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JB: About fifteen years ago, you wrote that the distinctive contribution of German sociology of religion is theory, and that at times sociology of religion in Germany is even subsumed under “grand theory.” Is that still the case?

HK: Well, perhaps we now have to say that theory was the distinctive contribution of German sociology to the sociology of religion. I doubt one could still claim today that the distinguishing feature of German sociology is its theoretical contribution. This is in part connected to its international visibility: German sociology of religion does not particularly stand out at the international level. We are now talking about a time long after the formulation of the theoretical contributions of Niklas Luhmann, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Luckmann, and others. Since then nobody has come forward with a distinct contribution on the international level.

However, in principle, German-language sociology of religion—I would include Switzerland here—still places high value on theory. The reason is—and I suspect this is a bit different than elsewhere—that it regards religion as part of general sociology. I believe that is a characteristic perspective that stands out in comparison to other national sociologies of religion and the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. Religion is treated as part of a broader concept of society, not just as the object of a subdiscipline.

Of course, we have subdisciplinary departments, but they are relatively few and relatively indistinct. Even in comparison to other European countries, the sociology of religion in Germany is very weakly institutionalized, but that is also a consequence of the principle that religion is regarded as a part of sociology and as a social phenomenon.

If you are asking what has happened since that time, what you find are continuations, further developments of existing approaches. Matthias Koenig builds on the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt; Detlef Pollack practices classical church sociology with the addition of some Luhmannian theory; Monika Wohlrab-Sahr is strongly in the line of Ulrich Oevermann; and I stand in the tradition of Thomas Luckmann. These are all connected to classical German grand theories that we, in the second or third generation, run through empirically. I think that is what sets the current generation apart. We don’t pursue grand theory as our main vocation. We have rolled up our sleeves and attempted to apply theory empirically in a number of different ways.

I would even go one step further and claim that our main contribution is our quite sophisticated methodological discussion. Methodology has become the focus of discussion. This debate has come quite far and has even been incorporated in religious studies (Religionswissenschaft).

JB: Does the sociology of religion in Germany have any input into issues that touch on religion that have high public visibility, such as the current debate around circumcision?

HK: [Laughs] German sociology of religion—well, perhaps I should first clarify what we are talking about here. We are talking about a mere handful of professorships that deal with religion among other areas. In other words, we are speaking of an institutional nullity compared to other countries. That has a lot to do with the fact that, in Germany, we have religious studies, which is far more institutionalized and also has a sociology wing, much like religious studies in the United States. But even religious studies is hardly present in public discourse.

Another factor is that the churches play a far different public role than in the United States. The churches are official interlocutors of the state and the public, and they fill this role using highly professional means. So no, the sociology of religion does not play any public role. We are a purely academic enterprise—though, considering how few of us there are, we are still amazingly effective.

JB: Your book on popular religion is written for a wider public audience. How do you view the potential public role of sociological research on religion?

HK: I had Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s book Religion as a Chain of Memory in mind as a kind of form to emulate, and I was surprised that my book wasn’t particularly noted by the public and that the public did not seem able to handle it. My book on near-death experiences, Reports from Beyond (Berichte aus dem Jenseits), got a much more popular reception, but I basically only slipped the sociological debates into it.

I assume that this has something to do with the role of religion as a public topic. In Germany, this topic is influenced much more by the interested parties than by scholarship (Wissenschaft). Scholarship on religion plays an astonishingly minor role. Similarly, religious education in public schools is not scholarly instruction; it is instruction by the actors, although it is still seen in connection with the state.

In summary, I don’t believe sociology of religion is a big topic in the German public. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I know that the older church sociology often resonated with the wider public because it was seen to confirm the public’s prejudices about religion.

JB: Let me attempt a somewhat crude comparison of intellectual traditions in the sociology of religion. In France, for instance, the factor of integration has been very important since Durkheim, and we can see that as an expression of the French republican social model. In American sociology of religion, the main innovation has been the rational-choice approach, and we can read that, too, in parallel to the social model: live and let die. Would you say that in Germany there is a similar parallel between the theoretical approach and the social model?

HK: Roughly speaking, it is the model of secularization. Not only more recent scholarship in the sociology of religion, but Weberian and Simmelian sociology also asked what remains of religion after secularization, what secularization does to religion. Presumably, the answer is the expulsion (Austreibung) of religion from society.

That is German sociology of religion’s main preoccupation, whether in the shape of a Luhmann’s theory of differentiation, Overmann’s secularization theory, or in Habermas’s work. That, in any case, was the big topic until the early 2000s. Since September 11, 2001, and its consequences, other aspects of religion have surfaced as public interest has turned. But throughout the twentieth century, secularization has been the keynote.

Religion was regarded as the Other of modern society, if you will, something that had to be kept in mind because of modernization. That’s the reason why those among us who theorized on the basis of the life-world—the anti-rationalist basis, so to speak—were among the few that were perceived as “pro-religious.” That applies to Luckmann as well.

Nobody ever doubted structural secularization, despite the considerable institutional presence of the churches, and I believe that is a unique trait of German society—a trait that is often overlooked.

JB: I would like us to return to the question of what has changed since 2001, but first could you tell me a bit more about the extent to which secularization theory is still accepted?

HK: That also has to do with the role of the sociology of religion. When I began working in this field in the 1980s and 1990s, the tenor in German society was that the churches would die out, that religion would phase out, and that negative growth would continue apace. When sociologists were asked, they just had to confirm the image of empty churches or, in our case, the reshaping of religion in a modern cast.

Since September 11—not any earlier—this has changed in an ambivalent manner. Since then, it’s not religion that is being taken note of, it is Islam. That was the “double shock” that happened in Germany. People started noticing the presence of a new, vital religion. Of course it was already there before, but the Twin Towers really raised awareness. It took a few years, but awareness of Islam and its establishment are now underway.

I think the perception of non-Islamic religion is a very different story. In Berlin you notice that religion is not seen as a considerable vital force, but in parts of west Germany that is markedly different. There, religion often has a direct, local influence.

When the pope was in Berlin we observed that he traveled between specially prepared islands, and the routes in between were heavily guarded, like when the president of the U.S. paid a visit in the cold war era. In Vienna, in contrast, the pope really was in the city.

Public discourse has changed considerably, however. Journalists and public opinion began recognizing religion and valuing it differently. Whereas before they perceived religion as the Other of modernity, now journalists are interested in what is happening in this area, and they are able to report on it in ways that are marketable.

The ambivalent thing is that, on the one hand, the belief based on modernization theory in religion’s expulsion continues to influence society as a whole—including the churches, which continue to shrink. On the other hand, it is evident that there is this dynamic—in Islam as well as in other religions—that is somewhat surprising, and in trying to name it, the concept of spirituality comes up. The concept has become established in a somewhat murky way as a stand-in to name something that has nothing to do with the established forms.

But the way these issues are represented in public has in fact turned around in a manner that probably is hardly understood in the U.S. because there is little awareness of the fact that the idea of secularization was backed by everyone, even the churches, into the late nineties.

JB: The manner in which religion is present in public has a lot to do with church–state relations, and I think many Americans are surprised to hear that in Germany we have religious education and church taxes.

KH: Yes, exactly. I cannot emphasize enough that we have one of the highest levels of institutionalization in our church structures, even when compared to other European countries. The hiring process for professorships at public universities, not just in theology but in sociology as well, involves bishops. We don’t see this state of affairs as a scourge, but I assume that elsewhere it is difficult to imagine that professors for secular subjects at public universities would be hired in this way. That’s just one example of this institutionalization. The concept of religion in Germany is strongly pegged to these enormously strong institutional structures.

JB: So the concept of spirituality enables one to say, there is religion, which is administered by the Roman-Catholic and Protestant churches, and then there is spirituality, which is anything else that is going on.

KH: Yes, precisely, and it has far-reaching ramifications. When I was conducting interviews on near-death experiences, many people denied that the experience had anything to do with religion. Religion is something that only has to do with churches, and they didn’t see any kind of connection. The word “spirituality” fills this void which we once referred to with the term “invisible religion.” It fills this void in a positive manner instead of leaving a negative absence. That’s one of the big changes, and I think from an American perspective it is difficult to understand.

JB: Let us get back to what has changed since 2001. To scholars of religion and public life, Habermas’s Peace Prize speech in October 2001 stands out. The speech is widely perceived to mark a turning point in Habermas’s œuvre: Ever since, religion has played a bigger role in his thinking. That is a dimension of his current work that is getting a lot of international attention as well.

HK: Yes, I agree. There was also his conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger.

JB: Perhaps you could say a few things from your vantage point about the impact his thinking is having here and about the research or public debates it has stimulated.

HK: Habermas is the leading intellectual at this juncture. Habermas is more of a symptom for a social development that he anticipated. I’m a bit ambivalent. Habermas has really gone through two turning points, and the most recent one that you refer to was the smaller of the two. In my view, the bigger one was his transformation from a sociologist into a philosopher—from the author of The Theory of Communicative Action seeking to describe social developments to the ethicist who wants to help shape social reality (though, I have to add, that was part of his ambition earlier as well). His most recent turn falls into this second phase in which Habermas is working as an ethicist and defines himself as such. The sociologist and the philosopher are two different Habermases, if you will, so I would first want to make that distinction.

But even coming from The Theory of Communicative Action his turn toward religion is not a big stretch. He says so himself. He begins his reading of Durkheim recognizing that religion bears the resources of communicative action and that religion is a means to transcend the subject. By the way, my own stance is not very far from Habermas’s. I hold him in high regard, because I think that the work he is doing on the recognition of the other dovetails with a Schützian concept of transcendence. His belief in the rationality of language follows a thoroughly religious motif—a secularized, Greek-philosophical variant of religious conceptions.

Habermas doesn’t only think that we should be able to understand each other; he thinks we can understand each other. Our ability to understand resides in the rationality of language. As such, he has religious traits from the outset. If you read The Theory of Communicative Action and then his speech, you’ll find that, in his speech, he concedes what he previously only expounded in evolutionary terms. In other words, he weakens his modernization theory and concedes that religion plays a role that he ascribed to it all along.

The fact that he can do so “out loud,” and that he does so in 2001, is a symptom of the reversal in public debate. Religion isn’t just recognized as a public player in the sense that José Casanova meant, but as a modern contemporary. That’s the reversal in the German debate, and Habermas is an expression of it—possibly even the first noticeable expression, and possibly even somebody who carried this reorientation forward.

In 2001, Habermas was the intellectual of the Federal Republic, much in the same way Adorno was in the 1960s. Habermas is one of the few to epitomize the classical image of the intellectual, that is, somebody who doesn’t just appear as an antitype, but as a representative. As such, he is a symptom. His debate with Benedict was a logical consequence.

JB: And then they “agree in operational terms,” or how did they put it?

HK: Yes, I think their premises are similar because they are both based on special forms of communication—the “mysterium fidei” in the case of Benedict—except that Habermas thinks that it is built into  linguistic communication.

JB: You said that Habermas’s position likely was a symptom of changes that were already underway rather than something that stimulated change. Even so, has his position stimulated debate, whether in the wider public or in more specialized circles?

HK: I’m not sure Habermas had that kind of effect. It’s clear that the terms of debate have shifted. Something has indeed happened, and Habermas signals it as a symptom: It is possible now to talk about religion and to take it seriously, not merely—as Casanova sees it—as a voice in the public canon, because that is a role the church in the Federal Republic has played since the days of Adenauer, but as something that impacts present-day society.

Habermas insists we refer to present-day society as “modern,” not “postmodern.” But it is a different modernity from the one he describes. So postsecularism was a kind of attempt to do something with “post” after all. He rejects postmodernity, so he has to introduce a different “post.” He sees religion as a sign of modernity. But I feel I must point out—and this is where the “provinciality” of the Habermasian debate becomes apparent—the notion that religion is a force of modernity is a theoretical line that I was already acquainted with by way of Berger and Luckmann’s work from the 1960s. They always emphasized the productivity of religion for modern society, albeit in a transformed shape. In any case, all this was certainly a novelty for the public-critical discourse that was long dominant in Germany, by which I mean the critical theory-influenced discourse. In fact, the religious situation in Germany isn’t what has changed—it actually remains largely unchanged, religion hasn’t become any more fashionable—but public discourse has changed. The fact that one of Germany’s leading intellectuals raised his voice to acknowledge religion certainly played a big role in this. There’s no doubt about that.

