These are strong claims with powerful appeal. In India too, national narratives would trace today’s secular democracy to the foundational moment when religious freedom—taken in a broad sense, at least—was established as a political ideal. Many regard Indian secularism to be deeply rooted in an ideal of equal respect for all religions. The annual reports issued by the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom over the past several years credit the Indian achievement by noting that the constitution protects religious freedom. But they also observe that laws at the state level have restricted this freedom. The 2010 Report cites legislation restricting religious proselytizing, which it describes as “‘anticonversion’ laws,” but which are properly known as Freedom of Religion acts.

The Report’s choice of nomenclature glosses over an important debate about the meaning of religious freedom in India. Many critical observers of Indian debates over conversion argue that to interpret religious freedom to include a right to proselytize, as is normative in American foreign policy and human rights law, is to impose “a Western conception of religion and religious freedom on the rest of the world.” They argue that religious freedom so construed favors “proselytizing religions,” like Christianity, over “non-proselytizing religion,” which is more typical to India.

I will not dwell on this line of argument here except to note that it has a long and respectable pedigree. Far from confined to the Hindu Right, it is integral to a prominent tradition of Indian secularist thought: the Gandhian tradition, first articulated during the 1920s. This explains the fact, also glossed over in the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, that many “progressive” Indians support restrictions on proselytizing. In an important sense, the Indian secularist imagination took shape as an intervention in the politics of religious freedom.

What is the politics of religious freedom? As others in this series have remarked, the question hinges on what we take religion to be. Critical reflection has called into question whether it is possible to produce a sufficiently neutral definition of religion to allow religious freedom to be administered to all persons equally. But this is more than a question of majority bias—important as this question is, more is at stake than whether religious freedom is interpreted in such a way as to privilege Christians over Hindus, or Hindus over Christian and Muslim minorities. We must ask what is foregrounded when we speak of religion and what forms of politics our talk of religion might exclude. This is particularly true when we consider the politics of religious freedom outside Europe and North America.

The International Religious Freedom Reports on India only hint at this larger story. Untouchability is illegal in India, but members of the Scheduled Castes or Dalits—castes formerly referred to as “untouchable”—continue to face discrimination and violence regardless of their religious affiliations as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist. Their struggles for equality make their appearance in the State Department reports only briefly, when they involve religious conversion: “some Dalits who sought to convert out of a desire to escape discrimination and violence encountered hostility and backlash from upper castes.” But Dalits are subject to discrimination, even by their co-religionists, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim. A mere change of religious affiliation does not bring escape from caste-based discrimination. So just what kinds of practice are we talking about, using this imprecise language of “religious conversion”? What forms of political practice does our attention to religious freedom conceal?

I want to draw attention to the different forms of political struggle that have come to be sheltered under the language of religious freedom in India, but that are also obscured by it. By considering the Indian case from the vantage point of caste, I also hope to provoke a rethinking of the truism that religious freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. Critical reflections have taught us that the category religion is neither natural nor universal, but derives from a modern, European history. The history of religious freedom in India is therefore a history of (partial, incomplete) translations. I cannot do justice to this complex history in this brief post (see more in my contribution to this volume). Instead my aim is to highlight the problem of translation.

From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, the category of religion organized the colonial policy of the British government in India. It informed the colonial policy of religious toleration, and it informed the practice of extending political representation to Indians as members of communities. Indian political elites learned to speak this language of religion, and to invoke their right to religious freedom against the intrusions of the colonial state.

But in India the English-language discourse of religion was specific to the civic arena of colonial politics. Scholars have often remarked upon the divided or “bilingual” quality to colonial politics: the civic arena, which was organized by a quasi-liberal political idiom, was confined to a relatively small circle of social actors—the English-educated elites—particularly when they addressed their British rulers. Outside this narrow arena, political effort in colonial India was organized by vernacular idioms that reached deeper into Indian society and drew upon a longer history on the subcontinent. Scholars often resort to using a religious vocabulary to describe the vernacular idioms of politics outside the civic arena. But to do so obscures the labor of translation that was required when Indian actors represented their political struggles before the state.

Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, those judged to belong to low or “untouchable” castes took part in what I refer to as “ritual-political” struggles for dignity, respectability, and equality of treatment with (Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu) upper castes. Ritual-politics targeted the “meticulous rituals of power” that constituted certain caste groups as subordinate. Low castes were prevented from adopting the dress or ceremonial of superior castes, were required to show prescribed forms of deference in their postures and their forms of greeting, and were often excluded from equal access to common spaces. In the ritual-political initiatives of the low castes, these distinctions were loci of resistance, together with restriction from use of common wells and vessels, exclusion from common schools or education, debarment from owning land, forced obligations to perform demeaning tasks, and unpaid labor.

Some of these ritual-political initiatives—I have in mind the shuddhi activities associated with the Hindu reform organization, the Arya Samaj—came to be identified as “religious conversion” and, during the 1920s, became the focus of national debates over religious freedom. For the members of “untouchable” castes who actively pursued shuddhi into the first half of this decade, shuddhi was important not because of any nominal change of religious identity it brought about, but because of the way it could be made to serve the ritual-political struggle against caste oppression. But in the 1920s, Indian elites translated this politics of shuddhi into the language of religious freedom: they debated whether religious freedom should protect shuddhi “proselytizing,” or whether “proselytizing” posed an intolerable threat to peaceable relations between (in this case, Hindu and Muslim) religious communities in India. As elites translated shuddhi into the language of religion and religious freedom, the struggle against caste inequality dropped out of sight.

A great deal has changed in the politics of caste and in the politics of “conversion” between the 1920s and today. As this brief history of religious freedom in India suggests, we must ask not only what kinds of politics the active promotion of religious freedom in India might facilitate, but also what forms of politics and modes of collective action it might foreclose.

It is critical for our society that we get this normative debate right, for the stakes are high. We face increasing religious diversity. Liberal theorists, like Rawls, say that unless we keep religious reasons out of the public sphere, we could descend into a religiously motivated civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, critics of liberal theorists, like religious ethicist Charles Mathewes, say that unless we allow each other to talk about our deep differences, such as our religious beliefs, we could descend into the same nightmare that concerns the liberal theorists.

This normative debate is about what people should do in public debates, but knowing what people actually do would allow theorists to develop greater nuance in their analyses. When we see what people actually do, we can further inquire as to whether there are social structures that are pushing people toward good or bad behavior. For example, it is possible that the normative structure of the contemporary public sphere works so strongly against certain normative proposals that they should just be abandoned as utopian. Moreover, it is possible that we may gain normative wisdom from the collective practices of citizens. In any event, given the many hundreds of normative analyses, some empirical examinations may usefully agitate the debate.

One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates. A few political scientists have examined the use of religious and secular reasons by the largely evangelical Protestant religious Right. If anyone would want to use religious reasons, it would be these activists. But what the scholars find is that, in fact, the religious Right offers secular reasons for their policy proposals. This is not because they are normatively sanctioned for using religious reasons, as critics of liberal theory suggest. Rather, religious reasons do not convince people to accept one’s position. In a country with diverse comprehensive perspectives, and especially when trying to pass a national, not a local, law, it just does not work to give “Leviticus 18:22″ as your reason. The upshot of this empirical finding is that unless the U.S. public sphere becomes less religiously pluralistic, religious activists trying to enact legislation will not want to use religious reasons. The claims of the critics of public reason thus appear to be moot.

Of course, for normative theorists, the acceptability of using religious reasons depends on the proximity of the reason-giver to the creation of policy, with a spectrum ranging from citizens conversing over the fencepost about what laws should exist, through social movement activism and political campaigns, to the actions of legislators and other elected officials with actual power to enact policy. Scholars such as Robert Audi say that religious reasons should not be used anywhere along the spectrum, while others, like Chris Eberle in an earlier post, argue that religious reasons can be given by elected officials while passing laws; and Charles Taylor writes that the use of religious reasons by elected officials is fine, but secular reasons are required in the “official language of the state,” such as the wording of laws.

With this continuum in mind, the research on the religious Right suggests that near the “actual power” end of the spectrum, religious people do not want to give religious reasons, because they do not work.  If they do not work to mobilize a sub-group of citizens to  advocate for banning abortion, they are not going to be effective for forging a majority vote in Congress, which in theory is just as pluralistic as the citizenry. Thus, Eberle and Taylor seem to be arguing for a right that no one would ever use. Political scientists have found that religious Right activists still use religious reasons, but only when among members of their religious group. Given that they are not violating the basic norm of using religious reasons in public, the more subtle normative question is whether having “real” religious reasons is normatively improper.

