The Commodification of Religion

There has been considerable amount of research on how commodification and the Internet are transforming the religious lives of young people. For young Muslims, Internet use is an important means of building a consensus about, for example, whether the use of henna for cosmetic purposes is com­patible with Muslim tradition or whether dating and premarital intimacies are compatible with the life of a “good Muslim.” Whereas the religious sys­tem of communication in an age of revelation was hierarchical, unitary, and authoritative, the system of communicative acts in a new media environment are typically horizontal rather than vertical, diverse and fragmented rather than unitary, devolved rather than centralized. Furthermore, the authority of any message is constantly negotiable and negotiated. The growth of these diverse centers of interpretation in a global communication system has pro­duced considerable instability in the formal system of religious belief and practice. In Islam, for example, there has been an inflation of sources of authority, since through some local and specific consensus, almost any local teacher or mullah can issue a fatwa to guide a local community. Because new media provide multiple channels of access and encourage discursive interaction on blogs, they bring about a democratization of knowledge and religious lifestyles. Although there is clearly a digital divide, more and more people have access to these religious sites of communication. There is a democratization of Islam in the sense that many young Muslims bypass their traditional ulama and imams in order to learn about Islam from pam­phlets and sources, but this is equally true of other religious traditions.

There is in very general terms an important growth of religion online. In developing an account of the commodification and democratization of religion, let me return to the matter of ineffability, concentrating on the issue of communication and modern Islam. How is the Internet shaping the daily lives and religious practices of young generations? One obvious answer is that it makes the actual collective practice of religion—such as going to church or to the mosque—no longer necessary, and the result is that reli­gion online becomes online religion. The Internet has therefore only served to reinforce the problem of authority. Within the Muslim diaspora, where young Muslims face new problems relating to personal conduct, the new Internet intellectuals create personal websites, providing religious or ethi­cal rulings on various questions relating to religious conduct. These e-mail fatwas are not recognized by traditional shari’a courts as admissible evidence and cannot be readily enforced, but they clearly have an influence within the diaspora. They become authoritative, as users compare these rulings against other sites and e-fatwas. The debate on the Internet between multiple Mus­lim audiences constitutes an informal shari’a in which a communal consen­sus can emerge around controversial issues related to appropriate practice in new environments.

In summary, the Internet is an important technology for creating an imagined community for individuals and groups that are separated from their homelands and exist as minorities in alien secular cultures that are often hostile to Islam. These Internet sites also serve to reinforce the indi­vidualism that many observers have associated with neo-fundamentalism because, in the case of Islam, the global virtual ummah, or community of believers, is the perfect site for individuals to express themselves while still claiming to be members of a community on whose behalf they are speak­ing. We can conclude therefore that these forms of religious communica­tion are characterized by a principle of subsidiarity by which authority rests in the local and specific act of communication rather than in a principle of hierocracy.

These media contribute to a growing subjective individualism that is very different from the rugged ascetic and disciplined individualism of early Protestantism. This emerging religious subjectivity can be interpreted as a facet of the “expressive revolution” that had its roots in the student revolts of the 1960s. In the new individualism, people invent their own religious ideas and borrow religious practices from diverse traditions. The result has been a social revolution flowing from both consumerism and individual­ism, and as a result, “Capitalism’s success eroded class rivalries and replaced the activist and utopian mass politics of the inter-war era with a more bloodless politics of consumption and management. Goods not gods were what people wanted.” Consumerism helped to break down the old division between religion and the world, contributing to the contraction of the span of transcendence.

Religious lifestyles get modeled on consumer lifestyles in which people can try out religions rather like the way they try out a new fashion in hand­bags or shoes. In a consumer society, people want “goods not gods,” and to a large extent their desires can be satisfied by consumer credit. A new indus­try has emerged, concerned with spiritual advice on how to cope with the modern world while remaining pious and pure. Pious lifestyles are marketed by religious entrepreneurs who need to brand their products in the spiritual marketplace.

The consequence of these developments is a growing division between traditional “religion” and modern “spirituality.” Globalization has brought the spread of personal spirituality, and these spiritualities typi­cally provide guidance in the everyday world as well as subjective, tai­lor-made meaning. Such religious phenomena are often combined with personal therapeutic, healing services or the promise of personal enhance­ment through meditation. While fundamentalist norms of personal dis­cipline appeal to social groups that are upwardly socially mobile, such as the lower middle class and the newly educated, spirituality is more closely associated with middle-class singles who have been thoroughly influenced by Western consumer values. David Martin’s study of Pentecostalism also suggests that new therapies and lifestyles can be sustained through mem­bership in Pentecostal groups in which religion and material aspiration no longer conflict.

The new religions are closely associated also with themes of therapy, peace, and self-help. Of course the idea that religion, especially in the West, has become privatized is hardly new. However, these new forms of sub­jectivity and privatized living are no longer confined to Protestantism or the American middle classes; they now have a global audience. These reli­gious developments are therefore no longer simply local cults but burgeoning global popular religions carried by the Internet, movies, rock music, popular TV shows, and pulp fiction. I have described these new forms as pick-’n’-mix religions because their adherents borrow freely from a great range of religious beliefs and practices without any noticeable regard for coherence. It is also a new experimental context in which the iconic can also be the iconoclastic, as represented in Madonna’s experimentation with both Cath­olic and Hasidic personae.

These phenomena have been regarded as aspects of “new religious move­ments” that are, as we have seen, manifestations of the new spiritual mar­ketplaces. Such forms of religion tend to be highly individualistic, they are unorthodox in the sense that they follow no official creed, they are charac­terized by their syncretism, and they have little or no connection with insti­tutions such as churches, mosques, or temples. They are post-institutional, and in this sense they can legitimately be called “postmodern” religions. If global fundamentalism involves the modernization of social groups who are new arrivals to global megacities, the global post-institutional religions are typical of postmodernization.

Finally, spirituality is a mobile religiosity that mobile people can trans­port globally to new sites where they can mix and match their religious or self-help needs without too much constraint from hierarchical authorities. It is a religious orientation that permits rapid and easy transitions between dif­ferent identities, in which modern conversions tend to be more like a change in consumer brands than a searching of the soul. If the new religious life­styles give rise to emotions, these are packaged in ways that can be easily consumed. Brand loyalty on the part of consumers in low-intensity religions is also minimalistic.

Conclusion: New Gods of Communication

In modern societies, the principal characteristics of religion are its individu­alism in association with the decline in the authority of traditional institu­tions (specifically, the church, the liturgy, and the priesthood) and a grow­ing awareness that religious symbols are social constructs. Robert Bellah’s predictions about modernity have been strikingly confirmed in the growth of popular, de-institutionalized, commercialized and largely post-Christian religions. In fact, similar processes are at work in all the major religions. In a differentiated global religious market, the various segments of the religious market compete with one another for followers and resources. Bourdieu’s ideas about the struggle for symbolic capital in the field of religion provide a valid sociological perspective on the volatility of this religious field. The new religions are genuinely consumerist, but while fundamentalist move­ments appear to challenge consumer (Western) values, they are themselves typically selling a lifestyle based on special diets, alternative education, health regimes, dress codes, pilgrimage destinations, and marriage services. The contemporary religious market is consequently highly diversified into a range of competing groups, charismatic movements, Pentecostal churches, traditional religions, spirituality, and the like, but these are all, to varying degrees, influenced by consumerism. The audiences for religious services are also differentiated by class, gender, education, region, and so forth.

The triumph of popular, democratizing, global consumer culture is now having a deep impact on the traditional, hierarchical, literate religions of the past. Perhaps the most important development in modern religion is the changing status of women; one can safely predict that women will become increasingly important in religious leadership, and not simply in liberal Episcopalian churches but in the world religions more generally. Gender is a crucial feature of the new consumerist religiosity in which women increas­ingly dominate the new spiritualities; women will be and to some extent already are the important “taste leaders” in the emergent global spiritual marketplace.

Globalization theory has focused scientific attention on modern funda­mentalism, which is seen as a critique of traditional and popular religiosity. However, the real effect of globalization has been the growth of heterodox, commercial, hybrid, syncretistic religions over orthodox, authoritative, and institutional versions of the spiritual life. The ideological effects and social consequences of these religions cannot be easily or effectively controlled by religious authorities, and they often have a greater impact than official mes­sages, at least among the young. In Weber’s terms, it is the triumph of mass over virtuoso religiosity.

Pentecostalism has prepared the lower middle classes for participation in the emerging consumer economy of Latin America, and in a similar fash­ion, reformist Islam in Southeast Asia provides newly urbanized people, and especially educated women, with values and practices that are relevant to life in more complex, multicultural urban and largely secular societies, in coun­tries where international corporations have provided employment opportu­nities for young people willing or able to leave their villages for work in the megacities.

The habitus of the modern adherent of deinstitutionalized religion is basically compatible with the lifestyles of a commercial world in which the driving force of the economy is domestic consumption. Megachurches have embraced the sales strategies of late capitalism in order to get their message out to the public. On these grounds, one can claim that modern religions are compromised because the tension between the world and the religion is lost. We may define these developments as a form of social secularization. One can imagine that social historians will object to this argument, claim­ing that commercialized religion was not unknown in the Middle Ages, when pilgrimage and relics were basic elements of the economy of European societies. However, with contemporary social differentiation, the market no longer dances to the tune of the dominant religious institutions. Further­more, these secular developments are global rather than simply local. The result is a sociological paradox or set of paradoxes. Religion has erupted into the public domain, being associated with a number of radical or revolution­ary movements from Iran to Brazil and from Poland to Colombia, but at the same time, religion has been coming to terms with a variety of changes that are the consequence of commodification. More precisely, the secular­ization of religion has occurred through a double movement—democratiza­tion and commercialization. The sense of mystery and awe surrounding the ineffable character of the sacred has been eroded by the liberal ethos of democracy, in which egalitarian, immediate, and intimate relations are valued more than hierarchical, distant, and formal relationships. Religion as an agent of social change has been further compromised by the loss of any significant contrast between the sacred and the world. Religion has special­ized in providing personal services and has therefore been competing with various secular agencies that also offer welfare, healing, comfort, and mean­ing. In this competition, religious groups have by and large taken over the methods and values of a range of institutions operating within what we can, for want of a more sophisticated term, call “the leisure industries.”