Habermas is not a critical theorist, or only to a degree, so that may be why he was able to make his most recent turn rather easily.

JB: Often the first turning point in Habermas’s work is seen to be his transformation from critic to state-supporting (staatstragend) thinker.

HK: Yes, but that was already Adorno’s function in the 1960s. You will hardly find anybody who was more present on public television than Adorno, who served as the Federal Republic’s conscience. The Federal Republic had to put its conscience on display. Habermas is also present in this function, as the intellectual who epitomizes this good conscience on an international scale, the sincere German, morally unencumbered in a way that Arnold Gehlen and others were not. That’s the role Habermas plays, and that is the source of his high national and international visibility.

JB: In the case of Berger, many speak of a turning point as well—between 1969, when he published The Sacred Canopy and was a clear defender of secularization theory, and the late nineties, when he recanted.

HK: Yes, Berger undoubtedly had to change his views, but Luckmann wrote an essay about the “myth” of secularization as early as 1969, and The Invisible Religion goes a different path and asserts the productivity of religion. By the way, it’s not a coincidence that The Invisible Religion has not been reissued in English for several decades. It’s an argument that works better in the continental European context—the book is still very successful in Poland, for example, though not in France.

In part 2 of the interview, Professor Knoblauch will talk about his own work on popular religion and spirituality, as well as his relationship with smoking.—ed.

It was, then, a stirring sight to see Habermas sit down with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004 for a philosophical dialogue. It is hard not to miss a breath at the image of both men in conversation, one the arch-defender of reason and rationality, described by Habermasian scholar Thomas McCarthy as the “last great rationalist,” and the other, renowned as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and subsequently as Pope Benedict XVI), for his steadfast theological defense of Catholic tradition and moral teaching. At the same time, the twinning of the two Germans made for a fitting tableau: through their long careers, both have shown little interest in sociological realities and have remained intellectually aloof from lived experience.

It was, in any case, an interesting conversation. Among other points, Habermas noted that the Enlightenment project of modernization had gone somewhat awry, has become derailed. In particular, as he had previously elaborated, he noted that globalizing economic markets defy the control of consensual rational judgments, and he lamented not only the extent of global socioeconomic inequality but the mass political indifference toward it. This indifference is part of a longer depoliticization process resulting from modernization and increased affluence and consumerism, highlighted by Habermas decades earlier. For Habermas, the threat posed by current globalizing forces to potentially “degrade the capacity for democratic self-steering,” both within and across nations, makes the need for public communicative reasoning all the more necessary. He thus looks to discover new (i.e., underappreciated) political cultural resources for the democratic revitalization project. Hence, “a contrite modernity,” one characterized by several social pathologies that need fixing, may benefit, Habermas argued, from religious-derived norms and ethical intuitions. He conceded that these religious resources can help human society deal with “a miscarried life, social pathologies, the failures of individual life projects, and the deformation of misarranged existential relationships.”

Many sociologists have elaborated on the perils of globalization and the increased polarization between classes and regions as the profit logic of capitalist markets inexorably trumps normative considerations. Yet only Habermas looks to the religious domain rather than pushing for attentiveness to a rearticulated political ideology of, for example, global social democracy, as a way of reorienting societal thinking about modern socioeconomic pathologies. In his view, “The translation of the likeness of the human to the image of the divine into the equal and absolutely respected dignity of all human beings” offers a way of using religious values to reorient society’s values toward principles of economic and social justice. Clearly, Habermas’s new affirmation of the relevance that religious ideas and ethics have for contemporary political debate marks a major transformation in his thinking. I very much welcome this more inclusive view of religion as a potentially emancipatory political and cultural resource, a resource that can open up and enhance rather than retard public discourse, and energize the creation of more deliberative and more participative social institutions.

Habermas’s view of religion’s potential as a remedial cultural resource for contemporary societal ills is shared by many religious leaders. For example, more than one hundred diverse religious leaders meeting in Rome in June 2009 ahead of the G8 summit collectively affirmed the urgent need for political leaders to recognize the relevance that religious ideas and moral values have in shaping the social fabric. They strongly emphasized that economic and political decisions, devoid of awareness of their moral consequences, cannot serve the common good. These themes are further elaborated in Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) and are in line with a long tradition of Catholic social teaching originating in the late nineteenth century, through which Catholic leaders, drawing on natural law reasoning, have cautioned against industrial policies that marginalize workers and ignore the needs of the economically downtrodden.

Habermas’s new regard for religion, articulated across several venues since 2001, leads him to embrace the term “post-secular society” in order to demarcate the current moment. He is not the only one to use this language, and there has been a tremendous amount of hairsplitting over what exactly the term means and how it is related to the secular, secularization, secularism, secularistic, and post-secularism. The gain in popularity of post-secular terminology comes in the wake of the postmodern, the postcolonial, and the post-national. Many scholars would concur that there really is something qualitatively different about the post-1970s era, enough to warrant a new term that differentiates the modern era (roughly defined as the period encompassing 1770–1970) from the postmodern. As David Harvey has argued, “There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972. This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time” and has produced what he refers to as “the condition of postmodernity.” Similarly, the post-national captures the changing legal and political status of the nation-state in the context of the rise of transnational or supranational entities (e.g., the European Union), and the postcolonial offers a dynamic way of rethinking the cultural agency, transformative identities, and differentiated histories of previously colonized peoples.

It is not compellingly evident that the term “post-secular” is newly warranted. After all, sociologists still have a hard time conceptualizing and especially measuring secularization, something that is surely related to the secular. By extension, it is challenging to assess whether or not secularization has in fact occurred given that there is so much differentiated evidence for and against its sociological reality; even the most secular societies, such as the United Kingdom, still have, for example, public rituals affirming the symbolic and cultural influence of religion on government. If we are unsure about the secular, it may be intellectually premature to talk about the post-secular (although it is certainly a stimulating way to change the conversation).

Yet it makes sense for Habermas—as Habermas, and with his Habermasian worldview—to construe a post-secular society. His understanding of progressive societal evolution and his deep intellectual commitment to the triumph of reasoned argumentation—to communicative action rather than strategic action—suggest that he has long construed the West as essentially secular since the Enlightenment. But now that, as he states, the Enlightenment project has been partially derailed and reason subsumed by strategic market interests and political indifference, it is appropriate for him to rethink the secular. Hence, in my reading of Habermas, the post-secular provides him with a useful analytical device for acknowledging not so much the persistence of religion as the partial failure (derailing) of the Enlightenment, a failure that by default brings religion back and into the secular. The post-secular denotes that the secular, like the Enlightenment, fell short of its originally intended destination. It is not that secularization has not occurred; it is just that there are some complications that the persistence of religion has thrown on its tracks. Overall, Habermas is clear that, despite his recognition of religion’s continuing relevance, “the data collected globally still provide surprisingly robust support for the defenders of the secularization thesis.”

There is some ambiguity in Habermas’s use of post-secular language. He argues that the term “post-secular society” applies only to those affluent societies “where people’s religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed” since the mid-twentieth century. In this designation, he includes European countries and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet Habermas also argues (in the same passage) that even in Europe, “sociological indicators…of [the] religious behavior and convictions of the local populations” have not changed so dramatically as to “justify labeling these societies post-secular” despite their trends toward deinstitutionalized religion. The confusion with Habermas’s definition emerges because while he talks about “post-secular society,” it seems he really intends to talk about a post-secular Zeitgeist, “a change in consciousness.” Thus, he subsequently clarifies, “Today, public consciousness in Europe can be described in terms of a post-secular society to the extent that at present it still has to adjust itself to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment.” Driving this post-secular consciousness, Habermas argues, is the resurgence of religion in Europe, evidenced by the increased participation of churches in public policy debates in some “secular societies” and the increased visibility of religion in local immigrant communities (principally Muslim) as well as religion’s increased global presence, especially manifested through various fundamentalist movements. In short, for Habermas, the term “post-secular” can be applied to secularized societies in which “religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground.”

Because the “post-secular” recognizes the public relevance of religion and of religious ideas in informing civic discourse, I would argue that it is applicable to the United States, notwithstanding differences in U.S. secularism compared to that of Europe or Canada. Although religion has maintained a relatively steady and exceptionally strong hold for Americans, churchgoing Americans typically show a highly autonomous (virtually secular) attitude toward religious obligations and church teachings and, like their affluent peers in Europe and Canada, for example, presume to live in a secular society. Thus, while their religious ties have not necessarily lapsed, they make their own choices about how and when to be religious; their religious beliefs and practices are determined largely by their own authority (acting as modern, self-oriented individuals) than by the coercive power of an external religious authority. Moreover, the United States is secular in that it is a constitutional republic with a strict separation of church and state, and public consciousness of this separation dominates legal opinion and legislative and policy debates notwithstanding the visibility of religion in politics and public culture. In my view, the term “post-secular” is more theoretically robust if we can use it to help us understand the more general relevance of religion as a public cultural resource in all modern democratic societies regardless of their varying degrees or levels of secularism and secularization.

Let us begin with secularism, which rather than “a stance,” I would suggest we call an ideology or, to paraphrase Michael Freeden’s definition of ideology, a way of simplifying a complex social reality whose kernel would otherwise escape the understanding of the many. In simplifying complexity, ideology is a practical guide for “converting the inevitable variety of options into a monolithic certainty which is the unavoidable feature of a political decision, and which is the basis of the forging of a political identity.” In simplifying complexity, secularism worked and still works as a practical guide for making decisions at the state level. This helps us to see why secularism cannot be identified with the liberal nature of politics or a form of government. Indeed, it pertains to the affirmation of the authority of the state, prior to and autonomously from any form of government. It is crucial to keep sovereignty separate from government to better grasp the difference among secular projects. Countries in which the state has never won the competition with the church over the regulation and control of individual behavior are forced into a stronger politics of secularism. This fact is primed to condition the tenor of politics, even in those countries that have embraced constitutional democracy.

Bilgrami rightly argues, for instance, that the ideals that motivated the political regime that Atatürk imposed on Turkey defined an authoritarian regime, although secularist in character. Secularism can, of course, open the state to a liberal transformation of the nature of its political regime, but to make this possible other kinds of vindication are needed that endow individual actors with prerogatives that limit the power of the state—beginning in the eighteenth century, this is what the bills of rights and constitutional revolutions have done.

What does a secular state need in order to be more liberal or for its politics to acquire a liberal nature—namely, respect for individual freedom against political and religious authority? This question brings me to the last issue in relation to which I would like to propose some additional comments on Bilgrami’s article that pertain to religious pluralism as an unavoidable condition for making secularism of a liberal nature, even when the government is formally democratic. The argument I would like to propose is the following: a mono-religious society, which has the chance to produce a secularist project has less or weaker chances to produce a liberal society, even when and if it embraces a democratic form of government. In mono-religious societies, secularism is destined to be more radical than in pluralist societies even when the state is democratic, because in these societies the risk of theocratic temptation is stronger. The issue of pluralism is sensitive above all in a constitutional democracy, whose public sphere and civil society is naturally open to host ideas and opinions of any kind.

I would like to strengthen my comment with reference to an empirical case that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere. It pertains to a constitutional democracy in a society that is mono-religious, and in which Bilgrami’s two features of secularism—the ideas of the separation of church and state and that the state maintains a neutral equidistance from different religions within a plural society—are difficult to attain.

During the Parliamentary debates on issues of artificial insemination in Italy two years ago, the Speaker of the Italian Low Chamber, Mr. Gianfranco Fini felt the need to specify something that might seem redundant in a constitutional liberal democracy. He declared that “the Parliament should not pass laws that are inspired by religious precepts.” Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a prominent Catholic theologian very active in Italian public debate, replied immediately:

The issues on which Catholics intend to be active in politics are not definable as ‘religious precepts’ because they pertain to fundamental rights that are written in human nature, demonstrable by reason, and endorsed by the Italian constitution. Catholics are in the right position for actively participating in the public and parliamentary debate against abortion and euthanasia and to protect family.

