Religion and the Postsecular Public Sphere (original) (raw)
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Towards the Postsecular: Rawls and the Limits of Secular Public Reason
2013
The article argues that frequently-voiced critiques of Rawls’s political liberalism have been misguided, because the ignore the extent to which Rawls takes his inspiration from a particular historical experience, namely that of the USA. The article suggests that a better model to accommodate the European historical experience would be a ‘symbolic’ presence of religion in public political argument: In a situation of world-view pluralism, politicians are well advised to show how the values and coercive laws they promote can be derived from within one or a number of) particular religious traditions. Such attempts will be particularly valuable where they are symbolic, in the sense that they are undertaken by politicians who do not themselves belong to the religious tradition(s) in question.
Political Theology and the Dialectics of (Counter)Secularization
Politics and Religion, 2013
This article builds on Habermas's hypothesis of a post-secular world society and on Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. It first analyzes the genesis of the post-secular hypothesis in the work of Habermas. It then looks at the historical roots of the post-secular world society since the Axial Age. Finally, it delineates the evolution of religious actors in modern societies, at the political and cognitive levels, focusing on the European Counter-revolutionaries, the Islamist and post-Islamist movements of the Middle East, and the Hindu Nationalists. The article concludes that Habermas's hypothesis provides a plausible alternative to neo-Schmittian theory of the Clash of Civilizations proposed by Huntington.
Ruth Wodak & Bernhard Forchtner (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge, 587–599., 2017
This chapter explores how the modern distinction between religion and the secular has become a debated and contested discursive tool in the political organization of modern societies. This discourse is in operation in scholarly works as well as in public debates. Both are introduced and examined in this chapter. The main argument is that while important social and political issues are negotiated with the help of categories such as 'religion' and the 'secular', scholars should pay more attention to what is achieved by deploying such categories and distinctions in various locations and contexts.
The Religious Argument in the Public Space: Beyond the Perspectives of Rawls and Habermas
To what extent can democratic citizens legitimately draw upon religious arguments in supporting and justifying coercive decisions and public policies? To say it better: to what extent can liberal democracy tolerate the employ of religious argument as means of support and justification of its policies? Through this paper I will attempt to respond to such a ticklish question. In order to do this, I will take into account two of the most important contemporary political thinkers, such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, who have dealt with this issue in their works since the second half of 1990s . After having presented their specific views on the role of religious arguments in the public space, I will show up their—to a certain extent—common points of weakness, both normative and practical. Finally, by drawing on recent works of various and normatively heterogeneous political philosophers such as Weithman (2002), Gaus and Vallier (2009), Lafont (2009), Boettcher (2000), and Ferrara (2009)—explicitly critical of Rawlsian and Habermasian stances on this matter—I will try to give my own answer to what above I defined as the liberal trade-off between religion and democracy: either one exalts the freedom of publicly expressing religious beliefs as political arguments by sacrificing the ideal of democratic citizenship or one limits the public manifestation of religious arguments in favor of the principle of democratic legitimacy. My personal view is that solving this dilemma—that is the concomitant safeguard of both principles— is possible and desirable. In other words, I believe that it is conceivable to build up a normative design that recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance in the public space, whether religious or secular, without giving up on the obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone that justify coercive policies to which all must comply. To put shortly, I retain that the maximum of religious freedom and the safeguard of political equality of citizens are not incompatible ends in contemporary liberal society.
Rawls and Habermas on religion in the public sphere
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2007
In recent essays, Jürgen Habermas endorses an account of political liberalism much like John Rawls'. Like Rawls, he argues that laws and public policies should be justified only in neutral terms, i.e. in terms of reasons that people holding conflicting world-views could accept. Habermas also, much like Rawls, distinguishes reasonable religious citizens, whose views should be included in public discourse, from unreasonable citizens in his expectation that religious citizens self-modernize. But in sharing these Rawlsian features, Habermas is vulnerable to some of the same objections posed to Rawls. In this article I assess Habermas' ability to overcome two objections frequently posed to Rawls: (1) that religious citizens are unfairly expected to split their identities in public discourse, and (2) that the burdens of citizenship are asymmetrically distributed. I conclude that while he may be able to overcome the second, the first remains a problem for him.
Much of the academic literature on religious dialogue, and the policy being formulated regarding inter-faith relations, lacks any scope for genuinely political relationships or any account of how inter-faith relations are affected by the market and the state. Abstracting accounts of inter-faith relations from broader accounts of political economy masks how the state and the market are key factors in establishing the conditions and possibilities for such relations. This article avoids such abstraction and develops a constructive account of how to reconceptualize inter-faith relations as a civic rather than religious practice and common action between different faiths as directly political rather than as humanitarian service provision. Part of this account entails situating it within broader debates about secularization and whether the contemporary context can be described as “postsecular.” The key question addressed in this article is how can a common life be negotiated between different faith traditions, with different and competing claims to truths, amid the pressures and structures brought to bear upon that common life by the state and the market on which all depend? This article describes some of the factors shaping the relationship between faith groups, state and market within the contemporary context, and then, after locating these issues within broader theoretical debates about secularization, makes some constructive proposals for how religious groups might engage in inter-faith relations within this context. It closes by identifing the civic practices of listening, a commitment to place, and the building and maintenance of institutions as central to the formation of a politics of the common good.
The Unquiet Frontier: tracing the boundaries of post-secular public life and religion
There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the ‘post-secular’. My own view is rather agonistic, that it constitutes a problematic space between two contradictory trends that are unprecedented, meaning we have little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. We are caught between a rock and a hard place, or between the Scylla of religious resurgence and the Charibdis of continued secularism and scepticism. How the re-emergence of religious activism and discourse is to be mediated back into a secularized public domain, and the terms on which that is negotiated, has proved to be one of the most problematic dimensions of the whole debate. If we are thinking of the post-secular as a time of the return of religion to public life, what concepts of ‘religion’ are invoked? Is this religion as belief, or cultural resource; and where are the emerging manifestations of resurgent religion and who are its mediators? Are these essentially functionalist models? And do they bear any relation to the lived realities of religious agents themselves, as demonstrated in their social and political practices?