can mitigate the functionalist and instrumentalist
imperatives of neo-liberal economics and that can thereby achieve a renewed
closure of an economically unmastered world society.3 Like David Held, Mary
Caldor and others, Habermas imagines a global politics that draws upon a
multileveled system of local, national, and supranational governing institutions as
well as a world organization with the power to impose peace and implement
human rights. In theory, both nation-states and citizens will exercise their voices
as members of a global public that influences extra-national political commonwealths.4 This stands in stark contrast to Kants original notion of a federation of
republics. Yet Habermas maintains that his vision embodies the cosmopolitan
ideal that Kant articulated in Perpetual Peace, because the participants in a
global domestic politics will think from the perspective of the universal condition
of humankind even as they remain members of particular nation-states.
According to Habermas, the institutionalization of this proposed cosmopolitan
order turns on the question of whether global communication in an informal
public, without constitutionally institutionalized paths for translating communicative influence into political power, can secure a sufficient degree of integration for
a global society and whether it can confer a sufficient level of legitimacy on the
decisions of the world organization.5 Both integration into a global society and the
legitimacy of the actions of supranational institutions depend on the generation of
norms arising from an overlapping consensus and shared understandings that acts
of democratic deliberation cultivated. From what contemporary moral sources can
these shared understanding be drawn?
This is the point where Habermass notion of post-secular public reasoning
comes to the fore. The notion is a response to Kants philosophy of religion, which
Habermas praises not only for clarifying the division of labor between theology
and practical reason, but also for distinguishing the justified uses of practical
2. Jrgen Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political
Theology, in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan
VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 27.
3. Jrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy, in The
Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
11112.
4. Jrgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London:
Polity Press, 2012), 42.
5. Jrgen Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of
Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, in Between Naturalism and Religion (London: Polity Press,
2008), 142.
Mark Redhead
87
reason from excessive metaphysical claims to knowledge, on the one hand, and
from supersensible religious truths of faith, on the other.6 Habermas contends that
Kants philosophy of religion can be read as a warning against religious
philosophythat is, a brand of secular reasoning that fails to learn from other
forms of thought.7
Despite these insights, Kants legacy in this area is wanting, says Habermas.
John Rawlss account of public reason, for example, offers an important but
limited starting point for post-secular public reasoning. The logic of Rawlss
infamous proviso cannot satisfactorily account for religious citizens who are
unable to generate liberal rationales for their politics8 yet might practice the virtue
of reciprocity towards other deliberators and potentially take part in the justification of legal and/or political norms.
Contra Rawls, Habermas argues for a translation proviso. According to this
proposal, religious languages are fine for public discourse so long as those who use
religious language agree to translate their potential truth contents into a generally
accessible language before the notions find their way onto the agendas of formal
public bodies.9 The generally accessible language would serve as an institutional
filter between the informal and formal public spheres. In Habermass opinion, the
translation proposal achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that all legally enforceable and publically sanctioned decisions can be formulated and justified in a
universally accessible language without having to restrict the polyphonic diversity
of voices at its very source.10
Habermas finds an additional shortcoming in the arguments of neo-Kantians,
like Rawls. Their models fail to cultivate the slender bonds of solidarity that a
global domestic politics requires. According to Habermas, the models of neoKantians do not have the power to awaken the cosmopolitan ideal and to keep
awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity
throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to
heaven.11 Habermas insists that a change in mentality on the part of both religious
and non-religious individuals is necessary, so that both groups can become
reflexive enough to engage in complementary learning processes. In his opinion,
Rawlsians and many other Kantian (and Lockean) inspired liberals do not
recognize the need for generating solidarity in their approaches to religious
6. Jrgen Habermas, The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception and
Contemporary Importance of Kants Philosophy of Religion, in Between Naturalism and Religion, 24243.
7. Ibid., 247.
8. Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political
Theology, 25.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 26.
11. Jrgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith
and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London: Polity Press, 2010), 19.
88
pluralism12 because these thinkers focus more on liberal justifications of laws than
on the solidarity-building consequences of deliberation. Habermas hopes that an
alternative perspective on the genealogy of reasona perspective which is
aware of the shared origin of philosophy and religion in the revolution of
worldviews of the Axial Age (in particular the two traditions based respectively
in Jerusalem and Athens)will address this need.13
Working down this alternative path, Habermas casts a receptive eye upon
theistic thinkers like Aquinas. Like Alasdair MacIntyre, Habermas regards Aquinas
as an authentic intellectual voice whose absence today is simply a fact. In a
homogenizing media society, everything loses its seriousnessperhaps even
institutionalized Christianity itself.14 Habermas is not a cheerleader for Thomism.
Rather, he understands cultural and societal secularization as a double learning
process that compels both the traditions of the Enlightenment and religious
doctrines to reflect on their own respective limits.15 According to Habermas,
tolerance demands that believers and unbelievers alike expect dissent when they
express their views. Without a reasonable expectation of disagreement between
theists and non-theists, neither group can engage in public reasoning because
neither will feel compelled to translate its morally compelling intuitions into a
generally acceptable language.16
Crucial here is the self-realization among secular citizens of the limits of
rationally comprehending religious experience. Faith, Habermas points out,
remains opaque for knowledge in a way which may neither be denied nor simply
accepted. This reflects the inconclusive nature of the confrontation between a selfcritical reason which is willing to learn and contemporary religious convictions.
Exchanges between believers and non-believers can heighten post-secular public
reasonings awareness of the unexhausted force of religious traditions, while
those devoted to religious beliefs can come to experience secularization as a
transformer which redirects the flow of tradition so as to make a given religious
tradition accessible to non-devotees.17 Habermas notes that for non-believers, this
12. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason
by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.
13. Ibid., 17.
14. Jrgen Habermas, A Conversation about God and the World (1999); reprinted in Jrgen
Habermas, in Time of Transitions, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (London, Polity, 2006),
154.
15. Jrgen Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? in The
Dialectics of Secularization, ed. Jrgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press,
2006), 23.
17. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 18. See also his Religion in the Public Sphere:
Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.
Mark Redhead
89
means that they must acknowledge that there can be linkages between faith and
knowledge that are not exclusively irrational.18
Habermas distinguishes the secular from the secularist. The former adopts an
agnostic stance towards religious claims, while the latter adopt a polemical stance
towards religious doctrines which retain a certain public influence even though
their claims cannot be scientifically justified. Today, secularism often appeals to a
hard, that is, scientifically grounded, version of naturalism.19 A liberal democratic state might slide from secular to secularist when the state fails to realize that
when attempting to protect all citizens freedom of belief and conscience, it may
not demand anything of its religious citizens which cannot be reconciled with a
life that is led authentically from faith.20 Post-secular public reason tries to
promote a democratic common sense that, in the case of devotes of Athens and
Jerusalem, remains osmotically open to both camps while maintaining its
independence.21
Habermas, in addition, argues that a liberal democratic state can guarantee
equal freedom of religion to its citizens only under the proviso that they do not
barricade themselves within the self-enclosed lifeworlds of their religious communities and seal themselves off from each other.22 All groupsincluding those with
strident neo-liberal, Hobbesian, or neo-Kantian orientationsneed to loosen their
holds on individuals so that individuals can recognize others both as citizens and
as members of a larger democratic political community, who are capable of
learning through public reason. As citizens, individuals collectively give themselves laws and rights, which enable each and all, as private selves, to uphold the
collective practices that define their personal identity. In the case of theists,
religious consciousness, be it in the form expressed by the American evangelical
or by the Muslim immigrant to Europe, must become reflexive when confronted
with the necessity of relating its articles of faith to competing systems of belief and
to the scientific monopoly on the production of factual knowledge.23 It follows
from his translation proviso that religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal
members of a constitutional democracy must accept the proviso as the price to be
paid for the neutrality of the state toward competing worldviews.24 Theistic citizens
18. Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 5051. See also his
An Awareness of What Is Missing, 22.
19. Jrgen Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, in
Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 74.
20. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 21. See also his Reply to My Critics, 372.
21. Jrgen Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, in The Future of Human Nature, trans. Max Pensky
(London: Polity, 2003), 105.
22. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 74.
23. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 21.
24. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 371 and 376.
90
must realize that the translation of sacred beliefs into profane ethical claims is the
fundamental feature of a secularity that is not anathema to their faiths.25
According to Habermas, the ethics of citizenship entails a complementary
burden for non-theistic citizens. Because of the duty of reciprocal accountability
towards all citizens (including religious ones), non-theistic citizens are
obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and
will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and
religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level. For a
democratic process the contributions of one side are no less important than
those of the other side.26
The liberal state must expect its secular citizens, in exercising their role as citizens,
not to treat religious expressions as simply irrational.
Neither side of the ethics-of-citizenship imperative will be easy to follow. It
forces secular citizens to practically resolve the question of how modern reason,
which has turned its back on metaphysics, should understand its relation to
religion. Of course, the expectation that theology should engage seriously with
postmetaphysical thinking is by no means trivial either.27 Both expectations
appear even more demanding when one considers the changes in mentality that
are needed to foster the forms of solidarity upon which Habermass democratic
vision rests. According to him, deliberations that are learning processes and
that are not simply changes in point of view only from the perspective of a secular
self-understanding of modernity will produce solidarity. These changes in the
orientations of theistic and non-theistic citizens cannot be prescribed. Nor can
the changes in orientations be politically manipulated or forced through law .
Learning processes can be fostered, but they cannot be morally or legally
ordered.28
What Forms of Post-Secular Learning Are Actually Happening

