Religion as Source, Resource, Evaluation, and Hindrance: Intellectual Humility and the Relationship between Religion and Politics

Abstract

How ought religion and democratic politics relate to each other in a spirit of intellectual humility? This chapter suggests four potential understandings of the relationship: hindrance, resource, evaluation, and source. Each of these understandings seems to take for granted a form of Enlightenment rationality (whether in support or opposition), and the final section of the chapter develops a synthesis of Durkheim and Dewey to consider a different way through which religion and deliberative democracy can coexist, one more sensitive to the role of emotion, ritual, and contingency and thereby more open to the problem of epistemic arrogance and the necessity for intellectual humility.

Citation

Guhin, J. (2019), "Religion as Source, Resource, Evaluation, and Hindrance: Intellectual Humility and the Relationship between Religion and Politics", Religion, Humility, and Democracy in a Divided America (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 36), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 23-46. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920190000036003