Habermas and Religion

Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745653273
  9780745653266
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745656700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both religion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagement with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in philosophy, politics and social theory.

Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple trajectories of modernization in the contemporary world. He calls attention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical" thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societies that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public reason.

Habermas and Religion presents a series of original and sustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in the public sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections from leading philosophers, social and political theorists, and anthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both to Habermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project and to his most recent work on religion. The book closes with an extended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from one of today's most important thinkers.

Part I

Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities

1

Exploring the Postsecular

Three Meanings of “the Secular” and Their Possible Transcendence

JOSÉ CASANOVA

Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most influential theorists of secular modernity. His theories of societal rationalization and rationalization of the lifeworld, his theory of linguistification of the sacred, and his theory of the public sphere all are grounded in the formulation of a master process of secularization which is, on the one hand, intrinsically related to processes of Western modernization and, on the other, is understood as the latest and most advanced stage within a general stadial and evolutionary process of human development (TCA; STPS; HE). In this respect, “secular” and “modern” had always been coterminous and intrinsically related within his theory.

It is therefore remarkable that Habermas has now initiated a new discourse of “postsecular” societies, the more so if one considers the fact that for decades he had resisted the new discourse of postmodernity, insisting on the need to defend and promote “the unfinished project of modernity” (PDM). Since one can assume that Habermas is not yet ready to abandon the discourse or the project of modernity, one must ask what can modern “postsecular” mean? In which way might modern individuals or societies be said to be “postsecular”?

In the following presentation, I would like to proceed by exploring, first, three different meanings of the term “secular,” to which would correspond three different understandings of the postsecular. Second, I would like to interrogate the extent to which Habermas’s conception of secularization is still too closely linked to particular European patterns of secularization, meaning that as a result he may maintain still too intrinsic a correlation between processes of modernizations and processes of secularization. Finally, I want to offer a few remarks concerning the idea of a postsecular world society.

I Three Meanings of Secular

I would like to introduce an analytical distinction between three different meanings of the word secular, or three different ways in which one may be said to be secular, to which would correspond three different understandings of the process of secularization.

I.i Mere secularity: living in the secular world and in secular time

This is the broadest possible sense of the term “secular,” which is derived from the medieval Christian theological transformation of the Latin term “saeculum.” Originally, the Latin word saeculum, as in per saecula saeculorum, only meant an indefinite period of time. But, as first used by Augustine, the “secular” referred to a temporal space between the present and the eschatological parousia in which both Christians and pagans could come together to pursue their common interests as a civil community.¹ In this respect, the Augustinian use of “secular” is very similar to the modern meaning of a secular political sphere, that of the constitutional democratic state and that of a democratic public sphere, which is neutral with respect to all worldviews, religious as well as non-religious. Such a conception does not equate the secular with the “profane,” as the other of the “sacred,” nor is the secular the other of the “religious.” It is precisely a neutral space that can be shared by all who live in a society that is either not religiously homogeneous or is multicultural, societies which by definition will have different and most likely competing conceptions of what is “sacred” and what is “profane.” This was precisely the situation in late antiquity. Judeo-Christian monotheism had led to a de-sacralization or disenchantment of the pagan sacred. Consequently, the Christians’ refusal to sacrifice to “pagan” gods or to worship the divine emperor earned them the epithet of “atheists.” The Christian sacred was the pagan profane and vice versa.

Eventually, however, with the consolidation of Western medieval Christendom and the hegemonic triumph of the Christian Church, the secular became one of the terms of a dyad, religious/secular, which served to structure the entire spatial and temporal reality of medieval Christendom into a binary system of classification separating two worlds, the religious-spiritual-sacred world of salvation and the secular-temporal-profane world. The sacred-profane and the religious-secular binary systems of classification became superimposed, and the secular became equated with the earthly city while the religious became equated with the heavenly city: thus, the distinction between the “religious” or regular clergy, who withdrew from the world into the monasteries to lead a life of Christian perfection, and the “secular” clergy who lived in the world along with the laity.

It is from this new theological perspective of medieval Christendom that the modern meaning of “secularization” emerges. To secularize means, first of all, to “make worldly,” to convert religious persons or things into secular ones, as when a religious person abandons the monastic rule to live in the world, or when monastic property is secularized. This is the medieval Christian theological meaning of the term “secularization” that may serve, however, as the basic metaphor of the historical process of Western secularization. This historical process needs to be understood as a particular reaction to the structuring dualism of medieval Christendom, as an attempt to bridge, eliminate, or transcend the dualism between the religious and the secular world. Even in the West, however, this process of secularization follows two different dynamics.