Today?
Today, many individuals are open to learning through practices of public reasoning a great deal about their own beliefs and those of their fellow democratically
oriented citizens. Yet, it is unclear if Habermas accounts for the various forms of
25. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 114.
26. Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political
Theology, 26.
27. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 22.
28. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 75. See
also his Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious
and Secular Citizens, 13940.
Mark Redhead
91
democratic learning currently taking place. Part of the problem lies in his framing
of post-secular public reasoning as a mutual-learning process between theists and
non-theists, in which the former have a much higher set of demands than the latter.
Even sympathetic readers like Craig Calhoun admit that Habermas seems to place
a heavier burden on theistic citizens then on non-theists.29
According to some theorists of deliberate democracy, contemporary democratic civil societies should provisionally treat all citizens as equals. This means, as
Charles Taylor aptly puts it, that public spheres cannot be overtly Christian or
Muslim or Jewish, but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist nor
Kantian nor Utilitarian.30 The state should be a locus for free-flowing discourses
on values, identities, and common goods that arise from genuinely reciprocal
position-taking among all sections of the populace. Equally stringent demands of
critical reflexivity should be made on all democratically oriented citizens (especially those of a neo-liberal, Hobbesian, neo-Kantian, or other non-theistic variety),
not just theistic ones.
Habermas counters Taylors point by claiming that because a democratic
order cannot simply be imposed on its authors, the constitutional state confronts its
citizens with the expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere
obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must do more than
merely conform to the constitutional order in a superficial way. Like Rawls,
Habermas maintains that citizens and communities must appropriate the secular
legitimation of constitutional principles under the premises of their own faith.31
Theists have to engage in a triple reflection. They must come to terms with the
incommensurable faiths of other theists; they must recognize the authority of
science and its monopoly on secular knowledge; and they must accept the
premises of a liberal democratic order grounded in a profane morality.32 Theists
must split their identities up into private and public elements, and must translate
their arguments into a non-theistic language before their arguments can be taken
seriously.33 Non-theistic citizens simply need to open themselves to the possibility
that religious citizens might have something important to say. Religious citizens,
meanwhile, not only must recognize that non-theists might indeed be reasonable.
They must also try to find, within their own faith, analogues to secular forms of
political theorizing.34
29. Craig Calhoun, Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere, in Rethinking Secularism, ed.
Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2011), 83.
30. Charles Taylor, What Does Secularism Mean? in his Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2011), 321.
31. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 75.
33. Ibid., 109
34. Ibid.
92
At play here seems to be an implicit assumption by Habermas that faiths hold

on a theistic citizen is much more problematic for public reasoning than are the
forces in the mental topography of a non-believerbe the believer a neo-Kantian,
a neo-liberal, or something else. But, Taylor responds,
how can you discriminate discourses on the basis of a deep psychological
background? I could make another story about the psychological background
that Kantians have and why they get excited by certain things which dont
excite me. But what has that got to do with the discourse out there? Can people
not understand it? Why discriminate on those grounds?35
According to Taylor, Habermasian post-secular public reasoning, far from promoting a form of public reasoning that promotes mutual perspective taking, seems to
be built upon a not quite defended inequality vis--vis the reasonableness of nontheistic versus theistic perspectives.
The asymmetrical demands that Habermas places on theistic citizens vis--vis
non-theists brings to the fore the unjustified role played by secular reason (or reason
alone, as Taylor defines it) in Habermass account of post-secular public reasoning.
According to Habermas, secular reasons do not expand the perspective of ones
own community, but push for mutual perspective taking so that different communities can develop a more inclusive perspective by transcending their own universe
of discourse.36 Religious forms of reasoning can either come to the same
conclusions, which makes them superfluous, or can come to different conclusions,
which makes them at best valid only for members of a given religious community.37
According to Taylor, underlying Habermass argument is a latent myth that the
Enlightenments celebration of reason was an unmitigated cultural gain. Habermas
appears to subscribe to a non-religious account of practical reason that resolves
certain moral-political issues in a manner that can legitimately satisfy any honest,
unconfused thinker, and presumes that religiously based conclusions will always
be dubious, and in the end only convincing to people who have already accepted
the dogmas in question.38 Taylor finds the distinction between religious and nonreligious discourses here to be utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the end
of the day that religion is founded on illusion, and hence that what is derived from it
is less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason for
greater suspicion being directed at it.39
35. Jrgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, Dialogue: Jrgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, in The
Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, 63.
36. Ibid., 66.
37. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 384.
38. Habermas, What Does Secularism Mean? 323.
39. Charles Taylor, Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism, in The Power of Religion in
the Public Sphere, 53.
Mark Redhead
93
The problems of an unjustified asymetricality that Taylor detects belie three

deeper issues with Habermass framework: First, his theist versus non-theist framework is built upon Western historical origins. Second, accounting for the various
spiritual positions between Jerusalem and Athens (as well as from elsewhere) that
are expressed today in Western public spheres. Third, determining which beliefs can
be engaged in acts of post-secular public reasoning and which are not as malleable
and are often implicitly invoked when engaging the former set.
With regard to the first issue: Habermas does not take into account the
contingent nature and historical origins of his post-secular optics. As works like
Taylors A Secular Age have documented, Western secularity (and the consequent
need to think through a post-secular orientation) arose from a series of historical
shifts that include the emergence of a disenchanted view of reality, exclusively
humanist moral codes, and, most importantly for Habermass concerns, the
proliferation of universalizable codes of human behavior derived from the correct
use of reason. Two problems arise here. First, as scholars like Scott Appleby have
argued, this historical narrative itself gives rise to so-called fundamentalist
movements. To deliberate with members of such movements is to partly engage
in a peculiarly modern discourse of public reason that engages some of their
concerns over the complex and varied manners they articulate a loss of the sacred
in contemporary public spheres. Even though these public spheres are now
understood through a rather historically contingent manner of understanding
them.40 Second, setting aside Habermass historically contingent framing of the
problem of religious life in a post-secular society, are there other questions that
theistic citizens might call on secularists to reflect on? 41 After all, why do many
choose not to travel down the Athenian path and, instead, think in religious terms?
Are other non-secular frameworks in play today? And could some of the theistic
framings be in certain respects more productive than secular reasoning? 42
40. R. Scott Appleby, Rethinking Fundamentalism in a Secular Age, in Rethinking Secularism,

