Abstract

Richard Rorty interpreted religion as a historically constituted part of culture. As a philosopher, he sought primarily to understand religion’s socio-cultural nature and role. His approach was socio-critical, intellectually sympathetic and humanistic. The paper provides an account of Rorty’s key phases in his philosophy of religion. During phase one, he was primarily interested in whether, in a democratic society, religion should simply be a private matter or also one of public concern. During phase two, his thinking on cultural politics developed more broadly, and he wrote about ‘romantic polytheism’ and the future of religion, etc. In his writing from phase one, he portrays himself as a ‘secular humanist’ as well as an atheist and, in his writing from phase two, as a ‘non-theist’ and ‘anti-clericalist’.