Religion and Civil Society: A Critical Reappraisal of America's Civic Engagement Debate

This article looks at some of the cutting-edge issues that have been raised in the current civic engagement debate, notably with respect to the role played by organized religion in reviving America's democracy. The framework used to analyze the relationship between religion and civil society borrows from Arendt's, Habermas's, and Rawls's writings in political philosophy. In its core analytical claim, the article draws a division between a discourse-based deliberative democracy and one that is based on participation in mostly local communities and associations. In this context, the author contrasts a social-capital approach to understanding the role of religion and civil society with one that emphasizes the primacy of political relations and hence the importance of political capital. The purpose of the article is to provide a critical framework that can be used by theoreticians and practitioners, facing issues of management and political activism in an organizational environment, in which religious values and secular guidelines increasingly overlap.