24344.
41. As MacIntyre points out, for theists like himself the main issue in contemporary secular discourses
on religion is not the issue of Gods existence or nonexistence, but the contrast between His presence and
His absence, between those occasions when He manifests Himself in and through particulars and those
dark nights of the soul when He withdraws from us. To someone engaged in prayerful practice of the
presence of God the thought that perhaps God does not exist would be an idle thought, certainly not a
thought to be responded to by philosophical argument any more than the fanciful thought that some
human friend whom one only hears from at long intervals has perhaps never existed. Alasdair MacIntyre,
On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 84 (2011): 2332.
42. Colin Jager, This Detail, This History: Charles Taylors Romanticism, in Varieties of Secularism in a
Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 171.
94
Consider the Muslim experience of European secularity, which partly motivates

Habermass work. Nilfur Gole, Talal Asad, and other scholars have shown
that European secularity and religious Islam increasingly have a symbiotic relationship.43 Some features of European secularity, such as the Kantian forms of autonomy
that Habermas loves, become clearer through comparisons with practices of
religious Islam.44 Intellectual creations, like a supposedly monolithic Arab identity,
also play central roles in contemporary articulations of what it means to be a secular
Westerner.45 To promote effective forms of public reasoning, post-secular public
reasoning needs to account for and critically engage these moments of mutual
imbrication and, in the process, account for the divergent manners in which a postsecular Europe is experienced by groups like Islamic Westerners. Democratically
oriented citizens of all ethical persuasions should at least be able to engage the
abstract question of how a specific version of secularity is historically framed, as well
as the more concrete topics of how those who work through different optics engage
current European secularity. Many within contemporary public spheres in fact
engage such questions and issues, as they develop their own unique identities and
discern previously un-thematized points for possible concord.
This last point draws our attention to a second area where more conceptual
work is needed. Habermass focus on mutual learning between devotees of Athens
and devotees of Jerusalem neglects many spiritual positions within contemporary
polities. Part of the problem with Habermass dichotomy of believer versus nonbeliever is its failure to account for the myriad of spiritual positions today as well as
the many ways individuals can and do live between (in Habermass language)
Athens and Jerusalem. Numerous ethical orientations either lie between Athens
and Jerusalem or are external to both, and can and do play significant roles
in modern politics. Given the deeply diverse assortments of beliefs, balancing
freedom of thought (particularly for new religious immigrants) with equal respect
for ways of life that many belief systems might find objectionable becomes crucial
if new arrivals are to see themselves as dignified members of their post-secular
societies. Furthermore, the cultural terrain on which twenty-first-century politics
43. Nilfur Gole, The Civilizational, Spatial, and Sexual Powers of the Secular, in Varieties of
Secularism in a Secular Age, 246.
44. Asad shows how the contemporary liberal understanding of autonomy, which come from the
Christian ethical tradition, sanctifies a markedly different political division of public and private realms
than is found in Islamic states. The contemporary liberal state allows social workers, police, and others to
intrude into the private realm in the name of individual rights, while permitting freedom of expression and
dissent in the public realm. In the Islamic tradition, this is reversed: the private realm is private, but
conformity in public space may be much stricter. Talal Asad, Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular
Criticism in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith
Butler, and Saba Mahmood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 37.
45. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London:
Polity Press, 2013), 74.
Mark Redhead
95
operates provides many spiritual and anti-spiritual possibilities, which many

