Religious Reasons and Public Reason: Recalibrating Ireland’s Benevolent Secularism

Abstract

Liberal regimes in the West are not homogeneous in their application of secular principles. What kind of “secular” state a particular government promotes depends in large part on the strength and influence of the majority religion in that region. This article acknowledges the heuristic value of a recent threefold taxonomy of secularism: passive, assertive, and benevolent forms of secularism. I take issue with and challenge certain institutional privileges granted to the majority religion in one benevolently secular regime, the Republic of Ireland. I consider how benevolent secularism, while remaining benevolent toward religion, can align its application of secularism in the arena of publicly-funded education (primary and secondary education). A politically liberal regime, defined by the idea of public reason, invokes the principle of publicity, namely, that discourse and public policy be intelligible (and acceptable to a large degree) not only to an individual’s religious or moral community but also to the broader collection of members who constitute a liberal state. Drawing on John Rawls’ conception of public reason, and using Ireland as a case study, I show how this particular state-religion interrelation can be recalibrated in order to increase the prospects of reconciliation with a secular space of public reason.

Blumenberg’s Problematic Secularization Thesis: Augustine, Curiositas and the Emergence of Late Modernity

“…For standard volumes on secularization theory that remain relevant if contestable, see (Luckmann 1967;Berger 1969;Martin 1978;Wilson 1969). For a discussion of the Irish landscape on this score, see (Rivera 2020).…”