One is the dynamic of internal Christian secularization which aims to spiritualize the temporal and to bring the religious life of perfection out of the monasteries into the secular world. It tends to transcend the dualism by blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular, by making the religious secular and the secular religious through mutual reciprocal infusion. This path was initiated by the various medieval movements of Christian reform of the saeculum, was radicalized by the Protestant Reformation, and has attained its paradigmatic expression in the Anglo-Saxon Calvinist cultural area, particularly in the United States.

The other different, indeed almost opposite, dynamic of secularization takes the form of laicization. It aims to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical control and in this respect it is marked by a laic–clerical antagonism. Unlike in the Protestant path, however, here the boundaries between the religious and the secular are rigidly maintained, but those boundaries are pushed into the margins, aiming to contain, privatize, and marginalize everything religious, while excluding it from any visible presence in the secular public sphere, now defined as the realm of laïcité, freed from religion. This is the paradigmatic French-Latin-Catholic path of secularization, but it will find diverse manifestations throughout continental Europe.

With many variations, these are the two main dynamics of secularization which culminate in our secular age. In different ways, both paths lead to an overcoming of the medieval Christian dualism through a positive affirmation and revaluation of the saeculum, that is, of the secular age and the secular world, imbuing the immanent secular world with a quasi-transcendent meaning as the place for human flourishing. In this broad sense of the term “secular,” we are all secular and all modern societies are secular and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, one could almost say per saecula saeculorum. Postsecular in this context could only mean a re-sacralization or re-enchantment of modern societies within a sacred immanent frame akin to that of pre-axial societies, something that must be viewed not only as empirically unlikely but as practically impossible. This is certainly not the intended meaning of post-secular in Habermas.

I.ii Self-contained secularity within the immanent frame of the secular age: to be or not to be religious, that is the question!

There is a second narrower meaning of the term “secular,” that of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, when people are simply “irreligious,” that is, devoid of religion and closed to any form of transcendence beyond the purely secular immanent frame. Here, secular is not any more one of the units of a dyadic pair, but is constituted as a self-enclosed reality. To a certain extent, this constitutes one possible end result of the process of secularization, of the attempt to overcome the dualism between religious and secular, by freeing oneself of the religious component.

In his recent work, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has reconstructed the process through which the phenomenological experience of what he calls “the immanent frame” becomes constituted as an interlocking constellation of the modern differentiated cosmic, social, and moral orders.² All three orders, the cosmic, the social, and the moral are understood as purely immanent secular orders, devoid of transcendence, and thus functioning etsi Deus non daretur, “as if God would not exist.” It is this phenomenological experience that, according to Taylor, constitutes our age paradigmatically as a secular one, irrespective of the extent to which people living in this age may still hold religious or theistic beliefs.

The question is whether the phenomenological experience of living within such an immanent frame is such that people within it will also tend to function etsi Deus non daretur. Taylor is inclined to answer this question in the affirmative. Indeed, his phenomenological account of the secular “conditions” of belief is meant to explain the change from a Christian society around 1500 CE, in which belief in God was unchallenged and unproblematic, indeed “naïve” and taken for granted, to a post-Christian society today in which belief in God not only is no longer axiomatic but becomes increasingly problematic, so that even those who adopt an “engaged” standpoint as believers tend to experience reflexively their own belief as an option among many others, one moreover requiring an explicit justification. Secularity, being without religion, by contrast tends to become increasingly the default option, which can be naively experienced as natural and, thus, no longer in need of justification.

This naturalization of “unbelief” or “non-religion” as the normal human condition in modern societies corresponds to the assumptions of the dominant theories of secularization, which have postulated a progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices with increasing modernization, so that the more modern a society the more secular, that is, the less “religious,” it is supposed to become. That the decline of religious beliefs and practices is a relatively recent meaning of the term “secularization” is indicated by the fact that it does not yet appear in the dictionary of most modern European languages.

