ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Jurgen Habermas’s essay "Religion in the Public Sphere". In order to evaluate the plausibility of his account, it summarizes the basic features of the liberal view of the ethics of citizenship central to Habermas’s discussion. The chapter also summarizes the objections of Nicholas Wolterstorff and Paul Weithman that Habermas finds compelling and begin to explain his alternative proposal designed to avoid them. In his essay, Habermas points out that the liberal conception of democratic citizenship is based on the assumption that “natural reason” is sufficient to discover the moral and political obligations. According to Habermas, the most serious objection that authors such as Wolterstorff and Weithman have articulated against John Rawls’s account of the ethics of citizenship is that the obligation to provide publicly accessible reasons for political decisions imposes an undue cognitive burden on religious citizens, threatening the integrity of their religious existence.
