Religion in Public Life: Must Faith Be Privatized?

Roger Trigg has written an insightful, balanced and clear-headed book on the complex topic of the relationship between religion and politics in a modern, pluralist, democratic state.  Trigg defends a role for religion in public life in modern democracies, and along the way exposes many of the fallacies at the heart of much of contemporary academic thinking on this subject.  Much of the discussion in the book revolves around a careful description of what is going on in various democratic states, both in terms of academic and elite opinion, and in terms of actual social, political and religious practices.  While the book is full of good, careful, common sense distinctions and arguments, it lacks sustained engagement with the main thinkers on religion and politics, and so is more likely to appeal to the general reader than to the specialist.  Nevertheless, Trigg’s insights make a very important contribution to this much misunderstood topic.