Consensus,convergence,and COVID-19: The ethical role of religious reasons in leaders’ response to COVID-19

The practical argument for religious appeals

Religious communities have had mixed responses to COVID-19 public health guidelines. While many have been willing to abide by those guidelines, a significant number have also appealed to their religious commitments as reasons for resisting them. Thus, for instance, while many Christian churches transitioned from using in-person to online weekly services, the US also saw massive protests to state mandates to close weekly religious services that were based on the religiously-grounded conviction that churches are “essential businesses” that should be treated as on a par with grocery stores and laundromats (which states permitted to stay open; Gjelten, 2020). In the global context, the world also saw religious institutions take very different approaches to, for example, the performance of religious pilgrimages. While Saudia Arabia imposed severe restrictions on Muslims’ hajj pilgrimage to the Ka’ba in Mecca, religious clerics in Iran resisted governmental and global advisories to shut down religious shrines in Qom. Insider videos later showed massive numbers of dead bodies in bags in Qom’s morgues because there was (reportedly) no room left for proper burial sites for the many who had perished from COVID-19 (Singh, 2020). Leaders who are able to engage with those who resist COVID-19 policies on religious bases by offering them counterposing religious reasons that point in favor of compliance may be able to save lives that would, but for such compliance, likely be lost.

As the examples in the last paragraph begin to suggest, the significance of appealing to individuals’ religious commitments in the context of a highly contagious disease like COVID is especially pronounced because many faith-based practices are oriented around public rituals and gatherings (Durkheim, 1912/2008). ¹ These may take the form of weekly meetings—like the Friday prayer celebrated by Muslims, or synagogue or church services attended by Jews or Christians, respectively, the celebration of holy days (like, for example, the Hindu celebration of Holi), or other religious commemorations and rituals like wedding ceremonies or pilgrimages (for instance, the Muslim hajj to Mecca). These public gatherings not only serve as potential sites of “super-spreader” events that put the religious attendees at risk, but also make all those who come into contact with those attendees in other contexts vulnerable to exposure. Moreover, masses of people are committed to the religious traditions that encourage participation in these public practices.

While secularly-oriented academic settings may easily leave researchers and scholars with the impression that religious believers represent only a minority of voices in global society, this is far from being the case. Worldwide, a vast majority—about 84% of the world’s population—ascribe to a religious tradition (PEW, 2017). According to PEW estimates, there are roughly 2.3 billion Christians (1.3 billion of whom are Catholics), 2 billion Muslims, 1.1 billion Hindus, 0.5 billion Buddhists, 0.4 billion followers of traditional folk religions, 25 million Sikhs, 10 million Jews, and 34 million adherents to the Baháʼí, Jain, Taoist and other smaller traditions. Only 16% or 1.2 billion people assert no religious affiliation. Given the large numbers of individuals who subscribe to religious commitments, and the ways in which these commitments encourage them to engage in publicly interactive practices, it is incredibly important for leaders concerned with public health to be able to secure religious believers’ endorsement of best practices related to highly contagious and deadly disease like COVID-19. Indeed, scholarly studies like those undertaken by Ngwa et al. (2017) on the spread and containment of other diseases, like cholera, highlight how important aligning public health practices with individuals’ religious commitments can be to promoting public health outcomes.

Appeals to religious beliefs to encourage compliance with COVID policies can take many forms. In some cases, such appeals may cite faith-based injunctions and practices that are (even within the context of the tradition) specifically targeted to the promotion of health. For instance, Iranian leaders working in Qom at the time of the outbreak could have appealed to sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadiths) like “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the if plague outbreaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhari (n. d.)) or “those with contagious diseases should be kept away from those who are healthy” (ibid: 5773–5775). Leaders may also make reference to historical religious figures and practices that religious believers might be inspired to emulate. For instance, leaders working with resistant Christian followers could make reference to Martin Luther’s sixteenth century treatise on the importance of being pro-active in the fight against the bubonic plague that racked his community (Miller, 2020), and those engaging with Muslim individuals might make reference to the Arba’iniya, a practice of taking 40 days of isolation after exposure to a contagious disease that was recommended by Ibn Sina (980–1037) and later referred to and adopted by merchants from Venice as the practice of “quarantine” (Hatim, 2020).

