Although it is often assumed that, in a liberal democracy, conduct of political debates as well as justifications of the decisions they lead to should not make use of religious arguments (Rawls 1991), discussions concerning some highly controversial issues have failed to meet this standard. Questions concerning human reproductive cloning and stem cell research belong to this category.
In this paper, I examine the role played by religious arguments in the political discussions concerning these questions in France, the United States and the United Nations. I first propose to analyze the arguments used in the political debates concerning these issues, comparing the United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning (2005), the American federal law banning federal funding for human cloning (2010) and the very restrictive French law banning all stem cell research (2004). Then, I aim at distinguishing between different categories of religious arguments among the arguments that were offered in each of the three cases: whereas the persuasive force of some arguments rests necessarily on the recognition of the existence of God, others arguments only use references to religious texts, images or values as metaphors or illustrations. I will finally examine more specifically those arguments that are formulated in a secular vocabulary but convey a religious content, following Habermas’s requirement of a translation proviso (Habermas 2006). I will use as an example to clarify this point the arguments made in terms of “human dignity”, that often but not always hide a religious understanding of the issue at stake.