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.

Philip S. Gorski

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JB: You’re working on a book on civil religion at the moment. Could you tell me a little bit about that project?

PG: Sure. It wasn’t really the book I had planned or expected to write. It was more occasioned by hearing certain things in Obama’s campaign rhetoric that reminded me of ideas about civil religion that I had picked up from Robert Bellah at graduate school. He was my adviser, so it was something that was parked in the back of my brain, and I remembered in particular his rather despairing line in The Broken Covenant where he said that American civil religion is nothing but “an empty and broken shell.” Suddenly it seemed like it was reappearing, so I wrote something about this for The Immanent Frame, and an editor from a press saw it and said, “Oh, you should write a book about this. It’s very topical.” It’s something that I was really quite engaged by at that time, more than some of the other things I’d been thinking about working on, so I started digging more deeply into it. The starting point was really Bellah’s argument that he develops in the Daedalus article from ’67 and then the Broken Covenant book. In reading some of the reactions to his argument, I pretty quickly saw that a lot of people fundamentally misunderstood—or maybe also intentionally misunderstood—what he was up to and accused him of being a proponent of some kind of political idolatry, or national self-worship. I knew this wasn’t at all what he intended, but it made it quite clear to me that one had to draw some sort of a conceptual distinction between what he wanted to call civil religion and then something else, which I decided was best called religious nationalism. Eventually, I started to conceptualize civil religion as a mediating tradition in between two other alternative traditions within American political culture, the third being some form of radical secularism. The easiest way to conceptualize it is to imagine religion and politics as separate fields or arenas, and there’s an ongoing argument about what the proper relationship between them should be. It re-erupted most recently in reactions against Rick Santorum’s remarks about the JFK speech. You can imagine three basic modalities: these spheres are completely separate, they’re completely fused, or somewhere in between. There’s some sort of overlap or tension between them. So that’s the sort of underlying thought for these three different traditions: civil religion, radical secularism, and religious nationalism. But of course that’s a very formal way of thinking about it. One has to think about this more substantively, as well. I guess what I realized when thinking about religious nationalism is that it draws on a very different set of texts. So it draws in particular on the kind of blood sacrifice and apocalyptic tropes within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; it draws on tales of conquest in the Pentateuch or Kings; it draws on the apocalyptic prophecies in Daniel and the book of Revelation. Civil religion, by contrast, draws much more on the prophetic tradition: the Hebrew prophets proper, and one can certainly put Jesus in that same group in certain ways—you can see him as part of that prophetic tradition. The other difference is that civil religion also draws on a non-theistic tradition, which is civil republicanism—something that had been rediscovered in American political culture during the 60s when Bellah was writing the civil religion book, and it finds its way into his argument. So in essence, I agree with Bellah about what the two central threads of the civil religious tradition are: there’s a prophetic tradition within the Bible and civic republicanism as it grows out of the American Revolution. Where I diverge from him is in trying to be much clearer that this is not the only tradition, but that we need to think about there being at least three competing and sometimes opposing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship of religion and politics in the United States.

JB: And what can this tell us about civil religion in American today?

PG: The contemporary relevance of this is fairly clear. Our current politics is in many ways defined by the people on the edges, by radical secularists on the Left and religious nationalists on the Right. Not to say that this is all that’s going on in American politics, but if you take this religious slice of it, I think that’s a lot of it, with the culture wars and so on. The two feed off one another to a certain degree. The radical secularists become a stand-in for anybody who’s on the Left and anybody who’s not the religious nationalists, and the radical religious nationalists become a stand-in for everybody who’s religious. When people look at religious people from the Left, you get this kind of undifferentiated and polarizing picture, so there is this rather unfortunate synergy between the two positions. That’s the political thrust of the project, to say that there is this other mediating tradition. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody’s just going to get along, but at least there is a tradition that might actually bring people together again into more of a common argument. I think one of the big discoveries of this that’s also most relevant to the present is the way in which the conservative movement in the last few years has completely written equality out of the American political tradition. It’s actually quite foundational. I think the tension between liberty and equality is one of the defining tensions of the American political tradition, and people disagreed about how to define equality. Certainly political conservatives tended to define it more narrowly. They had a very narrow understanding of equality and opportunity, but they didn’t pretend that it was unimportant. Now if you listen to the rhetoric of many political conservatives, all they talk about is liberty: liberty, liberty, liberty. It’s quite amazing to think how much of an impact that a once-fringe group of libertarians has had on the conservative movement. This also involves a very particular reading of the founding documents, for example. It’s not coincidental that they constantly cite the Constitution and not the Preamble to the Constitution, and surely not the Preamble to the Declaration, which is where the values of national solidarity, “We the people,” and equality, “Created equal,” are to be found. These are the governing principles of the American tradition; the Preambles express the higher aspirations. There’s this kind of originalist, literalist reading of these documents, which of course resonates with a certain kind of scriptural hermeneutic for a lot of these people, too. This is also of course the way that they read the Bible. Part of the more immediate political message of the book will be to reclaim and to reassert equality as one of the central values of the American republic.

JB: In Montreal in 2009, I had the good fortune to go to the AAR [American Academy of Religion] panel that you were on with David Kim, David Morgan, and Ebrahim Moosa. Among you and the other panelists, there was optimistic talk about Obama’s role in civil religion, but the tone was tentative. I’m wondering now if you think Obama’s been able to establish a new rhetoric of this kind of civil religion that you’re talking about.

PG: Definitely not. I, like a lot of people, have seen some of my higher hopes disappointed. I think that’s just what happens in politics, and it’s a good reason not to invest all of your hopes and all of your energies in politics. There is a sort of curious way in which I think some of the jibes from the Right were correct about the almost messianic fervor around Obama at the time. I was talking with a conservative colleague a couple of weeks ago, and he told this very funny joke: “I hear the Obama team is actually in Jerusalem. Oh, really; what are they doing? Oh, they’re visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. What is it that they’re doing there? Well, they’re actually trying to get a burial plot for Obama. You’re kidding. They actually want to have him buried there, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? Yeah, that’s what they’d like. Is this going to work out? Well, they had to do a lot of hard negotiating, but in the end, they worked it out. Well, what were the terms? It’ll cost a billion dollars. They reported this back to the President, and he wasn’t entirely on board. He said, ‘A billion dollars? Just for two nights?’”

JB: [Laughs]

PG: It’s true that I think there were some messianic hopes invested in Obama, and a lot of folks, including myself, were swept up in that. But on the other hand, I think without that kind of over-reach in our aspirations, you never get anywhere. I’m not as critical of his administration as a lot of people are. I think he basically hasn’t done much that I wouldn’t have expected him to do. There are certainly some disappointments. Guantanamo was certainly a big one. But a lot of this just turned out to be much harder than he realized, or than any of us thought. Within the constraints of American politics and the world we live in, I think he’s done a reasonably good job. In terms of the civil religious tradition, I think part of the problem there that I’ve come to realize is that the prophet is actually somebody who’s supposed to stand outside of politics. The prophet’s not supposed to, him or herself, be somebody who’s an actual political actor. This has always created a performative contradiction for American presidents, in enacting the discourse of civil religion. The way that it’s usually been handled consciously or unconsciously is by creating a fairly sharp divide between certain occasions: campaign speeches and the high ritual of events like the State of the Union and the Inaugural Address, where they speak much more in poetry. But you can’t talk like that all the time and govern, I don’t think. So it’s actually quite difficult to manage that from a purely performative standpoint. I guess the bigger question it raises is, “Why do there seem to be fewer voices,” or, “Why are the voices that are out there that do speak in this kind of prophetic tradition not being heard?” The carrier of that tradition for the last hundred years has been the Black Church. I’m no expert on this. I just throw this out there. There are people like Cornel West, for example, who continue to try to keep this alive, but are there younger voices that we don’t know about? Are they just not getting heard? America’s becoming a more complicated place, a more pluralistic place. Clearly there would have to be voices. You can’t expect this aging generation of Civil Rights leaders to do the heavy lifting forever.

JB: This leads to an interesting question: who’s going to take up the mantle of theology? In your essay in The Post-Secular in Question, you ask, “What’s the role of sociology?” Your answer is that it could be a moral science that recovers the idea of “the good.” What would that moral sociology look like? Is there a relationship that you see between the creation of a civil religion and the creation of a sociology that’s more concerned with the good?

PG: That would certainly be a hope of mine, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, whether there’s a limited kind of moral realism that we could defend, and that we might actually be able to contribute to through social science or at least through academic reflection of some kind or another? My suspicion is that there is; I just don’t know what the scope of it is. It would have to be premised on some understanding of human flourishing—that human beings are put together biologically, neurologically, in a certain way—that they have certain kinds of capacities or propensities—that their flourishing and well-being in general involves the development and cultivation of these propensities and capacities. Of course I’m simply channeling a lot of research that’s being done in neighboring fields. There’s recent work in positive psychology, for example, which is starting to get a great deal of attention by people like Jonathan Haidt and Marty Seligman. There’s a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition that people like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Kraut have revived and defended in recent years. Even some folks like Amartya Sen have tried to make a basis for a different way of thinking about economics and development policy. So the question is, “How do you develop a theory of the human good which doesn’t become a kind of hardened dogma, a sort of a one-size-fits-all understanding of what a life well-lived is going to mean?” We don’t live in Athens anymore. We live in a much more diverse, much more egalitarian, much freer society. Clearly there has to be a great deal of room for people to act freely. Part of flourishing is also making mistakes and learning and developing, so it’s not the idea that you simply prescribe some kind of a lifestyle. I think this notion that Nussbaum has developed, a kind of capacities approach to justice—that you need to create a basic set of preconditions for people to explore their own particular talents, capacities, inclinations—that that probably strikes the right balance between liberalism and a more robust form of moral realism. I think where sociology might contribute to this is in thinking harder about how you create the preconditions for the sorts of social connections and communities that are clearly part of human flourishing. We know that this is one of the clear results of recent work in positive psychology: that relationships to other people are critical. There’s a lot of confirmation for this in evolutionary biology and psychology, the mounting evidence of pro-social characteristics of human beings. But most of these disciplines are really focused on the human organism, or they’re focused on the human psyche. They don’t really think deeply about the social, per se, so this is where sociology might actually step in and make some kind of a contribution to this, I think. But I expect there’ll be a lot of resistance. One of the first things that you learn in graduate school in the social sciences is about the fact/value distinction, that there is no way of knowing or discovering what’s good. I don’t think people really believe that. I think that’s why most people go to graduate school, because they think this will help them answer these kinds of questions. But you get professionalized and socialized out of this during your first few years in graduate school. It’s salutary to the degree that we learn to establish a certain kind of reflexive distance to our tacit assumptions about what’s good, but I think the next step is to return to those basic practical questions that really animate people and get them interested in academic life and scholarship in the first place.