Additionally, appeals to religious reasons may make reference to general moral principles like, for instance, the Jewish and Christian mandate to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (VanderWeele, 2020), the Buddhist injunction to emulate the bodhisattva’s spirit of compassion (Sang, 2021), the Hindu virtue of daya—which concerns the desire to mitigate the suffering of others (Devgun, 2021), or the Muslim principle of darar—which highlights the importance of avoiding injury to others (Mustafa, 2014). Even when religious practitioners are not fully convinced of scientific reports of the harms of COVID-19 (e.g., its contagiousness and salient mortality rates), or the benefits of vaccination, appeal to these principles may encourage believers to cooperate with COVID policies by drawing attention to the moral significance of causing even (allegedly) “small” chances of harm to others by being unnecessarily incautious. Finally, a leader might highlight to religious individuals their commitment to religious practices that, although perhaps not originally oriented towards physical well-being, turn out to have beneficial health outcomes. For example, she might appeal to the Buddhist practice of greeting others by pressing one’s hands together in front of one’s chest as a hygienic alternative to shaking hands (Sang, 2021). ²

Despite reasons for thinking that appeals to religious commitments could contribute to the achievement of morally desirable social outcomes like the containment of COVID-19, leaders working in secular contexts may feel wary of using religious appeals as a means to achieve those outcomes. In the sections following, I consider arguments offered by prominent liberal political theorists that may be able to explain the moral motivations behind this hesitance. I then go on to contend that these arguments are ultimately unpersuasive.

Before getting to the substance of my argument, however, one might reasonably ask why—even if one is concerned primarily with outcomes—other means of persuasion would not work just as well, or better, to effect the same morally desirable results. For instance, why should leaders aiming to stem the spread of COVID-19 not simply focus on ramping up the publicization of scientific research supporting relevant public health directive, it is important to first note that a pure focus on scientific research regarding the potential harms of the spread of COVID-19 does not provide an argument for why relevant stakeholders should comply with COVID mandates absent some appeal to premises that explain why they should care about the prevention of those harms. To explain why individuals should care about the prevention of those harms, moreover, leaders will often need to rely on moral premises—concerning, for example, individual responsibility for promoting the common good. Since many individuals look to their religious commitments as sources of moral guidance, pure appeal to scientific research is unlikely to be effective without some reference to salient, religiously-informed, moral ideas.

Second, in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) where—whether due to historical colonial oppression or otherwise—governments have not been able to provide average citizens with much formal scientific training, citizens may have comparatively less access to, and so reason to trust, the advice of scientific experts than they do the moral recommendations of their religious traditions. In these contexts, appeals to religious commitments may be all the more important to motivating compliance. Sturgis et al. (2021), for instance, find that in populations where there is a lower level of consensus around the trustworthiness of scientific institutions, individuals are significantly less likely to be confident about getting vaccinated, and a majority of countries in which they find such a lack of consensus are low and middle-income. Insofar as, for example, many of these countries have Muslim majority populations, it stands to reason that appeals to Islamic principles and practices may be particularly fruitful.

