Religion in the 21st Century

Challenges and Transformations

Lisbet Christoffersen, Margit Warburg, Hans Raun Iversen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409403982
• eBook ISBN: 9781317067504
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In spite of the debate about secularization or de-secularization, the existential-bodily need for religion is basically the same as always. What have been changed are the horizons within which religions are interpreted and the relationships within which religions are integrated. This book explores how religions continue to challenge secular democracy and science, and how religions are themselves being challenged by secular values and practices. All traditions - whether religious or secular - experience a struggle over authority, and this struggle seems to intensify with globalization, as it has brought people around the world in closer contact with each other. In this book internationally leading scholars from sociology, law, political science, religious studies, theology and the religion and science debate, take stock of the current interdisciplinary research on religion and open new perspectives at the cutting edge of the debate on religion in the 21st century.

PART I:
CHALLENGES Political and Intellectual Challenge

Chapter 1
Religion Challenging the Myth of Secular Democracy

José Casanova

For the last two to three centuries it was religion that was on the defensive, being constantly challenged by secular modernity. Today it is Western secular modernity, another of our mental constructs, that feels intellectually and politically challenged by religion. In this presentation, I would like to examine this political challenge coming from religion under three separate headings: the challenge of ‘de-privatization’, the challenge of ‘confessional de-territorialization’, and the challenge of ‘global denominationalism’. It would be misleading, however, to view those challenges as if they were coming from religion per se. Rather, religions and the secular across the world are being transformed in multiform ways by global historical processes that we tend to conceptualize under the shorthand category of globalization. In other words, contemporary global historical processes are creating conditions of possibility and opportunity structures for religions to be transformed in manifold ways that challenge our received conceptions of Western secular modernity. This is particularly the case in Western Europe, where secular modernity as a construct had become hegemonic, a kind of ‘unthought’ doxa, the taken-for-granted assumption of elites as well as of ordinary people.

The Challenge of ‘De-privatization’

It has been over a decade now since the publication of my book Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), and it can be asserted with some confidence that the thesis first presented there that we were witnessing a process of ‘de-privatization’ of religion as a relatively global trend has been amply confirmed. The most important contribution of the book, in my view, was not so much the relatively prescient empirical observation of such a new global trend, but the analytical–theoretical and normative challenge that my thesis presented to liberal theories of privatization claiming that religion in the modern world was and ought to remain an exclusively ‘private’ affair. I argued that such a claim was no longer defensible either empirically, as evidenced by global historical trends, or normatively, since there was no valid justification, other than secularist prejudice, to exclude religion from the democratic public sphere. In a certain sense, the best confirmation of the validity of the ‘de-privatization’ of religion can be found in the heartland of secularization, that is, in Western European societies. It is here that the challenge of ‘de-privatization’ is most keenly felt.

To be sure, there is very little evidence of any kind of religious revival among the European population, if one excludes the significant influx of new immigrant religions. At most one could say that the general precipitous decline in individual religious belief may have come to a halt throughout much of Europe and we may be witnessing a slight upward trend in ‘belief’ among the younger generations. But this is a form of ‘private’ religion, of ‘believing without belonging’, in Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s apt characterization, that does not translate into greater participation in public religious ceremonies of any kind, much less does it present a political challenge to secular democratic structures.

But religion has certainly returned as a contentious political issue to the public sphere of European societies. It may be premature to speak of a postsecular Europe, but certainly one can sense a significant shift in the European zeitgeist. At first, the thesis of the de-privatization of religion found practically no resonance among Western European publics, academic and non-academic alike, with the exception of small groups within the sociology of religion or of small intellectual religious publics. The privatization of religion was simply taken too much for granted both as a normal empirical fact and as the norm for modern European societies. The concept of modern public religion was still too dissonant, and religious revivals elsewhere could simply be explained or rather explained away as the rise of fundamentalism in not yet modern societies. But recently, in the last four to five years at least, there has been a noticeable change in attitude and attention to religion throughout Europe. Every second week one learns of a new major conference on religion being planned somewhere in Europe, or of the establishment of some newly funded research center or research project on ‘religion and politics’ or on ‘immigration and religion’ or on ‘religion and violence’ or on ‘inter-religious dialogue’. None of this would have been thinkable even a decade ago. Most tellingly, there are very few voices in Europe today simply defending the old thesis, unrevised and unadorned, that religion is and ought to remain an exclusively private affair. Even the self-assured French laïcité is on the defensive and ready to make some concessions. The question is no longer whether religion will remain private, but how to contain the de-privatization of religion within acceptable limits, so that it does not present a major threat to our modern secular liberal democratic structures.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, successive terrorist bombings in London and Madrid, and the many foiled attempts elsewhere, as well as the resonance of the discourse of the clash of civilizations in light of the ‘global war on terror’ pursued by the Bush administration and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – all of these developments have certainly played an important role in focusing European attention on issues of religion. But it would be a big mistake to attribute this new attention solely or even mainly to the rise of so-called Islamic fundamentalism and the threats and challenges that jihādist terrorism poses to the West and particularly to Europe. Internal European transformations contribute equally to the new public interest in religion. General processes of globalization, the global growth of transnational migration and the very process of European integration, particularly the possibility of Turkey joining the European Union, are presenting crucial challenges not only to the European model of the national welfare state but also to the different kinds of religious–secular and church–state settlements that the various European countries had achieved in post-World War II Europe, as well as to the civilizational identity of Europe.