people are increasingly open to sampling without having to commit to a single
one. Deliberatively democratic practices must involve learning how fellow citizens
engage beliefs between and beyond the rather rigid theistic and non-theistic poles
that Habermas seems to work within.
Habermas also doesnt account for how thinkers like Taylor and MacIntyre,
who have spent their life working between Athens and Jerusalem, actually practice
post-secular public reasoning. Habermas seems to presuppose a binary between
philosophy and religion, in which philosophy circumscribes but does not
penetrate the latters alien core. According to Habermas, democratic actors deeply
informed by religious questions must evoke a social cognitive shift in attitude and
thereby adopt the supposedly impartial perspective of a reasonable deliberator.46
This response ignores what profoundly theistic yet secular thinkers like MacIntyre
and Taylor actually do. Certainly their philosophical work is deeply informed by their
theistic commitments. Likewise, their faith-based practices draw sustenance from
their careers as professional philosophers. Contra Habermas, when these democratic reasoners practice philosophy, it does not simply circumscribe the core of
their religious experience. In many respects, their faith drives and frames their
practice of philosophy.
From Taylors vantage point, positions like Habermass exemplify modern
liberal philosophys exclusive focus on the horizontal dimension of ethical
thinking, on our moral relations with other humans, and modern liberal philosophys consequent marginalization of the vertical dimension of mans relationship
to some higher calling, purpose, or sense of order.47 Actions in the vertical open
the possibility that by rising higher, youll accede to a new horizontal space where
the resolution will be less painful/damaging for both parties.48 Habermas, as his
critique of Rawls indicates, is cognizant of the power of the vertical dimension of
ethical thinking. Yet, he does not deploy this insight and conceptualize how a
change of mentality among non-theists can occur, so as to allow the vertical
dimension to occupy a more prominent place within post-secular public
reasoning.
This leads to the third area in which Habermass post-secular public reasoning
needs more clarification. In his discussions of post-secular democratic discourses,
Habermas places a great deal of hope in the mutual learning of all participants.
The question, though, is what can and cannot be learnt? What deeply held beliefs
(if any) are foundational and not subject to change? What beliefs are more
malleable? Habermas tells us that non-theistic philosophers can learn from religion
46. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 379.
47. Charles Taylor, Perils of Moralism, in Dilemmas and Connections, 350.
48. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 706.
96
while keeping their distance and remaining agnostic.49 Philosophy has too
much respect for the glowing embers, rekindled time and again by the issue of
theodicy, to offend religion.50 Post-secular public reasoning abandons the
rationalist presumption that reason alone can differentiate rational from nonrational elements of faith and, instead, insists on the difference between the
certainties of faith and publicly criticizable validity claims. Post-secular public
reasoning, furthermore, recognizes that the core of a given faith remains
as profoundly alien to discursive thought as the hermetic core of aesthetic
experience, which likewise can be at best circumscribed, but not penetrated, by
philosophical reflection.51
This move by Habermas is a refreshingly honest though problematic, given his
stress on translatability. When encountering the public dictates of a secular polity,
theists are often forced to work through their most fundamental positions. The nontheist, meanwhile, is never asked to think critically (in a manner that might
challenge some of her most cherished beliefs) about some distinctly non-secular
concerns that theistic citizens bring to democratic politics. For example, the neoliberal is seldom asked to justify why (to use Foucaults language) a homo
economicus perspective on social relations and individual subjectivity should
enjoy high standing within popular and some academic discussions of public
policy.52 For many theists (as well as some scholars like Habermas), the uncritical
acceptance of that perspective seems hardly justifiable.
Moreover, even though Habermas has attempted to engage some sojourners on
their path to Jerusalem (like Pope Benedict XVI), his proposed translation
exercises might simply be moments of assimilating a religious perspective into that
of secular citizens, instead of being acts that also involve critical reflection on the
ethical biases that frame a specific non-theistic viewpoint.53 Like undergraduate
students who dismiss ideas from Plato or Aquinas simply because they seem
foreign to the students contemporary historical milieu, the non-theist is only
compelled to engage theistic iterations of viewpoints that he or she already holds.
The non-theist does not need to think through how she or he could learn from
ideas that might come from foreign metaphysical and ethical sources. Habermass
dichotomous thinking blinds us to what it takes to change ourselves and, also,
prevents us from seeing that today there can be vastly different modes of life (as say
49. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 113. See also his Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive
Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.
52. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, trans.
Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, 2008).
53. Friedo Ricken, Postmetaphysical Reason and Religion in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith
and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, 57.
Mark Redhead
97
celibate priests and non-celibate believers) that are equally important and valid,
equally essential.54
A related point, which many theists like Taylor and MacIntyre and non-theists
like Connolly are aware of, is the fragility of all faiths today. The large array of
diverse and, on some level, incommensurable beliefsthat is, beliefs which are
incapable of scoring an intellectual knock-out over the competitionin contemporary polities not only calls forth the need for inclusive public reasoning, but also
makes ones own fundamental commitments more fragile or uncertain. For theists
like Taylor, this fragility is central to the experience of their faith because the
fragility brings forth a tension between the acknowledgment of the fallibility of the
believers own faith and the extra-rational pull that faith has on any believer:
For what believer doesnt have the sense that her view of God is too simple, too
anthropocentric, and too indulgent? We all lie to some extent cowering under
the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful. On the other
side, the call to faith is still there as an understood temptation. Even if we think
that it no longer applies to us, we see it as drawing others. Otherwise the ethics
of belief would be incomprehensible.55
Habermas and many of those who are drawn to his work seem blind to this point.
They are satisfied with becoming aware of the ethical motivations missing from
their manners of reasoning, but they do not work through the fragility of their core
commitments. In this respect, they often mirror more dogmatic theists. Both types
of thinkers build their world views on deprecatory stories about others, and this
can reinforce blindness. For Taylor, MacIntyre, and many other theists, the failure
to acknowledge the fragility of ones faith(s) is a missed opportunity to learn. The
opportunity can be regained only if those like Habermas are willing to engage in
something akin to the self-reflexive manners used by theists and some non-theists,
like Connolly, who openly address their spiritually fragile condition.
A crucial task for Habermas and others who yearn to cultivate viable forms of
solidarity is not only to point out the need today for mutual-learning processes, but
to think about ways that mutual learning can get many but not all potential
54. Habermas, Perils of Moralism, 364.
55. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 57. MacIntyre points out that this dilemma can only be avoided at the cost of
living either a divided life or a life in denial. As he puts it, theistic belief has a double aspect, at once
problematic and unproblematic. As the former, it invites ruthless and systematic questioning. As the latter,
it requires devoted and unquestioning obedience. Theists, who recognize one of these aspects of theism,
but not the other, have an imperfect understanding of their own beliefs. Yet it seems impossible to
acknowledge both aspects without tension and conflict. So theists have, it seems, a dilemma. Either they
must willfully ignore some aspect of their own beliefs or they must live as divided selves, agonizing over
the incompatible attitudes to which their beliefs give rise. Alasdair MacIntyre God, Philosophy,
Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield,
2009), 8.
98
participants a little out of their comfort zones. I say many because I assume that
unabashed fundamentalists and those who see their ethical orientation as a priori
giving them privileged access to the truth (be they Marxists, neo-liberals, Hobbesians,
neo-Kantians, or what not) will not partake of such deliberative exercises. Instead,
they frequently will view others with different orientations as Schmittian-style
enemies rather than as individuals with whom reciprocity could occur. Moreover,
as Peter Levine notes, many people find the latter, absolutist-style of politics more
reassuring.56 A democratic politics of public reasoning can feel too uncomfortable
for some, and such individuals would, instead, prefer to associate with citizens who
think like themselves, rather than engage with and learn from others.
However, as Taylor, MacIntyre, Connolly, moderate theists like Luke Bretherton,
and democratic thinkers like Levine point out, many humans today hold ethics
and embrace faiths in a manner that is less absolutist, and such believers can be
persuaded to partake of the not-so-comfortable democratic practices of public
reasoning. This population includes many with an affinity for neo-liberal and
Hobbesian/Schmittian orientations to politics. Often, many of those who are not
absolutist (either in their faiths about markets or in their love for a strong
sovereign) can be opened to at least thinking about their collective existence in a
more democratic manner. This can sometimes be seen during the rebuilding of
cities, such as post-Katrina New Orleans, in which market rationality is not
necessarily the most efficient starting point for thinking about how to rebuild a
community. Likewise, there are often cases of public safety, where a politics of
mutual solidarity building with those whom one potentially views as enemies
might be more pragmatic than a Hobbesian/Schmittian approach of simply
exposing those one does not like to the forces of the state.
How, though, to engage in such processes? How to entice people to problematize one set of prejudices (such as either a love of the market or a Schmittian
orientation towards different groups) while holding onto others? An awareness of
what Taylor calls the vertical dimension of ethical reasoning offers a good starting
point. Likewise, what Habermas calls a post-conventional level of discourse can
compel subjects to distinguish between what is from what is not necessary to their
faith and to the identity that it generates.
The ideal of a post-conventional discourse is both chimerical and distorting,
however. It is chimerical in that one always reasons from somewhere, from some
tradition of practical and public reasoning that circumvents much of what can be
put up for critique and discussion. The ideal is distorting in that many insightful
thinkers, like Taylor and MacIntyre, draw sustenance from their ability to be
distinctly non-post-conventional. They reason through the ethical premises that are
56. Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
101.
Mark Redhead
99
central to the theistic traditions from which they draw sustenance, rather than
vainly reasoning apart from those traditions.
This brief outline of a set of tasks confronting Habermass model points to the
need to make post-secular public reasoning more cognizant than it already is of the
contingent, ambiguous, yet interdependent features of the pluralistic terrain upon
which it attempts to conceptualize mutual-learning processes that can generate the
partial and incomplete forms of solidarity that a global domestic politics requires
for its initial development. Today, a wide range of divergent and interconnected
cultural and ethical sources informs the on-the-ground practice of deliberative
democracy (or as Habermasians prefer to say, communicative reason). Many of
these sources draw from either Athens or Jerusalem; some draw from other points.
These cultural and ethical sources offer different readings of history and different
frames through which actors who are sincerely committed to democratic deliberation can practice democracy. Political theorists who wish to conceptualize these
activities need to be aware of the large number of democratically oriented
individuals who reason through and modify some of their cherished beliefs (even
as they hold on to others). Such individuals attempt to learn from others by
reasoning through differing and on some level incommensurable beliefs. Political
theorists need to comprehend, in other words, how individuals reason through
(rather than reason independently or in abstraction from) baggage.
Reasoning through Baggage

