Last week we listened in on an internal debate among voices on the political and religious left reacting in long letters to *The Nation* (March 12). Respondents took on author Ellen Willis, who had spoken up for "Freedom from Religion" (February 19).  Willis re-reacts.

She claims she did *not* write a broadside against religion at all. She thanks Rosalind Petschesky, Arthur Hertzberg, and dissenting Catholic Frances Kissling.  (Kissling, not quoted here last week, had laudedWillis for giving ammunition against the Catholic hierarchy which, Kissling says, is repressive and misuses power.)  For the rest, she deals with her critics.

Her attack, she claims, was not against religion but "against the broadside attack on secularism and secularists, particularly the claim that secular society is antidemocratic and violates believers' rights."  She claims to have acknowledged some contributions by the religious left to political movements.  And she joins those who "favor a secular society and are not religious in the conventional sense [but] have their own conceptions of the quest for transcendence."

Contrary to Parker, whom we did quote, Willis does not think that "religious and democratic sentiments are mutually exclusive."  But she attacks people like Yale law professor Stephen Carter, whom she hears saying that "democratic government should make special accommodations to religious belief *because* of its absolute nature." Willis goes on:  "Parker has me saying democracy has thrived by preserving clear boundaries between public and private, thereby minimizing conflict between secularism and religion.  My point is essentially the opposite:  that minimizing religious-secular conflict depended on confining the practice of democracy to a narrowly construed public, political sphere, and that the spread of democratic principles to 'private' life -- especially sex, gender and childrearing-- has greatly intensified the conflict."

Against Eric Michael Dyson, also not among those quoted in last week's*Sightings*, she agrees that the clergy had a big role in civil rights, but they had no monopoly, and that secularists had their part.  And she defends Enlightenment-based moral claims.

Rarely have we devoted two columns to one source, but debates on religion within the left are fairly rare and there are so few journals like *The Nation* representing the left that we take special notice.  Not likelyto be noticed as regularly as it ought to be: despite the whining of many religionists that secularists dominate the debates and run the country, we find the vocal among them on the defensive, having to explain themselves. If religion was ever a "private affair," it has indeed "gone public."