I only nitpick because, as I say, I wish to use the same critique myself! Your point about the religionS is right on the money too. In my own doctoral work on martyrdom it is precisely this distinction I am trying to draw: the ‘authentic’ Christian practice of martyrdom is quite different from the tribalistic and damn-the-lot-of-you versions of religious martyrdom that our secular neighbours are so revolted by.

There’s a question here of course for theologians to discuss about the ‘ontology of peace’ and so on, but some other time perhaps.

But beyond that, I would also note a few things: (1) Lilla’s restatment of the old myth of religious violence and secular/liberal/democratic peace seems to be prone to its own selective attention to “the phenomena.” It seems pretty clear that secular, and even liberal/democratic regimes, have been the cause of no shortage of violence and bloodshed in the 20th and 21st centuries. (2) The myth rests not only on matters of historical reconstruction, but assumes a distinction that is difficult to maintain: viz., that one can distinguish a thing called “religion” from other sorts of socio-political phenomena. And it’s not only Bill Cavanaugh that calls such neat & tiday distinctions into question. Consider, for instance, Daniel Dubuisson’s _The Western Construction of Religion_; (3) The religious violence/secular peace myth also needs to contend with sociological phenomena which suggest that religion is also clearly a very concrete motivating force for peace. Are there any secular pacificsts left? In contrast, consider the tireless work of Anabaptist, Quaker, and Catholic peacemaker teams who put themselves in the way of violence for the sake of peace. Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that “religion” is a category so broad as to be meaningless; we ought to attend to particular religionS, and even particular strains or streams within particular religious traditions. Only such fine-grained analysis can help us make sense of how “religion” can inform such different practices. For instance, if one asked whether “Christianity” caused violence, our ‘instrument’ (so to speak) would not be calibrated to see that Southern Baptist Christians are very different from Mennonite Christians. Not even our traditional socioligical categories like “conservative Protestant” or “evangelical” would be fine-tuned enough to register that distinction.

Of course Stout is very critical of how other “political theologians” like Milbank and Hauerwas carry out their projects. I didn’t suggest otherwise. (I also think Stout’s critique is mistaken, but can’t unpack that here.) But what’s interesting about Stout’s critique vis-a-vis Lilla is that when it comes to their accounts of “rationality” (and political rationality in particular), it seems to me that Stout is on the side of MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank regarding the conditions of reason. Where they disagree is in determining what this means for the shape of discourse and practice in a pluralist state; in other words, they have very different strategies for pursuing “the common good” (Stout, I guess, would think that Hauerwas, Milbank, et. al. are just not interested in the common good; I think that’s mistaken).

In short, I don’t think Lilla’s “political philsophers” just neatly map onto Stout’s “Emersonian democrats.”

Stout, as I read him, is committed to something quite different. While it is true that a kind of soft relativism animates Stout (i.e. “justification as a contextual affair”), democracy is precisely a practice of exchanging reasons, and citizens are to be praised for getting their own kind of clarity about the place of religion in politics. Some will be Emersonian, with a priority on self-reliance as the first democratic virtue. Others will be Augustinian, much more prone to what Lilla calls political theology.

Far from being left alone to enjoy their own “faith,” Augustinians should be joined in ethical dialogue by Emersonians, according to *Democracy and Tradition* (and surely Stout is Emersonian himself). In this exchange, Stout certainly hopes for a fusion of horizons, and fully expects reasons to continue to govern the way secularists, religious folk, and those who inhabit the muddy middle narrate the past and construct the distinction between licit and illicit religion in the public square.

My question is: I don’t think ‘as William Cavanaugh has demonstrated’ is really true. He makes an enticing alternative reading of the so-called ‘wars of religion’, but he hasn’t really done the historical legwork, that I have seen, to make his claim into a demonstrable lay-down fact in the way you suggest here.

I wish he had, or that someone would!