When I speak of reasoning through baggage, I am referring to wrestling with a
tension, in which the political deliberatorbe it a fellow citizen, judge, activist, or
a political theoristis at once above the fray and is attempting to generate the best
account of reality, yet comes from an ethically or politically biased position.
Paradoxically, this position prompts the deliberator to defend it, even though the
deliberator is frequently unaware of the constraints that the position places on the
deliberators efforts at defense.
Reasoning through baggage thus combines two notions. We reason through our
baggage in an ontological sense whenever we attempt to diagnose how our
baggage framesfor example, how we reason, how we articulate the claims of
others, how our language shapes what we recognize about and in others, what
ends we advance, and what ends we do not even consider. We also reason
through baggage in a moral sense whenever we attempt to deliberate sincerely
with others and try to tell truths about ourselves and about the standpoint from
which we reason (while appreciating the fact that we can never do so in a
completely free manner).
A large and eclectic array of thinkersfrom those firmly outside the
liberal tradition of political theory to those somewhat within ithave devoted
100
considerable efforts towards conceptualizing alternative manners of reasoning

through baggage and have produced a plethora of often conflicting recommendations. These include hermeneutical forms of self-understanding (such as Taylors
doctrine of strong evaluation), Aristotelian models of practical reasoning (like
MacIntyres tradition constituted inquiry), various models of representative thinking inspired by Kants Critique of Judgment, and Parrhesiastic attempts at problematizing who we are and what we have become.
Despite their profound differences, these recommendations share some common features. All point to the centrality of truth to public reason and question not
truth per se but how participants articulate the truth claims that they seek to
advance. All of these versions of reasoning through baggage compel individuals to
make contingent (or at least problematize) many of their beliefs that they took to
be foundational, and encourage participants to think through how such a
discourse might be framed otherwise. For example, why should certain cultural
forces (like the market-oriented directives of neo-liberalism) and certain specific
viewpoints prevail and predominate in many public policy disputes in the United
States today? All of these methods of reasoning through baggage also provide
dynamic means of engaging a wide variety of voices. One asks oneself and
fellow democratic deliberators to identify the comprehensive visions and the other
social, historical, and/or culturally generated baggage that they bring with them to
acts of public reasoning. Talking in this way allows individuals to take a more
critical and responsible approach to their views, and compels individuals, who are
expected to give good reasons in support of their views, to be accountable for their
visions.57 More specifically, participants must discuss how particular elements of
their ethical visions shape the moral parameters through which they deliberate
with others, and must provide arguments for how they and how others might learn
from adopting what to them might initially appear to be an unduly limited moral
horizon. They must show why the holds that particular social forces have on a
given participant can (or cannot) be taken to be legitimate. Each participant must
ask how and to what extent the other deliberators should tolerate the optics, as
well as the parameters for engagement that the optics place on the participant. In
compelling interlocutors to speak as best they can the truth of themselves,
reasoning through baggage thus opens them to potential sources of learning about
themselves and others.
By seeing the interrelationships between the truths that a participant speaks and
the constitution of the self that engages through the process of truth telling,
individuals better appreciate the contingent natures of who they and their fellow
interlocutors are and what each has become. This allows us, as Foucault had
hoped, to loosen and strengthen the holds certain practices have on our individual
57. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 30.
Mark Redhead
101
identities.58 Reasoning through baggage can also allow for both a strengthening
and loosening of allegiances to certain moral and ethical truth claims advanced by
oneself and others. It thereby opens oneself and others up to the possibility of
finding new and not-so-predictable points of accord. As a result, post-secular
public reasoning becomes the mutual-learning enterprise that Habermas yearns
for, as it becomes more contestable and multifaceted. Through the process of
critically reflecting on practices of truth telling, participants, who momentarily
transgress the boundaries of their perceived moral horizons, open themselves to
ideas and ethical sources previously considered off limits. At the same time, they
respond critically to other moral horizons and thereby develop the potential to put
forth new contestable arguments that force others to re-appraise their own moral
and ethical allegiances, even as the participants strengthen their commitments to
other moral and ethical directives. As a result, deliberation is based on engagement with comprehensive visions rather than on elisions of such visions.
Athenian-oriented deliberators, in opening themselves to the possibility of
finding other powerful ethical sources of moral motivation and other manners of
conceptualizing the normative terrain upon which they are deliberating, engage in
possibly more sincere forms of democratic deliberation with theistic citizens,
including those who take their ethical bearings from somewhere between Athens
and Jerusalem as well as elsewhere. Many (but not all) citizens can then potentially
learn from each other as they think, as best they can, through the contestable from
the non-contestable (or, the not-so-fundamental from the fundamental) features of
their beliefs. Sincere attempts at mutual learning in the eyes of their fellow citizens
can go a long way towards creating the respect and trust necessary for a common
endeavor of democratic self-governance, which draws on ethical traditions flowing
from Athens, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. This can, in turn, facilitate moments of
deliberation in which many individuals, gaining a greater awareness of the
malleability of previously considered bedrock beliefs through a comparison with
other foundational beliefs, can reach novel points of concord with their fellow
deliberators, and can thereby cultivate those slender moments of solidarity among
democratically oriented individuals that post-secularist public reasoning was
partially tasked with producing.
By way of example, consider Jeffrey Stouts Blessed Are the Organized and the
several experiences of reasoning through baggage that his writing describes. These
include activities synonymous with what Connolly calls critical responsiveness.
They also include actions that exemplify Taylors work on understanding the
partiality of ones own ethical vision and on coming to understand the voices of
others.
58. Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? trans. Catherine Porter [1984]; reprinted in Paul
Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 4849.
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Cultivating Solidary on the Ground

Habermas admits that the prospects of generating the forms of solidarity among
progressive actors, which are needed to promote a larger global social movement
that can inspire the development of institutions and procedures of a democratized
global order or pacified global domestic politics, are bleak at best.59 Many find
it hard to argue with Habermas here. However, twenty-first-century democratic
politics is not completely hopeless. In fact many vibrant grassroots democratic
organizations exist that can generate the slender forms of solidarity needed to forge
alternatives to not-so-democratic local practices of governance. Stouts Blessed Are
the Organized chronicles a number of such entities.
Stout focuses on IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) groups in New Orleans, the
Rio Grande Valley, and Southern and Northern California. Many commentators
have argued that today democratic politics seems under threat in these places,60
yet IAF citizen organizations have successfully promoted grassroots democracy
among the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Many of these IAF organizations draw
inspiration from the life and writings of Saul Alinsky, who saw the complete man as
devoted both to the promotion of social welfare and to practices that make
collective life meaningful, and who took the denial of political participation as a
denial of both human dignity and democracy. 61
Religious groups, such as local Catholic churches, constitute the cornerstone
of these IAF organizations. IAF activists include Opus Dei priests and other
Catholics who espouse beliefs on issues like abortion that folks like Stout do not
share, and whose framing of the theist/non-theist divide diverges from that of
Habermas. The activists build coalitions, such as COPS in San Antonio, Texas,
which often include secular activists, Jewish groups, and members of Protestant
churches.62
Stouts stories are interesting partly because the activists encourage practices of
reasoning through baggage. Of course, these IAF groups are eliciting relatively
local forms of solidarity, in comparison to the global ones that Habermas considers essential for his global domestic politics. Nevertheless, Stout describes how
practices of post-secular public reasoning not only hold power holders accountable, but generate solidarity among citizens.63 The moments of democratic
activism that Stout chronicles therefore can be read as iterations of broader lessons
that actors in other contexts can use.
59. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 74. See also his Reply to My Critics, 355.
60. Luke Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 216.
61. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Press,
1989), 123. Taken from Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 73.
63. Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 290.
Mark Redhead
103
One of these lessons involves the virtues of shared work. According to Levine,
deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work and work is
especially valuable when it is collaborative: when people make things of public
value together.64 IAF actors and the citizens they organize attempt to create new
means of holding those in power accountable. In doing so, the activists try to
enhance the capacities of ordinary citizens to deliberate, to conceptualize, and to
respond collectively to common malaises, even as they problematize or justify
specific power relationships and laws.65 In the course of promoting accountability,
IAF organizers try to help citizens cultivate civic relationships with each other,
which are non-exclusive and predicated on the value of the other person as a
fellow citizen, seen as someone who should be encouraged to participate in the
common life.66
Contra Habermas, the actors whom Stout describes promote not an impersonal
democratic process, but very personal democratic experiences fuelled by passion.67 Organizers plan intimate one-on-one conversations, neighborhood walks,
and house meetings, as well as broader assemblies of diverse constituencies.68
All of these activities illustrate an under-resourced and under-appreciated genre of
politics that Levine has called open-ended politics.69 Open-ended politics have no
predetermined goals. Instead, citizens decide what to do as they work together.70
Hence, they might arrive at neo-liberal or Hobbesian/Schmittian goals. What is
important, however, is how public reasoning between the participants transpires.
According to Stout, many IAF actors integrate concepts of sacred value and
human dignity into public defenses of those most vulnerable to oppression by
economic and statist forces.71 Collective activities are fraught with incommensurability and disagreement because sacred value is a highly contested term among
theists as well as between theists, non-theists, and those betwixt and between these
polarities. The not-so-malleable beliefs that participants bring to their grassroots
activities always limit public reasoning. Ethical disputes revolve around such
practical questions as what symbolic rituals, if any, should be used; what public
behavior should be prohibited; and who should enforce said prohibitions?72
To cultivate the bonds of solidarity and gain the trust of those they seek to
represent, IAF activists reflect on how they engage with the concerns of constituents, from what moral presumptions are the activists coming, and how the activists
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 14.

