ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the legacy of the rhetoric works in contemporary elite and semi-elite discourses, particularly ones designed to attenuate the influence of "religion" on "politics". It refers to these as the four "justifications for the exclusion of religion": public justification, private affair, they are naturally a special threat to the state, they are merely partisan. In Religious Commitment and Secular Reason, Audi discusses at length the exclusion of religious reasons from public justification. The sort of emphasis on theism was a typical feature of definitions of religions formed during the Enlightenment, which made Christianity the prototypical religion, and judged other traditions against it. Most importantly, the opposition between "religion" and "state", deployed in the cases in which "state" is opposed to some private, apolitical spirituality, should be abandoned because it maintains the belief that the powers of non-state institutions are somehow separable from the powers of state institutions.