My own analysis of the de-privatization of religion tried to contain, at least normatively, public religions within the public sphere of civil society, without allowing them to spill over into political society or the democratic state. Today I must recognize my own modern Western secular prejudices and the particular hermeneutic Catholic and ‘ecclesiastical’ perspective on religion that I adopted in my comparative analysis of the relations between church, state, nation and civil society in Western Catholic and Protestant societies. The moment one adopts a global comparative perspective, one must admit that the de-privatization of religion is unlikely to be contained within the public sphere of civil society, within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, and within the constitutional premises of ecclesiastical disestablishment and juridical separation of church and state. We need to go beyond the secularist discourse of separation and beyond the public sphere of civil society, in order to address the real issues of religious democratic politics across the world. Alfred Stepan’s model of the ‘twin tolerations’ offers in my view one of the most fruitful approaches.

The ‘secular’ nature of the modern European state and the ‘secular’ character of European democracy serve as one of the foundational myths of the contemporary European identity. There is a frequently heard secular European narrative, usually offered as a genealogical explanation and as a normative justification for the secular character of European democracy, that has the following schematic structure: Once upon a time in medieval Europe there was, as is typical of pre-modern societies, a fusion of religion and politics. But this fusion, under the new conditions of religious diversity, extreme sectarianism, and conflict created by the Protestant Reformation, led to the nasty, brutish and long-lasting religious wars of the early modern era that left European societies in ruin. The secularization of the state was the felicitous response to this catastrophic experience, which apparently has indelibly marked the collective memory of European societies. The Enlightenment did the rest. Modern Europeans learned to separate religion, politics and science. Most importantly, they learned to tame the religious passions and to dissipate obscurantist fanaticism by banishing religion to a protected private sphere, while establishing an open, liberal, secular public sphere where freedom of expression and public reason dominate. Those are the favorable secular foundations upon which democracy grows and thrives. As the tragic stories of violent religious conflicts around the world show, the unfortunate de-privatization of religion and its return to the public sphere will need to be managed carefully if one is to avoid undermining those fragile foundations.

But how ‘secular’ are the European states? How tall and solid are the ‘walls of separation’ between national state and national church and between religion and politics across Europe? To what extent should one attribute the indisputable success of post-World War II Western European democracies to the triumph of secularization over religion, as is usually done? If one looks at the reality of ‘really existing’ European democracies rather than at the official secularist discourse, it becomes obvious that most European states are by no means strictly secular nor do they tend to live up to the myth of secular neutrality.1

Indeed, France appears to be the only Western European state that is officially and proudly ‘secular,’ that is, that defines itself and its democracy as regulated constitutionally by the principles of laïcité. By contrast, there are several European countries with long-standing democracies that have maintained established churches. They include England and Scotland within the United Kingdom, and all the Scandinavian Lutheran countries – Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and, until the year 2000, Sweden. Of the new democracies, Greece has also maintained the establishment of the Greek Orthodox Church. This means that, with the exception of the Catholic Church, which paradoxically has eschewed establishment in every recent (post-1974) transition to democracy in Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain) and in Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia), every other major branch of Christianity (Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Orthodox) is officially established somewhere in Europe, without apparently jeopardizing democracy in those countries.

Since on the other hand there are many historical examples of European states that have been secular and non-democratic, the Soviet-type communist regimes being the most obvious case, one can, therefore, safely conclude that the strict secular separation of church and state appears to be neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for democracy, despite the frequently repeated cautionary warnings directed didactically at non-Western cultures undergoing processes of democratization, as if implying ‘do as we believe, not as we actually do’.

Indeed, one could advance the proposition that, of the two clauses of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, ‘free exercise’ of religion, rather than ‘no establishment’, is the one that appears to be a necessary condition for democracy. One cannot have democracy without freedom of religion. In fact, ‘free exercise’ stands out as a normative democratic principle in itself. The ‘no-establishment’ principle, by contrast, is defensible and necessary only as a means to free exercise and to equal rights. Disestablishment becomes politically necessary for democracy wherever an established religion claims monopoly over the state territory, impedes the free exercise of religion, and undermines the equal rights of all citizens. This was the case of the Catholic Church before it officially recognized the principle of ‘freedom of religion’ as an unalienable individual right. In other words, secularist principles per se may be defensible on instrumental grounds, as a means to the end of free exercise, but not as an intrinsically liberal democratic principle in itself.

