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This paper examines the appropriateness of the use of religious language in the American political sphere. The paper will make use of public reason and public discourse theories by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and Michael Walzer. Rawls, Habermas' and Walzer's theories have ample overlap despite their many disagreements. Their primary agreement is that the highest levels of government must remain secular, a stance I adopt. However, Habermas and Walzer see religion as a part of general will formation. Religion helps to form morals and values, so completely striping religion from the public sphere would overly restrict who could participate in public debate. I agree with Walzer and Habermas on this point and argue that Rawls' public reason (without his postscript) was overly restrictive and ultimately undemocratic. I then applied my theory to examine three recent examples of religious language in the political sphere: a speech by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stating that the U.S. Constitution should better adhere to the bible; a statement opposing abortion released by the Society of Jesus; and the Supreme Court case questioning whether "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance was a violation of the Establishment Clause's rules regarding separation of church and state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alasdair MacIntyre's landmark After Virtue delivered a withering critique of both modern philosophy individualism that abandons the life of the virtues and the latter is said to institutionally embody "systematic politics" in its institutional forms (whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist) as hence its claims on our allegiance, is radically called into question because it is incapable of being Aristotelian ethics of the virtues as an alternative to Nietzschean emotivism, but its political theory local communities of virtue. In the thirty years since After Virtue, MacIntyre's philosophical ethics fundamentally a political theory of negation. I argue in this paper that MacIntyre's critique of modernity tension between the perspective of individualism and that of the common good. MacIntyre's philosophical science is not Nietzschean enough in its account of pre-modern politics and indeed not Aristotelian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]