JB: That’s really interesting. So in some ways it’s breaking down the limits of what an objective science can discuss. It makes me think of the ways in which sociology and economics can articulate with people who do governance. I can’t help but think about this sociology of the good as theology for technocrats, or something like that.

PG: [Laughs] Right.

JB: Do you think there’s any way to push an agenda through sociology that could speak to something much broader, or are we very insular in the way we work with disciplines, in the way that, in a Weberian sense, we compartmentalize our society, secularize it?

PG: I guess I would say two things. First, I think one of the theological virtues that any technocrat would have to learn first is some measure of humility. [Laughs] Yeah, I think perhaps one of the most important things is to make room for people who do work that’s more publicly engaged. Again, there’s a lot of resistance to this, sometimes motivated by resentment of people who get attention from the wider public or have some kind of non-academic success. It’s not to say that you can go to the other extreme. I don’t think that everybody in the academy should suddenly become some kind of activist or public intellectual. There has to be some sort of balance struck between the autonomy of the scientific community and its engagement with the public, which is probably difficult to maintain. It certainly seems to me that this is a moment where there is a lot of academic capital or knowledge that’s been stored up within the research university, which just gets ignored, gets drowned out. Nobody pays any attention to it. This is partly an institution-building question, too, of course. It’s not just a matter of a particular individual deciding, “I’m going to speak to the broader public.” Well that’s not going to get you heard. You have to figure out ways to reach a broader public, and that’s a huge problem in and of itself, obviously. Non-academic intellectuals have figured this out.

JB: I wonder if we can talk about Émile Durkheim a little bit. In that same essay on recovering the good for sociology, you talk about Aristotle’s influence on Durkheim. If Durkheim is this figure at the birth of sociology, and he’s able to influence government and morality and science in the Third Republic, is there anything in Durkheim that we should be thinking about now, that we can use to create a sociology that’s more concerned with the good, or eudemonia? What can we take from Durkheim?

PG: That’s a very good question. Certainly one thing that I would say, which is an obvious point to make about Durkheim and civic life, is the importance of different forms of collective ritual. That’s something of which there’s actually very little in the United States. To some degree, I think this is just a long-term influence of a culture shaped by dissenting Protestantism, which is very leery of ritual and representation of any kind, which has an iconoclastic MO. But ritual is important. Going back to civil religion and the Obama campaign, that was part of what generated the excitement. We all know about the big crowds that turned out, the rallies, and the stadium events. For a lot of people, that was one of the first times that they had really experienced a kind of classic collective effervescence, in Durkheim’s terms, in a political arena. It used to be that there were a lot more of these political rituals in US culture, and they’ve really declined over the last forty or fifty years. I know it sounds kind of hokey, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing, for example, if there were some kind of National Service Day, where as many people as possible pledged to volunteer a day of their time to do something for the community. Or if there were more opportunities for young people, for example, to do something like Americorps, that there were forms of involvement in service that weren’t just military service, which kind of defines what we talk about. “Have you served your country?” That tacitly means, “Have you been in the military?” That’s fine; it’s one way of serving your country. But I worry sometimes that it’s kind of the only one.

JB: You framed your concern about the lack of collective ritual within the past forty or fifty years, and I think collective effervescence is a very nice way to put it. But even in some of the critiques of Bellah’s civil religion, there’s a fear about interwar and WWII Germany. How do you avoid the idolatry of nationalism, and how do you find a civil religion that’s not idolatrous?

PG: The civil religion that’s not idolatrous is one that’s prophetic in the sense that it sees the American project as defined by a set of ideals, as opposed to being defined by a set of accomplishments. So if you imagine America as this great nation which has achieved all of these things, and you list all of the things that it’s achieved, in a way you’re already a little bit on the slippery slope toward idolatry. That always has to be held in balance with a recognition of how often and how much the US falls short of its central ideals that are part of the project. The United States, because it’s a nation of immigrants and because it’s so deeply pluralistic, can’t be defined in terms of some shared background culture or in terms of some kind of ethno-national descent. It’s not Sweden, where they can disagree, but at the end of the day, they’re still Swedes. The only way in which you can really have any kind of coherence to an American project is to have it based around some set of ideals. But one has to always be somewhat critical. I think the real danger sign that you’re slipping toward some form of potentially dangerous state idolatry is when you start to hear too much about blood and blood sacrifice. This is a very dangerous kind of rhetoric, which one hears inevitably in times of war and conflict. It tends to redefine national belonging in the United States around race, around lineage, clearly to exclude more recent immigrant groups. That, I think, is the danger, where an attempt at a civil theology can degenerate into some kind of state idolatry.

JB: With the time we have left, maybe I can ask you about your experiences writing for The Immanent Frame. When you answered my first question, you talked about how that’s been productive, and I wonder if you can reflect on that a little bit.

PG: I would have to give a shameless plug for The Immanent Frame. I’ve posted on it three times, and two times it’s led to major publication invitations. It’s very clear to me that The Immanent Frame does fulfill a little bit this function we were talking about earlier, interfacing to some degree between a broader public and the scholarly community. I realize it’s not people all over America waking up, and the first thing they do is click on The Immanent Frame, but clearly there are folks in the world of journalism and publishing and public policy who tune in occasionally and look at what’s going on. So it does perform a really great function. I think it’s been great. It’s been highly successful. I am one of these guys who reads it almost every day, just to sort of see what’s new. It’s endlessly interesting.

JB: Have you ever assigned any articles from The Immanent Frame to students, or has it ended up on a syllabus yet? Or is that domain still for peer-reviewed articles?

PG: That’s an interesting suggestion. The answer is, no, I haven’t done that, but I probably should think about doing that. I do mention it to people, graduate students and undergraduate students who have a broad set of interests in religion and politics that The Immanent Frame tends to talk about. And I do know graduate students who read it, too. That’s a good idea because a lot of these things would be very good vehicles for discussion in an undergraduate seminar or lecture class. I’ll take that under advisement.

Occupy Wall Street and cognate groups around the world are part of a protest movement that is both global and local. It is global in terms of geographic scope, thematic range, and social composition. It is local in terms of the specific objects of protest and the protesters’ goals. The organic blending of the global with the local is reflected in the very unfolding of this worldwide wave. As the Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz has remarked, the various groups “work in symbiosis, learning from and imitating each others’ strategies . . . the call for Occupy protests came from Canada, the General Assembly structures came from Spain, and the outcry of ‘We are the 99%’ came from Italy. Many occupiers took inspiration from our Tahrir Square; now the Occupy movement across the United States is inspiring us in Egypt.”

The movement’s “glocal dynamic”—to coin an ugly phrase—is also visible in the protesters’ response to the violent crackdown that has already been unleashed in Cairo, New York City, and elsewhere. Just as Occupy Wall Street has triggered similar protests across the United States and encouraged the protagonists of the Arab Spring to continue their largely peaceful uprising, so too the brutal eviction is fueling the worldwide Occupy movement and strengthening the resolve of its local participants on Tahrir Square and the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Of course the global crackdown varies locally in nature, scope, and intensity; yet at the same time, it suggests that both nascent and mature democracies are compatible with police states that suspend core constitutional provisions and fundamental civil liberties.

The fusion of the global with the local is equally evident in relation to the specific objects of protest and the goals of the individual Occupiers. On the one hand, those activists who had previously been involved in international campaigns have recognized the need to engage with the concerns of the local community on whose territory they are now encamped. But on the other hand, as participants in a global protest movement, the Occupiers cannot be concerned with local issues alone. Protests, in order to be effective, must have a specific local object that nevertheless has global resonance: Tahrir Square exemplifies resistance against political oppression; los Indignados (the outraged) in Madrid and the demonstrators in Athens have mobilized against the austerity policy of debt-deflation; Occupy Wall Street and the St. Paul’s camp express a deep-seated anger about the impact of global finance on the local, real economy, which is shared by ordinary people and certain elites alike.

Civic Anatomy

I shall return to the interlocking of national states and transnational markets presently. For now, two brief points need to be made about the nature of the current glocal protest movement. First of all, the differences with the movements that emerged in recent decades are striking. In the past, virtually all movements either appealed to specific communities—workers, women, students, minorities—or crystallized around specific issues, like anti-colonialism, third-world poverty, globalization, and climate change. By contrast, the protest movement now views itself as the broadest possible community of resistance and transformation—a vision that is encapsulated in slogans like “We are the 99%” and “Whose streets? Our streets.” The Occupy movement is an expression of popular outrage and mobilization that is not beholden to certain anarchist or communist extremes that dominated many anti-globalization movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nor is today’s popular protest connected with any established political forces that can co-opt and manipulate it. As such, the worldwide wave transcends single-issue campaigns, social movements, and political protest in the direction of a civic community that seeks to (re-)establish the priority of the social over the economic and the political by (re-)embedding states and markets in the civic bonds and interpersonal relationships of civil society.

Linked to the primacy of shared “civicness”is an interesting development beyond the categories and practices of postmodern pluralism. The latter either absolutizes difference (however spelt), which leads to conflict that can only be regulated by power, or else it strives to convert the “other” into the “same” through ahistorical, supposedly universal but in reality narrowly Western secular categories such as values of “liberation” and “emancipation” linked to the political left or values of “freedom of choice” and “opportunity” associated with the political right. In a strikingly different configuration, the glocal protest movement neither sacralizes otherness nor erects absolute divisions. Rather, it attempts to break down the barriers that shield the governing elites from democratic accountability by pursuing a politics of the common good in which all citizens can share. As such, the glocal protest movement seeks to reassert broad civic control over the economy and politics, democratize both states and markets, and reintroduce popular participation into political representation. Thus, we are seeing the resurgence of the civic that blends individual and group rights with mutual help and reciprocal responsibility.

