ABSTRACT
The issue of religion in public political culture has received much attention and debate recently among Western academics. There are generally two approaches to this issue. Liberals question whether religion should have any part in public political culture in modern pluralistic democratic societies, since they are deeply concerned with the private-public distinction and the legitimacy of religion in public life. While facing the challenge of the liberal call for restraints on religion in political life, and the tendency to curb and even privatize religion in the public realm, their critics among religious scholars reafrm religious values and defend their expression in the public political debate. There are also some criticisms of the liberal position from a nonreligious perspective. While I refer to various scholars who engage in this debate on the liberal side, I concentrate my study on the more elaborately articulated theories presented by John Rawls and Robert Audi.