Alfred Stepan has pointed out how the most important empirical analytical theories of democracy, from Robert Dahl to Juan Linz, do not include secularism or strict separation as one of the institutional requirements for democracy, as prominent normative liberal theories such as those of John Rawls or Bruce Ackerman tend to. As an alternative to secularist principles or norms, Stepan has proposed the model of the ‘twin tolerations’, which he describes as ‘the minimal boundaries of freedom of action that must somehow be crafted for political institutions vis-à-vis religious authorities, and for religious individuals and groups vis-à-vis political institutions’ (Stepan 2001: 213). Religious authorities must ‘tolerate’ the autonomy of democratically elected governments without claiming constitutionally privileged prerogatives to mandate or to veto public policy. Democratic political institutions, in turn, must ‘tolerate’ the autonomy of religious individuals and groups not only to complete freedom to worship privately, but also to advance publicly their values in civil society and to sponsor organizations and movements in political society, as long as they do not violate democratic rules and adhere to the rule of law. Within this framework of mutual autonomy, Stepan concludes, ‘there can be an extraordinarily broad range of concrete patterns of religion–state relations in political systems that would meet our minimal definition of democracy’ (ibid.: 217).

This is precisely the case empirically across Europe. Between the two extremes of French laïcité and Nordic Lutheran establishment, there is a whole range of very diverse patterns of church–state relations, in education, media, health and social services, and so on, that constitute very ‘unsecular’ entanglements, such as the consociational formula of pillarization in the Netherlands, or the corporatist official state recognition of the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany (as well as of the Jewish community in some Länder).2 One could of course retort that European societies are de facto so secularized and, as a consequence, what remains of religion has become so temperate that both constitutional establishment and the various institutional church–state entanglements are as a matter of fact innocuous, if not completely irrelevant. But one should remember that the drastic secularization of most Western European societies came after the consolidation of democracy, not before, and therefore it would be incongruent to present not just the secularization of the state and of politics, but also the secularization of society as a condition for democracy.

In fact, at one time or another most continental European societies developed confessional religious parties that played a crucial role in the democratization of those societies. Even those confessional parties that initially emerged as antiliberal and at least ideologically as anti-democratic, as was the case with most Catholic parties in the 19th century, ended up playing a very important role in the democratization of their societies. This is the paradox of Christian Democracy so well analyzed by Stathis Kalyvas (1996). Catholic political mobilization emerged almost everywhere as a counter-revolutionary reaction against Liberalism and its anti-clerical assault on the Catholic Church. Political and even social Catholicism was in many respects fundamentalist, intransigent and theocratic. Focusing on Catholic ideology and doctrine, one was bound to conclude that Catholicism and democracy were indeed antithetical and irreconcilable, as the liberal and Protestant anti-Catholic discourse never tired of stressing throughout the 19th century (Casanova 2005). Yet, somehow, the dynamics of electoral competition led to the transformation of Catholic parties everywhere. Those parties, in turn, by embracing democratic politics made a fundamental contribution to the consolidation of democracy in their respective countries. With important variations the similar story repeats itself in Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Italy, the countries where Christian Democracy became dominant after World War II.

Kalyvas’s conclusions concerning the role of non-liberal Catholic parties and, as he also points out, the role of similarly non-liberal Social-Democratic parties in the democratization of Western European societies, are poignantly relevant at a time when the alleged incompatibility of Islam and democracy and the supposedly anti-democratic nature of Muslim parties are so frequently and publicly debated. Equally forgotten is the fact that the initial project of a European Union was fundamentally a Christian-Democratic project, sanctioned by the Vatican, at a time of a general religious revival in post-World War II Europe, in the geopolitical context of the Cold War when ‘the free world’ and ‘Christian civilization’ had become synonymous. Indeed, ruling or prominent Christian Democrats in the six signatory countries of the Treaty of Rome – Germany, France, Italy and Benelux – played a leading role in the initial process of European integration. But this is a history that secular Europeans, proud of having outgrown a religious past, from which they feel liberated, would apparently prefer not to remember.

When Europeans today observe with dismay different types of political religious mobilization elsewhere throughout the world, whether Muslim political parties in Turkey, religious mobilization in American electoral politics, or religious nationalism in India, to give some prominent examples, rather than remembering their own recent past recognizing in them typical historical European patterns that have become globalized along with many other aspects of European modernity, they prefer to view these phenomena as manifestations of the otherness of non-Western cultures that have not yet learned to live up to the standards of European secular modernit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Challenges
• Part II: Transformations
• Index