As this brief exchange shows, the Italian Parliament and the Roman Catholic Church are presently engaged in a political confrontation that is radical because it involves sovereignty—of civil and of canonical law. The confrontation involves more or less an explicit ideological battle between secularism and theocracy. Yet contrary to older confrontations between the state and the church for the acquisition of supreme authority over human actions (the external domain of behavior), in contemporary constitutional democracies the conflict over the control of civil authority is performed in deliberative style, through the posture of reasoning and the language of rights. This dialogic transformation of politics has opened the public sphere to religious citizens in a new way. At the same time, it also poses a new set of potentially serious problems for constitutional democracy, particularly in societies that have a predominant religion.

In his answer to the Speaker of the House, Monsignor Sgreccia adopted a style of reasoning that John Rawls’ revisited public reason and Jürgen Habermas’ post-secular democracy would consider legitimate. Indeed, while publicly proclaiming principles that he derived from his comprehensive doctrine, Monsignor Sgreccia made an effort to reach out to non-religious citizens by arguing that those principles can also be accepted by them because they are in agreement with the principles of public reason contained in the Italian constitution although expressed not in the form of public reason (like constitutional rights) but in the philosophical language of natural rights, according to the Thomistic tradition. Endorsing this discursive style would seem to be a secure passport for citizens with comprehensive doctrines to actively participate in the public sphere of deliberation.

Hence, Habermas has argued that in post-secular democratic society religious citizens have the right to participate in public discourse with their own principles and convictions. In fact, Habermas is even more generous than Rawls and thinks that the limits on individual liberty that Rawls’ injunction of translation of “private” reasons into “public” reasons contemplates is still too demanding and, moreover, unequal, since it demands more of religious citizens than non-religious ones. In Habermas’ view, thus, Monsignor Sgreccia should be allowed even to claim publicly that the law of the Italian state should be consistent with his “religious precepts” without bothering to engage in any sort of stylistic translation. Indeed, as an ordinary citizen who participates in public opinion formation but not lawmaking, Monsignor Sgreccia should not be asked, not even in the name of what Rawls would call an informal or moral “duty of civility,” to rephrase his religious arguments so as to make them in agreement with the language of civil rights. The question is that Sgreccia’s argument was direct and strong enough to reach the parliament and the Catholic representatives whom all political parties include. In any event, the Italian Parliament produced a very restrictive legislation on the individual choice to procreate through artificial insemination. “Deliberation” in the public sphere was easily translated into the law; the vision of the Catholic majority was able to impose itself over all the citizens, thus violating both the principle of equal rights and secularism. A mono-religious democratic society can easily be subjected to what liberal theorists called the “tyranny of the majority.”

This example shows that liberal democratic theories of public reason, although in different ways, are tailored to and on a philosophical reflection of the liberal societies that are the home of practiced religious pluralism. However, they are—Habermas’ more so than Rawls’—hardly suitable and safe if extended or applied to liberal societies in which one religion enjoys a strong majority and pluralism is only predicated in the constitution but is not a lived experience in society. In relation to the place of religion in the public sphere, I would suggest that along with Rawls’ distinction between liberal societies and despotic societies (whether decent or not) we make also a distinction within liberal societies, among those in which religious pluralism is both a juridical and a social reality, and those in which religious pluralism is protected by the law but is not a social reality or an ethical culture that inspires the public reasoning of ordinary citizens.

This Hegelian distinction/relation between the juridical and the ethical level is important and meant to suggest two ideas: first that we must regard the norm (of constitutional democracy) always in its porous relationship to the actual cultural life of the society, and democracy always as both a set of principles and procedures and an actualization that is contextually specific; and second, that in mono-religious societies—and democratic societies in particular, in which the state’s equidistance is a precept that does not receive the support coming from the practice of religious pluralism—the state cannot avoid adopting a more secularist politics.

In conclusion, I would like to strengthen Bilgrami’s appeal to the relevance of the context when issues of state/religion relationship are at stake. In matters that have a direct impact on the individual freedom of religion and social peace such as the presence of religion in the public sphere, political theorists should pay close attention to the ethical context and the historical tradition of a given society without deducing practical conclusions from an ideal conception of democracy and liberalism. This pragmatic suggestion of going back and forth from the ideal norm to the context is an admission of the fact that a political practice that is liberal in a pluralistic religious environment may turn to be anti-liberal in a mono-religious society. Pluralism is the essential condition within which we should situate the discourse of the role of religions in the public sphere and the issue of secularism. Without pluralism (as a social fact or as an actual plurality of religions, not only a formal declaration of rights) a constitutional democracy has a weaker liberal nature and may generate decisions that are not more liberal or tolerant than those made in a non-constitutional democracy (or in a decent illiberal society, to paraphrase Rawls).

Kahn’s surprising conclusion is that political theology is fundamentally an examination of freedom. The free act of will, undetermined by law, reason or interest, appears in the decision for revolution; in the maintenance of the state through civic sacrifice in moments of existential crisis; in the judge’s decision in applying norm to fact; and in the philosopher’s free inquiry into forms of meaning. A theory, a life, or a state committed to law without exception denies the reality that law alone can never grasp the foundational act or the existential situation.

Kahn evokes an essential unity between citizen, popular sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice that exemplifies the free act. Working within, alongside, and at times against Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, Kahn argues that the freedom of the decision is inexplicable by strictly “secular” categories, whether empiricist or rationalist.  That is why it is free, and why we need theology to understand it.

Thus Kahn’s political theology does not provide yet another vantage point from which to debunk the conceptions of human freedom declared by the Enlightenment, by secularism, or by liberalism by pointing to a deeper form of unfreedom at their root. It is liberalism (or secularism or Enlightenment) in itself and on its own terms—for instance, in its studied avoidance of the decision—that fails to grasp the free act. He debunks, or, rather, supplements such conceptions by pointing to a deeper form of freedom. Kahn’s, then, is not a conception that focuses on the fundamental otherness of the sovereign and the state in modern politics. Rather, Kahn largely inverts such a topography of the political: we are (potentially, ideally, and sometimes actually) the sovereign, and the sovereign, by definition, is free.

The freedom depicted by Kahn in Political Theology is certainly not a negative freedom. It is, among other things, the collective freedom of a community to found a state and to sustain it. It is, given Kahn’s emphasis on the notion of popular sovereignty, a freedom enacted through individuals’ participation in the life of the sovereign—paradigmatically through the giving of one’s own life. It is a freedom to sacrifice, to suffer an immortalizing, sacred death. It is thus the freedom to transcend the self: “Where we find that meaning [i.e., an ultimate meaning], we will find freedom.”

*  *  *

Yet precisely that which is striking and appealing in Kahn’s account—his interweaving of sovereignty, freedom and political theology—and which should serve to broaden the ambit of political theological inquiry, rather seems to confine it. For Kahn asserts the mutual exclusivity of an order committed to law and one guided by political theology: “If politics has become a domain wholly ordered by law, then there is no need for a political theology.” There is no political theology, for instance, “appropriate for the institutions of the European Union: it is politics as a fully secularized practice of reason.” Nor is it to be found in many parts of the international legal order, which are often systems set against the decision, against sovereignty, and thus, per Kahn, against freedom.

While the European Union may claim ideologically to be a sovereignty-free project, Kahn’s own analysis of the decision operative in the routine legal case suggests that there is freedom in the establishment and maintenance of a legal order. So why does Kahn draw the boundaries of the political theological inquiry in this manner? A footnote provides a good metaphor for some of the exclusions he makes: “if my arguments sound more Protestant than Catholic, that too reflects the American political imaginary.”

Even if Kahn is right to situate the “domain wholly ordered by law” beyond freedom, we may still wonder why it follows that there is no “need for a political theology.” Is freedom the only inexplicable, hence theological, feature of our political landscape?

Political theology, conceived rather as applying in the last instance to more than freedom alone—for instance, as the examination also of a society’s supposedly sacred or highest values—might provide an illuminating perspective on the oft-asserted sanctity of humanity, of property, of reason, of nature, or of the rule of law itself. To approach such commitments and projects as forms of political theology is to underscore that they, too, rest on premises that cannot be derivative, which is to say, on a leap of faith of sorts. Perhaps, in maintaining that there is no political theology in the workings of the EU, Kahn concedes too much to the liberal self-conception that he otherwise adeptly deflates.

To follow Kahn and Schmitt, perhaps we should not call these other sacred or highest values political theological if they do not self-consciously evoke Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction or entail the possibility of human sacrifice (although they may do so more often than we would like to think). But rather than accept their “secular” self-declarations as Kahn seems to, we might have recourse to other labels (such as “legal theology,” to cite John Comaroff). On the other hand, I am skeptical of using the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction as the criterion for the political as it seems, through inversion and thus replication, to privilege the core liberal values—of life and self-ownership—over other highest values. Conjoining “political” and “theological” presents an opportunity to focus on the creation and maintenance of a cultural order more broadly—something that can take place in settings aside from the confrontation with the enemy, such in as the creation of a trade zone. Another way, then, of understanding the exclusions that Kahn makes—of the EU, and its lack of an enemy, for example—is that he emphasizes the “political” side of the conjunction more than the “theological.”

If one concern, then, is that Kahn gives up too much in terms of the self-declared secularity of substantive areas and sites of legal activity, a second fear is that by treating freedom and popular sovereignty as a kind of prerequisite for engaging the theological, Kahn excludes from its scope the experience of being unfree. That is, Kahn’s political theology consists of the internally generated, not the externally imposed or imported, political order. But to return to the examples of the sacred nature of property, trade, or humanity—such valorizations might very well be, and in fact often are, imposed by external powers. Indeed, in the postwar era, juridical sovereignty itself is the form through which many states have been governed, as much as it is the form through which they have engaged in self-government and freedom. A conception of the sovereign, accordingly, as an outsider and alien—like Marshall Sahlins’s “stranger king,” who comes from abroad and is joined to the local people through marriage and sacrifice—is still relevant. In many postcolonial contexts, though, it may be hard to decide who is the best candidate for such a designation: the estranged national elite; the global banking class; the U.S., on which Kahn focuses; or, most recently, China.

Even in the U.S., popular sovereignty is not the only conception of sovereignty. I heartily agree with Kahn that popular sovereignty merits a political theological analysis, in the U.S. and elsewhere. But in legal doctrine and state practice, governmental sovereignty often derives directly from the Crown and international law, not from popular sovereignty. (See, for example, Justice Sutherland’s remarkable opinion describing the sovereign powers transmitted from the Crown to the Union, and not derived from the Constitution. United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 [1936]). The exclusion of these genealogies of sovereignty is surprising in a study of American political theology, because it is from within this lineage that the United States government proclaimed itself to be sovereign. This dimension of American sovereignty is no less free, and no less theological, than Kahn contends, though it is not grounded in popular sovereignty.

And, as Kahn notes, even within the tradition of popular sovereignty it is possible, indeed common, for the manifestations of popular sovereignty of one moment to be alien to those living at a later moment. Put another way, the freedom he describes entails the power to create order for others. It may even include the freedom to present one’s own commitments to property, trade and humanity as non-political, non-theological, and universal. The experience of the recipients of such intergenerational or imperial beneficence need not be ruled out of the bounds of political theological inquiry because they do not act freely.

*  *  *

In sum, I would ask whether political theology ought not to be construed in a frame wider than Kahn allows, as a study of the continued forms and presence of the god-like within the nominally secular—whether or not they derive from free self-governance. Nonetheless, Kahn’s interweaving of popular sovereignty, freedom, and political theology is a powerful corrective to a sense of political theology as an inquiry only into unfreedom, into the condition of living in a world made by others. Documenting such unfreedom seems an obvious sense of what political theology is about, and Kahn compels us to consider additional possibilities.