The London protesters are a good example of this. Once their attempt to occupy the London Stock Exchange failed, they set up camp outside neighboring St. Paul’s Cathedral. The City of London Corporation, which owns the occupied land, served an eviction notice on the encampment—with the connivance and approval of some cathedral staff, who had closed St. Paul’s on health and safety grounds and wanted the camp removed. That prompted the chancellor of St. Paul’s, the Reverend Giles Fraser, to resign in protest against the church’s apparent support of bankers and the police against the Occupy movement.

At first, anger among the Occupiers and beyond focused on the cathedral staff and the bishop of London—whose closure of St. Paul’s and complaint about lost revenue from tourist visitors betrayed the church’s vocation to serve all the people of London and pursue the city’s good. As popular outrage spread from the protesters to many of Britain’s usually quiescent elites, the cathedral dean stepped down and Bishop Richard voiced his qualified support for the Occupy movement. Meanwhile the City of London Corporation briefly suspended its legal action before serving once more an eviction notice.

In response, the protesters have turned their attention to the status of the Corporation, which in its locality is uniquely independent of national law and regulation but has used its privilege to serve the interest of global finance. This represents “a perversion of properly medieval participatory and guild arrangements originally designed to subordinate commercial to social purposes” that is the result of central government removing limits on capital mobility and enhancing the power of multinational corporations over their local self-government. That is why the Occupy movement’s call for proper civic control over London’s economic governance represents a local object of protest that can make an immense global difference.

Resistance against Big Business and Big Government

The constitutionally unconstrained rule of London’s City over the city of London and the rest of the country—aided and abetted by successive British governments since Margaret Thatcher—points to the interlocking of national states and transnational markets that characterizes the dominant model of globalization since the late nineteenth century. Worldwide there is an implicit, inchoate sense that big business and big government have colluded at the expense of the people. Both central states and free markets are increasingly disembedded from society, and society is progressively subjugated by the global “market-state.” For example, through local vassals like the City of London Corporation, the market-state subordinates social to commercial purpose. More fundamentally, global finance is disconnected from ethical and social goals. Likewise, governments of the left and the right have either replaced mutualist arrangements among workers with centralized, bureaucratic welfare or outsourced the delivery of public goods to private service providers—or indeed both at once. That is why protesters have denounced not just the banks but also the regulators and the executive branch of government, which have all been complicit in the credit-fueled, debt-financed consumption spree on which the “new economy” was built.

The collusion of big government and big business has brought about a system that privatizes profit, nationalizes losses, and socializes risk. In turn, this has exacerbated already existing income and asset inequality and also reinforced poverty in developed countries and emerging markets. Linked to this are, first, a centralization of power and, second, a concentration of wealth that are more reminiscent of pre-revolutionary France than the post-1945 settlement. From its outset, the global economic turmoil of 2008–2009, with its devastating social consequences, was merely a symptom of a much larger political and moral crisis.

So far, the expressions of anger are as diverse as the demonstrators’ demands are vague. But recent weeks have seen a remarkable effort by very different groups to agree on both general principles and concrete policy proposals. Given the local context in which the staff of St. Paul’s Cathedral initially sided with the City of London Corporation and the police against the protesters (before eventually backing down in the face of resistance from courageous clerics, the laity, and the wider public), the call by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for a public debate on specific action has global significance.In symbolic and real terms, the parish remains the most primary unit of social and civic life that connects people across cities and countries and even beyond national borders. As such, the church really does embody the “free space” between the “sovereign ruler” and the “sovereign people” on which the autonomy of civil society ultimately rests.

In London and elsewhere, faith groups—together with nonreligious, civic associations—are uniquely positioned to contribute to such public debates and translate new ideas into transformative action. Indeed, religious communities provide a space where righteous wrath can be channeled and directed toward concrete campaigns, as demonstrated by the work of London Citizens (recently expanded and renamed as Citizens UK, with local branches in other cities and regions of Britain), a civic organization that brings together about 150 local communities, associations, and different faith groups under the umbrella of Christian social teaching and the tradition of community organizing pioneered by Saul Alinsky. In London and elsewhere, it has successfully campaigned for the introduction of the “living wage” (higher than the minimum wage) in both the public and the private sector, voluntary caps on interest rates (for example, on credit cards and shop cards), and a more hospitable treatment of migrant workers and asylum-seekers, led by community-based groups instead of public authorities or private companies.

Such and similar action connects protest movements like the Occupiers outside St. Paul’s to existing grassroots movements and civic associations. There are growing contacts between the Occupy movement and Citizens UK, as evinced by a recent initiative, entitled “Ethical Economics and Moral Markets,” that will provide reading resources and campaign ideas for a national network of parishes, mosques, synagogues, and nonreligious communities. In this manner, religious and secular groups cooperate and link growing popular discontent to fundamental moral questions that demand fresh answers. Neither state laws nor business regulations can by themselves instill the virtuous behavior—integrity, honesty, mutual trust, reciprocal respect—on which a good society and a good economy depend. Local communities and global networks—both religious and secular—provide the civic embeddedness that states, markets, and the so-called third sector require.

Crucially, religions also remind us all that global capitalism is ultimately a heresy. The problem is not so much that the high priests of global finance preach a new creed, which worships false idols. Rather, the capitalist economy redefines the sacred in ways that destroy the sanctity of life and land, as Karl Polanyi first argued.By sundering material objects from moral meaning and symbolic significance, disembedded capital de-sacralizes the shared reality we all inhabit and reduces everything to tradable commodities. And by separating financial from ethical value and measuring all things according to nominal monetary worth, global finance grants abstract money quasi-sacred status. In short, capitalism profanes the sacred and sacralizes the profane—a modern radicalization of the moneylenders who desecrated the temple. In part, this explains why the glocal protest movement is concerned not just with purely material or technical issues but also (and perhaps more so than previous protests) with symbolic resonance.

Beyond the Religious-Secular Divide

Against capitalist commodification, religious and nonreligious groups are increasingly united in their efforts to re-embed the economy in society. For example, Ken Costa, an influential Christian banker who has funded the Alpha course, an introduction to the basics of Christian faith, has urged bankers and financiers to heed the call of protesters and eschew short-term profit maximization in favor of long-term sustainable investment with a social purpose. He now spearheads the new St. Paul’s initiative on how to reconnect finance with ethics. Of course, neither this nor any other similar initiative by an establishment figure is likely to lead to genuine transformation. But it is surely a sign of our time that secular and non-secular critiques of capitalism are converging and producing shared ideas.

This also confirms that we have entered a “post-secular” phase, where religious and other ideological bodies should be able to express themselves directly in their own terms within the public square. However, for Jürgen Habermas, the norms to regulate this debate must remain secular and liberal (procedural and majoritarian). For Joseph Ratzinger, by contrast, there must be a plural search for a shared common good. In the pope’s case, a reinvention of constitutional corporatism in a more pluralist guise against modern liberalism is linked to an insistence both on the fundamental relationality of all beings and on the indelible role of basic social units above the level of the individual. That reflects the growing focus on groups, associations, and all the intermediary institutions of civil society that—taken together—constitute the civic realm, which is more primary than either the economic or the social. So configured, the civic resists the redefinition of the sacred by the secular forces of the global market-state. Moreover, beyond the old divide of exclusively sectarian or purely secular accounts, religious and nonreligious groups alike link the moral foundations of the market to notions of the sacred and the practice of virtue. Far from being utopian, such a perspective combines strict ethical and civic limits on the power of market-states with the pursuit of the common good in which all can share.

The nascent global cooperation between local protest groups is producing a number of general movement objectives and concrete policy proposals. First of all, against taxpayer bailouts of corporate banks, the Occupy movement, Citizens UK, and other civic groups are calling for the demonopolization of banking and finance and other sectors that are dominated by oligopolistic or monopolistic arrangements. They are also campaigning for the relocalization of global finance, which is increasingly abstracted from the real economy but at the same time pervades all areas of economic activity and ties them to the volatility of worldwide capital. Once again, focusing on a local object of protest can make a significant global difference. Indeed, the international campaign for the separation of casino-style from retail banking and greater investment in more locally owned, mutual banking—based on existing building societies and credit unions—is gathering pace.

Second, the local protest outside St. Paul’s has provided renewed impetus to the global campaign for the introduction of a financial transaction tax, or “Robin Hood tax,” which Archbishop Rowan and other senior clergy and religious leaders also endorse. This measure has been advocated for some time by civil-society campaigners and was promoted by a thousand economists from fifty-three countries in a letter addressed to the G-20 finance ministers at their April 2011 summit meeting in Washington, DC. While the current governments of France and Germany are in favor, the United States and the United Kingdom are opposed to the Robin Hood tax as long as it is not adopted globally. But even the International Monetary Fund, in a study published earlier this year, shows how it can be applied unilaterally. In fact, this is already the case for various kinds of stamp taxes levied on the value of shares owned by investors. For example, the United Kingdom charges 0.005% on the value of shares owned and listed on the London Stock Exchange—precisely where the St. Paul protesters are encamped. To break the political deadlock, a tax could be levied on a trial basis on foreign currency exchange, which amounts to US$4 trillion per day, before it is extended to other financial transactions. Broad religious support for such and similar initiatives can exert real pressure and leverage. For example, the Jubilee campaign in 2000 helped bring about third-world debt forgiveness, and subsequent initiatives have seen ecumenical efforts to “Make Poverty History.”

Third, both the Occupiers at St. Paul’s and Citizens UK call for the abolition of the legal and political walls that separate global financial districts like Wall Street and the City of London from their respective metropolis. That separation has led to the progressive disembedding of the economy from society and the perverse re-embedding of the social in the economic. As a result, the commercial purpose of short-term maximization trumps the social purpose of long-term investment and shared prosperity, and corporate finance is disconnected from public ethics. Linked to this is the imperative to subject financial services and the whole of corporate governance to democratic accountability, as Maurice Glasman has argued. These efforts at civic renewal are connected to the idea of fostering democratic participation so that all citizens have a say in the ways wealth is produced and distributed. Based on a renewed guild structure and a bicameral ruling institution, including a vocational chamber, businesses and other professional associations would also be given a voice in the governance of towns, cities, and metropolises.

