Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning in a Liberal Democracy

Abstract

This article compares Habermas’s and Taylor’s approach to the role of religious language in a liberal democracy. It shows that the difference in their approach is not simply in their theories of religious language. The contrast lies deeper, in their incompatible moral theories: Habermas’s universal discourse ethics vs Taylor’s communitarian substantive ethics. I also explore William Rehg’s defence of discourse ethics by conceding that it is based on a metavalue of rational consensus. However, I argue that Habermas’s and Rehg’s discourse ethics and translation proviso are untenable. While Taylor rightly argues that there is no reason to exclude religious reason from the formal political sphere, his proposed fusion of horizons to generate a new hybrid framework is also problematic. I suggest that Taylor’s historical hermeneutics should be extended to include the narrative approach to ethical deliberation as conducive to mutual experiential understanding, and hence to achieving a fusion of horizons of the diverse worlds of citizens in a liberal democracy.     

Found in Translation: Habermas and Anthropotechnics

Abstract

In his recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has stressed the need for a dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. This dialogue should focus on the translation of religious traditions into rational, secular forms. In his more recent work on the social function of rituals, however, he rejected the Durkheimian view of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this article I discuss Habermas’s early reflections on postsecularism and assess his interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then propose an alternative to his translation proviso whereby religious symbolic content would be translated into behavior-regulating technologies aimed at developing the dispositional resources needed for a continuous postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens.     

A Difference in Kind? Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on Post-secularism

Abstract

In this essay I examine the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the post-secular state. I argue that, although their views on the relation of religion and politics converge in certain respects, a profound difference remains between their overall approaches. Their disagreement on the epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons, and on the role religious arguments can play in the public sphere testify to a deeper schism. Thus what might at first seem like a quarrel about details proves to be a fundamental philosophical divide on the issue of modernity. I conclude that Taylor’s model of post-secularism is more promising as an approach to the challenge posed by growing religious and cultural diversity, for, if understood as a version of “reiterative universalism,” it avoids both moral relativism and Eurocentrism.     

Political Involvement and Religious Compromises

Abstract

The risks of modern politics are significant enough that religious believers ought to be making greater efforts than many of them are currently doing to think soberly about the effects of their political participation. In this article I argue that Stanley Hauerwas’s most recent approach to political participation is a promising one but that there are further measures that are equally profitable as ways of facilitating the public witness of the faithful. I develop out of my discussion of Hauerwas some participatory guidelines for religious believers. First I suggest that they ought to be abiding by a worldview integrity condition, and then I argue that they ought also to be subjecting themselves to the assessments of a critical community.     

A Public Faith—but for Everyone and Every Public?

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s sets out a strong, good thesis about the freedom religious people ought to have to participate in public as fully themselves, as religious people. This thesis is in tension with the fact that some people seek to harm others, or to radically compromise public life itself, in the name of their religion. Along the way, Volf makes a number of points that seem puzzling, at least overstated, but perhaps even incoherent with other claims he makes or with data that he likely also knows. I raise the possibility that the author’s social location may help to explain at least some of these debatable features of his otherwise salutary book.     

Habermas’s Theological Turn and European Integration

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue that the early history of European integration has important implications for Habermas’s conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious justifications from discourse within state institutions. I question this exclusion of faith by reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the foundation of the European project. By focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive, postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation.     

Religion in Habermas’s Two-Track Political Theory

Abstract

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework.     

Mission Impossible: "Nonsectarian" Prayer in the Military Chaplaincy

Abstract

Recent media-saturated events such as then-Navy Chaplain Klingenschmitt's hunger strike in front of the White House, an ultimately unsuccessful class-action lawsuit against the Navy that alleged discrimination against evangelical Christians, and formal charges of religious bias at the US Air Force Academy have renewed concerns about the content of chaplain-led public prayers in ostensibly secular contexts. Some have accordingly touted the advantages of offering "nonsectarian" prayer in command-hosted settings, where attendance by service personnel is mandatory in a real or de facto sense. This paper argues that this push toward nonsectarian prayer ultimately does a disservice to the chaplains themselves and the religious communities from whence they come, whether civic prayer is interpreted as an instance of "ceremonial deism" or a rite of civil religion. But the solution it offers is not for public prayers to become more religiously particular, but for military commanders to cease requesting that chaplains lead public prayer of any kind in such settings.     

The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.     

Public Faith and the Common Good A Radical Messianic Proposal

Abstract

The article inquires into the implications of Christianity not being a religious perspective among others in the contemporary Western debate on religious pluralism. A quick glance at a recent debate in Sweden serves to demonstrate how Christianity, although marginalized in its traditional forms, remains a dominating cultural interpretative scheme that continues to influence the majority’s view on private and public, individual and collective, rational and irrational. Against this background, the author argues, it is imperative that any Christian theologian who engages in the question of religion in the public sphere in the Western world, also must critically confront the question of Christianity’s particular status. Not least in light of contemporary right-wing rhetoric about the West as an exclusively “Christian civilization,” theologians need to reflect on how to avoid articulations of the Christian vision of the common good that manifest themselves at the expense of other religious traditions. The article ends by sketching a possible direction for such reflection.     