Within the frame Kahn has chosen, it can be difficult to discern the status of the form of freedom that he describes. Is it actual and present in everyday life, a reading encouraged by his depiction of his project as phenomenological and almost ethnographic? In that case, he confronts factual claims to the contrary. Or is it latent, a necessary background condition underlying the creation and maintenance of the state? In fact, one can discern both senses of freedom in Kahn’s work. To my mind, Kahn’s freedom has a status similar to Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Such an ideal sacrifice situation shares something methodologically with Habermas’s construct as regulatory ideal while inverting much of its content. Kahn’s is an ideal of the potential unity between citizen, sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice; a unity, that is, of the body of the citizen, the ethereal, non-institutionalized popular sovereign, and the bricks and mortar of the state. Seen from this perspective, those who would critique Kahn for failing to see that we are not free at the moment, or that the state is actually a monster, take up a methodological and analytical position like that of critics who have attacked the unreality of Habermas’s ideal. They may be correct in any given instance, but perhaps they miss the main points at issue, one of which is to determine where and when such an ideal as ideal might be thought to exist.

In the American context, Kahn has identified an ideal—the sacrificial ideal of freedom—that exists both as an ideal and at times in practice. And while the U.S. is certainly his main subject, he describes an ideal of freedom that has purchase well beyond American borders. Perhaps this freedom is what we’ve seen evoked by some of the protesters in the Middle East and North Africa in recent months. And Kahn is right to draw our attention to the claim that there is something miraculous in the plausible appearance of “the people.” Conjuring the people by giving up one’s self seems to represent just the kind of freedom and popular sovereignty that Kahn has in mind. The challenge for those who accept Kahn’s ideal is how to bring the individual and the conjured popular sovereign into a sufficient degree of unity with the apparatus of government, for such is the condition of more lasting freedom. These are the directions in which Kahn pushes us, and we need not think that he is correct on a factual or phenomenological level all of the time in order to examine this ideal, to ask when and how it emerges, and to see it as something astounding and “theological.”

Kahn’s ideal might also serve a regulatory function, furnishing a critical perspective from which to view efforts by policy makers to unbundle sacrifice, the sacred and the state. For example, might we not interpret the rise of the private military contractor in the U.S. as an attempt to “outsource” sacrifice, to avoid or undermine the ideal of sacrifice that makes possible the unity of citizen, sovereign, and state? We might interpret in a similar fashion the reliance on immigrant soldiers. These policies are illustrations of the gap between Kahn’s ideal of popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and contemporary global and imperial practices, on the other. And yet, Kahn’s ideal of sovereignty as civic sacrifice is not completely evaded: contractors are now seeking out the same honors as soldiers, and contractors from Fiji killed in Iraq, for instance, have been honored by the State department for their sacrifices. Immigrants in the military become—even posthumously—eligible for citizenship.

Kahn’s perspective also helps underscore the oddity of the sacralization achieved through the terrorist killing of American citizens, who are thereby “conscripted” in the war on terror, writes Kahn. This is a sacralization and sacrifice brought on from the outside, one where the terrorist is—awkwardly and impossibly—in the position of sacrifier. Kahn stresses the essential continuity of different modes of sacrifice: “There is a direct line from the revolutionary consciousness of 1776 to the mass weapons of today.” But there is a jagged line too. Reading Kahn’s concept of freedom as an ideal made actual—and hence experienced, or phenomenologically manifested—on occasion, it can serve as one baseline from which to examine how different contexts and technologies recalibrate the distribution of sacrifice.

*  *  *

In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt evinces fascination with the rise of U.S. power, which potentially entails, he says, a new kind of nomos, a lived legal order, one not based on the divide between land and sea, Europe and its colonies, but that would encompass land and sea and operate through economic domination. Juxtaposing this post-World War II book to Schmitt’s interwar Political Theology provokes a number of questions—which I pose here but do not answer—that are pertinent to Kahn’s American political theology. Namely, “where” is America? In other words, who falls within—and who remains outside—its political theology, and in what way? If not defined by a territorial boundary, how is it delimited? What is the relation between the individual and collective experience of political theology that Kahn evokes and sovereignty as it is practiced?

The juxtaposition of Schmitt’s two books also raises the question of whether we might relegate his assertions about the political theology of some states to an earlier moment—before the end of World War II, as Kahn sometimes suggests, or at the time of the collapse of the European nomos, which for Schmitt was around World War I? Is it that after the Second World War the Western European states are no longer “theological,” having been secularized by the terror of war and the fact of their encompassment by America and the Soviets? Or is their apparent political diminishment not necessarily an index of a decline in their theological commitments but simply a shift towards human dignity, the rule of law, or other values?

As the colonies become formally sovereign in the decades after World War II, does each become “theological” inversely to a possible “secularization” of its former European colonial state—a kind of global zero sum game of the theological? How are the European states and their former colonies embedded within an American (and/or Soviet) nomos and political theology? If there is a new nomos—let us say one of free trade, human rights, anti-Communism, state sovereignty, etc.—is it “theological” for the U.S.? And for these others? An examination of American political theology should ask how it intersects with these transformations, since it certainly participates in them.

Kahn makes a critically important contribution in drawing attention to the “we” invoked through popular sovereignty, a move in contrast to the formulation of the sovereign as the “other.” We find both in the American tradition: self-government and a global role. Kahn helps us see the interior idealizations of that tradition, and he provokes the question of whether American political theology can interpret its own global significance. Can the popular sovereign recognize itself from the outside, or must it remain locked in an internal perspective and thus structurally unaware?

Thus, allow me, in closing, to add one additional stop to Kahn’s tour of the sites of American political theology. While conducting fieldwork in an immigration detention center in California in 2000, I encountered in the basement of the U.S. federal building a number of detention tanks holding people awaiting imminent deportation from the U.S. as well as persons just arrived. Officials had installed one-way mirrors, but they had inadvertently installed the mirrors the wrong way, such that they saw their own reflection while the detainees had a clear view of the officials. Yet the officials did not correct the mistake. Not only was it useful for occasional grooming, this inverted panopticon, to my mind, captured multiple truths about the overall situation: the desire of officials—and by extension, “America”—to be free of the awareness of those under lock and key; the desire, nonetheless, to be seen, but not to see; and the great knowledge that outsiders have of the U.S. Is this arrangement part of American political theology, or is political theology, rather, the perspective from but one (the reflective) side of the glass?  For my part, I believe the study of American political theology should endeavor to see from both sides of the glass.

It has now been twenty-five years since Richard John Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square—an effort to understand what lay behind renewed religious mobilization on the right. Neuhaus did not think the public square was actually “naked”; in fact he thought this an impossibility, for there could be no such thing as engaged democratic public life that didn’t depend on and connect to citizens’ deeper moral commitments. In the U.S., he argued, public life would necessarily involve religiously motivated and religiously framed participation, because a democratic public sphere was necessarily open to all citizens and open to them in terms they themselves had a central role in defining—and, in America, religion was important to most citizens. But, Neuhaus suggested, when so many believe in a public sphere stripped of religion, they actually, ironically, cede much of the democratic impulse in the public sphere to groups like the then prominent Moral Majority of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The peril in this is not simply that the Moral Majority is conservative. It is that “it wants to enter the political arena making public claims on the basis of private truths.” As Neuhaus continues: “The integrity of politics itself requires that such a proposal be resisted. Public decisions must be made by arguments that are public in character.” This is precisely the issue taken up in the present volume, most directly in Jürgen Habermas’s opening contribution.

Neuhaus’s argument was a call from a conservative but centrist position in American politics to recognize the power of religion in the public sphere. Such calls came earlier in the United States. But even in Europe—where religious practice declined most and secularization theory seemed most to apply—the issue of public religion is now very much on the agenda, partly because of anxiety over migration and Islam. It is often framed as contestation over the heritage of the Enlightenment. Many misleadingly assume the Enlightenment was essentially secular. And certainly there was a largely secular branch of eighteenth-century philosophy that had huge historical influence, not least when amplified by the anticlericalism spawned in France by the alliance of the Catholic Church to antirepublican reactionary politics. But the Enlightenment was also a movement among religious thinkers. Jonathan Israel calls this the “moderate” Enlightenment. The term is apt (though not Israel’s implication that the “radical” Enlightenment was simply a more extreme and thereby purer, less compromised version of the same thing). The project of religiously informed public reason was understood to depend on a certain moderation not of faith but of enthusiasm. This was the term—along with fanatic —used to describe Puritans and others in seventeenth-century England who insisted with absolute confidence on what was revealed by their “inner lights” and brooked no public compromises. The ideas of the enthusiasts as well as religious moderates and both monarchists and antimonarchists all circulated in a vibrant public sphere made possible by a combination of preaching and other oral performances and printed circulation of sermons, pamphlets, and other texts.

Those who developed the idea that the public sphere was central to modern, especially democratic, society often described their own work as enlightenment—advancing the intellectual maturation of humanity—and in these terms they embraced resistance to enthusiasm. Emphases on education, discipline, and orderly conduct of public debates shaped elite views of how the public sphere should advance. Sometimes these became matters of class distinction; liberal elites feared the debasement of public life if nonelites were admitted. The inclusive ideal of publicness has recurrently confronted arguments that exclusion was in fact necessary. Some of these have centered on religion. But, equally, religious thinkers have often held that public reason is not only an arbiter of policy decisions but also a vital means for advancing all sorts of understanding, even of religious convictions and their implications. Religious voices have remained active in the modern public sphere, sometimes in pursuit of enlightenment and sometimes in reaction to the Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment secularism. Even in Europe, secularization of public political debate only became pronounced after World War II.

Nonetheless, in both academic and public understanding, both the Enlightenment and the birth of the modern public sphere came to be understood in overwhelmingly secular terms. Jürgen Habermas’s classic book, to which we owe today’s commonplace usage of the term public sphere, is an influential case in point. Habermas offered a genealogy in which the eighteenth-century literary public sphere informed the development of a public sphere of rational-critical debate that gave individuals in civil society a way to influence politics. He generally ignored religion in his historical account of the public sphere, as he has acknowledged. And, until recently, religion did not figure in his further considerations on communicative action and the organization of modern society. So it is significant that Habermas in the last decade has begun to argue that finding ways to integrate religion into the public sphere is a vital challenge for contemporary society (and theories of contemporary society). His work is appropriately a point of departure for the discussions in this book.

Habermas’s argument is an elaboration of the fundamental premise that the public sphere of a democratic society must be open to all. It is imperative to include religious citizens both as a matter of fairness and as a matter of urgent practicality. Religiously informed actors, including Christian fundamentalists in America and Islamists in Europe, matter so much in contemporary political life that we endanger the future of the democratic polity if we cannot integrate them into the workings of public reason. Further, Habermas sees political liberalism as in need of new moral insights and commitments and recognizes religion as a potential source of renewal. Such renewal should not take the form of a direct appeal to religious doctrines or comprehensive worldviews in ways that foreclose public debate. His opening examination of Carl Schmitt’s political theology is precisely an attempt to put to rest the notion that political authority can derive either directly from religious revelation or from the self-founding sovereignty of an absolutist state. Insisting on a homogeneous mass society as the basis for the constitutional state, and relying on the shifting moods of such a society for political motivation, can only in the most superficial sense be seen as involving democracy. Schmitt’s approach is both impossible, because society has become irretrievably pluralist, and directly authoritarian despite its democratic disguise. Political religion could have similar implications. What prevents this is commitment to public reason—and on this Habermas is in accord with Neuhaus. Religious and nonreligious citizens meet as equals, and religious ideas inform the public sphere through argument rather than through simply dissemination (let alone topdown authority).

Because the public sphere is for Habermas a realm of rational-critical argumentation and propositional content, admission is a matter of ability and willingness to participate in open debate. He worries that religious commitments inhibit this, both because faith or revelation are reasons that can’t hold weight for those who don’t experience them and because religious ideas come in language that is not accessible to those outside particular traditions. Accordingly, he calls for the potential truth contents religious people bring to public discourse to be “translated” so that they are stated in ways not dependent on specifically religious sources. Translation should not be a burden only on religious citizens, but an ethical obligation for nonreligious citizens who should seek to understand what is said on religious grounds as best they can. But not all that religious citizens have to say is “translatable”; the residuum can be allowed in informal public discourse, but an institutional filter must exist to keep it out of the formal deliberations of political bodies.

