An uneasy marriage of necessity

Santamaria would have been happier with his latter-day followers' focus on issues of sexual and procreational morality and euthanasia, areas in which the bishops still think they can command obedience. But Catholics and other Christians have increasingly diverse and considered views on these matters, and talk of "the Catholic vote", though still influential in some quarters, is mostly an anachronism.

Abbott and others with simplistic pictures of the role of religion in public life see politics as an arena in which religion battles "secularism", but this is a dangerous muddle. An anti-religious ideology of secularism must be distinguished from the commitment to secular space for politics.

Granting such a space need not indicate contempt for religion, nor relegation of it to the private sphere, since religious people are free to announce and pursue openly their conscientious values and argue for their political implications in the public sphere. They will, however, compromise their religion and weaken the impact of their values if they behave like puppets of their religious leadership or seek to further their ends by devious or surreptitious means.

Some theorists (such as the American philosopher Robert Audi, himself a Christian) hold that liberal democracy cannot allow religious premises a place in the arena of public reasoning, but there seems to me no principled reason for this restriction. The appeal to religious premises may be unwise since it may not convince the non-religious, but some religious values can be acknowledged on other grounds by outsiders, and an open statement of one's deep values is better than offering spurious non-religious arguments as a mere tactic.

One general lesson is that religious people should bring their values into politics with a sense that the complexities of policy will often make the concrete relevance of those values a matter for interpretation and controversy, even among those who share them. Faith, reason and politics can co-habit, but there is no slick formula for their successful marriage.