Although our pluralistic culture tends to assume that there must be a wall between religious and "secular" ethics, with only the latter variety having a proper role in public bioethics, this is not really true. Moreover, a good deal of communication is possible between religiously based and "secular" or philosophical ethics. Specifically religious themes and stories can even play a part in stimulating the moral imagination in groups with no shared religious tradition. Let me address each of these points in turn.

Our political culture maintains a fairly strict separation of church and state, in order to promote individual liberty and tolerance in our common life. Religious dogma, it is feared, might be imposed illegitimately, and lead to the suppression of minorities and of the right of every person to follow his or her own conscience. Therefore, we tend to divide religious morality from the "secular reason" that supposedly sets the standard for public policy and biomedical decisions in pluralistic settings. Ethics committees, of course, exist in such settings. They typically bring together persons from diverse personal, moral, and religious backgrounds, who must analyze some urgent practical problem and arrive at a consensus position. Ethics committee members rarely, if ever, use specifically religious arguments. When they do, such arguments may well be seen as inappropriate.

But we should not assume that hospital ethics committees can and should insulate themselves from the influence of religious beliefs and ideals. The authors of the U.S. Constitution had fresh memories of the wars of religion and of the religious persecutions that had torn apart Europe in the centuries immediately preceding the founding of a new nation on this continent. However, the founders' very prizing of individual conscience and freedom had roots in Christianity and in the seventeenth-century British social contract theorists, like John Locke, who explicitly linked their views of citizenship and society to religious values. (It should also be noted that neither their religious backgrounds nor their political values prevented our founders from limiting liberty and the pursuit of happiness to Euro-American males.)

The values of autonomy and privacy that are often assumed to be "rationally self-evident " and thus legitimately "public" and "secular" are in reality themselves tradition-based values. They are important and relevant to biomedical decision-making. But they are neither neutral and tradition-free, nor the only values that should govern the deliberations of ethics committees. Other important values include human life and health, family relationships, and the common good (including justice in access to healthcare resources).

Religious communities and commitments can help sensitize us to dimensions of ethics beyond autonomy, dimensions which are fundamentally important components of human life and society. For example, religious doctrines of creation, sin, and salvation represent the finite and fallible nature of human beings, and they remind us that we exist in relation to other beings and to a realm of meaning that transcends merely human projects. Specific churches' practical moral teachings remind us that such values should take concrete form in the ways we conduct our lives and relate to others. Although the exact nature and application of such norms may have to be debated among people coming from different religious and moral traditions, this is not a problem for religiously derived norms only. There is no community-free zone of moral neutrality into which ethics committee members, for instance, can enter to resolve differences. That can only be done through a process of persuasion and compromise, where all participants respectfully listen to one another's moral insights and gradually enlarge the sphere of what is shared in common. Religious beliefs, moral formation, and personal experiences will influence the perspective one brings to this process.

Many of the moral insights of religious traditions, like those of other kinds of communities, can be expressed in language that speaks across the boundaries of cultural and moral differences, evoking engagement and response. For instance, "image of God" can be expressed as basic respect for others, "love of neighbor" as an ethos of compassionate service to the sick and suffering, and "the preferential option for the poor" as social justice that moves first to include the most marginal members of society. All of these also limit the role of market incentives in medicine and encourage caregivers to place "autonomy" in the context of a network of support and genuine care.

In this task, even specifically religious language and stories can sometimes stimulate listeners to look at situations and options in a new way, in which values like the above will seem more real and compelling. I have heard stories about figures in the Hebrew Bible and parables from the Christian New Testament told in an evocative way by bioethics committee members to colleagues of varied faiths, or who consider themselves thoroughly secularized. The effective storyteller is always modest and often humorous in recounting the tale, but inevitably receives a sympathetic hearing even from the confirmed atheist. Religious traditions capture the collective wisdom of the past and invite an affective, emotional, and very human type of moral discernment to which no abstract theory could do justice. Not everything that goes into the moral dimension of a religious commitment can be translated into a neutral common vocabulary. One reason for this is that no such thing exists. Another is that religion involves a whole way of life of which moral behavior is but a part. But every moral viewpoint is tied at some level to experience and to practices of a moral community. It is best to understand the task of ethics committees as the achievement of agreement and judgment that includes joint perspectives in reaching common ground, without abandoning the roots or particular identities of any discussion partners.

Religious faith and its moral perspective cannot be checked at the door of the ethics committee's meeting room. Nor need they be for fully reasonable, inclusive dialogue to take place. All moral discourse comes out of historical communities of identity. Members of these communities can together learn what fulfills moral obligations, respects human dignity, and serves the common good. Moral sensitivities indebted to religious faith can attune us to special aspects of moral situations and help us discern where true virtue lies, even in "human" terms. And specifically religious stories and sayings can stimulate the imagination, reorganize our priorities, and motivate us to act in ways that complement the principled analyses of moral philosophy.