The religious problem with religious freedom, Robert Joustra explains, is a reflection of the contested character of the religious and the secular, both as to ideas and practices. Joustra identifies no fewer than six rival versions of the two, in the US and Canada alone. The result is the complete absence of consensus on either the preferred relationship between the religious and the secular or what constitutes legitimate political authority. Several of the models assert a neutral, rational and secular public space but these are split between models of laicité that legitimize only a secular politics and others holding that the values of democratic politics derived from Judeo-Christian roots, which remain essential to the health of liberal democracies. Beyond these more familiar models, Joustra describes the relativistic “New Critics” (Canadian) model that identifies both secular and religious as fluid and discursive, and as a result can identify nothing fixed in their relationship and nothing more than a local space for political legitimacy.
His final, and preferred, model is a neo-Calvinist-derived principled pluralism which concedes the “essentially contested character of the religious,” but argues that this can generate the tolerance necessary for constructive secular policy making, because, as it were, our mutual conceding of the sheer fact of one another’s religious practices, and related commitments, can make room for us to agree on some common principles for negotiating civic life and making public policy. He compares this position favorably with the artificial neutrality imposed by open and closed laicité and by inclusive and exclusive Judeo-Christian secularism models, and with the ambiguity of the New Critics model, which fails to offer any reliable guidance on the religious liberty question.
In this summary are contained the essentials of the problem of religious liberty, as Joustra presents them. Although profound public policy implications are evident from both the summary and the two early chapters that summarize the work of the U.S. and Canadian offices devoted to religious freedom—the latter now defunct—and the debates and disagreements these offices generated, the professed focus of the book is not foreign policy per se but the theory of international relations.
For this reason, what follows is a presentation of the “religious problem” through an account of a history of the religious and the secular, which demonstrates both their interdependence and the very late arrival of modernity’s situating of the two as mutually exclusive. Only in the latter, historically abnormal, situation is religion rendered individual, interior, private, disembodied, and capable of divorce from the saeculum. The longer view shows it to be both shaped by and a shaper of the very concept of nation-state sovereignty. Joustra’s positing of religious liberty as an essentially contested concept derives as much from this historical context as from the divergent models he discusses.
Two themes, then, emerge in this book. The divergent models of religious and secular and how they might relate explain the importance of the search for a solution to the contemporary problem of religious liberty for which Joustra will articulate and defend principled pluralism. But their emergence against the history of religious and secular just summarized, calls for a prior undertaking, namely, the revisiting and recovery of political theology, a neglected field of international relations theory. Therein lies the book’s sophisticated contribution: Joustra wants to do more than offer another model of church-state relations; he wants to reconstitute the intellectual project of international relations, in the style of Philpott, Toft, and Shah’s God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (NY: Norton 2011).
But what is political theology, exactly? Joustra traces its origins to the work of Carl Schmitt writing in the 1920s, with his argument that “all significant concepts of modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Readers will catch here the older understanding of religion itself before its modern individualizing and privatizing addressed earlier. Joustra appreciates Philpott, Toft and Shah’s definition of political theology, namely, “the set of ideas that a religious actor holds about what is legitimate political authority,” but readers will immediately understand that this cannot go far enough for Joustra against the historical background of interdependency between religious and secular he has laid out, hence his own definition: “the understandings and practices that political actors have about the meaning of and relationship between the religious and the secular, and what constitutes legitimate political authority” (italics in original).
We now see that the essentially contested character of religion is not merely a concession to divergent contemporary models of church-and-state, but seeks to do justice to the history of religious and secular. And because principled pluralism respects that history in the way it understands religion, the argument for reconsidering religious liberty through principled pluralist lenses assumes enhanced legitimacy.
How does principled pluralism comprehend religion? It understands that everyone practices religion in some fashion, so it is vital to avoid “monopolizing the public logic, religious or otherwise, by which actors articulate their support for (principles of public life).” Moreover, religious beliefs are doxological, profoundly shaped by worship and religious practices generally. This is not a term Joustra employs but it captures well the embodied, communitarian, “lived” character of religion that principled pluralism’s forebears, notably Abraham Kuyper, took for granted, a perspective that enabled Kuyper to affirm the universality of the religious as a basic manifestation of human living, and to seek to accommodate its multiple expressions in policy debates and consideration of political structures.
Joustra’s principled pluralism gives us a diversity state whose principles for common life intentionally privilege no single religion but will reflect the composite of historical and contemporary religious practices in the nation-state in question. Joustra recognizes that principled pluralism’s very respect for diversity may leave it with public principles that are, in Oliver O’Donovan’s critique, too thin, and he does not minimize this risk, but in the end prefers the broad, inclusive space created by the diversity state.
Joustra may concede too much on this point. Principled pluralism does have a lengthy track record. Consider what Jonathan Chaplin has called “the only successful postwar political movement anywhere in the world explicitly committed to a sophisticated and well-articulated version of normative pluralism,” namely, European Christian Democracy. Christian Democracy embodied those principles in an appreciation of the importance of civil society institutions (and complementary limits on the state), best expressed as the (Catholic) principle of subsidiarity; and realized a confessional pluralism in such policy realms as education and electoral systems. The latter, for example, do not exclude “those diverse others who are unable or unwilling to accept the conditions which make [principled pluralism] possible” (97). Instead they essentially exclude themselves if their canvass for votes is unattractive to the democratic citizenry. This record may have merited some attention and assessment.
The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom is compact—a mere 130 pages of text—and much has to be assumed about what the reader will already know, even as the writing is lucid and the arguments well presented. This, presumably, is not a problem for the upper division undergraduate or graduate student, but the informed layperson may want to take an excursion or two into the wealth of material on which Joustra relies—God’s Century comes immediately to mind, as does O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations, to name but two works from the extensive bibliography.
In closing, it is appropriate to return to Joustra’s purpose in writing this book. Provocative as its framing of religious liberty in the context of political theology and international relations theory proves to be, the penultimate chapter on the practices of principled pluralism delivers a complementary, practical payoff in the form of a robust set of guidelines for diplomats, complete with budgetary specifics and advice. Mounting a defense of the late Canadian Office of Religious Liberty, Joustra argues that principled pluralism’s advocates “need to build the confidence of the bureaucracy and foreign service, find strategic partnerships on ongoing projects with which to supplement religious literacy and training, and principally allay concerns of laicist and Judeo-Christian advocates alike that such training and integration with foreign affairs is essential to practical policy making in twenty-first-century policy” (133). The tenor of this welcome work is found in these sentiments.