In this essay, Nick Spencer unpacks the role of religion in public debate. Is there really any difference between a religious and non–religious argument? 12/06/2024

About the essay

What role should religion play in public debate? In particular, what role should it play in complex political debates like that over assisted dying?

For some, the answer is as little as possible. Objections to religious contributions to the assisted dying debate claimed that they were either (1) intellectually inadequate, (2) insufficiently willing to compromise, (3) inadmissible in a secular culture, or (4) dishonest about their motivations.

This essay tackles each of these criticisms and argues that while religious arguments can be guilty as charged, they need not be and, in this debate, that they rarely were. In this respect, they are little different from non–religious arguments.

The essay looks at what role religion actually played in the assisted dying debate and in doing so, it answers a question that is more assumed than understood: what even is a “religious reason”?

You can read the essay here.

About the author

Dr Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the author, most recently, of The Landscapes of Science and Religion: what are we disagreeing about? (OUP, 2025) He is host of the podcast Reading Our Times.