Fall 2025 SCP Work in Progress Talks
Joshua Thurow | Published on 11/3/2025
Here is the schedule for the SCP work in progress talks. Each talk will be at 3pm eastern time.
Nov 14 - Jaclyn Rekis, "Can Religious Proselytizers be Epistemically Harmed?"
Dec 5 - Marilie Coetsee, "Religion, Revolution, and Democratic Neutrality"
Dec 12 - Daniel Rubio, "Is Theism Compatible with Patchwork Principles?"
Here's information on the upcoming November talk:
Jaclyn Rekis, "Can Religious Proselytizers be Epistemically Harmed?" The talk will be held here: https://meet.google.com/qeq-sdgk-vcx
Abstract:
Religious proselytizing has a bad rap. More strongly, to some, the very act of attempting to convert another to one’s religion may seem outright wrongful or harmful. Perhaps it is wrongful or harmful because it is coercive, manipulative, epistemically arrogant, exploitative, or some such. At least, when it is coercive, manipulative, etc., proselytizing lives up to its bad reputation.
There are many ways to parse out what exactly makes proselytizing wrong when it is wrong, and many ways of understanding what harms can be incurred by the one being proselytized to (the proselytizee). This is no doubt important, for both moral and legal reasons, to think through. However, there must also be cases where it is not wrong to proselytize, for it is simultaneously thought to be a great good that people have the opportunity to freely attempt to persuade others of the truth as they see it, and religious proselytizing is but one form of such persuasion. We indeed should expect and perhaps even desire that proselytizing occur in liberal and tolerant democracies where people have different conceptions of the good, and may benefit from sharing them with one another, as John Stuart Mill famously thought (1978).
Not only must it not always be wrong to proselytize then, but we may, insofar as we believe we hold the truth and that others might benefit from it, have a duty to proselytize. And for some religious persons, this duty is not only grounded in the values constitutive of liberalism just mentioned, but comes directly from their religious doctrine. Perhaps most well-known is the Christian call to proselytize according to Christ’s command in the New Testament that believers spread the gospel.
This article takes for granted the prima facie good of proselytizing, and asks not how the proselytizee can be harmed, as is often the focus of those writing on how proselytizing can go wrong (Battin 1990; Newman 1972, 1982, 1986; Novak 1999; Lebens 2021). Instead, I ask how the proselytizer, when misunderstood (or something along these lines) can be harmed, and so consider how proselytizing can go wrong in the opposite direction. There are many ways to parse this harm out, too, I think, but one particularly illuminating, if challenging, way that I explore here is how religious proselytizers can be harmed epistemically. My thesis is that proselytizers are harmed epistemically when they are falsely understood to be coercing others with their beliefs, of ‘forcing’ them on others, when they are not, and are thus thwarted in the communicative act of attempting to persuade. I argue that this faulty perception of what proselytizers are doing is owed to features of the social imaginaries constructed by liberalism and secularism, and particularly, their overlap, which sustain pernicious ignorance over what religious persons as proselytizers are in fact doing in their attempt to persuade.