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 Jürgen Habermas at the Hochschule für Philosophie München
  in 2007. Photo: Wolfram Huke/wikipedia.de

THE POST-SECULAR SOCIETY. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Jürgen Habermas is a philosopher who has retained a meaningful balance between the cloud-capped towers of academic metaphysics and everyday down-to-earth existence through his continuous participation in public debate about burning current issues like Islam in Europe. In fact, at the core of his famous theory of ‘communicative action' is a firm belief in the need for inclusive, critical discussion, in which all parties cooperate as equals for the purpose of achieving understanding.

Religion
Habermas told the Dutch audience: "What a democratic public sphere and a liberal collective culture need in the first place is deliberation and the input of informed and well reasoned arguments", and here he was once again revealing his respect for the potential of Reason to bring people from different cultures onto the same wavelength. Habermas has consistently retained respect for the democratic and human rights achievements of the Enlightenment as having universal validity, and he rejects the radical multiculturalist dismissal of the Enlightenment as just another tool of western imperialist domination.

During his lecture in Tilburg, entitled The Post-Secular Society. What does it mean?, Habermas took a very critical look at the assumption that modernisation goes hand in hand with secularisation and necessarily leads to a diminished role for religion, particularly in the public sphere. The belief that religion gradually disappears during the course of modernisation is losing ground, he says, and in the affluent West we appear to be living in a ‘post-secular' society.

United States
Looking at the United States, for example, Habermas cited "the vibrancy of American religious communities and the unchanging proportion of America's religious committed citizens", pointing out that "the United States nevertheless remains the spearhead of modernisation". Rather than being regarded as an exception to the secularisation rule, says Habermas, "the United States now seems to exemplify the norm, while Western rationalism that was once supposed to serve as model for the rest of the world is actually the exception."

Looking at what might be regarded as "a worldwide resurgence of religion", from Evangelical missionaries in Latin America to the advance of orthodox trends in the established world religions, Habermas describes the regime in Iran and Islamic terrorism as "merely the most spectacular examples of a political unleashing of the potential for violence innate in all of our religions.

Often smouldering conflicts that are profane in origin are first ignited once they are coded in religious terms. This is true", he says, "of the so-called desecularisation of the Middle East conflict, and of the mobilisation of the religious right in the United States before and during the invasion and war in Iraq."

Church and state
It is true that in the modern age, says Habermas, religion has tended to confine itself to the core function of pastoral care, and the practice of faith withdrew into the more personal sphere. At the same time, however, religion is gaining influence worldwide, also in our national public sphere.

"Churches and religious organisations are increasingly assuming the role of what we may call communities of interpretation in the public arena of our secular societies.They can obtain influence on public opinion with relevant contributions to key issues, irrespective of whether their arguments are convincing or objectionable." This leads Habermas to pose the question: "What must we reciprocally expect from one another, in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states like ours, social relations remain civil despite the plurality of cultures and religious world views?"

In seeking an answer to this question, Habermas takes a look first at the principle of separation of church and state, which grew out of the religious wars in Europe in the early modern age. He reminds us that separation of church and state was only gradually realised over the course of centuries, and it took a different form in each national body of law in our various European countries.

Democracy
While governments assumed a secular character, religious minorities gradually acquired more rights. Habermas reminds the audience that tolerance in those days had nothing to do with esteem or respect for the other's views but was simply a modus vivendi, in which each opposing confessional side simply nested into its own niche. The state's initial task after the Protestant Reformation was to pacify society, disarm the quarrelling parties, and monitor their precarious co-existence.

Habermas stresses this way of life proved to be insufficient, however, under the new democratic order created at the end of the 18th century, when the state became subjected to two forces: the rule of law, and the democratic will of the people. Habermas says: "This constitutional state is only able to guarantee its citizens equal freedom of religion under the proviso that they no longer barricade themselves within their religious communities sealed off from one another", and he adds that under this new democratic and constitutional order all subcultures are expected to free their individual members from their embrace.

Equal rights
And here we come to one of the core arguments of Habermas' thinking about the proper balance in a post-secular society:

"The awareness of the fact that the other is a member of an inclusive community of citizens of equal rights, in which equal citizenship and cultural difference complement each other."

Looking at the German situation, Habermas points out, for example, that as long as a considerable number of German citizens of Turkish origin and Muslim faith live more clearly in their old home country than in the new, their votes and their voice cannot influence the public sphere or the values of the dominant political culture.

At the same time, Habermas suggests that both religious and secular mentalities should undergo a complementary learning process. As for religious citizens, Habermas says they "must not only superficially adjust to a constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith."

Here Habermas argues that Muslim communities may well have to undergo the same painful learning process as the Protestant and Catholic churches have had to do, but he emphasizes that "it is the (Muslim) religious communities themselves who will have to decide whether they can someday recognize in a reformed faith their true faith."

Secularism
Habermas wonders at the same time whether a similar complementary learning process isn't also required of the secular side. If secular citizens continue to foster reservations about people with a religious mindset as people who are not to be taken seriously, they abandon the very basis of mutual recognition that shared citizenship entails. Habermas says that secular citizens must remain open to the possibility that even religious utterances, when translated into a secular context, can have meaning for them. "Not everything can be achieved by political decision and legal enforcement."