The use of religious reasons by ordinary citizens talking over the fencepost may be different than their use by activists. I recently published an empirical analysis of whether there is a shared moral language among diverse religious people in the U.S. used in debates over reproductive genetic technologies. In one chapter, I evaluate whether people would want to refer to religious reasons in discussing reproductive genetics with their neighbors. I asked in-depth interview respondents whether one should explain one’s position on reproductive genetic technologies to a Hindu neighbor “using religious terms or secular terms.”

In my interviews, a majority of the people thought one should use religious discourse with the Hindu neighbor, with conservative Protestants being the most likely to say so. Interestingly, a majority of the secular respondents also thought that one should use religious discourse, which I will address below. The most prevalent reason given for advocating the use of religious reasons is that using only secular reasons is not possible if you are religious. For example, a Pentecostal woman said that she would use religious reasons because “that’s who I am . . . so that’s probably how it would come across.” A traditional evangelical woman said, “I can’t separate that because my spiritual beliefs influence everything I do and say. If I really feel that that’s the core of who I am, then to say, ‘it only influences me some of the time,’ is a mistake.”

This seems to be empirical support for the claim made by Calhoun and many others, such as Wolterstorff and Habermas, that people who are religious cannot separate out their religious reasons and their secular reasons—or, more subtly, that they cannot translate between the two. They have no choice but to use religious reasons.

Not quite. Like the religious Right activists described by political scientists, respondents actually wanted to start the conversation with secular reasons in order to be understood. As one evangelical said, he tries to avoid “Christian speak” because “nobody knows what the heck you are talking about.” However, if they were asked to give reasons for their reasons, then the respondents thought that eventually their religious reasons would have to be brought into the conversation, because those are “behind” everything.

There are two implications here for producing a more nuanced normative theory. First, it seems that both professional activists and ordinary religious people, including religious conservatives, want to use public reasons in the public sphere. While social movement organizations may just provide one reason, in an actual conversation between two people, reasons beget reasons. Eventually, religious reasons will be given by those who have them. If you scan the normative literature, you will be hard pressed to figure out whether giving a religious reason as a second- or third-order reason is thought to diminish the possibility of conflict or offense. A second implication is that, contrary to what many theorists maintain, religious people appear to be quite capable of translating between religious and secular reasons, as they claim to first present secular reasons, and only later the “real” religious reasons “behind” those secular reasons, in public debate.

These data speak to another normative issue. Calhoun, expanding on Habermas’s notion of translation, explores the idea that what is needed is not the translation of religious reasons into secular reasons, or the exclusive use of one or the other, but “mutual interrogation,” or a “complementary learning process” about people’s real reasons, religious or otherwise. What would happen if people started invoking their comprehensive perspectives by using religious reasons? Famously, Richard Rorty claimed that religious reasons are a conversation-stopper, because they are unintelligible to those who do not share one’s religious beliefs. So, if Rorty is correct, Habermas’s translation proposal will never work.

Ordinary religious people turn the intelligibility argument on its head. Even though religious reasons are second-order, having religious reasons and not using them is considered insincere. To actually understand the other person’s argument, you have to hear their religious reasons if they have them. As one interviewee said, “it would be disingenuous to use strictly secular terms. I wouldn’t want them to explain their decision to me without their faith being part of it, so I think we both ought to be able to use faith terms to understand the decision making.”

Interestingly, the secular respondents did not want religious people to give secular reasons. Their reasoning is: if this is how a religious person thinks, why shouldn’t they be able to talk that way? Of course, many of the secular people added that they were not going to be convinced by the religious reasons, but they would want others to offer such reasons if they wanted to.  My interview question asked about someone whom the respondent knows, whom they expect would be civil in discussion, and not someone whom they consider intolerant. This suggests that if normative theorists conclude that Habermas is right that we should engage in mutual translation, or that Calhoun is correct that we should pursue “transformation” through conversation about our deep differences, at least the religious people in the U.S. seem willing to engage in translation or transformation with people they know.

This is but a sampling of the normative insights that can be developed from the limited existing empirical data on the use of religious reasons in the public sphere. It would be helpful for normative theorists to identify the critical empirical questions that they have, and for empiricists to discuss with them what is actually possible to determine. Working together, the two groups could really shake up the debate about this critical social issue.