Ibid.
Ibid., 56.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 218.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 223.
104
might mitigate the problem of their own distorted understandings of their present
and future representees. Stout explicitly alludes to the first type of practice of
reasoning through baggage but not the second or third.
Like Habermas, Stout believes that when ameliorating sacred disputes, people
cannot reasonably take for granted a single conception of sacred value, when
conversing or debating with one another. The discussion does not proceed from a
consensus on sacred value, but it does give expression to multiple, contested
conceptions of sacred value.73 IAF activists are fully aware that the public spheres
within which they work within are (as, Luke Bretherton among others points out
more forcefully than does Habermas) sites for multiple and conflicting understandings of living ethically in modern times.74 IAF organizers have therefore
learned that the core beliefs of actual individuals must be the starting point for
open-ended democratic deliberations about social justice and public accountability. Deliberation alongside those who hold conflicting accounts of the sacred
can generate experiences of public reasoning in which individuals critically
examine parts of their acculturated beliefs and values but only while taking
others, for the moment, as the default starting point of our questioning.75 By
compelling interlocutors to speak as best they can the truth of themselves and to
reason as sincerely as possible through parts of their baggage, IAF activists allow
interlocutors to open themselves up to new and unexpected potential sources of
learning about themselves and others. These moments of learning through
engagement with deep ethical diversity can generate moments of deliberation that
many of those affected by the outcome will regard as legitimate because their most
significant concerns and sources of identity have been given a fair hearing. Due to
the relative fairness of the proceedings, IAF activists not only can obtain a sense of
somebodys interests but also can challenge participants to think constructively
about the situation (that is, to see the contingent, arbitrary features of it), to
transcend bitterness, and to produce constructive power76 so that they and some of
their perceived oppressors can more amenably participate in a more just political
arrangement.77
What Stout calls critical thinking could be re-labeled critically responsive
thinking because it involves what Connolly calls critical responsivenessor, a
manner of critical engagement in which rival viewpoints are scrutinized even as
some positions are taken as fundamental starting points. More specifically, in
critical responsiveness, participants in a discussion open themselves to new ethical
orientations, social movements, and identities in a manner that critically engages
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
Ibid., 224.
Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 15.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 147
Ibid., 206. See also Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 167.
Mark Redhead
105
them and does not simply tolerate them, on the one hand, or accommodates them
only to the degree that they conform to ones own moral horizon, on the other.
Critical responsiveness entails altering ones recognition of difference, which
means revising ones own terms of self-recognition as one goes about recognizing
others. A critically responsive agent does not reduce the other to what some we
already is. Rather, through their critical engagement with an other they seek to
open up cultural space through which the other might consolidate itself into
something that is unafflicted by negative cultural markings.78
Critical responsiveness resembles what Arendt calls thinking without banisters. There are no fixed procedures for opening oneself to and then critically
evaluating the viewpoints of not quite consolidated identities.79 How and to what
degree one is critically responsive can never be determined a priori by some fixed
analytical, transcendental or theistically informed criteria.80 Critical responsiveness
invokes something like a conversion experience on the part of all who practice it.
According to Stout, participants, through their critical receptivity of others,
experience a self-perceived awakening of their identity, their powers of perception, their judgment, and often their faith.81 Because critical responsiveness
involves determining what beliefs can be called into question and modified in
response to demands from other beliefs, critical responsiveness brings about a
politics of becoming. Unexpected points of solidarity emerge through and within a
political discussion and become a new basis upon which diverse assemblages of
democratically oriented actors can organize so as to influence and contest the
decisions of not-so-democratically responsive power holders.82
By seeing the interrelationships between the truths that one speaks and the
constitution of the self that engages in critically responsive thinking, individuals
can better appreciate the malleable yet coherent identities of themselves and of
their fellow interlocutors. This can allow for both a strengthening and loosening of
allegiances to certain moral and ethical truth claims advanced by oneself and
others. Critical responsive thinking can thus open oneself and others to the
possibility of finding not-so-predictable points of accord.
As Levines research points out, individuals are often capable of such discovery
when they engage in deliberate forms of civic action.83 In the case of Stouts IAF
groups, because they valued both their bridge-building efforts and their capacity
to learn from their interactions with others, their understanding of themselves as a
78. William E. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xvii.
79. Hannah Arendt, On Hannah Arendt, in Hannah Arendt, the Recovery of the Public World, ed.
Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), 336.
80. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 27.
81. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 162. See also William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative
( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 1993), 56.
82. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 128.
106
group was flexible without being entirely amorphous. The participants understandings of what they value and of the truths they try to speak change over time
in response to the groups interactions with other groups including both the haves
and the have-nots.84 Moreover, a leaders engagement in critically responsive
thinking often is central to the leaders later decision to open the political process
to concerns that are deeper and broader than a preference for a slightly higher
wage or a slightly lower tax rate.85
However, critically responsive thinking is fraught with risk and can produce
outcomes that might be counter-progressive. Chauvinistic self-understandings
might promote fragmentation rather than meaningful solidarity. Stout reports that
IAF activists, to mitigate this risk, pursue two other forms of awareness, two other
forms of reasoning, which resemble the sorts of reasoning through baggage that lay
at the heart of Taylors work. First, the activists try to understand how and why
certain beliefs have such strong holds on participants and the ethical partiality that
follows. Second, the activists try to comprehend the ethical prisms through which
others deliberate, and how they then comprehend our deepest ethical concerns.
The first task is vividly exemplified by the following dilemma that Taylor
articulates and that many of Stouts IAF organizers acknowledge.
Im a Catholic Christian with a strong theistic outlook, and although I recognize
that its pretty clear that when you come from somewhere you get certain ideas
that you dont when you come from somewhere elsein that sense my work
reflects my standpointI nevertheless think that we can and ought to reason
with each other . That means that I have a double stance to what I write, on
the one hand Im offering a description I think other people from other
standpoints ought to accept, on the other hand, I evaluate the whole thing in a
certain way too. So I think that there is an important loss here.86
The loss to which Taylor refers involves the following aporia. When describing
the modern social imaginary, Taylor offers not only a self-consciously partial view
of that social imaginary and of the moral conflicts that transpire under it. He also,
by invoking values from the set of theistic competitors in which Taylors work is
embedded, implicitly introduces a question-begging criterion for determining a
successful resolution of the conflicts.
For our purposes, Taylors self-understanding of this aporia is quite helpful as it
dramatizes both the limits to mutual learning and the enduring partiality of any
critically reflective position. Taylor concedes that his writings, like Sources of the
Self and A Secular Age lay out,
84. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 130.
85. Ibid., 128
86. Charles Taylor, Taylor Made Selves, Interview by Alex Klaushofer, The Philosophers Magazine 12
(2000), 38.
Mark Redhead
107
unashamedly, a master narrative. The adverb bespeaks the view I hold, that we
cant avoid such narratives. The attempt to escape them only means that we
cant operate by an unacknowledged, hence unexamined and uncriticized,
narrative. Thats because we (modern Westerners) cant help understanding
ourselves in these terms.87
According to Taylor, what is important about the narrative is its hold on those
subjects living under the social imaginary whose growth the narrative charts.
Taylor, well aware of the partiality and the selective genealogy that underlie his
framing of our secular age, pleads with all of us to finally put our ontologies where
our (rhetorical) mouths are.88 This is especially pertinent for critically minded
secular thinkers like Habermas who, after constructing their own ambitious
master narrative, argue from it during their acts of public reasoning. Critically
minded secular thinkers seldom spend much time thinking about how others, who
publically reason in light of different master narratives, might respond to the
secular theorists world views.
Taylor challenges those who have the courage to become at least cognizant of
their narratives to think about how their narratives affect their receptivity to and
engagement with other public reasoners who wish to frame moral and ontological
discussions quite differently. He also encourages individuals to appreciate the
obstacles to telling non-deprecatory stories about the alterative perspectives of
ones fellow interlocutors, and to opening ones self to the many diverse ethical
orientations at play in contemporary public spheres today. Finally, Taylors
comments on his own narrative suggest how ones understanding of others can
become more nuanced and enable the rise of a discourse in which others can feel
respected and as partners in a solidarity-generating discussion oriented towards
mutual understanding.
Awareness of the roles that other master narratives play in the lives of other
democratic citizens can help deliberators better engage in critically responsive
thinking. They become more appreciative of the contingency of their own
perspective. This opens them up to the possibility that views derived from
heretofore un-consulted ethical sources and epistemological orientations might
have merit. This openness is necessary for the change in orientation that
Habermasian mutual learning seeks and that Stouts reports describe.
However, the actual practice of critically responsive thinking brings to the fore a
third form of awareness that IAF activists used and that Taylors illustration of
reasoning through baggage entails: awareness of others. Taylor notes that the
challenge of understanding the other comes
87. Charles Taylor, Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo, in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age,
300.
88. Charles Taylor, Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa, Dialogue 33 (1994), 131.
108
not from their place within our identity, but precisely from their challenge to it.
They present us with different and often disconcerting ways of being human.
The challenge is to be able to acknowledge the humanity of their way, while
still being able to live ours.89
This problem arises because citizens, whenever trying to comprehend the ethical
vantage points of other citizens, always draw on unquestioned cultural prejudices
about what it is to be human and what it means to lead a good life, even as the
citizens attempt to reflect critically upon these same prejudices.90 The more we
think we have sidelined it or neutralized it, as in the natural-science model, the
more it works unconsciously and hence all the more powerfully to ethnocentric
effect. 91 The other, as many who have been on the less powerful side of
European colonialism know quite well, is often been understood in a vocabulary
incommensurable with its own descriptors. This creates the problem of distorted
understanding.92 Habermas, as his comments on philosophys inability to penetrate the opaque core of religion reveal, is well aware of this point. Yet he is
perhaps too cautious because of it.
Distorted understanding is an intractable problem because reason itself
imposes certain demands upon us. When arguing with others (and also when
others press claims of distorted understandings upon us), we always claim the
reasonableness of our mode of argumentation. We cant treat the distinction
reasonable/less reasonable as a nonhierarchical one, because it defines how we
ought to think.93 We can, however, distinguish between better and worse social
practices in various cultures and faiths, just as we can see how historical narratives
(like the rise of secularism) can reflect moments of loss as well as moments of
progress.94 In other words, we should be able to think about the conflicts between
the requirements of incompatible cultures on analogy to the way we think about
conflicts between nonjointly realizable goods in our lives.95 By generating a
broader understanding of both ourselves and others, we can learn what aspects
of our selves are amenable to change and reconciliation with others and what
aspects are not. For Taylor, this is what the Habermasian style of mutual learning is
primarily about. It is also what Stouts organizers, when creating grassroots
collectives out of a diverse populace, cultivate.
89. Charles Taylor, Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes, in
Gadamers Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens
Kertsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 296.
90. Ibid., 284.
91. Charles Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 150.
92. Taylor, Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes, 295.
93. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 156.
94. Charles Taylor, The Future of the Religious Past, in Dilemmas and Connections, 286.
95. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 162.
Mark Redhead
109
The crucial step is comparison. Understanding of others is always comparative,

