We Believe These Truths: American Democracy's Humanistic Political Ethic of Belief

In We Believe These Truths: American Democracy's Humanistic Political Ethic of Belief, I argue that scholars whose work that relates religion and democracy in the United States generally miss American democracy's doxastic, hermeneutic, and dialogic dimensions—dimensions which are crucial for adequately capturing key aspects of its relationship to religion. I draw on and develop John Dewey's theory of democracy and Michael Walzer's theory of interpretation and social criticism to develop a hermeneutic and dialogic theory of democracy that can better capture these aspects of the relationship between religion and democracy in the United States. I apply this theory of democracy to the religious social criticism of John Courtney Murray, S.J., Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and John Dewey, and show how it helps capture these dynamics. Doing so, I show how American democracy's ideal of popular sovereignty implies a humanistic axiology and I demonstrate how this humanistic axiology is in fact a "public" axiology whose underdetermined form both enables and requires hermeneutic mediation between democracy's humanistic axiology and those of diverse religious, moral, and philosophical worldviews in American society. The idea at the core of this hermeneutic, dialogic, and doxastic approach to democracy is that religious social critics, drawing as they do on their own traditions, can and do help democracy understand itself better, especially in response to the challenges to freedom, equality, and inclusivity which it regularly confronts. I show that American democracy gives rise to political prophets who remind us what democracy requires us to believe and what that belief looks like in real terms.