Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American DemocracyContemporary debates on the role of religion in American public life ignore the overlap between religion and race in the formation of American democratic traditions and more often than not imagine democracy within the terrain of John Rawls's political liberalism. This kind of political liberalism, which focuses on political commitments at the expense of our religious beliefs, fosters the necessary conditions to open historically closed doors to black