The Transformative Potential of the Civic

All this points toward a new kind of settlement whereby both the centralized bureaucratic state and the unfettered global free-market are transformed in order to serve the genuine needs and interests of persons, communities, and the environment. More global coordination and local cooperation are required in order to address worldwide issues such as capital flows and climate change. Thus, the global protest movement and its manifold local expressions seem to provide a post-secular response to the secular heresy of global capitalism and its political sponsors. The contested space of the city—both local and global—appears to contain the germs of a vision for an alternative economy that reconnects the financial to the ethical and an alternative politics that reasserts the primacy of the civic over the economic and the social.

If this is the case, then it seems that the global protest movement has the potential to offer a new kind of ideology that transcends the old binary relations that have characterized modern politics. By linking universal principles to particular, transformative practices, the global protest movement and the myriad of local civic initiatives might even politicize the wider population and help foster new virtuous elites.

But it behooves us to think more deeply about what this regional stability is understood to consist in. It is clearly understood to include the maintenance of existing treaties and strategic military arrangements with Israel. And this is interesting, because Israel defines itself as a religious state. So, we have a situation in which Egypt’s becoming a secular democracy is thought to assure its continued diplomatic and military commitments to a religious state. One might object here that Israel is not a religious state and that it does not define itself in that way. This objection would be partly correct: Israel’s secular and religious identity constitutes a continual ambiguity, one with which it continues to struggle internally. Thus, although much of the population defines itself as secular, explicitly self-identified religious groups exert enormous power in government and society, well out of proportion to their actual numbers. This creates enormous controversy over central issues, such as the accepted criteria for deciding whether or not one is Jewish. Moreover, like Egypt, Israel’s personal status law is heavily rooted in religious law. Israeli religious authorities have so far successfully resisted the institution of civil marriage—a situation that forces non-religious couples in the country to choose options that provide them with fewer rights and guarantees. Unlike Egypt, however, Israel’s profound secular-religious ambiguities are not seen to threaten the existing treaties and security arrangements upon which regional stability is thought to rest. We might ask why this is so.

It is also unclear why it is assumed that if Egypt becomes a secular democratic state, it would be necessarily sympathetic to Israel. Egypt’s commitment to secular democratic ideals might well lead Egypt to distance itself from Israel on account of Israel’s ambiguous religious-secular character. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia maintain strategic relationships with Israel, but while Turkey is a country that imposes a particular brand of secularism on its people, Saudi Arabia is one in which a narrow version of Islam is imposed on the population. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic character is not seen as a threat to the region’s stability, even though its Wahhabism has been cast by some (largely lay) commentators as an ideological source of terror.

These are some of the ways in which our discourses on the secular and the religious so often twist and turn, get entangled in, and finally confound, each other. What gets lost, however, in all of the talk of regional stability and of secularity and religiosity is the crucial issue of Palestine. Few have emphasized this link in the regional chain, with the exception of Rashid Khalidi, who, thankfully, continues to remind us of it. What matters here is not whether Egypt, or even Israel, is a secular or a religious state. What matters is how Israel treats—or continually mistreats—the Palestinians, denying them their internationally agreed upon rights, and whether Egypt will continue to support this ongoing mistreatment. Here, it is important to note that the repression of the last thirty years in Egypt has been allowed to grow unhindered—both tolerated and supported—by the U.S., precisely because of its interest in maintaining those political and strategic arrangements with Israel that enable the continual and increasing violation of Palestinian rights. And it is this repression that Egyptians have so powerfully protested against.

In the end, it may be doubted whether the regional stability that so many are concerned about, and which Egypt is hoped to help sustain, can really be counted as stability. After all, this “stability” has allowed both Israel and the U.S. to conduct a number of aggressive wars throughout the region, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq. If commentators are genuinely concerned with democracy in Egypt and stability in the Middle East, they should fear less the Muslim Brothers and more the U.S. funding and regional alliances that aim to enact American foreign policy in the region, and which have choked off democratic possibilities for so long.

Having made these points, important for our considerations of the present moment, I would like now to turn to some more broadly theoretical reflections concerning what the events in Egypt might teach us about questions of secularity and religiosity more generally.

The question of whether Egypt is or will be a secular or a religious state has been asked for a long time, because of both the country’s strategic geopolitical location and the genuine religious-political ambiguities that it exhibits. It is therefore a question that I have not been able to avoid in my own research. However, I have tried to approach it not by looking at the norms that secularism imposes but rather the questions that it obliges us to ask and answer. That is, I do not assess the norms found in Egypt by judging whether or not they conform to secular standards, because those standards are seldom clear, highly contested, and often changing anyway. What I explore instead are the underlying, longstanding questions against which those norms are continually adduced, established, contested, and transformed as answers. I see secularism as a problem-space—a historical ensemble of questions and attached stakes; the question that anchors this historical ensemble is where to draw the line between religion and politics and what the limits of religion in society ought to be; the attached stakes are those rights and liberties typically identified with liberalism—such as equality, tolerance, and freedom of belief. That these questions and stakes are longstanding is evident; that the answers to them have been changing and contested is equally clear. What is important to note, however, is that though the problem-space of secularism is relatively recent historically (in medieval Christian and Muslim times, for example, a principled distinction between religion and politics was not typically seen to be connected to a range of fundamental rights and liberties)—it has now become indispensable to the practical intelligibility of our ways of life and to many of the ethical positions we take. It is difficult to remain indifferent to it.

It has been historically, and remains today, the case that the state has the right to ultimately decide the central questions that constitute the problem-space of secularism. This right of decision is, and has been, an expression of the principle and practice of the state’s sovereign power. We can therefore say that the power of secularism is not the power of the norm but of the question and of the sovereignty that decides it. The question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state is but one manifestation of this power; that it has been continually asked both in and outside of Egypt is just one indication that the country is fully subsumed within the problem-space of secularism, as are Israel, the United States, England, France, Germany, and many other states that continue to exhibit secular-religious ambiguities and that stake fundamental freedoms upon their clarification. And this will remain the case until the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics is no longer deemed necessary to ask in relation to the range and distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. (I have discussed these points in greater detail here.)

The approach to secularism as a historical problem-space, and the central role of the state’s sovereign power within it, has consequences for some of the critical claims of political theology. It may also help to frame the recent events in Egypt in a particularly revealing light. The fact that it is state sovereignty that ultimately decides where to draw a line between religion and politics means that it is a power that stands, importantly, prior to religion and politics. Since it stands prior to both, it cannot be pinned down to either. In other words, pace Carl Schmitt, some significant political concepts are not secularized theological concepts. This is especially the case with state sovereignty, because it stands prior to religion and politics and decides the distinction between them. Importantly, however, while state sovereign power stands prior to religion and politics, it is not indifferent to the question of how to distinguish and separate them.

This conception of state sovereignty contrasts with the manifestation of sovereignty that we saw in the protests. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, the protests were a manifestation of pure popular sovereignty. I will contrast this to state sovereignty by calling it “bare sovereignty.” Like state sovereignty, bare sovereignty stands prior to religion and politics. Unlike state sovereignty, however, this bare sovereignty is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them. It stands apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and does not partake of it. Not surprisingly, the protests expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none. In the sense that it stands prior to religion and politics, and that it is indifferent to the question of their distinction, the bare sovereignty manifested by the protest movement stands outside the problem-space of secularism. In that sense, it represents a genuinely asecular power.

(Bare sovereignty is therefore much more than, and significantly different from, the principle of “we the people” that is formally used to justify state sovereignty within the democratic tradition. That principle has been frequently used by the state to justify various impositions and exceptions upon the population it governs. Bare sovereignty, however, breaks through this principle of justification; indeed, bare sovereignty is not a principle at all, but an exceptional existential moment, an expression of power that arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode of life. For more on this point, see the remarks of legal and political theorist Samera Esmeir.)

Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these protests? The term “non-secular” is too easily confused with the notion of the religious. And unlike post-secularity, asecularity is not a temporal marker. It allows for the possibility that asecularity has, in different forms, always been with us, even from within the traditions from which state secularity arises. Explorations of post-secularity typically try to identify the emergence of new norms. Such attempts fail to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power. In contrast, the term asecularity specifies a situation not where norms are no longer secular, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are no longer seen as necessary. It is a situation where we can be genuinely indifferent to those questions, the ways that particular stakes are attached to them, and their seeming indispensability to our ways of life.  As a result, such moments open up spaces for us to think beyond our current predicaments. Here, it is worth noting that the condition of asecularity manifested by these protests was also associated with a genuine ethos of democratic sensibility.

In regard to this connection, Talal Asad makes some important remarks, with which I would like to end. In an article entitled “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics” (forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert Orsi, ed.), he distinguishes between “democratic sensibility as an ethos” and “democracy as the political system of the state,” and goes on to say that:

the former . . . involves the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity. The latter is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protects the subjective rights of its citizens (including their right to ‘religious freedom’), infuses them with nationalist fervor, invokes bureaucratic rationality in governing them justly; it is fundamentally exclusive. My point is not to make an invidious comparison between sensibility and politics, not to argue that the two are necessarily incompatible. I simply ask whether the latter undermines the former—and if it does, to what extent.

Following Asad, we might say that the problem-space of secularism falls within the purview of the state, its sovereignty, and its expanding regulatory capacities. But what this manifestation of asecular, bare sovereignty shows us is that it may not be necessary to have a principled distinction between religion and politics to express an ethos of democratic sensibility. Or, to put it more precisely, one may not be obliged to ask and answer the question of where to draw the line between religion and politics in order to foster the mutual care, attunement to pain and distress, concern for truth, non-judgmental disposition, and tendency toward inclusion by which Asad characterizes this ethos. Indeed, the only way to obtain it might be to be indifferent to the question of their distinction and the set of stakes historically attached to it. This might be one way to construe Asad’s statement at the end of the essay, where he writes: “One might suggest, finally, that the modern idea of religious belief (protected as a right in the individual and regulated institutionally) is a critical function of the liberal democratic nation-state but not of democratic sensibility.”

