Religion, Enlightenment, and a Common Good
Religion, Enlightenment, and a Common Good
This chapter examines the fate of “religion” in the Western “settlement” or regime of tolerance. It looks into how people choose between “science” and “faith,” as if the two are irredeemably driven to collide. It first explores two contrasting views of liberal monism, namely, the Lockean and the Rousseauian. For John Locke, one can be a citizen of each so long as religion means freedom of conscience rather than strong institutional loyalty to an autonomous religious body that engages society in all its aspects and is itself a particular form of governance. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau however, the solution was that societies require a civil religion that buttresses the legitimacy and authority of the civic republic in order to attain common good. The chapter relates the discussion of the views to the internationalization of human rights and the powerful drive toward democracy.
Keywords: religion, tolerance, science, faith, John Lock, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, freedom of conscience, civil religion, common good, human rights
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