ABSTRACT
In philosophical terms democracy and its cognates often seem to assume the role of place-holders that carry little or no semantic information beyond the simple fact that their use expresses a positive attitude: the use of the terms denote that Mark Chater and Clive Erricker view some particular thing or process positively. On some occasions the appeal to democracy by them has some force, as when it is used as a shorthand for democratic values, say that of equality or inclusion, though their temptation is again to think that appeals of this nature ‘trump’ all other considerations. There is both contradiction and irony in Chater and Erricker’s appeal to democracy; first the contradiction. They have already been quoted as deploring any compromise between representatives of religions and religious educators because, in their view, educators should wholly determine the curriculum.
