According to one recently influential version of liberalism, law and public policy in a democracy should be justified independently of the controversial ethical or religious beliefs that divide citizens, because political membership is coercive, involuntary and profoundly influential to our overall well-being. For children, however, the parent—child relationship shares these three salient features of the political domain: it is also necessarily coercive, involuntary and profoundly influential. In this article, I examine the case for extending the ideal of public reason to parental conduct in connection with religious upbringing. After distinguishing several senses in which the personal is political, and several modes of applying political principles to personal conduct, I reject the proposed extension, and conclude that liberalism is ultimately compatible with `fundamentalist' upbringings.
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