JEFFREY STOUT IS DEEPLY concerned about the implications of the increasing polarization of American life for democracy. In his important recent book Democracy and Tradition, he sets out to trace the fault lines of this conflict and to advance a position that moves past the dominant alternatives that now jockey for position. We are increasingly confronted, Stout argues, by two "very abstract, oppositionally constructed positions": an authoritarian version of a new religious traditionalism and an "antireligious form of liberalism" (10). He rightly notes that "each of these positions thrives mainly by inflating the other's importance" (10). Their destructive dance endangers the flourishing of democratic life that depends essentially upon the "democratic exchange of reasons." Any