Habermas’s arguments leave the worries that the translation proviso is necessarily asymmetrical and that the call to recognize explicitly religious voices in the public sphere is at least partially instrumental—a call to include ideas because they are useful while implicitly doubting that they may be true.

Charles Taylor’s approach speaks to each of these worries. Taylor approaches religion in the public sphere indirectly, as it were, through competing meanings of secularism. He has addressed other dimensions of the topic in A Secular Age. Here his focus is specifi cally on what sort of stance toward religion is required of a modern democratic state with a diverse population. He agrees with the notion that states must achieve neutrality, but sees two problems with most discussion. First, there is the tendency to fixate on religion, as though it posed radically different questions from all other sorts of differences among citizens. It doesn’t, suggests Taylor. And the issue is not just a misunderstanding of religion but also a misunderstanding of the relationship of both culture and personal agency to public reason. Deep differences requiring translation—and perhaps further work to reach common understandings—are not limited to religious differences. Reason is always rooted in culture, experience, and what Taylor has called “strong horizons of evaluation” (that citizens seldom make fully explicit in either public reason or their own private reflections). “The point of state neutrality,” he writes, “is precisely to avoid favoring or disfavoring not just religious positions, but any basic position, religious or nonreligious.”

Taylor’s second point follows from this. Given the importance and variations of deep commitments that orient citizens, there is no solution to be found by means of an institutional arrangement demarcating where deep values may be asserted and where they may not. At best, formulae like “the separation of church and state” are shorthand heuristics. But much more important for democratic societies is exploring ways to work for common goals—like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Constructing a democratic life together may depend more on being able to engage in such shared positive pursuits than on any institutional arrangement (or, indeed, agreement on all the reasons to engage in common pursuits). This also suggests that we should not understand the public sphere entirely in terms of argumentation about the truth value of propositions. It is a realm of creativity and social imaginaries in which citizens give shared form to their lives together, a realm of exploration, experiment, and partial agreements. Citizens need to find ways to treat each other’s basic commitments with respect; fortunately they are also likely to find considerable overlaps in what they value.

Like Habermas, Taylor is concerned with identifying ways in which the public sphere can help to produce greater integration among citizens who enter public discourse with different views. Habermas stresses agreement and clearer knowledge while Taylor stresses mutual recognition and collaboration in common pursuits. But both see excluding religion from the public sphere as undermining the solidarity and creativity they seek. In different ways, Judith Butler and Cornel West ask about the limits of optimistic visions of the public sphere in which harmonious integration is the apparent telos.

Butler emphasizes occasions when it is impossible to achieve intellectual (or political) integration, including agreement on truth and value. Religious sources of ethical insight may matter enormously precisely when deliberation in the public sphere fails. Deep differences may remain—and remain troubling and troubled. Religion may provide a guide to action in the face of divisions it cannot undo. This is true especially when the realities of state power and geopolitics bring people into the same place, not necessarily by choice, and into social relationships, though they do not understand themselves to constitute a single people or polity. Pluralization is not always a challenge to be overcome.

Butler offers the idea of cohabitation as an alternative, or perhaps a crucial supplement, to that of integrative public reason. It is an understanding of what is both possible and ethically right that she draws from Jewish tradition, shaped by the historical experience of statelessness, subjection, and partial autonomy under states Jews did not control. The ethic of cohabitation thus has an internal relationship to being Jewish—and on this basis criticizing state violence that is at odds with cohabitation must be “a Jewish thing to do.” Butler sees this as more than simply distinguishing “progressive” Jewish positions from others, because it entails taking seriously the limits of any identitarian concept of Jewishness—of identifying Jews with a nation-unto-itself in the manner of much nationalist rhetoric rather than with the position of people always already engaged in relationship with non-Jews.

Cohabitation guides an ethics on which Jews should act independently of whether it is met by a symmetrical commitment on the part of non-Jews, though they may hope that it will be. It is thus a religious contribution to the public sphere that does not depend on agreement but applies in its absence. Its significance comes from underwriting recognition of the importance or at least inevitability of continued life in the same place, even when values, identities, and practices cannot readily be reconciled. It is an understanding of what is materially necessary and an ethics following from this that does not depend on theory or discourses of justice—and may even be impeded by the attempt to ground all action in resolution of claims to justice. Taking cohabitation seriously indicts attempts to base politics exclusively on consensus, even when this is approached as a matter of the most inclusive possible public reason.

Cornel West, blues man in the life of the mind, jazzman in the world of ideas, challenges conceptions of public life limited to rational arguments, ethical consensus, and even cultural harmony. The secular need to hear the music of religion, he says, but also vice versa. Mutual understanding is achieved through empathy and imagination, learning the rhythm of each other’s dances and the tunes of each other’s songs. This sort of knowledge is tested in action, not in propositions; the capacity to understand each other is not derived from arguments. Of course, this partially prediscursive ability to understand each other may be the condition of good arguments in which participants feel they make progress toward knowledge.

West hopes for reconciliation and mutual understanding, but he doesn’t see religion offering this in a neat package. In the first place, he joins the others in this book in suggesting that we live in a multiplicity of different intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks. We are called to find ways to relate well to each other, ideally to understand each other, but not to erase these differences. Indeed, participation in the public sphere offers not just collective benefits but also the personal good of existence enriched by greater ability to put oneself in the shoes of others. This is not simply an instrumental good conducive to potential agreement; it is valuable in itself. More than this, West insists that the Christian message (at least, and he doesn’t rule out similar messages from other traditions) is not simply a logic of equivalence—Rawlsian justice—but of a superabundance of love. Justice would be good, I think he is saying. It would be a big improvement. We should feel “righteous indignation against injustice.” But in itself justice cannot be entirely definitive of the good.

Perhaps most important, West calls on us to find resources within our traditions, including especially our various religious traditions, to disrupt harmonies that disguise underlying discord. He calls on us to bear witness to suffering (even when we do not yet know how to end it). He insists that prophetic religion has a place in the public sphere, for its very disruptions are calls to attention that make people see realities that make them uncomfortable. Calls to attention are not arguments or propositions that should be subjected to critique; they are performances of a different sort. Prophetic religion is neither consensus building nor simply dissent; it is a challenge to think and look and even smell (funky) anew; it is not a matter of gradual evolutionary progress but of urgency. The demand prophecy makes on us is not that of faith but that of truth—or, rather, potential truth, for the prophet articulates not only the evils at hand but the possibilities of a future in which we are damned for what we have done and a future in which we have the chance to do better.

To say that religion has power in the public sphere is not to say that it can be easily absorbed or that it should be. It is a basis for radical challenges and radical questions; it brings enthusiasm, passion, indignation, outrage, and love. If enthusiasm is sometimes harnessed to unreflective conviction, passion is also vital to critical engagement with existing institutions and dangerous trends. The public sphere and the practice of public reason have power too. And they not only take from religion but also offer it opportunities to advance by reflection and critical argument.

The public sphere is a realm of rational-critical debate in which matters of the public good are considered. It is also a realm of cultural formation in which argument is not the only important practice and creativity and ritual, celebration and recognition are all important. It includes the articulation between deep sensibilities and explicit understandings and it includes the effort—aided sometimes by prophetic calls to attention—to make the way we think and act correspond to our deepest values or moral commitments.

Read Craig Calhoun’s full essay—along with chapters by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West—in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, an SSRC volume edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and just published by Columbia University Press.

For Habermas, religion has been a continuous concern precisely because it is related to both the emergence of reason and the development of a public space of reason-giving. Religious ideas, according to Habermas, are never mere irrational speculation. Rather, they possess a form, a grammar or syntax, that unleashes rational insights, even arguments; they contain, not just specific semantic contents about God, but also a particular structure that catalyzes rational argumentation.

We could say that in his earliest, anthropological-philosophical stage, Habermas approaches religion from a predominantly philosophical perspective. But as he undertakes the task of “transforming historical materialism” that will culminate in his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, there is a shift from philosophy to sociology and, more generally, social theory. With this shift, religion is treated, not as a germinal for philosophical concepts, but instead as the source of the social order. This approach is of course shaped by the work of the classics of sociology: Weber, Durkheim, and even Freud. What is noteworthy about this juncture in Habermas’s writings is that secularization is explained as “pressure for rationalization” from “above,” which meets the force of rationalization from below, from the realm of technical and practical action oriented to instrumentalization. Additionally, secularization here is not simply the process of the profanation of the world—that is, the withdrawal of religious perspectives as worldviews and the privatization of belief—but, perhaps most importantly, religion itself becomes the means for the translation and appropriation of the rational impetus released by its secularization. Here, religion becomes its own secular catalyst, or, rather, secularization itself is the result of religion. This approach will mature in the most elaborate formulation of what Habermas calls the “linguistification of the sacred,” in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action. There, basing himself on Durkheim and Mead, Habermas shows how ritual practices and religious worldviews release rational imperatives through the establishment of a communicative grammar that conditions how believers can and should interact with each other, and how they relate to the idea of a supreme being. Habermas writes:

worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority.
[. . .] Whereas ritual actions take place at a pregrammatical level, religious worldviews are connected with full-fledged communicative actions.

The thrust of Habermas’s argumentation in this section of The Theory of Communicative Action is to show that religion is the source of the normative binding power of ethical and moral commandments. Yet there is an ambiguity here. While the contents of worldviews may be sublimated into the normative, binding of social systems, it is not entirely clear that the structure, or the grammar, of religious worldviews is itself exhausted. Indeed, in “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” Habermas resolves this ambiguity by claiming that the horizontal relationship among believers and the vertical relationship between each believer and God shape the structure of our moral relationship to our neighbour, but now under two corresponding aspects: that of solidarity and that of justice. Here, the grammar of one’s religious relationship to God and the corresponding community of believers are like the exoskeleton of a magnificent species, which, once the religious worldviews contained in them have desiccated under the impact of the forces of secularization, leave behind a casing to be used as a structuring shape for other contents.

In the “postmetaphysical” stage of Habermas’s intellectual itinerary, he turns his attention away from sociology and towards philosophy once again, in particular, political and moral philosophy. Metaphysical thinking, which for Habermas has become untenable by the very logic of philosophical development, is characterized by three aspects: identity thinking, or the philosophy of origins that postulates the correspondence between being and thought; the doctrine of ideas, which becomes the foundation for idealism, which in turn postulates a tension between what is perceived and what can be conceptualized; and a concomitant strong concept of theory, where the bios theoretikos takes on a quasi-sacred character, and where philosophy becomes the path to salvation through dedication to a life of contemplation. By “postmetaphysical” Habermas means the new self-understanding of reason that we are able to obtain after the collapse of the Hegelian idealist system—the historicization of reason, or the de-substantivation that turns it into a procedural rationality, and, above all, its humbling. It is noteworthy that one of the main aspects of the new postmetaphysical constellation is that in the wake of the collapse of metaphysics, philosophy is forced to recognize that it must co-exist with religious practices and language:

Philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.

In contrast to metaphysical thinking, with its overvaluation of philosophy’s power, and thus its belief that philosophy is itself the voice of the truth of being, postmetaphysical thinking would neither dismiss religion as mere myth, and thus as the other of reason, nor assimilate itself to religion, usurping religious language and contents (as with mystical philosophies, such as that of the later Heidegger, with his call for a God who would save us). In other words, metaphysical thinking either surrendered philosophy to religion or sought to eliminate religion altogether. In contrast, postmetaphysical thinking recognizes that philosophy can neither replace nor dismissively reject religion, for religion continues to articulate a language whose syntax and content elude philosophy, but from which philosophy continues to derive insights into the universal dimensions of human existence.