Of course, it is not only citizens in LMIC countries that may be skeptical of COVID recommendations that scientific institutions put forward: in the US, conservative Republicans report significantly less trust in scientists (AAAS, 2018), and are comparatively more likely to resist relevant recommended COVID policies, than their more liberal Democratic counterparts (Wright, 2021). In the last half century, religious voters—particularly white evangelicals—have increasingly identified with the Republican party (Putnam et al., 2012), and so appeals to religious values may help persuade this segment of the American public to comply with COVID policies. Whereas religious appeals may function in some LMIC countries to counteract a lack of trust in science that is rooted in a lack of scientific education, religious appeals aimed at these conservative American believers are more likely to function as a (partial) remedy for suspicions they harbor about biases that (allegedly) influence scientific institutions and the policy recommendations they issue (Goldenberg, 2021; Levy, 2019). Even among Republicans and Democrats with the same level of scientific education, Republicans appear to be significantly more skeptical than their Democratic counterparts about, for example, vaccines (Joslyn and Sylvester, 2019) and consensus views on climate change (Funk and Kennedy, 2016). In fact, Kahan (2015) shows that among conservatives, higher scores on the Ordinary Science Intelligence scale actually corresponds with higher rates of rejecting consensus views about climate change—apparently because scientifically educated conservatives are more likely to trust their independent critiques of “established” scientific views. Rather than being grounded in a general ignorance about, or rejection of, “scientific” knowledge as such, conservative voters’ resistance to scientific experts’ policy recommendations seems to be better explained by their belief that those experts’ claims are distorted by bias: on many issues, conservative Republicans are significantly less likely than liberal Democrats to have confidence that scientists will “act in the interests of the public,” report findings “even if they go against the sponsor of the research,” and give “impartial” evidence on matters of public debate (AAAS, 2018: 19).

In the case of COVID policies, there is at least strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that conservative religious believers’ skepticism about those policies is predicated on the assumption that relevant scientific “experts” act in collusion with a hazardous secular, liberal political agenda. Contending that the public ought to be guided “faith not fear” (Tallman, 2020), some evangelicals allege that public health leaders fail to put appropriate trust in God’s protective providence, and aim instead to utilize the disease as an excuse for a political grab for power or (more generally) a justification for liberal governmental overreach (Babie, 2021; Dias and Graham, 2021; Neuberger, 2021; Starr 2020; for background, see also Perry et al., 2020). In this context, leaders who are able to show how relevant COVID policies can be justified by reference to religious values—for example, love of neighbor (Vander Weele, 2020)—may be able to relieve the suspicion that those policies must necessarily issue from self-interested or liberally biased political motives. Other researchers have found that conservatives are more likely to accept global warming statistics when they are framed in a way that highlights their compatibility with conservative free-market values (Dixon et al., 2017; see also Hart and Nisbet, 2012), and so it is reasonable to expect that presenting COVID policies in a way that highlights their congruence with conservative religious values may facilitate greater acceptance of those policies than could be procured through arguments that are formulated in more purely scientific terms.

Political liberalism and the “Exclusivist” approach to religious reasons

Even when the ends one aims at are morally praiseworthy, not all means of achieving those ends are equally morally commendable. Thus, it would be intuitively inappropriate for political leaders to induce citizens to conform with COVID policies by adding compliance-inducing hallucinogenics into the public water system—even if that could significantly slow the spread of COVID. Prominent political theorists who advocate for what has come to be termed “public reason” liberalism explain this intuition by arguing that civic leaders should respect citizens as rational, autonomous moral agents. Drawing on the moral insights of Kantian ethical theory, they contend that the expression of such respect calls out for those leaders to engage with citizens’ powers of reason—their abilities to appreciate evidence, and to make logical inferences and judgments on the basis of that evidence—when attempting to gain their compliance with salient public policies As a result, they argue, leaders should “publicly justify” those policies by appealing to reasons that citizens can reasonably be expected to accept in the process of justifying their enforcement of those laws (see Gaus 2003 for an overview). While public reason liberals’ theories are addressed to evaluate the ethics of political leaders’ conduct, their theories apply in predictable ways to leaders who are, like political authorities, charged with settling on and enforcing policies that others are compelled to abide by. The principles of public reason liberalism suggest that leaders should only adopt policies that followers could be reasonably persuaded to autonomously endorse, and that—in the process of justifying those policies—they should thus appeal to reasons that those followers can reasonably be expected to accept.

Public reason liberals would argue that, just like it would be a violation of individuals’ rational autonomy to induce obedience to COVID policies by way of relying on compliance-inducing hallucinogenics, so also it would be a violation of that autonomy to induce such obedience by way of, for instance, pressuring individuals into accepting the tenets of a particular religious tradition that is friendly towards those policies. Of course, I have not claimed that leaders should use that strategy; instead, I will suggest only that they should appeal to religious justifications as reasons for why citizens who already accept particular religious commitments should also comply with COVID mandates. Nevertheless, some public reason liberals—in particular, “exclusivist” political liberals who draw on the work of John Rawls (a central political philosopher of the last half-century)—may object even to this limited reliance on religious reasons. In this section, I outline political liberals’ argument for excluding appeals to religious reasons as grounds for why citizens should comply with public policies, and apply that argument to cases where leaders more generally may (or may not) rely on religious reasons to persuade individuals to adhere to COVID guidelines.