because we perceive many differences between ourselves and others prior to the
devising of any language of qualitative contrasts.96 The most effective contrasts
are ones that simply let the other be. For Stouts activists, the key means of letting
the other be for Stouts actors is listening. Through listening we learn from others,
and as others listen to us, we come to identify with the larger work of faithful
political action.97
Listening itself cannot be done passively and from a distance, however. Rather,
as IAF organizers are well aware, it requires active involvement and commitment
to a particular place and the formation of relationships in that place because
building trusting and stable relationships takes time and personal presence.98
Letting the other be through listening to them involves a good deal of micro-level
work on ourselves. We try to discern how our implicit understandings of others
distort how we perceive their realities.99 This only happens by allowing ourselves
to be challenged by what is different in the lives of other people, and acknowledging what we have to let be in order to let them be.
Listening effectively can yield two interdependent moments of clarity. First, we
can see our own particularity when we see how features of our self are, for others,
culturally unique and not indicative of some general human nature. Second, in
becoming aware of the partiality of our own perspective, we can perceive the
corresponding attribute of the other in a less distorted manner.100 The activists that
Stout describes achieve something similar by repeatedly participating in one-onone meetings with potential recruits and employing active listening. Through such
dialogues, IAF organizers reportedly are compelled to build an awareness of where
they and their potential recruits are ethically coming from. They must do this to
develop the trust needed to speak for new voices during a political struggle.
For Habermas, moderate theists achieve this second sense of clarity when they
partake of post-secular public reason and confront the partiality of their perspective via devices like his translation proviso (or Rawls own proviso), and realize that
they live in a secular world in which their perspective is in some respects nonmajoritarian. Clarity is more elusive for non-theists who dont have the burden of a
translation proviso and for whom learning is synonymous with an evolutionary
social theory. They often find it hard to see the singularity and historical
contingency of their world views unless, like Taylor, they reflect critically on the
96. Ibid., 152.

