An article from the Fall 2007 symposium issue of the West Virginia Law Review, Volume 110, on “The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century.” The symposium was convened by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the West Virginia University College of Law on October April 12 and 13, 2007.

As part of the series of papers from the symposium panel “Religion and Politics,” Eduardo M. Peñalver, Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, wrote on the question, “Is Public Reason Counterproductive?” In the article, “Eduardo Peñalver is . . . concerned with the proper role of religious argument in public political deliberation. He manages to shed new light on that complex and much-discussed topic by asking whether the ideal of public reason might prove counterproductive. Advocates of public reason, who insist (with varying degrees of stringency) on the exclusion of religious arguments from public deliberation, typically claim that a commitment to public reason is necessary to avoid the social instability that might otherwise result from our significant levels of religious pluralism. Peñalver argues, however, that pluralism can also enhance political stability by causing groups to moderate the demands they make of one another. Whether religious pluralism under a given set of social conditions tends to promote or undermine stability is an empirical question that is difficult to answer, but the answer has significant implications for the public reason debate. If religious pluralism actually promotes stability, insisting that religious groups abandon their native vocabularies for those offered by public reason could undermine political stability rather than promoting it.” - From Introduction by William P. Marshall, Vivian E. Hamilton and John E. Taylor.