Political liberalism and “public” reasons

Rawls begins his argument by pointing out an apparent paradox that arises in trying to formulate a conception of justice that shows respect for the importance of citizens’ political autonomy in a consistent and coherent way. In alignment with the Kantian principles outlined above, Rawls argues that such a conception of justice must be able to earn the free assent of (at least) “reasonable” citizens—but, as he points out, it must also simultaneously protect their rights of free thinking and liberty of conscience. Rawls suggests that these two requirements seem to undermine each other. When liberty of conscience is protected, then (according to Rawls), the “burdens of judgment”—roughly, the everyday obstacles and complexities involved with reasoning about difficult, abstract moral, religious, and philosophical questions—will lead even reasonable citizens who desire to cooperate with each other on fair terms to hold conflicting “comprehensive doctrines”—that is, conflicting religious and philosophical worldviews about what constitutes a “good,” flourishing life and about the standards of personal morality one should adhere to achieve that life (1993: xxxix, 56). As Rawls suggests, this “fact of reasonable pluralism”—that is, the fact that the operation of the burden of judgments lead even “reasonable” citizens to ascribe to diverse comprehensive doctrines—seems, on the surface, to prevent such citizens from being able to mutually assent to a common conception of justice. It appears, then, that a conception of justice that protects freedom of conscience won’t be able to remain mutually accepted (even among “reasonable” citizens), and that a conception of justice that wants to remain mutually accepted can’t allow freedom of conscience (ibid: xxxix).

To resolve this paradox and thus to maintain a way to consistently show respect for citizens’ political autonomy, Rawls proposes that political leaders should justify public policies by reference to what he terms a “political” conception of justice (ibid: xlff). Rather than appealing to controversial ideas from citizens’ varied comprehensive doctrines, a political conception of justice works up its content from shared resources implicit in the public political culture of a democracy (ibid: 100, see also 199–200), including, for instance, the concepts of political freedom and equality and (as Rawls puts it) forms of reasoning “found in common sense” and well-established “methods and conclusions of science” (ibid: 67, 224). Though a democratic regime that protects liberty of conscience cannot interfere with the formation of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines, it can legitimately regulate the content of the public political culture. Thus, Rawls suggests, a political conception of justice whose content is worked up from ideas implicit in the public political culture of a democracy can be mutually accepted among “reasonable” citizens, even in a regime that protects their liberty of conscience. Since (according to Rawls) the value of political autonomy can only be consistently respected if public institutions rely on such a shared, political conception of justice to justify public policies, political leaders who respect others’ political autonomy will only offer justifications for public policies that are drawn from such a conception. Rawls calls these justifications—which draw only on shared political values, “common sense” and well-established scientific conclusions—“public reasons,” and concludes that political leaders should not appeal to controversial premises from comprehensive religious, moral, or philosophical doctrines (ibid: 212–254). At least on standard interpretations of Rawls’s view, the Singaporian government’s deployment of Islamic reasons (regarding the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings) as justifications for why citizens should comply with COVID-19 policies was thus impermissible: those reasons could not be commonly accepted by the religiously diverse “reasonable” citizens residing in Singapore who would be subject to those policies.

Insofar as leaders of secular or public institutions are, like political authorities, charged with settling on and administering COVID policies that religiously diverse groups will be compelled to abide by, the arguments discussed above make it relatively clear why they should not rely on reasons that find home only in some one, particular religious comprehensive doctrine to justify the imposition of COVID policies. Such reliance on principles drawn from a particular religious doctrine would not be “public” reasons, and so would deprive other, reasonable members of a group of grounds on which they, too, could also freely consent to those policies.

