Challenging popular and philosophical views, I argue for three main claims. First, political leaders’ worldviews have a deep and underappreciated influence on their official conduct. Second, citizens have a robust claim right to inquire into leaders’ worldviews, and leaders have a corresponding moral duty to provide responses to such inquiries. Third, it is worthwhile for citizens to engage in such inquiry. A citizenry that took this argument seriously would engage in far more searching political inquiry.

It is often assumed that people of faith should not endorse a law for religious reasons, since such an endorsement is considered to be disrespectful. Such a position is increasingly opposed by scholars who argue that such demands unjustifiably force people of faith to compromise their religious ideals. In order to defend their opposition to such demands, some scholars have invoked thought experiments as reductio arguments against the claim that endorsing laws dependent on religious reasons is necessarily disrespectful. I argue (...) that these attempts have failed, and present an alternative thought experiment that demonstrates that such a law is not necessarily disrespectful. Because I conclude that previously proposed principles cannot defend this conclusion, I defend an alternative way of accommodating this intuition; a post-secular deliberative approach based on the principle of double effect. (shrink)