The Role of Religions in the Public Sphere: The Post-Secular Model of Jürgen Habermas and Beyond (original) (raw)
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THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN JURGEN HABERMAS
Contemporary political liberalism understands itself as a nonreligious and postmetaphysical justification of the normative bases of the democratic constitutional state (cfr.Habermas 2006a,24). Citizens are politically autonomous only when they give themselves their own laws. Autonomy, for Kant, is the capacity to bind one's will by normative insights that result from the public use of reason. So, citizens are autonomous when they are self-legislators. Self-legislation also inspires the procedure of democratic will-formation that makes it possible to legitimate political authority on a fashion that is neutral toward religious worldviews or comprehensive doctrines. As a result, a religious or metaphysical justification of human rights becomes superfluous. Religion is regarded as mythic and metaphysical; religion states an authority that weakens human autonomy. (cfr.Habermas 2001,127) However, we Indeed live in a pluralistic world in which diverse worldviews and comprehensive forms of life are breaking out inside societies that previously were culturally homogeneous. To carry out public discussions about common issues, being aware that each one is rooted in his/her cultural and religious tradition, is a relevant question in contemporary political and moral philosophy. Political and moral standpoints are connected to traditions, and traditions are permeated by cultural values and meanings in which religion has a significant role. World religions rehearse God's care for the vulnerable, the young, the old, the abandoned, the poor, the imprisoned, the enslaved, the sick, the disabled and so forth, and these accounts influence whatsoever public argumentation. Modern citizens have to participate in the public sphere, i.e. in the arena within which public debates take place, looking upon opposing views, dissonant worldviews, and different forms of life. How could there be the public argumentation between members of different traditions and religions? Based on Jurgen Habermas' thought, this essay attempts to engage the role of religion in the public sphere. I will set forth this idea through the following steps: first, legitimacy of law in a deliberative democracy; second, the public sphere and democratic procedure; third, lights and shadows of religion from a postreligious legitimacy of deliberative democracy; and fourth, contributions of religion to the public sphere.
Since 2001, Jürgen Habermas has turned increasingly toward questions on the role of religion in the public sphere. Modifying his earlier position, Habermas now argues for the equal inclusion of religious voices in the political public sphere and urges for the recognition among secular citizens that we are living in a "post-secular" world that must become adjusted to the continued existence of religious communities. Such a process requires that secular citizens undergo a "cognitive dissonance" when confronting religious claims and attempt a "translation program" to discover the profane truth content contained within. While there is much to commend this position, I argue that Habermas's model is unnecessarily constrained by his narrow understanding of "religion" as a normative category, and that he privileges a Euro-hegemonic conception of "world religions" while circumscribing the parameters for how discourse on religion-both in philosophy and in the public sphere-ought to proceed.
This paper tackles Habermas' article entitled 'Religion in the Public Sphere'. Right from the outset of his career, Habermas has dealt with the role of the ‘public sphere’ in a deliberative democracy and it is from this perspective that Habermas engages with religion. Habermas insists on the need to translate religious language into secular terms and thus make them accessible to all; religious and secular people alike. This context lays the foundation of a postsecular concept that maintains that society accept that religion will continue to exist and should engage with it in a vibrant and dynamic way that produces constructive dialogue.I will call for a re-examination of the condition of institutional translation proviso that supposedly removes the accusation of placing an asymmetrical burden on religious citizens?; And will call for a re-evaluation of the religious realm that transcends the public sphere principles of reason, justice, equality and freedom.
Public Religions in a Postsecular Era: Habermas and Gandhi on Revisioning the Political
Telos, 2014
author copy • not for circulation An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide meaning in all aspects of contemporary social and political life. At the center of the recent contested cluster of ideas on postsecularism are the works of Jürgen Habermas, which have played a pivotal role in the renewed attention to religion beginning in the 1980s. Earlier, Habermas saw religion as irrelevant to the revitalization of a democratically engaged public sphere. 1 His new regard for religion, articulated across several venues since 2001, has led him to embrace the term "postsecular society" in order to demarcate the current moment: as a crucial stage in the historical development of the failure of secularism and as a fruitful ground in the cultivation of new forms of understanding religiosity. 2 He argues that 1.
Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives
The European Legacy, 2017
The recent rise of populism and nationalist majoritarianism in various countries from the United States and India to Turkey, Hungary, and Israel poses a challenge to constitutional democracy and human rights around the globe. Events such as Brexit and Donald Trump's electoral success are a reminder of the fragility of democracy in "times out of joint. " The full significance of these changes is difficult to fathom, and will become clearer only in the years or decades to come. It seems safe to argue, nonetheless, that we are moving into a more polarized and unstable world. 1 These changes have not come out of the blue: for decades political theorists, sociologists, and historians have been identifying and analyzing the signs of a malaise and growing disaffection in Western and non-Western democracies, the increased tensions between corporate capitalism and democracy, and the divisions between North and South. 2 Jürgen Habermas, for long at the forefront of these debates, has repeatedly addressed the tectonic shifts and tensions in modern capitalist democracies and has passionately advocated the democratic re-engagement of citizenry. Over the past two decades, Habermas has focused on two specific sociopolitical phenomena: the crisis of the European Union and the renewed influence of religion in the public sphere. To address this dual challenge, he introduced two new concepts: first, the notion of a European postnational constellation to counter the technocratic rule of bureaucratic experts and financial markets as well as the exclusive focus on the nation-state; 3 and, second, the notion of the postsecular society where the discourse of religious communities is reflexively integrated into public discourse and democratic practice. Habermas thus proposes an intermediate stance between two opposed and extreme views of the place of religion in contemporary democracies: the "revenge of God, " on the one hand, and the inevitable divorce of democracy from religion, on the other. 4 His vision of a postsecular society attempts instead to reconcile the tradition of the Enlightenment and modern religion, democracy and reflexive faith. In recent debates on postsecularism, critics of different ideological outlooks from various disciplines have often turned Habermas's vision into a punching bag. While it has become fashionable to debunk Habermas by reducing his view to a caricature or a series of clichés, his view has also been carefully scrutinized. 6 His left-wing critics see his growing interest in postsecularism as a retreat into conservatism, thus abandoning his earlier post-Marxist critique of religion as articulated in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Some see
“Found In Translation. Jürgen Habermas, Post-Secularism, and Anthropotechnics”, draft
In his most recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has argued in favor of establishing a reciprocal dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social and societal integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. According to Habermas, this dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens should focus on the translation of the varied and deep symbolic heritage of religious traditions into rational, secular ones. More recently, he analyzed the social functions of rituals and has rejected any Durkheimian understanding of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this paper I summarize Habermas's early reFlections on postsecularism, and assess his recent interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then suggest a shift in focus from religious symbolic content to behavior-regulating technologies aimed at the elevation of individual human beings as the starting point of a process for creating the dispositional resources needed to establish a continuing postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens.
Habermas and Gauchet on religion in postsecular society. A critical assessment
Continental Philosophy Review, 2009
This article seeks to demonstrate that in his recent reading of the role of religion in the postsecular public realm, Habermas overlooks a most fundamental dimension of religion: its power to symbolically institute communities. For his part, Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this fundamental dimension is central. In his evaluation of the role of religion in postsecular society, he therefore arrives at results which are very different from those of Habermas. However, I believe that Gauchet too underestimates the extent to which religion’s power of symbolic community institution has remained intact within modern, postsecular society. In support of this position, I show how relatively heterogeneous phenomena within Western societies, such as the renewed importance of religion in the public realm, the revival of certain forms of nationalism and the associated demand for recognition of group rights and hence for forms of legal pluralism, may prefigure a new transformation of the public realm.
Religion and the Postsecular Public Sphere
Quarterly Journal of Speech , 2016
Focuses on three overarching themes in three recent books – the edited volume “Rawls and Religion,” the edited volume “Habermas and Religion,” and Mahmood’s “Religious Difference in a Secular Age” – on challenges of religion: (1) an insistence on some neutral concept intended to theoretically and practically manage the fact of reasonable pluralism, thereby legitimating the use of political power; (2) the possibilities of a postsecular orientation established to strengthen moral and practical motivations in pursuit of stable, well-ordered, and just societies; and (3) the necessity of faith, in a religious and nonreligious sense, to collective public life. Critical scholars increasingly recognize that secularism, in all its varieties, shapes, orients, and remakes the lives of both religious and nonreligious citizens. Secularism deserves consideration as a crucial analytic category alongside the familiar triumvirate of race, class, and gender.