One difficulty with Rawls’s argument is that it does not make clear why leaders cannot appropriately make use of any religious reasons at all to help gain support for COVID policies. Even if respect for citizens’ autonomy requires that, for instance, civic leaders in Singapore should not appeal only to Islamic principles to persuade citizens to support COVID policies, it is far from obvious why his argument would imply that they could not appropriately appeal to Islamic reasons along with a variety of other scientific and religious reasons that other citizens can accept as bases for accepting those policies. Indeed, as we will see in the next section, this is precisely the kind of “inclusivist” approach to religious reasons that convergence theorists suggest. According to these theorists, public institutions do not show any objectionable disregard for individuals’ autonomy if they draw on a variety of (unshared) religious and philosophical reasons as grounds for why different citizens should commonly “converge” on the same policy proposals. Before discussing this “inclusivist” convergence approach in more detail in the next section, however, I close this section by examining why political liberals have typically rejected it and thus continued to insist that religious reasons should be excluded from the repertoire of public justifications for why citizens should comply with public policies like those aimed to stem the spread of COVID-19.

Public reasons, sincerity, and the exclusion of religious reasons

In Quong (2011) Jonathon Quong provides a more in-depth defense of Rawls’s “exclusivist” argument regarding the use of religious reasons in processes of public justification. According to Quong, the underlying principle that calls out for the public justification of policies—that is, respect for other’s autonomy—requires more than just that leaders offer others considerations that those others believe count as reasons to accept a policy. Rather, Quong’s argument suggests, respect for other’s autonomy also entails a Sincerity Requirement: it makes it important that the reasons that leaders use as means for persuasion be reasons that those leaders themselves regard as plausible (ibid, Chapter 9). Since, in a pluralistic society, a given leader may reject the religious doctrines of relevant followers as implausible, it follows from Quong’s argument that she should not appeal to such doctrines as though they served as actual reasons for why others should abide by COVID policies, for example, a policy to require COVID-19 vaccinations. Indeed, according to Quong, appeal to such reasons would in this kind of case constitute a form of manipulation rather than a method of genuine justification of her use of power to her constituents.

Why might respect for others’ autonomy ethically preclude a leader from relying on considerations—including, in particular, religious considerations—that she does not herself sincerely regard as plausible? To illustrate the answer, consider an example. Suppose that a family tells their young child, Sam, that Santa Claus exists and that—whether by fluke or malintent—Sam’s belief is never corrected, so that he grows up continuing to believe in Santa and trying to please him. Suppose further that Sam comes to believe that Santa Claus wants him to get a COVID vaccination. In this situation, a leader—say, an employer—could use appeals to Sam’s beliefs about Santa Claus to persuade him to accept a policy requiring vaccinations. However, insofar as that leader believes that Sam would be accepting that policy on the basis of false considerations and phony reasons, making reference to claims about Santa Claus as “justifications” for why he should comply them appears to amount to a form of insincere manipulation. After all (as far as this leader would be concerned) in making the salient appeals to Santa Claus, she would not be offering Sam any genuine reasons for assenting to COVID policies at all. Instead, she would (it seems) be taking advantage of—and so manipulating—(what she regards as) his false beliefs; she would purchase his cooperation, but only by handing him play money. Quong’s argument suggests that, even if this leader’s appeals to Santa Claus were successful in coaxing Sam to abide by her COVID policies, they would still be morally problematic for the same basic moral reason that reliance on compliance-inducing hallucinogenics would be: in both instances, the salient strategy of “persuasion” would still seem to treat Sam as a passive subject to be subdued into compliance, rather than genuinely expressing respect for him as an equal, rationally autonomous agent.

Neither Quong nor Rawls themselves contend that religious beliefs are in fact implausible or irrational in the way that Sam's belief about Santa Claus is. To the contrary, they attempt to remain neutral on that issue because—as mentioned in the prior explanation of Rawls’s original argument for exclusivism about religious reasons—they want to insist that the burdens of judgment make it possible for reasonable, conscientious citizens to come to hold to diverse religious and philosophical views. Nevertheless, Quong highlights that this very diversity will lead many leaders to reject religious doctrines as untrue and implausible. If his Sincerity Requirement is correct, then it would follow that such leaders should not appeal to religious reasons as bases for why others should accept COVID policies.