I thank Samera Esmeir and Saba Mahmood for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece. I also thank Talal Asad, especially for his help in clarifying my ideas on bare sovereignty.

For the past eight years, I have been studying the emergence of what might be referred to as “post-secular development” in Southeast Asia. I have documented initiatives in contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore that have formulated a mode of Islamic practice conducive to corporate success and transnational competitiveness. In documenting this phenomenon, I have argued that, whereas much of the post-colonial history of what were formerly called “developing nations” was characterized by what the anthropologist James Ferguson has referred to as “faith in development,” recent efforts to merge Islamic practice with scientific and technical knowledge instead represent efforts to develop faith. On the one hand, faith in development refers to the nationalist projects of facilitating economic growth through state-led industrial modernization that occurred in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the postwar period. In this configuration, the nation-state was to bring prosperity to its population through massive investment in industrial technology and production. On the other hand, developing faith refers to concrete initiatives designed to intensify religious practice under the presumption that so doing would bring the work practices of corporate employees into line with global business norms and effect greater productivity and transparency. Developing faith is not a complete break with faith in development, however, because both share the similar conviction that worldly problems can be solved through the proper application of technical and scientific knowledge.

The shift from faith in development to developing faith in contemporary Indonesia was particularly notable at state-owned Krakatau Steel, a massive steelworks in western Java where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2003 and 2005. Historically, Krakatau Steel was absolutely central to the developmentalist ambitions harbored by Indonesia’s former authoritarian president, Suharto. The company was a focal point in the nationalist project of modernization. According to the prevailing developmentalist logic purveyed in blueprints for modernization like Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, Krakatau Steel was part of a complex of institutions that would deliver progress, in the form of industrialization, economic growth, and increased living standards, to Indonesia.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis, the end of the Suharto regime, and the increasing integration of Indonesia into wider global economic circuits have called faith in development into question. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, Krakatau Steel had been the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in state development funds. For years state investment guaranteed the company’s viability, as it was able to keep up to date with advances in steel production technology. However, such investment was brought to an end in 1998, after the near bankruptcy of the Indonesian government. Tariffs on imported steel that had long protected the company from international competition were fully eliminated in April 2004. Finally, and perhaps most ominously for some employees, the Indonesian government has proposed privatizing Krakatau Steel, which could trigger sweeping job losses for members of a workforce that had previously been able to count on lifetime employment.

Given the wide-ranging changes taking place, the company’s existence could no longer be justified according to its status as a symbol of modernization, development, and industrialization. One foreman in the slab steel plant explained to me that, prior to the late-1990s, the “the social was the most important and profit was secondary,” but “now profit is number one and the social mission [misi sosial] is number two.” He said that this “social mission” was premised upon “padat karya,” which literally translates as “dense work” and refers to the practice of hiring more workers than necessary to operate businesses. The tension between the company’s social mission and its business mission was becoming increasingly acute. One general manager told me that a Booz, Allen, and Hamilton management-consulting audit of the company advocated releasing one-quarter of the company’s total workforce, corresponding to at least 1500 (out of roughly 6000) permanent, full-time positions. Some Krakatau Steel employees suspected that privatization would lead to the elimination of a substantial number of jobs. Managers often cited the practice of work spreading as the underlying reason for poor job performance at the company, claiming that employees at the company lacked motivation because they knew that they were superfluous.

To address the problem of employee motivation and prepare for privatization, Krakatau Steel managers sought to (in their words) “develop” the Islamic faith of employees by contracting a Jakarta-based company, the ESQ Leadership Center, to implement Emotional and Spiritual Quotient training at the company. The brainchild of the charismatic businessman Ary Ginanjar, ESQ asserts that a work ethic conducive to business success is present in the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of Muslim faith (iman). He has drawn other ideas for the program from business management and life coaching sessions, like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” that have greatly expanded in North America, Europe, and Asia in recent years. Through the multi-day training sessions that his company offers, Ginanjar stresses that Islamic piety should not only be restricted to religious worship. Rather, Islamic faith should animate all of one’s worldly activity, from interactions with one’s family to everyday work in the world.

At Krakatau Steel, ESQ training sessions were held once or twice per month. They were most often held in the large multipurpose room of the factory’s education and training center. The sessions usually ran from Friday through Sunday. The first two days started at 7:00 a.m. and lasted until just before the maghrib prayers, which usually begin around 6:00 in Indonesia. The third day included the program’s dénouement, which consisted of a simulation of three of the events that take place during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca: tawaf, the circumambulation of the kaaba; the sa’i, a ritual that consists of running seven times back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah in Mecca; and finally the stoning of jamrat al-aqabah, in which pilgrims hurl rocks at three representations of the devil, symbolizing the rebuking of demonic temptation.

The training was structured through a sophisticated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, consisting not only of graphs, charts, tables, and a litany of bullet points, but also with spliced film clips, colorful photographs, and popular music. The information conveyed was culled from a variety of web sites, including that of Harvard Business School. The training was delivered primarily as an interactive lecture in which the main trainer would alternate between engaging with the audience in the familiar style of a television talk show host and proceeding to deliver fiery and profoundly emotive lectures asking for collective redemption from Allah.

Ary Ginanjar draws evidence for the commensurability of Islam and what might be called the ethics of globalization by instructing participants in these programs that the five pillars contain lessons for business success. Thus, the fourth pillar of Islam, the duty to fast during Ramadan, is reinterpreted as a model for “self-control.” Based on this principle, ESQ seeks to inculcate the duty to constrain this-worldly desires in order to ensure other-worldly salvation. Corruption was a chronic problem at SOEs and was attributed to an uncontrolled desire for material wealth. ESQ sought to represent self-management as a divine injunction to remedy this rampant corruption. The third pillar, the duty to give alms (zakat), was taken as divine sanction for “strategic collaboration” and exercising a “win-win” approach in both business transactions and relations with co-workers. This principle was illustrated with an interactive exercise in which each participant paired up with another, shined his or her shoes, and then reciprocally paid the other for the service. A common critique of employees of state-owned enterprises was their poor customer relations. The exercise was intended to illustrate the importance of serving, rather than being served, for employees of a modern corporation.

In just seven years, ESQ grew spectacularly: by the end of 2010, over one million people had participated in the program. Although Krakatau Steel was one of the first companies to embrace it, the program has now spread across Indonesia to some of the country’s most prominent governmental institutions and state-owned firms, including Pertamina (the national oil company), Telkom (the country’s largest telephone company), and Garuda (the nation’s flag air carrier). Current and former military generals also are avid participants in ESQ, and several sessions have been held at the Army’s officer candidate training school in Bandung (SESKOAD). Recently, ESQ met its goal of becoming a national movement, having established branch offices in 30 out of 33 Indonesian provinces. In late 2005, the ESQ Leadership Center broke ground for a 25-story office tower and convention center in south Jakarta, funded in part through investment shares sold to past participants. When I returned to Indonesia in December 2008, large-scale spiritual training programs were being conducted in the already completed conference center portion of the building. Finally, ESQ has also “gone global”: the first overseas ESQ training was held in April 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, and, in 2007, regularly scheduled ESQ trainings were being delivered in Malaysia on a bimonthly basis. Mahatir Mohamed, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, recently endorsed the program. In addition, ESQ programs have been held in Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Brunei, and in 2008 Ginanjar brought the program to Houston and Washington, DC.

The spiritual training program was extremely popular at Krakatau Steel. According to one human resources manager, Sukrono, efforts to develop faith were the result of an updated reading of the Qur’an. He explained:

When we were a small developing country in the 1970s we thought that worship (ibadah) meant praying, giving alms (zakat), or going on the hajj, but this is not true. Now from studying the Qur’an we know that passages dealing with these things are only about 20 percent of the content, the rest of the Qur’an is about human relations. The crucial thing is that in everyday activity—waking up and going to work, doing family errands, and so forth—one’s intentions (niat) are toward worship.

Here Sukrono illustrates how the faith in development that had guided Indonesian modernization during the New Order had proceeded under the secularist presumption of the separation of religion from work and commerce. In contrast, after the end of the Suharto regime, managers like Sukrono have recast the Qur’an as a human resources management manual and seek to develop faith. In so doing, he echoed how Ary Ginanjar had transformed the five pillars of Islam into recipes for corporate success—for example, by rebranding zakat as “strategic collaboration.”

In response to what was conceived of as a “moral crisis,” spiritual reform reconfigured the relationship between faith and development in Indonesia so that faith itself became development’s object. During the New Order, development was the raison d’être of government policy and practice. However, after Suharto’s spectacular collapse, the logic of enhancement and growth that underlay the project of modernization was applied to the religious practices of industrial employees who were supposed to be the purveyors of development. Islamic practice, previously relegated to the background in Indonesia, was seen both as a means to revive economic growth and as something to be developed and enhanced.

Developing faith did not represent the end of faith in development, but rather a reconfiguration of its rationality, creating what I refer to as post-secular development. The same modernist logic that had guided the project of Indonesian development was still at work. Implicit was the assumption that worldly problems could be addressed through technical intervention and the application of human knowledge. Thus, faith was not viewed as a mystical or irrational practice, but as something that could be instilled through design. Developing faith and, in so doing, creating new patterns of human life, was executed according to the same logic that earlier guided building bridges, toll roads, and factories. Religious practice was something to be enhanced through a series of technical interventions. For many citizens in contemporary Indonesia who had come of age during the heyday of faith in development, Islamic spiritual reform appeared to resolve a number of oppositions that had plagued the project of modernization. ESQ spiritual training offered a recipe for living that was simultaneously Muslim and modern. Thus, post-secular development enabled one to be both an engineer and a devout adherent of Islam.

*   *   *

NS: Why is capitalism the focal point of your recent book? And what about capitalism is “postsecular”?

SD: Can I begin with the “postsecular”? It’s a rather confusing term. Mainly it points to a ceasefire—or, anyway, a slowdown—in the long battle between secular reason and religion. That’s ultimately what it implies in the recent work of Habermas, for instance. And that’s also what it means in the kind of intellectual history that uncovers the religious prehistory of secular concepts. But I suspect such work can usually be understood as secularism proceeding under the flag of its own decease. I am more interested in two other possibilities that occur when we think about a zone that is neither secular nor non-secular. The first appears when the limits of the (secular) world become apparent in everyday or mundane life, outside of religion. The second appears when we are compelled to radical leaps of faith—again, outside religion.