Since 2001, when he was awarded the Peace Prize by the German Booksellers Association, Habermas has been engaging religion even more directly, deliberately, and consistently. In the speech he gave on the occasion of this prize, for instance, Habermas claims that even moral discourse cannot translate religious language without something being lost: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offence against human laws, something was lost.” Still, Habermas’s concern with religion is no longer solely philosophical, nor merely socio-theoretical, but has taken on political urgency. Indeed, he now asks whether modern rule of law and constitutional democracies can generate the motivational resources that nourish them and make them durable. In a series of essays, now gathered in Between Naturalism and Religion, as well as in his Europe: The Faltering Project, Habermas argues that as we have become members of a world society (Weltgesellschaft), we have also been forced to adopt a societal “post-secular self-consciousness.” By this term Habermas does not mean that secularization has come to an end, and even less that it has to be reversed. Instead, he now clarifies that secularization refers very specifically to the secularization of state power and to the general dissolution of metaphysical, overarching worldviews (among which religious views are to be counted). Additionally, as members of a world society that has, if not a fully operational, at least an incipient global public sphere, we have been forced to witness the endurance and vitality of religion. As members of this emergent global public sphere, we are also forced to recognize the plurality of forms of secularization. Secularization did not occur in one form, but in a variety of forms and according to different chronologies.

With respect to his preoccupation that “the liberal state depends in the long run on mentalities that it cannot produce from its own resources,” through a critical reading of Rawls, Habermas has begun to translate the postmetaphysical orientation of modern philosophy into a postsecular self-understanding of modern rule of law societies in such a way that religious citizens as well as secular citizens can co-exist, not just by force of a modus vivendi, but out of a sincere mutual respect. “Mutual recognition implies, among other things, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen and to learn from each other in public debates. The political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes.” The cognitive attitudes Habermas is referring to here are the very cognitive competencies that are distinctive of modern, postconventional social agents. Habermas’s recent work on religion, then, is primarily concerned with rescuing for the modern liberal state those motivational and moral resources that it cannot generate or provide itself. At the same time, his recent work is concerned with foregrounding the kind of ethical and moral concerns, preoccupations, and values that can guide us between the Scylla of a society administered from above by the system imperatives of a global economy and political power and the Charybdis of a technological frenzy that places us on the slippery slope of a liberally sanctioned eugenics.

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This post is adapted from a longer essay by Eduardo Mendieta, entitled “Rationalization, modernity and secularization,” which will appear in Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, Barbara Fultner, ed. (Durham, UK: Acumen Publishing, forthcoming). Mendieta is co-editor of two forthcoming SSRC volumes featuring work by Habermas: Habermas and Religion and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.—ed.

It is critical for our society that we get this normative debate right, for the stakes are high. We face increasing religious diversity. Liberal theorists, like Rawls, say that unless we keep religious reasons out of the public sphere, we could descend into a religiously motivated civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, critics of liberal theorists, like religious ethicist Charles Mathewes, say that unless we allow each other to talk about our deep differences, such as our religious beliefs, we could descend into the same nightmare that concerns the liberal theorists.

This normative debate is about what people should do in public debates, but knowing what people actually do would allow theorists to develop greater nuance in their analyses. When we see what people actually do, we can further inquire as to whether there are social structures that are pushing people toward good or bad behavior. For example, it is possible that the normative structure of the contemporary public sphere works so strongly against certain normative proposals that they should just be abandoned as utopian. Moreover, it is possible that we may gain normative wisdom from the collective practices of citizens. In any event, given the many hundreds of normative analyses, some empirical examinations may usefully agitate the debate.

One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates. A few political scientists have examined the use of religious and secular reasons by the largely evangelical Protestant religious Right. If anyone would want to use religious reasons, it would be these activists. But what the scholars find is that, in fact, the religious Right offers secular reasons for their policy proposals. This is not because they are normatively sanctioned for using religious reasons, as critics of liberal theory suggest. Rather, religious reasons do not convince people to accept one’s position. In a country with diverse comprehensive perspectives, and especially when trying to pass a national, not a local, law, it just does not work to give “Leviticus 18:22″ as your reason. The upshot of this empirical finding is that unless the U.S. public sphere becomes less religiously pluralistic, religious activists trying to enact legislation will not want to use religious reasons. The claims of the critics of public reason thus appear to be moot.

Of course, for normative theorists, the acceptability of using religious reasons depends on the proximity of the reason-giver to the creation of policy, with a spectrum ranging from citizens conversing over the fencepost about what laws should exist, through social movement activism and political campaigns, to the actions of legislators and other elected officials with actual power to enact policy. Scholars such as Robert Audi say that religious reasons should not be used anywhere along the spectrum, while others, like Chris Eberle in an earlier post, argue that religious reasons can be given by elected officials while passing laws; and Charles Taylor writes that the use of religious reasons by elected officials is fine, but secular reasons are required in the “official language of the state,” such as the wording of laws.

With this continuum in mind, the research on the religious Right suggests that near the “actual power” end of the spectrum, religious people do not want to give religious reasons, because they do not work.  If they do not work to mobilize a sub-group of citizens to  advocate for banning abortion, they are not going to be effective for forging a majority vote in Congress, which in theory is just as pluralistic as the citizenry. Thus, Eberle and Taylor seem to be arguing for a right that no one would ever use. Political scientists have found that religious Right activists still use religious reasons, but only when among members of their religious group. Given that they are not violating the basic norm of using religious reasons in public, the more subtle normative question is whether having “real” religious reasons is normatively improper.

The use of religious reasons by ordinary citizens talking over the fencepost may be different than their use by activists. I recently published an empirical analysis of whether there is a shared moral language among diverse religious people in the U.S. used in debates over reproductive genetic technologies. In one chapter, I evaluate whether people would want to refer to religious reasons in discussing reproductive genetics with their neighbors. I asked in-depth interview respondents whether one should explain one’s position on reproductive genetic technologies to a Hindu neighbor “using religious terms or secular terms.”

In my interviews, a majority of the people thought one should use religious discourse with the Hindu neighbor, with conservative Protestants being the most likely to say so. Interestingly, a majority of the secular respondents also thought that one should use religious discourse, which I will address below. The most prevalent reason given for advocating the use of religious reasons is that using only secular reasons is not possible if you are religious. For example, a Pentecostal woman said that she would use religious reasons because “that’s who I am . . . so that’s probably how it would come across.” A traditional evangelical woman said, “I can’t separate that because my spiritual beliefs influence everything I do and say. If I really feel that that’s the core of who I am, then to say, ‘it only influences me some of the time,’ is a mistake.”

This seems to be empirical support for the claim made by Calhoun and many others, such as Wolterstorff and Habermas, that people who are religious cannot separate out their religious reasons and their secular reasons—or, more subtly, that they cannot translate between the two. They have no choice but to use religious reasons.

Not quite. Like the religious Right activists described by political scientists, respondents actually wanted to start the conversation with secular reasons in order to be understood. As one evangelical said, he tries to avoid “Christian speak” because “nobody knows what the heck you are talking about.” However, if they were asked to give reasons for their reasons, then the respondents thought that eventually their religious reasons would have to be brought into the conversation, because those are “behind” everything.

There are two implications here for producing a more nuanced normative theory. First, it seems that both professional activists and ordinary religious people, including religious conservatives, want to use public reasons in the public sphere. While social movement organizations may just provide one reason, in an actual conversation between two people, reasons beget reasons. Eventually, religious reasons will be given by those who have them. If you scan the normative literature, you will be hard pressed to figure out whether giving a religious reason as a second- or third-order reason is thought to diminish the possibility of conflict or offense. A second implication is that, contrary to what many theorists maintain, religious people appear to be quite capable of translating between religious and secular reasons, as they claim to first present secular reasons, and only later the “real” religious reasons “behind” those secular reasons, in public debate.

These data speak to another normative issue. Calhoun, expanding on Habermas’s notion of translation, explores the idea that what is needed is not the translation of religious reasons into secular reasons, or the exclusive use of one or the other, but “mutual interrogation,” or a “complementary learning process” about people’s real reasons, religious or otherwise. What would happen if people started invoking their comprehensive perspectives by using religious reasons? Famously, Richard Rorty claimed that religious reasons are a conversation-stopper, because they are unintelligible to those who do not share one’s religious beliefs. So, if Rorty is correct, Habermas’s translation proposal will never work.

Ordinary religious people turn the intelligibility argument on its head. Even though religious reasons are second-order, having religious reasons and not using them is considered insincere. To actually understand the other person’s argument, you have to hear their religious reasons if they have them. As one interviewee said, “it would be disingenuous to use strictly secular terms. I wouldn’t want them to explain their decision to me without their faith being part of it, so I think we both ought to be able to use faith terms to understand the decision making.”

Interestingly, the secular respondents did not want religious people to give secular reasons. Their reasoning is: if this is how a religious person thinks, why shouldn’t they be able to talk that way? Of course, many of the secular people added that they were not going to be convinced by the religious reasons, but they would want others to offer such reasons if they wanted to.  My interview question asked about someone whom the respondent knows, whom they expect would be civil in discussion, and not someone whom they consider intolerant. This suggests that if normative theorists conclude that Habermas is right that we should engage in mutual translation, or that Calhoun is correct that we should pursue “transformation” through conversation about our deep differences, at least the religious people in the U.S. seem willing to engage in translation or transformation with people they know.

This is but a sampling of the normative insights that can be developed from the limited existing empirical data on the use of religious reasons in the public sphere. It would be helpful for normative theorists to identify the critical empirical questions that they have, and for empiricists to discuss with them what is actually possible to determine. Working together, the two groups could really shake up the debate about this critical social issue.

*  *  *

I wondered how long it would take DPDF participants to undo what I thought I had carefully assembled in my opening post on “Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters.”  Not very long at all, it seems.  And so, I will try a response here to Justin Reynolds and Alex Hernandez, both of whom have questioned what I actually mean by saying that “secularization” is a conceptual improvement over “secularism.”  Hernandez is suspicious about my invocation of Blumenberg, who seems to him to have in the end a very thin concept of “secularization,” one that relegates the tradition that comes out of Carl Schmitt (or Carl Löwith) to a sort of category error (the religious and secular answer positions may look the same, but the answers are really very different).  But his best insight is to see the desire for the fulfillment of the standard “secularization thesis” as a kind of eschatology in its own right. (He suggests this is perhaps not a form of teleology, though I will avoid worrying the distinction for the moment.)  I agree with Hernandez completely on these points, and have argued as much elsewhere: Blumenberg’s approach does not finally allow him to respond adequately to people like Schmitt and Löwith; and the standard “secularization thesis” did indeed harbor a telos within it, as my example of Habermas’s lament over the “unfinished project of modernity” indicates.  This is why so many today are reexamining the assumptions behind the standard thesis, and why I was suggesting a notion of “secularization” at odds with that thesis.

Reynolds’s complaint is a bit trickier.  On the one hand, he wonders whether my own use of the term “secularization” remains necessarily eschatological, despite my protests to the contrary, and suggests that I have simply adopted the “delay of the day of salvation” idea from the theologians—salvation here being a fully secular world, rather than the Kingdom of God.  On the other hand, he suggests that I fall into such a form of reasoning because, in fact, there is no getting around the idea of transcendence (as Voegelin, Jaspers, Niebuhr, and Tillich might claim).  That is, even scientific thought relies on notions of “truth” that are, if not divine, at least sufficiently universal and unchanging to suggest something beyond the mere singularities of disordered perception (or poetry).  Plato argued, to great effect, that this was indeed the case; and Nietzsche, to equally great effect, argued that Plato’s argument—along with its Jewish and Christian re-statements—was the error that more or less ruined Western civilization.

I will save for a subsequent post a more elaborate account of what I am trying to say with the term “secularization.”  But I do fully agree with Reynolds that religious thought is often capable of openness and contingency—I just think religions need to be reminded every so often that certain defined ends do not always justify the means—and historically, the secularizing tendencies within religion have served that purpose.  Reynolds is also right that I do not buy Asad’s argument (derived in part from Foucault) that equates secularism at the level of the state with the pursuit of “governmentality.”  I don’t buy it because it seems obvious to me that all religions that have achieved some measure of political power—whether in classical Rome, Islamic Spain, Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Puritan states of colonial America, or Saudi Arabia, to name just a few—have been equally interested in issues of governmentality; of what use would conversion be otherwise?  Some nominally secular, capitalist regimes, as Foucault (like Max Weber before him) argued, have achieved hegemony on the basis of modes of self-regulation that, it is true, would have made earlier religious tyrants and monarchs green with envy.  But many have not, and it would seem to me that Turkey today might turn out to be an interesting test case: Turkey’s greater openness toward Islam may well mean less recourse to brute force (as under the old secular military regimes) and a more modern approach to “governmentality.”  But this would be achieved—contra Asad—with the re-assertion of religion’s public role, not its eradication or greater compartmentalization.