Preliminary objections and responses to political liberals’ “Exclusivist” approach

Even if, as Quong’s Sincerity Requirement suggests, leaders who reject a particular religious tradition’s doctrines should not personally utilize appeals to those doctrines as a means of persuading relevant religious followers to comply with COVID guidelines, one might press Quong by asking why the Sincerity Requirement should stop leaders who do belong to the same tradition as salient religious followers from doing the same. For example, even if secular public officials in Singapore should not make appeal to Islamic reasons, what about the ethical constraints of sincerity stop religiously committed public officials within the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore from doing so?

Here, Quong may respond by arguing that such appeals to religious reasons by religiously committed leaders are still problematic insofar as they occur in the context of institutional structures that involve a religiously diverse constituency. For one thing, Quong might contend that insofar as, for example, secular citizens see themselves as represented by the Singaporian government—of which the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore is officially a part—then, when religiously-inclined leaders within that government agency appeal to (what those secular citizens regard as) “spurious” religious arguments to coax their religious peers into “submission,” that will undermine the former, secular citizens’ ability to sincerely relate to the latter, Islamic citizens (who they know are targeted by those arguments) on terms of equal respect within the context of their shared governmental institutions. Second and relatedly, Quong might argue that insofar as a leader represents a religiously pluralistic group, the members of that group ought to be able to sincerely “stand behind” and endorse the language that he uses in his capacity as a leader of that group. To draw on the beliefs of a particular subdivision of the group as grounds of public justification for a policy would, Quong might argue, betray a kind of disrespect on his part for other members of the group who are therein deprived of the ability to feel fully and genuinely represented by his leadership.

Even assuming that political liberals are able to offer an adequate reply to this last concern about whom the sincerity requirement applies to, other problems for their approach still arise. One moral drawback of Quong and Rawls’s “exclusivist” conclusion about religious reasons in the context of COVID-19 policy is that—for the reasons discussed in the Practical Argument for Religious Appeals section—it may hinder a leader’s ability to most effectively stem suffering and death from the disease. Here, it is particularly relevant to highlight that while political liberals often assume that appeals to scientific results—at least, ones that are not controversial within the scientific community—will be commonly acceptable to citizens from a wide variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds (Rawls 1993: 67, 224), the discussion at the end of the Practical Argument for Religious Appealssection suggested that that is not always the case, particularly in contexts of lower and middle-income countries where science education is less well developed. If leaders appeal only to (allegedly) “shared,” neutral scientific reasons then—especially in these contexts—that may thus not produce the level of compliance with COVID policies that could be achieved by including appeals to religious reasons, and lives that could have been saved may be lost.

While political liberals might well lament this negative extrinsic outcome of their approach, they may still also continue to defend its intrinsic moral merits by suggesting that citizens who do not accept COVID policies on the basis of scientific reasons—and require specifically religious reasons to be persuaded to comply—are acting unreasonably in doing so (Kappel, 2021). Since (as noted above) political liberals think that it is only morally essential that “reasonable” citizens should be able to give their autonomous consent to public policies, the (alleged) “unreasonability” of resistant religious citizens would function (within political liberals’ framework) to morally “offset” the negative outcomes that result from those citizens’ failure to accept salient COVID policies. However, especially in the context of the lower and middle income countries that I drew attention to in the section on “The Practical Argument for Religious Appeals”—where citizens may not have been able to get the kind of formal scientific education that would justify automatic trust in scientific experts—citizens may be completely “reasonable” in not simply (blindly) accepting the recommendations of those experts. More generally, it does not seem “unreasonable” for citizens to want ethical reasons to supplement purely scientific, empirical claims in arguments that are meant to guide their reactions to those latter claims, nor for them to seek out such ethical reasons that connect with their most basic religious commitments.