Convictions,Loyalties and the Secular State

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between communal religious identity and the secular, liberal state. It addresses the concern that religious allegiance undermines an individual's or group's political loyalty. The liberal secular state is threatened when a religious community participates in public discussion because this challenges the positioning of religious belief as personal and private. Currently this issue is brought into sharp focus by the identities of Muslim people although it is by no means restricted to this religious group. The early Christians negotiated the difficulties of loyalty to the empire and worship of the one true God as uniquely divine. The work of William Cavanaugh and Maleiha Malik is utilized to argue that religious communities can participate in public discussions in secular liberal states while living by narratives not shared by these polities. In fact religious communities can deepen the moral discussions of liberal secular states by bringing to its instrumental rationalism convictions established on alternate beliefs and narratives about the human condition. The recognition of the public role of religions need not induce panic in the liberal secular state and may secure religious communities sufficiently to allow mature, critical debate and discussion of their loyalties.     

The Conservatism of Radical Theology

Abstract

This article is principally intended to argue something that is counter-intuitive, namely that despite the socialist values of a number of radical liberal Christian and post-Christian writers the philosophical outlook and language of this phase of religious thought focuses upon some key ideas which find important parallels in Conservative philosophy. This is not in any way to imply that these ideas do not find parallels in other political philosophies, it is merely to highlight a set of relationships which appear to go unnoticed in debates on politics and theology. Subsequent to this principle argument I hope that it will become clear that there is more to the interaction between Conservative and Christian thought than the promotion of right-wing social authoritarianism—the raison d'être of most Conservative organizations and thinkers promoting ‘Christian’ values.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the Presentation of the Henrician Reformation in his Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth

Abstract

It was no coincidence that Charles I commissioned a study of the life and reign of Henry VIII in the 1630s as he proceeded with controversial anti-Calvinist religious reforms in the face of Puritan opposition and suspicion that he was a closet Catholic. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's willingness to undertake the laborious scholarly task is initially more surprising but can be explained by his commitment to the eradication of religious conflict and his realization that it would enable him to disseminate his own rationalist, reunionist and Erastian views on religious belief, the organization of religion and the location of religious authority.     

The political geographies of religious sites in Moscow’s neighborhoods

Abstract

This paper addresses the spatial politics of Russia’s increased religiosity in Moscow. It analyzes the rights of minority Muslim communities within the context of increased political support for expressions of Russian Orthodoxy in Moscow’s public space. Moscow’s Russian Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders claim that their communities have a lack of religious infrastructure, with one church per 35,000 residents and one mosque per three million residents, respectively. The Russian Orthodox Church has been more successful than Muslim organizations at expanding their presence in Moscow’s neighborhoods. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, religious spaces are examined as sites of dissent as well as participatory, active citizenship at three different sites in Moscow. Protests over Russian Orthodox Church construction in one neighborhood are contrasted with the protests over mosque construction in two neighborhoods. This paper provides insights into how civil society and religious groups have increased their public presence in Moscow and shows the unequal access that different groups have to public space in that city.     

Editorial: Defending Ward Churchill

Abstract

While some fear that political values so contradict gospel values that engagement with wider society risks religious corruption, Roman Catholic teaching encourages civic engagement even with political structures, while remaining cautious that such collaboration does not become cooptation. Negotiating the tensions between discipleship and citizenship in practice has given rise to different stances within the American Catholic community, particularly with regard to patriotism, dissent and the use of force. A survey of different Catholic reactions to the US involvement in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 11 September reveals the tensions between discipleship and citizenship as well as the potential role for religious dissent or critique, even in times of war. It also suggests potential for a realignment or integration of conventional Catholic postures toward public engagement.     

In God We Trust: Abraham Lincoln and America's Deathbed Repentance

Abstract

This article maps several key moments in the evolution of religious symbolism and language on US currency, focusing largely on Abraham Lincoln's overlooked role in signing the motto "In God We Trust" into law. Interpreting the motto through the lens of Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Address"—which he delivered just one day after Congress passed the first statute allowing "In God We Trust" to be stamped on US coins—offers a counter-intuitive interpretation of the motto that functions as a deep, ironic, and historically significant critique of religious nationalism.     

New Models of Religious Diversity: Modern Judaism beyond the Scylla of “Political” and the Charybdis of “Religious”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a response to Julie Cooper’s piece in this volume. In her essay, Cooper insightfully analyzes ways in which the rise of the modern state has imposed “religious” forms of identification on Jews, and she engages a series of early twentieth-century Zionist thinkers who resisted and challenged that problematic imposition. I build on Cooper’s analysis, highlighting ways in which even these thinkers may still be caught up in the very paradigm that they sought to challenge. Yet despite their limitations, I suggest that it is precisely by engaging more deeply with such thinkers that theorists today can extend and continue the critique that they initiated. By gaining greater awareness of the ways in which useful critiques of “religionization” can still succumb to problematic “politicization,” and vice versa, theorists can better position themselves to draw on past texts and thought in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant “political” and “religious” options.     

Political Theology,Religious Diversity and the Nature of Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Driving this essay is a question central to political theology; that is, how can I keep faith with my distinctive commitments while also forming a common life with neighbors who have a different vision of life to me? My response has four parts. First, I develop a normative definition of politics within which to situate an account of citizenship and the political implications of deep religious plurality in a shared polity. Second, I examine how citizenship is not just a legal status that entails certain rights and duties, but also denotes an identity, a performance of politics, and a shared rationality. Third, I identify the dominant ways in which citizenship is understood in the contemporary context, namely, through either a nationalist or cosmopolitan framework, contrasting these with a consociational conception of citizenship. And lastly, I lay out how a consociational framework provides a more generative basis for conceptualizing religious diversity.