Both of these have a direct relation to democratic state capitalism. That’s because democracy and capitalism have each become compulsory and fundamental. They ground everything we do, including religious practice—so we can only get outside them through the kind of postsecular leap of faith that I am talking about. That realization is one of the things that is important about Alain Badiou’s thought. Such leaps may also be relevant to situations in which we encounter secularism’s limits—when secularism can’t contain the ethical and epistemological demands we make of it.

NS: Why can’t secularism itself contain leaps of faith? Why do we need to move past it, to the postsecular?

SD: Of course, there are all kinds of secular leaps of faith. But the will to get outside democratic state capitalism requires something else. It’s true that secular reason is useful in adjudicating upon the current system. You can at least attempt to measure its benefits—the joys, capacities, wealth, and opportunities that it does indeed provide us, and the way that it makes so much seem “interesting,” for instance—against  the insecurities, inequalities, restrictions, and controls that it also imposes.

NS: Why should we want to get outside secular, democratic state capitalism in the first place?

SD: It falls way short, and for two reasons. The first is simply that democratic state capitalism is now the only fully legitimated social system; for that very reason, it has become a limit. Second, and more importantly, we have no rational and secular means of adjudicating the possibility—often adduced in the lead-up to modernity—that we live in a regime of relative experiential poverty. We can’t compare the qualities of past lifeworlds to present ones; we just don’t know whether they’re better or worse. But we do know that the system we have is not as good—I prefer to say not as “perfect”—as we can imagine a society to be. To align oneself with that idea of perfection, and to acknowledge the poverty of contemporary experience, implies a postsecular leap of faith.

NS: What do you mean by “interesting,” specifically in the context in which you used it before?

SD: “Interesting” is a criterion of value that is important historically because it smoothed the path towards democracy and secularism. It first appears as a category early in the eighteenth century alongside sentimentalism and the notion that sympathy is a social tool, and basically being interesting ends up by swamping its rival criteria of value. We all still use interestingness as a category of judgment. But it’s a peculiarly undemanding category.

NS: How is it that an undemanding category like this—one used so casually and so habitually—leads the way to social change?

SD: It has so much power precisely because it is so casual. It’s the ideological air we breathe. And the great thing about interestingness is that it is so democratic: anything at all can be interesting, anyone at all can be interested. But that kind of indifference to distinction is also corrosive of experience.

NS: You suggest that humanities departments may be sites for developing alternatives to the capitalist order. But how can they do that while forced to justify their existence in universities increasingly defined by that order?

SD: Good question—I don’t know. I am now working in Australia, where the process you refer to is much more advanced than in the States. Universities here appear to be servants of the state, which, at its best, seeks merely to protect capitalism from itself. I suspect that we in the humanities have to try to detach our thought from the institutions that nurture us. More challenging, we have to return in a new spirit and with new tools to the conservatism—not to be confused with contemporary right-wing politics—that is the humanities’ default position, whatever the post-1968 generation (including me) came to believe. It is actually the orthodox churches, born before capitalism and democracy, and before the modern nation-state, that—potentially, at least—store the most social power against democratic state capitalism.

NS: What about digital spaces? Can they offer a route around what you call “endgame capitalism”? Or have they already been too thoroughly colonized by it?

SD: No, I don’t think digital spaces offer routes around endgame capitalism. On the contrary, they help expand and integrate the system. They may, however, occasion new paratactic associations that don’t fit the models of collectivity that our formal political categories—like democracy and liberty—depend upon. Freedom is easier in cyberspace, for instance, but only to the degree that it has less content there—although, admittedly, the Wikileaks affair, ongoing as we talk, does indeed show that the internet enables new possibilities for calling state power out.

NS: Why do you think the victory of the neoliberal order coincided with recent religious revivals—from the religious right in the US to militant Islamists?

SD: Islam and the American religious right have very different purposes and constituencies. They certainly don’t like each other. Islam, probably more than the other religions that predate modernity, stands outside the democratic state capitalism of which the US is the primary global missionary power. It appeals to those who most cleanly reject the dominant secular order, often because that order damages them. Why otherwise would Islam be the fastest growing religion among Australian aborigines? As to the rest of the question: why Islamic violence on top of belonging and faith? I’d guess that it’s mainly a matter of opportunity. Violence may be chosen according to a banal rational logic when its benefits seem to outweigh its costs. Political groups routinely take to terror in the face of their enemy’s overwhelming power. Perhaps militancy can also become a way of life for some.

NS: But what about the logic of religion? Is it really fair to say, as you do, that revealed religion is, “under modern truth regimes, false, unverifiable, or unproven”? What accounts, then, for its social force today?

SD: I don’t think there’s a close relation between what is true in the sense I intend and what has social force. It isn’t true that there is an internal sea in the middle of Australia, or that Jews are inferior to Aryans, or that monarchs are God’s emissaries on earth, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that there’s a life after death, or that sacrificing three oxen to Zeus helps assure safe passage on a sea journey, or that America is in Asia, or that hoarding gold makes a country more prosperous—but all these beliefs have had real social consequences, even though they traffic in untruth.

NS: If religion really does “traffic in untruth,” where does it stand with respect to literary fiction?

SD: Literary fiction has always been at home where the borders of the secular can be breached in ordinary life, outside of any supernaturalism—that is, in the postsecular. This breaching often happens when imagined characters have moments of rupture from the secular order. As a randomly chosen example, let me point to that passage in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time when Nick, the narrator, suddenly realizes that the run-down military accommodation in Cabourg where he is lodged at the height of World War II is the very hotel where Marcel holidayed during his affair with Albertine in Proust’s novel. It’s a dizzying moment in which the frontiers between the real and imaginary, the ordinary and the exceptional, are broken in a way that can’t be accommodated by a non-secular lexicon. It’s not sublime, or an epiphany, or a visitation of grace. But it carries its own ecstatic and unworldly charge.

NS: Can this kind of “charge” have anything like the social force of religious ideas? Can it compete with them, or even replace them?

SD: I don’t believe so. The example I have chosen is literary, and only a tiny (and declining) sector of the population is open to literature’s postsecular intensities. Of course, somewhat equivalent intensities can happen in other cultural domains, like art and film and dance and theater and video. None of these offers what Christianity and Islam can: the possibility of a collective life organized around the promise of salvation. But, of course, to be educated into modernity is, by and large, to lose the ability to believe in salvation.

NS: And—to turn to your earlier book, Modern Enchantments—where does religion stand with respect to magic?

SD: Secular magic, which is more or less equivalent to entertainment magic, is a popular instrument of secularization. It is spiritualism’s antagonist—and religion’s as well, if less so. Real magic is not secular at all, obviously. In general, religion and magic have to be thought of as opposed to one another, even if religion sometimes engages in magic too.

NS: The early nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists of religion were especially anxious to distinguish the two. But that’s not a concern one comes across much anymore. Why is that?

SD: Could it be because in the nineteenth century they still took religion seriously? They could not, or did not, write from a position of total unbelief. Since Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, until very recently, that position of unbelief has been required of social scientists. The interest in magic’s relation to religion might thus be considered a stage in the social sciences’ perhaps merely provisional march to secularity.

NS: Does magic offer another alternative space to the mechanics of capitalism? Or, perhaps, is capitalism itself a kind of magic?

SD: No. Magic offers no alternative to capitalism. And capitalism is not a form of magic. It’s only too unmagical—although it is true that the extension of secular magic depends on the development of commodified leisure markets. And it’s a bit true that in capitalism, as in some magic tricks, “all that is solid melts into air.” But not capitalism itself—it doesn’t vanish.

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.

Translated by Matthias Fritsch.

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EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, one reaches back to one’s own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization, rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of “first-borns.” These discourses must become habitual [sich einspielen] under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If we were to learn one lesson from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution.

EM: Let me come back to my original question: If we no longer can explain modernization in terms of secularization, how then can we speak about societal progress?

JH: The secularization of state power is the hard core of the process of secularization. I see this as a liberal achievement that should not get lost in the dispute among world religions. But I never counted on progress in the complex dimension of the “good life”.  Why should we feel happier [glücklicher] than our grandparents or the liberated Greek slaves in ancient Rome? Of course one person is luckier [hat mehr Glück] than another. As if at sea, individual fates are exposed to a sea of contingencies. And happiness [das Glück] is distributed as unjustly today as ever. Perhaps something changed in the course of history in the subjective coloration of existential experiences. But no progress alters the crises of loss, love, and death. Nothing mitigates the personal pain of those who live in misery, who feel lonely or are sick, who experience tribulations, insults or humiliation. This existential insight into anthropological constants, however, should not lead us to forget the historical variations, including the indubitable historical progress that exists in all those dimensions in which human beings can learn. 

I do not mean to dispute that much has been forgotten in the course of history. But we cannot intentionally go back to a point prior to the results of learning processes. This explains the progress in technology and science, as well as the progress in morality and law—that is, the de-centering of our ego- or group-centered perspectives, when the point is to nonviolently end conflicts of action. These social-cognitive kinds of progress already refer to the further dimension of the increase in reflection, that is, the ability to step back behind oneself. This is what Max Weber meant when he spoke of “disenchantment.”

We can indeed trace the, for now, last socially relevant push in the reflexivity of consciousness to Western modernity. In early modernity, the instrumental attitude of state bureaucracy toward a political power largely free of moral norms signifies such a reflexive step, as does the instrumental attitude, appearing at about the same time, toward a methodologically objectified nature, which first of all makes possible modern science. Of course, I have in mind, above all, steps of self-reflection to which, in the seventeenth century, rational law and autonomous art owe themselves; then, in the eighteenth century, rational morality and the internalized religious and artistic forms of expression of pietism and romanticism; as well as, finally, in the nineteenth century, historical enlightenment and historicism. These are cognitive pushes that have widespread effects—and which do not permit themselves to be easily forgotten.

