How Religious Belief Can Play a Role in Politics

What role, if any, should moral and religious beliefs play in the arena of politics? The question is a perennial one and will likely remain so, especially in a polity as religiously diverse as the United States and as internally divided on issues from abortion and religious liberty to, more abstractly, the proper role of fairness in economic decision-making and of compassion in criminal justice and immigration reform. All of these matters are rendered still more difficult to address given that some deny the relevance of moral concerns altogether, insisting that political questions can be resolved pragmatically, without reference to notions of good, bad, or ideal.

Lenn E. Goodman, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University and a noted scholar of Jewish and Islamic thought, has pondered and written about these matters for nearly a half-century. By learning and temperament, he is exceptionally well equipped not only to consider in what ways religion can or ought to inform public debate, but also to flesh out what a religiously informed politics might look like.

This is exactly what Goodman does, sequentially, in his two most recent books, Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere (2014) and Judaism (2016). The former volume lays the ground for a pluralistic conception of politics responsive to moral and religious arguments; the latter embodies that conception in a specific example.