VVAudi responds to Wolterstorff’s critique of the separation interpretation by seeking to modify that conception through consideration of state intent. Audi distinguishes his own interpretation of the separation principle from Wolterstorff’s: “if we take the separation interpretation to prohibit the state’s acting in order to promote religion and not its acting in a way that promotes religion, Wolterstorff’s dilemma can be avoided.”6 In preferring an interpretation that bans state intent of - as opposed to all state action achieving - promotion of one or any religion, Audi does two things: he gives the legislature much greater leeway to govern without concern for secondary effects of laws that might promote religious institutions or organizations, and he shifts the liberal position toward that advanced by multiculturalism - providing that the state has other, non-religious reasons for advancing a piece of legislation. Audi goes on to idealistically emphasize cooperation between religious organizations and the state as possible if and only if “each abstains from unduly influencing the other.”7 Audi therefore disavows a state policy of strict secularism—and the individual protections such a policy privileges—in favor of the possibility of (rather than Wolterstorff’s embracing of) collaboration with religious groups in education and other areas.
VVIn drawing on a theme of cooperation, Audi reflects Gutmann’s essay “Two-way Protection.” In it, Gutmann bridges the gap between liberalism and multiculturalism and argues that religious or secular reasons are also often public reasons, proposing that an extreme state dogma of secularism is counterproductive and that exceptions may be granted for the religious or nonreligious so long as the other party is not disadvantaged.8 Both Audi and Gutmann, then, blur slightly the lines between multiculturalism and modern liberalism. Audi advocates for the application of the separation interpretation of state neutrality amongst religions and between religion and non-religion, but he does so in a cautioned way. Gutmann does not explicitly distinguish between separation and impartiality in her essay, but she too pulls the two closer
together by prescribing equal access to exceptions as the means to both religious and non- religious educational ends. In terms of state funding of religious schools, then, the application of both Audi and Gutmann would dictate a policy that might benefit religious schools so long as it also gave equal benefits to non-religious institutions. Audi acknowledges that such a program might exist within a voucher system, while another option might be the provision of tax breaks or other incentive schemes for all private schools.9 Crucially, however, both of these—and any
other—options that Audi and Gutmann would find acceptable disallow the state from directly funding religious schools. Indeed, any of these relatively liberal programs would avoid structural
8886. Audi and Wolterstorff, 141-142
8887. Ibid, 143.
8888. Amy Gutmann, “Two-way Protection,” in Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 143.
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