It is also in connection with this widespread push toward reflection that we have to view the progressive disintegration of traditional, popular piety. Two specifically modern forms of religious consciousness emerged from this: on the one hand, a fundamentalism that either withdraws from the modern world or turns aggressively toward it; on the other, a reflective faith that relates itself to other religions and respects the fallible insights of the institutionalized sciences as well as human rights. This faith is still anchored in the life of a congregation and should not be confused with the new, deinstitutionalized forms of a fickle religiosity that has withdrawn entirely into the subjective.

Click here to read the remainder of this interview [pdf].

Habermas proceeds, as always, carefully and methodically, but it seems on this occasion with some additional caution and uncertainty about just how far he wants to go. Religion, after all, appears prominently in contemporary politics in the form of strikingly illiberal views and positions, and in a package with practices Habermas can hardly condone. It also appears in more positive and even heroic forms, of course, not least as part of movements for peace, civil and human rights, and equitable development. But Habermas recognizes that the theoretical challenge requires not just accepting “nice” versions of religion, but precisely determining in what way religious positions with which secular liberals may disagree vehemently should carry weight.

At the conference on the occasion of Jürgen Habermas’s Holberg Prize, as in a number of other contexts, the question of what it means to refer to a “postsecular” era was the subject of debate. Helge Høibraaten reflected the concerns of many when he asked whether the prefix “post” wasn’t misleading. Just as the ostensibly “postmodern” reflected cross-currents intrinsic to modernity, wasn’t this true also of the “postsecular”?

We could come at this historically as well as philosophically, noting the dramatic role played by religion – and periodic movements of religious revitalization – throughout the modern era. It is significant not just that Americans remain more religious than Europeans in recent decades, thus, but also that the United States has seen successive waves of Great Awakenings, each transforming not only religious but also apparently secular life. And while the contrast with Europe is not new, having informed both Tocqueville and Weber after their travels in the US, it is also not complete. For the Protestant Reformation was not the last time religion mattered in Europe. We should remember the anti-slavery movement and the influence of especially low-church Protestant religions on a range of other late 18th century and early 19th century social movements, including those also shaped by democratic and class politics. We should not neglect the mid-19th century renewal of spiritualism, even if much of it was outside religious orthodoxy, and we should not lose sight of its fluid relationships with Romanticism, utopian socialism, and humanitarianism. We should see religious internationalism both under the problematic structure of colonial and postcolonial missionary work and in the engagements shaped by Vatican II, the peace movement, and liberation theology. We should recognize, as Habermas does, the importance of religious motivations and understandings (and indeed organizational networks and practices) in a range of social movements during the 20th century, in Europe as well as America, and around the world. And of course we should recognize the growing importance of religion in Europe – largely occasioned by but not limited to Muslim immigration.

What has passed, I think Habermas means to suggest, is not a simple condition of secularity nor even a secularizing trend but (a) the plausibility of the assumption that progress (and freedom, emancipation, and liberation) could be conceptualized adequately in purely secular terms and (b) the plausibility of the notion that a clear differentiation could be maintained between discourses of faith and those of public reason. Note that the assumption and the notion have never seemed plausible to everyone; they shaped secular perspectives more than those of religious people though they did shape the discourse and views of both. In any case, loss of certainty on these dimensions is challenging, most especially for liberalism.

Religion, moreover, is part of the genealogy of public reason itself. To attempt to disengage the idea of public reason (or the reality of the public sphere) from religion is to disconnect it from a tradition that continues to give it life and content. Habermas stresses the importance of not depriving public reason of the resources of a tradition that has not exhausted the semantic contributions it can make. Equally, though, the attempt to make an overly sharp division between religion and public reason provides important impetus to the development of alternative or counterpublic spheres as well as less public and less reasoned forms of resistance to a political order that seeks to hold religion at arm’s length.

This issue is significant for Habermas’s reconsideration of the extent to which prevailing secularist assumptions are adequate for the current era. Not only is there value for public reason to gain if it integrates religious contributions, it is a requirement of political justice that public discourse recognize and tolerate but also fully integrate religious citizens. It is with this in mind that he rejects Rawls’ formulations in which public reason requires arguments conducted entirely in secular terms. Rawls’ reasoning is that this is necessary in order to ensure that all arguments are accessible to everyone. Religious people, in this view, must give reasons for their arguments that are not specifically religious and fully available for acceptance by those who are not religious. But this, Habermas rightly suggests, places an unfair and asymmetrical burden on religious citizens.

Official tolerance for diverse forms of religious practice and a constitutional separation of church and state are good, Habermas suggests, but not by themselves sufficient guarantees for religious freedom. “It is not enough to rely on the condescending benevolence of a secularized authority that comes to tolerate minorities hitherto discriminated against. The parties themselves must reach agreement on the always contested delimitations between a positive liberty to practice a religion of one’s own. And the negative liberty to remain spared of the religious practices of others.” This agreement cannot be achieved in private. Religion, thus, must enter the public sphere. There deliberative, ideally democratic processes of collective will formation can help parties both to understand each other and to reach mutual accommodation if not always agreement.

Rawls’ account of the public use of reason allows for religiously motivated arguments, but not for the appeal to “comprehensive” religious doctrines for justification. Justification must rely solely on “proper political reasons” (which means mainly reasons that are available to everyone regardless of the specific commitments they may have to religion or substantive conceptions of the good or their embeddedness in cultural traditions). This is, as Habermas indicates, an importantly restrictive account of the legitimate public use of reason – one which will strike many as not truly admitting religion into public discourse. Crucially, Habermas follows Wolterstorff in arguing that it is in the nature of religion that serious belief is understood as informing – and rightly informing – all of a believer’s life. This makes sorting out the “properly political” from other reasons both practically impossible in many cases and an illegitimate demand for secularists to impose. Attempting to enforce it would amount to discriminating against those for whom religion is not “something other than their social and political existence”. On more ambiguous grounds, Habermas does hold it acceptable to demand “properly political” justifications, independent of religion, from politicians even if not from those who vote for or endorse them.

Habermas seeks to defend a less narrow liberalism, one that admits religion more fully into public discourse (including both democratic will formation and the rule of law) but seeks to maintain a secular conception of the state. He understands this as requiring impartiality in state relations to those of any religious orientation or none and to all religious communities, but not as requiring the stronger laïc prohibition on state action affecting religion even if impartially. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the liberal state and its advocates are not merely enjoined to religious tolerance but – at least potentially – cognizant of a functional interest in public expressions of religion. These may be key resources for the creation of meaning and identity; secular citizens can learn from religious contributions to public discourse (not least when these help clarify intuitions the secular have not made explicit).

In this “polyphonic complexity of public voices” the giving of reasons is still crucial. Public reason cannot proceed simply by expressive communication or demands for recognition, though the public sphere cannot be adequately inclusive if it tries to exclude these. The public sphere will necessarily include processes of culture-making that are not reducible to advances in reason, and which nonetheless may be crucial to capacities for mutual understanding. But if collective will formation is to be based on reason, not merely participation in common culture, then public processes of clarifying arguments and giving reasons for positions must be central. Religious people like all others are reasonably to be called on to give a full account of their reasons for public claims. But articulating reasons clearly is not the same as offering only reasons that can be stated in terms fully “accessible” to the nonreligious. Conversely, though the secular (or differently religious) may be called on to participate in the effort to understand the reasons given by adherents to any one religion, such understanding may include recognition and clarification of points where orientations to knowledge are such that understanding cannot be fully mutual. And the same goes in reverse. Since secular reasons are also embedded in culture and belief and not simply matters of fact or reason alone, those who speak from non-religious orientations are reasonably called on to clarify to what extent their arguments demand such non-religious orientations or may be reasonably accessible to those who do not share them.

Indeed, one could argue that a sharp division between secular and religious beliefs is available only to the secular. While the religious person may accept many beliefs that others regard as adequately grounded in secular reasons alone – about the physical or biological world, for example – she may see these as inherently bound up with a belief in divine creation. She may also regard certain beliefs as inherently outside religion, but even if she uses the word “secular” to describe these, the meaning is at least in part “irreligious” (a reference to a different, non-religious way of seeing things and not simply to things ostensibly “self-sufficient” outside religion or divine influence). It is necessary to demand that the religious person consider her own faith reflexively, see it from the point of view of others, and relate it to secular views. Though this amounts to demanding a cognitive capacity that not all religious people have, it is not one intrinsically contrary to religion and equivalent demands are placed on all citizens by the ethics of public discourse. What the liberal state must not do is “transform the requisite institutional separation of religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith.” And with this in mind, Habermas also suggests that the non-religious bear a symmetrical burden to participate in the translation of religious contributions to the political public sphere into “properly political” secular terms – that is, they must seek to understand what is being said in religious terms and determine to what extent they can understand it (and potentially agree with it) in their own non-religious terms. In this way, they will help to make ideas, norms, and insights deriving from religious sources accessible to all, and to the more rigorously secular internal discursive processes of the state itself.

This line of argument pushes against a distinction Habermas has long wanted to maintain between morality and ethics, between procedural commitments to justice and engagements with more particular conceptions of the good life.

We make a moral use of practical reason when we ask what is equally good for everyone; we make an ethical use when we ask what is respectively good for me or for us. Questions of justice permit under the moral viewpoint what all could will: answers that in principle are universally valid. Ethical questions, on the other hand, can be rationally clarified only in the context of a specific life-history or a particular form of life. For these questions are perspectively focused on the individual or on a specific collective who want to know who they are and, at the same time, who they want to be.

Habermas does not abandon the pursuit of a context-independent approach to the norms of justice. But he does now recognize that demanding decontextualization away from substantive conceptions of the good life as a condition for participation in the processes of public reason may itself be unjust.

A further couplet of questions is also opened which may prove challenging for efforts to preserve a strong understanding of (and wide scope for) context-independence and universality in moral reasoning. First, is a genealogical or language-theoretical reconstruction of reason adequate without an existential connection between social and cultural history on the one hand and individual biography on the other? Second, is “translation” an adequate conceptualization of what is involved in making religious insights accessible to nonreligious participants in public discourse (and vice-versa)?

In my next post, I will argue that mutual understanding between religious and non-religious participants in public discourse requires transformation, not just translation – a process of transformation in culture, belief, and self.