However, in response to Reynolds’s claims that my use of the term “secularization” must be secretly eschatological and that I cannot escape from transcendence in any case, I must disagree on both points.  On the first point, I simply don’t see how a fully secular world is necessarily better—that it is something to be aimed at, or to be treated as any sort of fulfillment.  Actually, I don’t even know what the phrase “fully secular world” means.  For example, if it means leading one’s life rigorously according to scientific principles—at least the ones we know today—then I would say that the fully secular life is actually impossible to imagine: one would be in the predicament of a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s novels (which is certainly not to say that such predicaments never occur in real life—they do).  Another way to say this is: I am not a believer in any religious faith, but I recognize full well that I live my life in a world saturated with vestiges of religious faith and ritual from the past, and routine re-assertions of such faith and ritual in the present (as Sarah Shortall’s recent post also observed).  I cannot imagine that my life, even as an unbeliever, would necessarily be emotionally richer or happier if all of this, including all the historical and cultural consequences of it, were suddenly wiped away.  (In fact, I can’t even understand what that would mean, though I do recognize that it has been tried, generally with unhappy results.)  It is not necessarily that I think we must have religion to survive—we may not need it at all.  It is simply that I see no redemptive achievement—no telos worth pursuing—in its eradication.  There are people who have thought in such terms—both Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens claimed at different times that religion is the source of all evil in the world.  But I just don’t find enough evidence for such claims.

As to Reynolds’s second point about the unavoidability of transcendence—well, this is finally a semantic issue.  If, as I said above, this means we can’t avoid thinking in terms of universals and unchanging properties that have a more or less fuzzy relationship to actual things—my words “sex” and “wife” might conjure up an act and person that are quite different from the ones conjured in Reynolds’s head (at least, I hope so)—then I agree, but really, all that “transcendence” means here is what Durkheim meant by “collective consciousness”—that is, language itself, with all its formal coherence and sloppy substance.  But if transcendence means I can’t think, even scientifically or analytically, without invoking another world, so to speak, where all the ideas expressed in my words have an existence quite distinct from the one I inhabit, then I would say we avoid such transcendence well enough every time we use the word mind.  For me, a Kantian or Blumenbergian regulatory principle need be no more transcendent than a surgeon’s check-list.  And I hope we can all agree that, whatever they may think, surgeons have no special link to the divine.

*  *  *

Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the standard model of the “secularization thesis,” Jürgen Habermas famously pronounced modernity an “unfinished project,” and then proceeded to outline both the conditions needed to complete the project and the barriers that the twentieth century had thrown up in its way. This is obviously not the place to rehearse Habermas’s ideas, especially since so many others have done it well. (I am especially fond, still, of Anthony Giddens’s quick and reductive, yet incisive, overview of Habermas in Social Theory and Modern Sociology.) But, for the present purposes, I think we can usefully boil the conditions down to two. First, there is the completion of the process of the differentiation—or rationalization—of social spheres that had been emphasized (though not entirely happily) by Max Weber: the distinction of “state” from “society,” or the public from the private, that has become the hallmark of the liberal capitalist nation-state, and with it, the concomitant distinctions between the economic, the legal, and the political, along with the separation of science, morality, and aesthetics that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Second, in order to prevent the undeniable effectiveness of “steering mechanisms”—essentially, the purposive, means-ends rationality that has proven so successful in the areas of science and economics, and even, to a large extent, in utilitarian reformations of the law—from becoming “reified,” and thus overpowering all other potential social aims, the “life-world,” that is, the everyday world of lived traditions and customs, including the “semantic potentials” of religious beliefs and their ethical systems, would need to be preserved through a process of “communicative action” that based such beliefs on rational argumentation alone.

Nevertheless, Habermas posited that the major barrier to this happy (and still devoutly Weberian) synthesis, or balancing, of disenchanted managerial technocracy and charismatic life-world was the same one that had bedeviled the Enlightenment: myth. Again, this is not the place for detail, but it would be fair to say that Habermas is very much in the mainstream of Western thought in making a sharp distinction between religion (which is, in this view, rational in its own way) and myth (which is not), and then in assuming that the sorts of “semantic potentials” that could usefully be provided by religious tradition in the life-world of modernity were those that were already largely “rationalized” (that is, reformed), Protestant (or Judaic, in Hermann Cohen’s sense), private, individual, and directed toward ethical action in this world, rather than salvation in another—essentially, Judaic “justice” and Pauline “love.” In this sense, myth, from the dogmas and totalitarianism of the Right and the Left to what Habermas has called “idle postmodern talk,” is the primary enemy of the unfinished project of modernity.

It is obvious, from the vantage point of the present, that Habermas’s quite influential theory is in many ways a theory of secularization, and in the classical sense of that term. Those social spheres already emancipated by purposive rationality—by self-interest, that is—were the leading edge of a secular modern world. But they needed to be countered by residues of ethical tradition—in particular, it turns out, the belief set that came to be defined in the twentieth century as the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—until such time as such vestiges could be translated into the language of secular philosophy. In Habermas’s words, “As long as religious language bears within itself inspiring, indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation into a discourse that gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion.” Bracketing off the circularity of this statement—for example, are the contents of religion “inspiring” because they are “unrelinquishable” (that is, perhaps, innate), or “unrelinquishable” merely because they are “inspiring,” if obviously contingent?—Habermas’s Hegelian faith in the power of philosophical reason eventually to “translate” religious ethical contents into language with a firm (materialist and scientific?) basis is clear. That would, presumably, finish the project of modernity once and for all. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of all processes of “secularization,” and the full instauration of “secularism” as a lived, quotidian experience.

There is no way, I think, that Habermas, in his earlier work, could have predicted the return of religion in its more public forms in recent decades, any more than he could have foreseen the re-opening of the question of secularization within social theory since 1990. But these are empirical questions, and there has been a fair amount of debate about the factual reality of the oft-cited resurgence of religion, or “desecularization,” and about how to measure it. I am more interested here in the theoretical questions that Habermas’s work raises: What would a fully secularized world mean? What would the “project of modernity” look like if it were, finally, finished? What philosophy could achieve the thorough extirpation of all religious, or mythical, or irrational elements, and how would we respond to it?

Such questions remind me of a smart comment made by Barbara Johnson years ago—I now forget where—in reference to the voluminous amount of criticism leveled at the way the realist novel encoded and sustained gender inequities. Could the novel as a genre even exist, she asked, without the inequities? Johnson’s question is a properly deconstructive one, and I have no desire to re-open here the question of the utility of Derrida’s work. But even on historical grounds, she is right: the ongoing conversation that we call the novel in fact depends on certain kinds of irrationality, and gender is one of them (there are many others). But the same could be said about “philosophy”—indeed, I think that is, finally, what Habermas is getting at once you subtract the Hegelian teleology (itself attenuated by a question mark) from his work—or about “ethics” or “justice” or any of the other big ideas that are inevitably raised by social theory. Considerations of this sort have traditionally led people back to a kind of neo-Kantianism, that is, a sense that what matters most is the method by which we approach such questions, not whether we are able to posit a fixed endpoint to the discussion. Hans Blumenberg, for my money, has it about right when he insists, in a neo-Kantian vein, that the idea of progress—ethical, legal, and political, and not just scientific or technological—can be treated as an infinite project without positing any sort of “finish”: “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it and cannot promote it as mere means. Infinite progress does make each present relative to its future, but at the same time it renders every absolute claim untenable. This idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable, which is that all dealings must be so constituted that through them people do not become mere means.”

I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth already: Blumenberg leaves us with a Kantian “regulative principle” and nothing more. Worse, he hardly sets the bar very high. A history that is merely “humanly bearable” is a long way, in my book, from the one that would hold out the promesse du bonheur that Stendhal attributed to art, and that legions of Marxist thinkers in later decades demanded from society. (Indeed, even the reference to the “pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence would be, for most people, a substantial improvement over Blumenberg, I think.) Still, regulative principles can be extraordinarily useful—think of them as procedural “checklists” of the sort that Atul Gawande has recently promoted in medicine. In effect, Blumenberg’s regulative principle has two consequences. It not only demands that we eschew the willingness to tailor all means to predetermined ends promoted by dogmatism, from the religious to the scientific to the professional—a refusal of dogma that is the essence of what Edward Said once meant by “secular criticism,” and that is in many ways an echo of what Matthew Arnold meant by “Hellenism.” It also insists that the pathway to the ideal of “secular criticism” (or “Hellenism”)—that is, the pathway to secularism, in the terms I have set out in this post—is itself without end. No one, as far as I can tell, has yet been able to describe what a fully achieved secularism would mean. Were lives today to be lived only according to the latest scientific evidence, devoid of allegiances to that hodgepodge of ideas we call custom, tradition, religion, and (even) myth, we would need a new Jonathan Swift to capture the likely result; the eighteenth century was already fertile ground for his satire. And those “projectors” who subsequently tried to implement such a world—from Fourier with his phalanstery to J. B. Watson with his scientific child rearing—hardly inspire any more confidence. (Swift’s religion was, at its core, a stinging rebuke of mortal hubris.) My point here is not to resurrect Habermas’s “semantic potentials” under another guise, for these emotive elements of the life-world are “potentials” precisely in the sense that they would eventually be “translated” by rational actors who could then provide good reasons, based on sound evidence, for what they believe and do. Rather, I want to insist that “secularization,” in all its polymorphous perversity, is all that we have ever had, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and that this is, strictly speaking, an unending process, even if it is one that, for many reasons (such as the “regulative principle” against dogma), is worth pursuing. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, contra Habermas, the only modernity that any rational person should want is one that will remain both historically unnecessary and never complete. Finishing the project of modernity is precisely the oxymoron we want to avoid.

Finally, I believe that the proposals submitted for this year’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the “After Secularization” field suggest approaches to secular modernity that are quite congruent with what I have outlined so far.

First, there is a very clear interest, shared by about half the group, in empirical questions—that is, questions that have to do less with theoretical issues of, say, the meaning of secularization, or religion, or what (if anything) one might imagine “after secularization,” than with how a specifiable collectivity of persons responds to such questions in practice, in everyday life, and in the kinds of moral or political decisions they make. In one sense, this is not surprising: much of the work in the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the secularization thesis, from 1990 to the present, was theoretical in nature. When empirical considerations were taken into account, this was done largely through superficial surveys of population samples in given societies that could then be used for comparative purposes. What was evident in many proposals was a desire to dig deeper, to work especially via interviews and ethnographic investigation toward a more thorough and complex understanding of how and why secularization in particular societies occurred, and to elaborate more fully the kinds of resistance, or the types of return to religion, that might accompany this process. In particular, it seems that many younger scholars are concerned to view the boundaries of the secular and the religious as being far more porous than surveys might suggest, even in those instances when there are measurable claims to either strong belief or strong skepticism.

Second, it is clear that the wide range of problems that have been discovered in the “secularization thesis” over the past two decades equally unsettle the term secularism. The difficulty of defining “religion” in any comprehensive way, or with any pretension to universality, is a long-standing one. Indeed, one might say that the entire history and sociology of religion in the modern period, since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, have been built in large part around this difficulty. But it is now impossible to avoid the conclusion that secularism itself is not simply a word that defines a negative condition—the absence of religious belief, whatever that might be taken to mean—but rather a term that occasions almost as much ambiguity and difficulty as “religion.” Whether we consider the work of figures like Ashis Nandy, for whom secularism represents a particular imposition of Western values in non-Western religious communities, or that of Talal Asad, for whom secularism is the agenda of a specific regime of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality,” we no longer have the luxury of seeing the secular in some neutral, non-historical, non-political, and purely rational light. Many proposals demonstrated a fairly sophisticated awareness that, whatever “secularism” might mean, it was not going to be easily reduced to the sheer invisibility of religion, and that this was true, not only for some putative era “after secularization,” but also for the entire history of secularization itself.

