But if you think that religions are overarching interpretations of life (even if each isn’t right in everything it claims!) that offer meaning and orientation in life (even if sometimes they are used to incite to violence and legitimize violence), then you’ll be likely to think that it is odd to bar presidential hopefuls from expressing their religious views.

Of course, you’ll want them to express those views with sensitivity and to make no attempts to impose them on others. And once in office, you’d want them to be impartial to every overarching interpretation of life, whether religious or not.

The candidates for the highest office, just as all other citizens of liberal democracies, have the right to express their religious views in public. After all, this is precisely what it means to live in a liberal democracy: Everyone ought to be able to live as they see fit. If the way people see fit to live includes bringing to bear their religious convictions on public issues, they have the right to do just that.

But more is at stake than just exercise of the candidates’ rights. It would seem disingenuous if presidential candidates did not express their religious views. If the candidates are religious, presumably their religious convictions touch the very core of who they are and shape significantly their social vision. More broadly, religious motivations are then what largely makes them “tick.” Not to know their religious views is not to know them.

But should not candidates express only “generic human values” and use only “generic reason,” rather that expressing their own particular religious views, possibly by drawing on their particular sacred scriptures? No, they shouldn’t. And they shouldn’t for a very simple reason: There is no such a thing as “generic humanity” and “generic reason” suspended over time and space, floating above tradition and culture, untouched by concrete communal memories and hopes. We cannot escape our particularities.

The consequence? There’s as much reason to bar candidates from expressing their religious views as there’s to bar them from expressing their cultural or gender views, which is to say that there’s no reason for that at all.