Liberal-democratic citizenship and religious schools

A limited conception of liberal-democratic citizenship (LDC) ought to constrain the capacity of the state to ensure its own social reproduction to the detriment of other communities, including a religious community (RC). RCs may prioritize their own social reproduction over the development of LDC, or establish separate confessional schools to preserve themselves against a dominant culture that threatens to assimilate them. While neither the state nor the RC’s claim to social reproduction has first-order priority over the other, RCs in a democratic society may have a second-order interest in allowing some democratic regulation of schooling in order to preserve the political community of which they are part. Any limits to the autonomy of religious schooling rely not on the congruence of RCs to LDS values, but to a much more modest standard, a domestic analogue to the recognition Rawlsian liberals afford to “decent hierarchical societies” on the international sphere.