grounds a “hopeless” effort.10 By Wolterstorff’s conception, school prayer could be considered defensible only when the majority preferred its presence.
VVAgainst this blatantly majoritarian and heavily conditional argument, Audi proposes a liberal “principle of secular rationale.” Audi describes the principle as one of those that he believes help ensure civic virtue, and he defines it as demanding “that one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts human conduct unless one has, and is willing to offer, adequate secular reason for this advocacy or support.”11 Weithman criticizes this principle, proposing that a religious person’s advocating of policies based in her own religious convictions is reflective of a different democratic ideal than the one on which Audi argues. For Weithman, it is a question of balancing a desire for a society in which no person is constrained by another’s religion with an ideal of a society in which no person’s practice of her faith is inhibited.12 Indeed, this interplay lies at the root of the tension in liberal democracies that multiculturalism seeks to redress, but the imposition of prayer at the heart of religious observance policies step beyond Weithman’s free exercise-based argument.
VVWhile this philosophical underpinning remains important to the debate, this paper is concerned more with determining the practicality of multiculturalist policies. Citing known educational or other benefits as possible justifications for a policy mandating prayer in schools, Audi posits that application of this principle in state decisions may reduce conflict and tension between religious groups and between the religious and non-religious.13 Notably, neither Wolterstorff and Weithman’s multiculturalist nor Audi’s liberal arguments completely disavow the possibility that mandated regular religious observance periods in state-funded schools may not or may, respectively, be morally acceptable. Wolterstorff depends on the majority’s opinion, while Audi leaves room for prayer or meditation if such acts are deemed beneficial—on non-
religious grounds—to the children that they would engage.
8810. Audi and Wolterstorff, 97.
8811. Ibid, 25
8812. Paul J. Weithman, “The Separation of Church and State: Some Questions for Professor Audi,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991), 63-64.
8813. Weithman, 28
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