Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship
Chantal MouffeContrary to what many liberals had predicted, instead of becoming ob-
solete thanks to the development of ‘‘postconventional identities’’ and
the increasing role of rationality in human behavior, religious forms of
identification currently play a growing role in many societies. Yet the
question of what should be the place of the church in a liberal democ-
racy is a burning issue in several of the new Eastern European democra-
cies. It seems, therefore, that the old controversy about the relationship
between religion and politics, far from being on the wane, is again on
the agenda.
My aim in this paper is to examine some of the issues related to
this debate from the point of view of the model of agonistic pluralism
that I am currently elaborating. I hope to be able to show that this
model provides a better framework than many versions of deliberative
democracy for acknowledging the role played by religion in the forma-
tion of personal identity and the consequences that this entails for
politics.
Liberal Democracy as Agonistic Pluralism
In order to situate my reflection and to avoid misunderstandings, a few
general remarks concerning liberal democracy are needed at the outset.
First, I consider it important to distinguish liberal democracy from
democratic capitalism and to envisage it in terms of classic political
philosophy as aregime, a political form of society that needs to be de-
fined exclusively at the level of the political, leaving aside its possible
articulation within an economic system. Understood in those terms,
liberal democracy is much more than merely a form of government,
since it concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations. It refers to a
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