Convergence theory and “inclusivist” approaches to religious reasons

In light of the difficulties with political liberal’s “exclusivist” approach to the use of religious reasons, one may wish to seek out a more religiously inclusive alternative. “Convergence” theorists like Kevin Vallier and Gerald Gaus (2009; see also Vallier 2014 and Gaus 1996, 2010) provide such an “inclusivist” option. Vallier and Gaus distinguish themselves from “exclusivist” political liberals like Quong and Rawls—who they label as “consensus” theorists—by rejecting the idea that citizens must consent to public policies on the basis of shared, religiously neutral, “public” reasons. Instead, convergence theorists hold that it is enough for diverse members of the public to be able to “converge” on the same policies on the basis of different justifications that are motivated by different comprehensive doctrines. Convergence theorists thus conclude that, for instance, government leaders in the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore might well be morally justified in making appeals to Islamic reasons as justifications for why Muslim citizens should comply with COVID policies, so long as Singaporian officials also provide other citizens with other moral and scientific reasons that they too find adequately plausible for why they should comply.

This “convergence” approach to public justification has the benefit of potentially producing morally superior results for public health in that it has the potential to reach and persuade a wider variety of religious citizens to comply with COVID guidelines than political liberals’ more “exclusivist” alternative. However, convergence theorists argue for their approach on the basis of its intrinsic moral qualities, rather than (just) its morally beneficial outcomes. Like political liberals, convergence theorists subscribe to the basic principles of public reason liberalism: they hold that respect for citizens’ civic autonomy requires that public policies should be publicly justified to citizens by way of appeal to their capacities for reason. As a result, convergence theorists would—like political liberals—reject approaches to enforcement that rely on, for example, merely drugging or manipulating others into accepting policies, regardless of the potential for morally beneficial outcomes (see, e.g., Gaus 1996: 139). That granted, convergence theorists offer a wider, more inclusive conception of what an appeal to an individuals’ capacity for “reason” can involve than political liberals do. As we will now see, this allows them to deny political liberals’ claim that secular or differently religiously committed leaders’ appeals to others’ religious reasons must by necessity amount to manipulation.

Convergence theorists begin their argument by pointing out that it is possible to regard someone else’s belief as false and nevertheless also acknowledge that, in arriving at that (“false”) belief, he employed a respectable and reasonable process of reflection that serves to give him rational justification for believing in the way he does (Vallier 2014: 103ff and Gaus 1996: 30ff). More specifically, Gerald Gaus argues that secular (and differently religious committed) individuals’ can regard others’ (“false”) beliefs as rational in the sense of being “openly justified” (Gaus 1996: 30ff). To regard someone as “openly justified” in holding to a belief, one need not regard that belief as true; on the other hand, however, not simply any claim—religious or otherwise—that an individual sincerely believes will count as “openly justified” for him. Rather, according to Gaus, openly justified beliefs are (roughly) beliefs that rationally cohere with each other, and that could be rationally maintained given the addition of adequate, easily attainable information together with basically reliable processes of inference (Gaus 1996: 30–32; see Billingham (2016) for helpful discussion). So long as one regards (say) someone else’s religious belief in God or the prophethood of Mohammad as being “openly justified” for him, convergence theorists suggest, one can also reasonably regard his acceptance of that belief as an expression of his exercise of rational autonomy. Moreover, so long as one can appreciate and respect that that individual’s acceptance of that religious belief constitutes a manifestation of his exercise of rational autonomy in this way, convergence theorists hold, appeal to that belief as a basis for why he should comply with COVID policies constitutes a positive expression of respect for him as a rational autonomous agent, rather than a manipulative pretense designed merely to secure his submission.

The requirement that leaders should only appeal to considerations that are (at least) openly justified for those they are concerned to persuade rules out manipulative uses of “reason” like that that appears to be at issue in the case where a leader appeals to Sam’s beliefs about Santa Claus as method of procuring his assent to COVID policies. Because Sam’s belief in Santa Claus could be straightforwardly corrected by easily attainable information, it would plausibly fail to qualify as “openly justified” to Sam in Gaus’s sense. However, the kind of religious commitments that leaders might appeal to to persuade religious followers to comply with COVID policies need neither be—nor (as a result) be regarded to be—like Sam’s belief in Santa Claus.

