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21 results

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Making Religion Safe for Democracy
  • Transformation from Hobbes to Tocqueville
  • J. Judd Owen
  • Published online:
    05 January 2015
    Print publication:
    18 December 2014
  • Does the toleration of liberal democratic society mean that religious faiths are left substantively intact, so long as they respect the rights of others? Or do liberal principles presuppose a deeper transformation of religion? Does life in democratic society itself transform religion? In Making Religion Safe for Democracy, J. Judd Owen explores these questions by tracing a neglected strand of Enlightenment political thought that presents a surprisingly unified reinterpretation of Christianity by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. Owen then turns to Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the effects of democracy on religion in the early United States. Tocqueville finds a religion transformed by democracy in a way that bears a striking resemblance to what the Enlightenment thinkers sought, while offering a fundamentally different interpretation of what is at stake in that transformation. Making Religion Safe for Democracy offers a novel framework for understanding the ambiguous status of religion in modern democratic society.

  • The Struggle between “Religion and Nonreligion”: Jefferson, Backus, and the Dissonance of America's Founding Principles

  • J. JUDD OWEN
  • Journal:
    American Political Science Review / Volume 101 / Issue 3 / August 2007
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    26 July 2007, pp. 493-503
    Print publication:
    August 2007

  • The prevailing view of both the U.S. Supreme Court and liberal theory in America is that liberal principles are neither essentially religious nor essentially secular, but somehow foundationally neutral, or in the words of the Court neutral between “religion and nonreligion.” This essay challenges the cogency of this view through a comparative examination of two strong defenders of religious freedom from the American revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Backus. Jefferson, the Enlightenment rationalist, and Backus, the Calvinist-Baptist, may initially seem tailor-made for this foundational neutrality, but closer examination reveals that religious freedom for them was not only an extension of their radically opposed views on religion but also an instrument for the promotion of those views throughout society. The ambiguity of America's founding principles is best understood, not through the notion of neutrality, but as the product of a yet unsettled struggle between devout religion and secular Enlightenment.

  • The Task of Liberal Theory after September 11

  • J. Judd Owen
  • Journal:
    Perspectives on Politics / Volume 2 / Issue 2 / June 2004
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 June 2004, pp. 325-330
    Print publication:
    June 2004

  • The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, presented liberal societies with grave practical challenges. Yet, they also exposed the single most profound theoretical challenge since liberalism's origins: the challenge of illiberal revealed theology. Today's challenge is, in fact, a variety of liberal theory's original antagonist. The radical renewal of this old challenge, in a form markedly different from that which the early liberal theorists faced, requires fresh consideration from liberal theorists today.J. Judd Owen is the author of Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism and is working on a book entitled Religious Apathy and the Democratic Citizen. He thanks Peter Ahrensdorf, Robert Bartlett, Jennifer Hochschild, John Owen IV, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms.

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