The naturalization of “unbelief” or “irreligiosity” as the normal “modern” human condition is a characterization that certainly applies to a majority of Western European societies. But it is not characteristic of the United States, where being religious is still the normal default option, while unbelief is the uncommon option which requires a reflexive commitment and is in need of justification. Indeed, the fact that there are some modern non-European societies, such as the United States or South Korea, that are fully secular in the sense that they function within the same immanent frame and yet their populations are also at the same time conspicuously religious, or the fact that the modernization of so many non-Western societies is accompanied by processes of religious revival, should put into question the premise that the decline of religious beliefs and practices is a quasi-natural consequence of processes of modernization. If modernization per se does not produce necessarily the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices, then we need a better explanation for the radical and widespread secularity one finds among the population of Western European societies.³

The meaning of “postsecular” in this context would be that of individuals as well as societies becoming religious again, undergoing processes of religious revival, which would reverse previous secular trends. Peter Berger has used the expression “de-secularization of the world,” while David Martin asks whether “secularization (has) gone into reverse.”⁴ There is little evidence, however, that individuals or societies in the heartland of secularization, Western Europe, are becoming postsecular. Habermas also does not appear to use “postsecular” in this second meaning of the term.

I.iii Secularist secularity: secularism as stadial consciousness

I would like to maintain that secularization in the sense of being “devoid of religion,” does not happen automatically as a result of processes of modernization, but rather needs to be mediated phenomenologically by some other particular historical experience. Self-sufficient secularity, that is, the absence of religion, has a better chance of becoming the normal taken-for-granted position if it is experienced not simply as an unreflexively naive condition, as just a fact, but actually as the meaningful result of a quasi-natural process of development. As Taylor has pointed out, modern unbelief is not simply a condition of absence of belief, nor merely indifference. It is a historical condition that requires the perfect tense, “a condition of ‘having overcome’ the irrationality of belief.”⁵ Intrinsic to this phenomenological experience is a modern “stadial consciousness,” inherited from the Enlightenment, which understands this anthropocentric change in the conditions of belief as a process of maturation and growth, as a “coming of age” and as progressive emancipation. For Taylor, this stadial phenomenological experience serves in turn to ground the phenomenological experience of exclusive humanism as the positive self-sufficient and self-limiting affirmation of human flourishing and as the critical rejection of transcendence beyond human flourishing as self-denial and self-defeating.

In this respect, the historical self-understanding of secularism has the function of confirming the superiority of our present modern secular outlook over other supposedly earlier and therefore more primitive religious forms of understanding. To be secular means to be modern, and therefore by implication to be religious means to be somehow not yet fully modern. This is the ratchet effect of a modern historical stadial consciousness, which turns the very idea of going back to a surpassed condition into an unthinkable intellectual regression.

The function of secularism as a philosophy of history, and thus as ideology, is to turn the particular Western Christian historical process of secularization into a universal teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief, from primitive irrational or metaphysical religion to modern, rational, postmetaphysical, secular consciousness. Even when the particular role of internal Christian developments in the general process of secularization is acknowledged, it is not in order to stress the particular contingent nature of the process, but rather to stress the universal significance of the uniqueness of Christianity as, in Marcel Gauchet’s expressive formulation, “the religion to exit from religion.”⁶

I would like to propose that this secularist stadial consciousness is a crucial factor in the widespread secularization that has accompanied the modernization of Western European societies. Europeans tend to experience their own secularization, that is, the widespread decline of religious beliefs and practices among their midst as a natural consequence of their modernization. To be secular is not experienced as an existential or historical choice which modern individuals or modern societies make, but rather as a natural outcome of becoming modern. In this respect, the theory of secularization mediated through this historical stadial consciousness tends to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is, in my view, the presence or absence of this secularist historical stadial consciousness that explains when and where processes of modernization are accompanied by radical secularization. In places where such secularist historical stadial consciousness is absent or less dominant, as in the United States or in most non-Western postcolonial societies, processes of modernization are unlikely to be accompanied by processes of religious decline. On the contrary, they may be accompanied by processes of religious revival.

Now that we have introduced a distinction between th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities
• Part II  The Critique of Reason and the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment
• Part III World Society, Global Public Sphere, and Democratic Deliberation
• Part IV Translating Religion, Communicative Freedom, and Solidarity
• Reply to My Critics
• Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s Work
• Notes and References
• Bibliography of Works by Jürgen Habermas
• Index