To begin, consider the variety of religious principles that concern the importance of non-injury and compassion that were cited in the Practical Argument for Religious Appeals section—for example, Jewish and Christians principles like loving your neighbor as yourself, the Hindu principle of daya, or the Muslim principle of darar. These ethical principles have wide resonance between religious and secular traditions, and it should not be difficult for secular (and differently religiously committed) leaders to recognize that those who grow up in a religious tradition may arrive at these principles in ways that approximate the manners in which their own, similarly general moral principles have also been reasonably and reflectively developed. Like in the secular case, religious individuals who accept these general moral principles are not typically simply brainwashed or hypnotized into accepting them. Instead, they normally come to endorse these principles because of, for instance, how they cohere with the examples given by morally virtuous exemplars—in the religious case, religious saints, prophets, or members of the religious community—or moral stories or parables which are, in the religious case, often contained in scriptures or holy texts. Secular (and differently religiously committed leaders), should thus be able to regard others’ commitment to these general, religious moral principles as reasonable and “openly justified” in much the same way as they would regard their own moral commitments to such general principles as justified.

Second and more generally, both philosophers of religion and theologians working within various religious traditions have gone to great lengths to formulate rational arguments for the plausibility of the central doctrines of their “faith,” including both inductive and deductive theoretical arguments for the existence of a deity (or deities) and (where applicable) historical arguments concerning the relationship of that deity (or deities) to more particular scriptures and practices. ³ While many religious believers may not initially come to their beliefs by way of an examination of these philosophical and theological arguments, those arguments can still serve to render their beliefs openly justified in Gaus’s sense because “open justification” is tied to a counterfactual about what an individual would be able to rational maintain given the addition of adequate, easily attainable information together with basically reliable processes of inference. The existence of carefully worked out, rational arguments like those developed by philosophers and theologians makes it the case that an individual’s belief in the core tenets of her tradition need not—like with Sam’s belief in Santa Claus—be easily undermined by the addition of new, quickly attainable information or the use of basically reliable processes of inference. Moreover, insofar as a person’s belief in a central religious tenet—for example, let’s say, the prophethood of Mohammed—is openly justified, that person’s acceptance of more specific propositions that follow from belief in that central tenet—for example, acceptance of Mohammed’s directive to not enter a land where one has heard of an outbreak of a plague (see the Practical Argument for Religious Appeals section)—will also be rendered “openly justified.”

Third and finally, even when individuals’ religious commitments depend on sources that are more difficult for outsiders to immediately appreciate as consonant with norms of rationality—say, for instance, commitments that are based in religious experience or trust in religious authorities, texts, or practices—there is an extensive literature in contemporary philosophy of religion that offers detailed analyses of how reliance on these sources can, despite initial appearances, accord with rationally coherent standards of belief formation. For example, Christopher Eberle (2002) and Alvin Plantinga (2000, 2015) make careful, thorough arguments comparing the epistemic merits of religious individuals’ trust in their sense or experience of (a particular conception of) God with that of our ordinary trust in our other senses and rational capacities, for example, our sense perception and memory. A key insight that Eberle and Plantinga bring to the fore is that—whatever the rational merits of the former processes of religious belief formation—they do not appear to present any special problems as rational bases for belief-formation that are not also shared (in one way or another) by the latter, more “ordinary” processes of belief formation that religious and non-religious individuals regularly rely on.

Regardless of whether others’ religious commitments turn out to be correct, contemporary scholarship in philosophy and theology gives us good reason to think those commitments need not be “irrational” in the way that “faith”-based commitments are often assumed to be. To the contrary, there are many ways in which those commitments can be reasonably recognized to be consonant with basic norms of rationality. So, while it has become culturally commonplace to refer to individuals’ religious commitments as “faith”-based, and to off-handedly define “faith” as in opposition to “reason,” we need not give into this cultural construct or—as a result—treat leaders’ appeals to others’ religious reasons as morally problematic forms of manipulations of violations of respect for rational autonomy. Even secular leaders and followers working within secular institutional contexts should be able to understand appeals to religious reasons as expressions of respect for religiously-committed persons.