98. Ibid., 215.
99. As Taylor nicely puts it, If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not
as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be: no understanding the other without a
changed understanding of self. Charles Taylor, Remembering Gadamer, IWM Newsletter 76 (2002), 13.
100. Ibid., 12.
110
historical and cultural forces that have made their social imaginary what it is.
Non-theists easily find themselves as the frequent criticism of Rawls reminds
usplagued by the problem of always attempting to understand the theist in a
vocabulary that is foreign to the theist and, therefore, of fundamentally misrecognizing the theistic perspective.
To use Habermass language, these processes of other-understanding provide
participants with a discourse oriented towards mutual understanding, nevertheless. This enhances their self-understanding of the values and norms by which
they critique others, and also helps participants determine (and then appropriate)
what is of worth in other cultures. Participants expand their own contexts of
choice, as well as transform the perspectives through which they will then
encounter future others. Without sincere attempts at hermeneutic experiences,
the gaps in intuition will grow; and those individuals and groups who are adversely
affected by acts of public reasoning will increasingly view the acts as exclusionary.
They will view public reasoning as fragmenting, rather than as the solidaritybuilding exercises that Habermas yearns for. (Stout alludes to this problem in his
description of how a coalition can fall apart when leaders lose touch with the
ethical prisms through which constituents develop their specific political
concerns.)101
One, however, can never definitively say that he or she is truly encountering the
voice of the other, even when one conscientiously practices critical receptivity.102
No method exists for determining whether a new perspective has been acquired
and new truths grasped. One, after all, might be expressing previous biases,
prejudices, and the like in a different manner, rather than actually cultivating an
expanded horizon or an enlarged mentality. All one can do, Taylor reasons, is
apply further doses of the same medicine . Of course, in each case, something
is gained; some narrowness is overcome. But this still leaves other narrowness-es
still un-overcome.103
In other words, one must pursue reasoning through baggage further and more
deeply. This can include micro-techniques, such as what Connolly refers to as
dwelling, which involves comprehension of how we experience epiphantic
moments, as well as bicameralist thinking, which involves comprehension of
how we, as critically responsive thinkers, simultaneously activate the side of our
self that is aware of and receptive to diverse perspectives as well as the side that is
committed to advocating for our most cherished beliefs.104 Many of the IAF
activists that Stout describes similarly subscribe to a Christian version of time,
which is open to epiphanic moments of redemption and is built around bearing
101.
102.
103.
104.

Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 57.
Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 15051.
William E Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Mark Redhead
111
witness to ones deepest ethical commitments. As Luke Bretheron notes, this

understanding undergrids the possibility of meaningful participation not only in
politics, but also in the family and in work as activities open to the fulfillment of
time in Christ and so having significance beyond the immediate needs and
vicissitudes of the moment.105
In addition, IAF organizers periodically alter the formats of group deliberations
and the rituals that are use. The organizers thereby re-arrange the implicit power
structures within actual meetings and provide diverse venues through which
ordinary citizens can denounce elite dominance,106 tell stories about their lives,107
articulate their concerns,108 and listen to the concerns of others. Meanwhile, the
organizers, by empathetically listening to citizens stories in person, acquire a
better understanding of the importance and meaning of specific concerns for a
given storyteller.109 According to Stout, IAF activists could thereby reflect upon
their own understandings of the needs or truth claims of those they represent and
learn how to speak the plain truth about how things were going, but also how to
do so without being cruel or trying to score points.110 In Stouts opinion, the
activists needed to learn how to hear criticism of their own weaknesses111 from
constituents who believed that that their truth claims were being ignored.
Conclusion
Post-secular public reasoning does transpire today. Contra Habermas, it is a highly
personal activity. By partaking in critically responsive thinking, by becoming aware
of the larger ethical visions upon which they unavoidably draw, and by developing
their own micro-techniques, IAF activists offer examples of post-secular public
reasoning today. The activists show that reasoning through baggage does effectively promote mutual learning activities, cultivate bonds of democratic solidarity
among highly diverse assemblages of contemporary democratic actors, and
problematizes and sometimes justifies forms of public power.
If a global domestic politics, as envisioned by Habermas, is to emerge, it will do
so through the convergence of various efforts by activists who have found novel
ways to speak to broader constituencies. Reasoning through baggage will enable
activists to engage with people who hold ever more diverse epistemological and
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.

Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 162
Ibid.
112
ethical orientations and, thereby, to find previously unchartered but now compelling points of concord.
A key democratic challenge today, as Stout notes, is to construct effective
publics of accountability for every existing or emerging power holder, ranging
from the sheriff of a small town to the CEO of a company with workers,
stockholders, and effects all over the world. That includes local, state, and national
governments, but is hardly limited to them.112 A successful response to this
challenge will entail practices of reasoning though baggage. Because deliberative
publics are informed by a variety of ethical sources, it is incumbent on participants
to critically respond to the value orientations of other deliberators. This partly
involves reflection on what is and isnt a foundational feature of ones own ethical
optics. Such reflection will contribute to the formation of a larger public that can
engage in effective moments of calling power to account.
Connolly correctly notes that political theorists, as students of society, need to
provoke their own creative micro-practices of thinking and to appreciate how new
ethical orientations and new points of solidarity can emerge in the minds of
political actors.113 Given the numerous spiritual positions at play in contemporary
life, any moments of solidarity and any norms of accountability that deliberative
publics can foster will always be fragile. We must learn to embrace pluralism, to
live with incommensurability, and to learn from others. Then the profound
moments of overlapping consensus, which thinkers like Rawls and Habermas
yearn to cultivate, can develop, fragile though they may be.
In this paper, I have sketched some possible conceptualizations for solidaritybuilding acts of democratic deliberation that can speak to many citizens. Reasoning through baggage and cultivating an awareness of ones partiality can play
complementary roles in refining not only Habermasian post-secularity, but many
other strands of early twenty-first-century liberal democratic theory. Reasoning
through baggage can help to keep liberal democratic theory relevant in an age in
which many of its foundational beliefs increasingly seem provincial and chimerical to actors both within and outside Western polities. The challenge is to do so in
manners that engage not only those drawn from Athens and Jerusalem, but also
those whose ethical orientations lie both between and beyond these poles.
Mark Redhead is an Associate Professor of Political Thought at California State

University, Fullerton. He specializes in contemporary political thought as well as
nineteenth/ twentieth-century political theory. He has published a book-length study
of Charles Taylor as well as a longer study of reasoning through baggage entitled
112. Ibid., 258.
113. William E. Connolly, Biology, Politics, Creativity, Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013): 510.
Mark Redhead
113
Reasoning with Who We Are: Democratic Theory for a Not So Liberal Era
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). His work has been published in a variety of outlets
including Philosophy and Social Criticism, American Journal of Political Science,
Review of Politics, Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Canadian Journal of
Political Science. The author may be reached at mredhead@fullerton.edu

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Polity Volume 47, Number 1 January 2015

Reasoning between Athens and

Keywords public reason; deliberative democracy; secularity; Jrgen Habermas;

Cultivating Post-Secular Bonds of Solidarity

reminds us of the need to develop a constitutional frame for an emerging

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

What Forms of Post-Secular Learning Are Actually Happening

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

At play here seems to be an implicit assumption by Habermas that faiths hold

The problems of an unjustified asymetricality that Taylor detects belie three

40. R. Scott Appleby, Rethinking Fundamentalism in a Secular Age, in Rethinking Secularism,

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Consider the Muslim experience of European secularity, which partly motivates

operates provides many spiritual and anti-spiritual possibilities, which many

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Reasoning through Baggage

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

considerable efforts towards conceptualizing alternative manners of reasoning

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Cultivating Solidary on the Ground

Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 14.

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

The crucial step is comparison. Understanding of others is always comparative,

96. Ibid., 152.

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 101.

witness to ones deepest ethical commitments. As Luke Bretheron notes, this

Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 198.

REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

Mark Redhead is an Associate Professor of Political Thought at California State

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