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Democracy and Tradition Democracy and Tradition by Jeffrey Stout Princeton Univ. Press, 2003 348 pp. $35

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that religion was one of many possible guards that could help keep democratic societies running on their rails. Religion, Tocqueville saw, would offer ethical boundaries to potentially amoral democracies. Religion would ensure that democratic citizens were trained in a disciplined life, that their hearts and values were directed towards something other than self-interested material gain. In general, religion would contribute to the formation of good democratic citizens.

Tocqueville, of course, wrote at a time when Christian language was commonplace. A pervasive, if ill-defined theism explicitly shaped both legislation and public talk. Few democratic thinkers argued that the republic would be better off if stripped of its religious patina. Even fewer Christians argued that the churches would be better off if they withdrew from the political sphere (though Tocqueville thought otherwise).

Assumptions have changed. Many contemporary thinkers have challenged the relationship Tocqueville put forth between religion and democracy. Secular philosophers like Richard Rorty have insisted that theism is bad for democracy. With them, some Christian theologians have insisted that democracy is bad for theism.

If religious language still pervades democratic conversations, its authority, and even its propriety, is strongly contested. In recent years, pundits of all stripes have been debating the place of Christian claims in civic life. What role—if any—do religious people and their religious commitments have in the public square?

This conversation, it must be admitted, occasionally gets boring. But it is a necessary conversation, one essential to sustaining democratic culture. The question of how, without surrendering your particularities, to speak in a democracy to people with different particularities is in some ways America's founding question, and recent debates over the public meaning of marriage (not to mention Howard Dean's mealy-mouthed attempts to position himself as religious by locating Job in the New Testament) suggest its perennial urgency. We have more particularities to keep track of now than we did when Tocqueville toured America.

Enter Jeffrey Stout, religion professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy and Tradition, an elegant and artful new book that reinvigorates the conversation about religion and the public square. Stout is not a Christian, but neither is he a rabid secularist. To the contrary, Stout wants religion to be included in public democratic conversations. Democracy must include deep moral commitments, and religious people can usefully contribute to the articulation of those commitments. If for no other reason, says Stout, all citizens would benefit from a "lengthy, even leisurely unfolding" of our philosophical and ideological commitments, secular and religious alike. Such an "unfolding" would allow us to understand both ourselves and our neighbors better.

The "place at the table" metaphor is much overused—Christians are always insisting that they want a place at the table where they can speak, muse, and chew as Christians. But here the metaphor is apt, because Stout's undeniable accomplishment in Democracy and Tradition is to have modeled an etiquette under which Christians and non-Christians can speak to one another about matters of the common good. Democracy and Tradition is a manual of sorts for speaking across the divide: we Americans must realize that some of our neighbors possess very different commitments from our own. Stout asks people to hold on to their commitments—if perhaps sometimes a little more loosely than some are prepared to do.

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