Third, there was a manifest interest in the ongoing, yet also quite newly inflected, interrogation of the underlying theories of religion and secularization. This is particularly salient in the degree to which the broader set of questions once posed on the peripheries of mainstream secularization scholarship by “political theology” has now become far more central, whether in the work of early figures such as Carl Schmitt or in that of contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. But even here, there is a real desire to push the boundaries of, say, what “political theology”—a term with an essentially Christian frame of reference—might mean. Most significant is the widespread desire to re-situate theorizing about religion and the secular in global terms. No matter how limited by geography or confession individual projects may be, there appeared to be a fairly consistent sense that, even on theoretical grounds, new revisionist work on secularization and its history could not be done on Christian terms alone, no matter how one regards fairly entrenched claims—claims made with equal force from Max Weber to Peter Berger to Bernard Lewis to Talal Asad—about the overwhelmingly Christian origins of secularization in history.

According to many liberal theories, expressions of religious citizens are acceptable in the public sphere so long as they do not influence formal law-making and are expressed in an appropriate public venue. But the political reality is actually more complex and reveals a narrowing or even complete disappearance of public spaces in which religious expression is possible. Talal Asad explains this contradiction by engaging in a Foucauldian deconstruction of public space. Asad’s approach to secularism is particularly helpful for explaining the current debate on Islam in Europe, though it nonetheless requires some additional nuance and further contextualization.

Unlike the liberal theoreticians John Rawls and Charles Taylor, Asad does not see the secular public sphere as a neutral, shared space composed of different voices that accept and abide by the same principles or ethics of citizenship. Instead, he defines the private/public divide as embedded in a heterogeneous landscape of power. From the beginning, in Asad’s view, the “liberal public sphere” has excluded certain kinds of people: women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the poor classes, immigrants, religious groups, and others.

In the same vein, Dominique Colas analyzes the fight between Iconoclasts and the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century and observes elements relevant to the concerns raised by Asad: the power of the state is employed to violently crush movements that refused to accept the limitations placed upon their religious claims in the broader public realm. Colas clearly illustrates that the concept of tolerance in the “civil society” of the sixteenth century was not a neutral force. Those who refused to accept the limitations for social behavior and expression were labeled “fanatics” and harshly punished. “Fanaticism,” as defined by Colas, is precisely this refusal to accept the duality of the public and private realms of the social order.

The tension between civil authority and the particular cultural and religious norms of minority communities is the crucial issue in the debate over the definition of “secularism.” In twenty-first century Europe, it is important to understand the public sphere as, not only a disembodied voice, but also a product of the media as well as state-mediated discourses. During the cartoon crisis, for example, alongside Muslims protesting expressly against blasphemy, several made use of secular arguments that could, in principle, have been received in the public sphere, but were rejected because of the asymmetrical balance of power between European establishments and the growing—and increasingly assertive—Muslim minority. Some, for example, utilized arguments similar to those concerning the prevention of hate speech (as it is guaranteed by most European states), holocaust denial, and incitement to violence. Regardless, unconsidered perceptions of Muslims based on a stigma of extremism often prevent rational consideration of expressions that are legitimate within European legal systems.

In the same vein, the rallying of European Muslims who wanted to ban The Satanic Verses and murder its author, Salman Rushdie, has been seen by some prominent advocates of minority rights as an important example of a religious and cultural minority attempting to introduce restrictions that are unacceptable, given that they undermine individual autonomy. Charles Taylor, for instance, considered the demand that The Satanic Verses be banned to be illegitimate. Michael Walzer, well known for his relativist approach to values, took a hard-line liberal position to defend Rushdie against his detractors, arguing that immigrants, by their very choice of immigrating to Europe, have chosen to adopt the tenets of Western liberalism and should therefore conform to them.

On the other hand, many of those in Europe who champion multiculturalism, such as Tariq Modood and Bhikku Parekh, have criticized such positions, explaining that it is a mistake to see the fight against apostasy as British Muslims’ key motivation. Instead, they explain the protests of Muslim leaders as evidence simply of their desire to include Islam under the British Blasphemy Law that, before its repeal in 2008, was strictly limited to Anglicanism. These examples of the divergent ways in which Muslims make claims on and in the secular public sphere highlight the limits of the “overlapping consensus” view and suggest an imbalanced relationship of power between a specific religious group and the representatives of civil authority.

An important question raised by the Muslim presence in Europe is how the protection of specific subcultures can promote, rather than stifle, individual emancipation. Will Kymlicka offers one possible way to reconcile the two conflicting demands: “If we simplify to an extreme, we can state that minority rights are compatible with cultural liberalism when a) individual freedom is protected within the group, and b) they promote equality, and not domination, between groups within the different European societies.” Sometimes, however, Islamic groups collectively appeal for rights that would, in effect, limit individual freedom. The Rushdie Affair and the call to ban The Satanic Verses are illustrative of such dilemmas.

A different—and contradictory—example of the tension between civic order and the Islamic community, on which the rest of this article will focus, concerns the recognition of Islamic Law within existing legal systems. In order to bring nuance to Asad’s interpretation of secular space as simply a hegemonic regime, the examples that follow will show that representatives of civil authority do, in fact, try to foster equality and tolerance among European citizens of different cultures.

Contrary to the widespread belief that Muslims in the West seek the inclusion of shari’a statutes in the constitutions of European countries, most surveys show that Muslims are quite satisfied with the secular nature of European societies. When Muslims agitate for change, they engage in the democratic process, utilizing mainstream parties and institutions. At the same time, their acceptance of secular practices does not mean that they renounce the use of Islamic principles and legal rules to guide or structure their daily lives. In a study funded by the Sixth European Union Framework Programme, which convened 50 focus groups of Muslims in London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam, I clearly observed this tendency: for example, many Muslims expressed a strong attachment to religious, rather than civil, marriage and divorce.

We examined the literature and jurisprudence of several key European countries in order to ascertain the arguments used by the courts and by Muslims respectively when conflicts arise. The plethora of national laws in Europe and the diversity among Muslim groups makes comparison difficult, but we found a general trend of European countries recognizing foreign civil law. In countries like France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, the law distinguishes between national and foreign jurisprudence, allowing residents to act in accordance with their own national laws. In these cases, the country of residence may apply a discriminatory foreign law. For Muslims, Islamic laws on marriage, divorce, and custody may differ according to their school of thought (Hanafi, Shafi‘i, Maliki, Hanbali, etc.) or country of origin (Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, etc.). Furthermore, in some countries—like Tunisia, Turkey, and Morocco—the family law has been secularized and respects, in theory, the principle of equality between men and women. However, these reforms do not always prevent the continuance of customs that can be discriminatory toward women and that can often be presented as “Islamic.” One example is the recent divorce case of a Moroccan couple, brought before the French courts, in which the husband appealed for divorce on the grounds that his wife was not a virgin at the time of their marriage.

Similarly, participants in the focus groups highlighted the difficulty they faced in trying to express their indignation during the Danish cartoon affair. They were bothered less by the representation of the Prophet Muhammad itself than by the fact that he was depicted as the quintessential figure of violence. The participants felt that their disapproval of the cartoon was interpreted by their fellow citizens as unpatriotic, while they themselves did not consider such opinions to be incompatible with their European citizenship. The same discrepancy emerged in some groups with regard to issues of dress code and, specifically, the hijab, the wearing of which is considered unpatriotic in some European places, while it obviously has a very different meaning for many Muslim women. We see a further manifestation of this issue in the recent case of a fully veiled Moroccan woman who was denied French citizenship in 2008 on the grounds that wearing the niqab was incompatible with French values. And the same suspicion of anti-civicism or anti-patriotism can be discerned in the debate on the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

When we turn to the shari’a debate, Kymlicka’s two conditions come under intense scrutiny. Our research corroborates the Gallup polls’ findings showing the acceptance of secular orders by the majority of Muslims in Europe. In fact, not one of the focus group participants expressly rejected European secular principles. Nevertheless, such acceptance does not preclude tension between, for instance, Islamic practices of marriage, divorce, and child custody and the principle of individual freedom under secular civil law. In legal practice, the question of whether to take Muslim family law into account in the regulation of daily life is bound to the condition that these laws meet the criteria prescribed by human rights and fundamental liberties. Therefore, due to inequality between men and women, acknowledgment of Family Law codes imported from some Muslim countries appears as a hindrance to the process of integrating Muslims, to the point that some compare the situation to a conflict of civilizations. There do exist fringes of the Muslim population across Europe that reject the paradigm of secular civil law and act violently in ways that strongly prejudice Europeans’ perceptions of Islam and Muslims. However, the silent majority of European Muslims already accept Islam’s compatibility with the basic precepts of human rights.

The second condition advanced by Kymlicka, promoting the equality of cultures, is also problematic, since Islam as a religion and culture is still perceived as alien to Europe. Promoting equality between cultures involves redefining public culture and the status of Islam within the public space at the level of both nation-states and the European Union. However, some claims on behalf of Islamic culture in fact champion the European conception of human rights, by arguing, for example, that laws banning religious symbols from French public schools are contradictory to the European notion of fundamental rights.

Because of these complex circumstances, we find different and sometimes contradictory attitudes among Muslims toward European secular laws. As mentioned previously, complete rejection of secular law is rare; more commonly, objections are targeted specifically at elements of French secularism. But complete acceptance of European civil law is also rare. Among focus group participants, a preference for Islamic prescriptions for family organization was clearly expressed, especially in the European context. However, the extent to which these prescriptions are taken to heart varies greatly according to gender, age, and education. For example, educated Muslim women tend to adopt a more individualized attitude toward family law, requesting greater equality between men and women. On the other hand, less educated men tend to remain closer to some cultural traditions inherited from their countries of origin.

In short, the majority of European Muslims acknowledge the compatibility of Islam with the basic tenets of human rights, although there are still parts of the Muslim population in Europe who reject this paradigm. For example, a group called Islam4UK, which emerged in autumn 2009 in Great Britain, demands the enforcement of shari’a. It is also significant that Islamic parties have recently emerged on the political scene in Germany and the Netherlands.

Surprisingly, this reconciliation between Islamic principles and secular regimes has often been conducted in an indirect way through decisions by European judges rather than Islamic legal experts or Muslim theologians. Consequently, a slow and “invisible” form of personal Islamic law is being constructed and adapted to Western secular laws. Of course, European judges do not claim Islamic authority, but the fact that Muslim theologians do not contest their decisions, and sometimes even endorse them, illustrates the law’s adaptation. The contours of this evolution remain to be defined, depending on the country and the Islamic group concerned.

These results, derived from survey research of European Muslims, clearly demonstrate the core deficiency of Asad’s view of secularism: it fails to adequately recognize the complexities of political interactions that occur between disparate stakeholder communities. Craig Brittain correctly states, “It is one thing to argue for the legitimacy of religious adherents to publicly voice their particular worldviews; it is quite another matter to suggest that such voices be granted equal argumentative weight, without mediation, in public debate.”

SECULARISM AS A TRAGIC CATEGORY

Interestingly, Talal Asad has perceived the tragic character of secularism, especially in his interpretation of Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Incidentally, it may contradict his tendency to reject the category of secularism as an instrument of power and domination: “This world is ‘secular’ not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the ‘real’ has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainty, without fixed moorings even for the believer, a world in which the real and the imaginary mirror each other. In this world, the politics of certainty is clearly impossible.”

Such a perception of secularism can help religious theorists address Asad’s principal concern that the concept functions with an overly Westernized bias against non-Western religions. It echoes at the level of what Charles Taylor calls “the third meaning” of secularism, namely, the fact that believers exist in a world in which their beliefs are continuously challenged by other values. The challenge of being able to believe without feeling threatened by others’ beliefs came across very strongly in the focus groups when participants were asked about relationships with non-Muslims and tolerance vis-à-vis apostasy. No real consensus emerged on these issues, but the discussion highlighted a clear divide between the perception of the virtuous Muslim as one who values the moral commitment of the Ummah above all others versus one who lives according to Muslim principles but maintains a certain sense of relativism. This question forms the core of a book by Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks that led to an intense and controversial debate in the UK six years ago, and represents the most salient challenge to the status of Muslims in Europe or the United States: how can one maintain one’s sense of the Islamic truth and simultaneously acknowledge the truth of others?