European Culture Wars and the Italian Case

Luca Ozzano, Alberta Giorgi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317365471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica culturale

This book aims to understand the European political debate about contentious issues, framed in terms of religious values by religious and/or secular actors in 21st century. It specifically focuses on the Italian case, which, due to its peculiar history and contemporary political landscape, is a paradigmatic case for the study of the relationships between religion and politics.

In recent years, a number of controversies related to religious issues have characterised the European public debate at both the EU and the national level. The 'affaire du foulard' in France, the referendum on abortion in Portugal, the recognition of same-sex marriages in many Western European States, the debate over bioethics and the regulation of euthanasia are only a few examples of contentious issues involving religion. This book aims to shed light on the interrelation between these different debates, as well as their broader meaning, through the analysis of the paradigmatic case of Italy. Italy summarizes and sometimes exasperates wider European trends, both because of the peculiar role traditionally played by the Vatican in Italian politics and for the rise, since the 1990s, of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit ethical and civilizational issues.

This work will be of great interest to scholars and students of a number of fields within the disciplines of political science, sociology and law, and will be useful for courses on religion and politics, political parties, social movements and civil society.

1 Religion, secularism, and the public sphere

DOI: 10.4324/9781315669892-1

In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical and methodological aspects of our research. First, we assess the book’s aim as concerns the category of culture war. Then, in the second section, we propose a brief overview of the literature addressing the role of religion in contemporary society. The following paragraphs focus on the possible concerns that the presence of religion raises in the political sphere, namely in relation to the compatibility between religion and democracy, the issue of cultural pluralism, and the increase of religion-related issues in the public debate.

The culture war

The controversies around public issues involving religion have been framed, in US literature, under the perspective of ‘culture war’. The concept of ‘culture war’ was proposed for the first time, in its present meaning, by the social scientist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Hunter 1991), arguing that contemporary America was the battlefield of a struggle between the orthodox (finding their guide in transcendent authority and in principles inherited from the past) and the progressive (committed to rationalism and to change towards a more inclusive and tolerant world).

The concept was, however, made popular by the columnist and twice-presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. In his speech at the 1992 Republican convention, that crowned George H.W. Bush as the presidential candidate, Buchanan pointed at the uncompromising difference between the Republicans, committed to traditional values, and the pro-abortion on demand and pro-LGBT rights Clintons, with these words:

this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

(Buchanan 1992)

In the following years a fierce debate flared in both academic circles and popular press, about the existence, the consistency, and the meaning of this cultural struggle, with many authors countering Hunter’s thesis to affirm that America is ‘one nation after all’, while culture wars are just ‘a myth’ (Wolfe 1999; Fiorina et al. 2005). There have also been some attempts to apply the ‘culture war’ concept outside of the US: in contemporary Australia (Melleuish 1998), in Egypt (Mehrez 2008), in mid-twentieth century Brazil (Williams 2001), and in Canada (Naymark 2011). Notwithstanding, although many scholars view the ethical-religious debates as a binary issue (‘secular’ versus ‘religious’), the concept of culture war remains essentially American. The most interesting attempt to apply it to the European context is probably George Weigel’s, who argues the existence of two separate culture wars in today’s Europe: Broadly speaking, the culture war debate raises several crucial questions that we will try to address. Particularly, the first point to take into account is the existence of a culture war in today’s Europe. Is the idea of two mutually opposed forces acting in the different ethical-religious debates throughout EU countries and their institutions realistic? And, if so, are they consistent, or rather, do the actors’ positions and alliances change according to context, time, and issue? In this book, we analyse controversies around religion-related issues in order to understand whether there is a ‘war’ opposing stable coalitions on a secular/religious divide.

The first of these wars – let us, following the example of Spain’s birth certificates, call it ‘Culture War A’ – is a sharper form of the red state/blue state divide in America: a war between the postmodern forces of moral relativism and the defenders of traditional moral conviction. The second – ‘Culture War B’ – is the struggle to define the nature of civil society, the meaning of tolerance and pluralism, and the limits of multiculturalism in an aging Europe whose below-replacement-level fertility rates have opened the door to rapidly growing and assertive Muslim populations.

(Weigel 2006, p. 30)

A second crucial point is related to the level at which cultural conflicts take place: are they a popular or rather only an elite phenomenon? This is a very controversial point in the US debate, in which Hunter’s opponents claim that conflict is relevant only at an elite level, whereas among the wider population there is an alleged ‘general consensus’ (Hunter and Wolfe 2006, p. 42; Wolfe 1999; Fiorina et al. 2005). This second point raises methodological concerns, since different methods of enquiry seem to lead to different results: while survey-based research reveals a general popular consensus on some fundamental values, works based on discourse analysis and other methodologies seem to lead to opposite conclusions. Here, we argue that political positions are not stable configurations: on the contrary, issues’ polarization led to different values’ mobilization – and volatile coalitions.

Religion in contemporary democracies: secularization and beyond

The first step for analysing the controversies on religion-related issues requires assessing the role of religion in contemporary democracies (for an overview, see Foret and Itçaina 2011; Driessen 2014; Madeley and Enyedi 2003). Scholarly literature mostly agrees on the fact that the modern democratic states stemmed from a historical process of emancipation of the state apparatuses from religious bodies and values (secularization). The forms, dynamics, and consequences of this process are highly debated and make the subject of a wide interdisciplinary literature. For the sake of clarity, we can delineate three spheres of impact of the secularization process: politics, society, and religion (Dobbelaere 1999 and 1981; Ferrara 2009; Tschannen 1991). In the political sphere, secularism means that the State and the Churches (or other religious bodies) are separated, and that all citizens have the right to exercise their religious freedom. This political aspect of secularism is what French scholars call laïcité (see, for example, Barbier 1995; Peña-Ruiz 2003; Portier 2003; Rusconi 2000a). An important body of literature analyses the cross-national and within-country variations of the Church–State separation. ¹ The secularization of religion involves the changes within religious denominations in terms of identity, internal organization, and relationships with the mundane world (see, for example, Lagroye 2006; Garelli 2003 and 1991; Guizzardi 1977). Finally, the secularization of society indicates that religious communities became specialized sub-groups, people less and less frequently refer to religion (values, arguments, and categories) in their everyday lives (Ferrara 2009, pp. 78–79). Scholars analysed the changing shape of religions and religiosity in contemporary society, introducing concepts like ‘religion à la carte’, ‘patchwork religion’, ‘invisible religion’, ‘diffused religion’, ‘believing without belonging’, and the ‘decline of religious authority’, to point out the different aspects of the individualization of religiosity (Chaves 1994; Davie 1994 and 2000; Hervieu-Léger 1999; Luckmann 1967; Roof 1993; Schlegel 1995; Wuthnow 1998 and 1992).

As Casanova, among others, pointed out (1994), the studies on the secularization process implicitly affirm that religion, in modern societies, is more and more confined to the private sphere. Nevertheless, the privatization thesis has been challenged by a wide variety of arguments and events. Specialized scholars have been addressing the issue since the 1980s (see Hadden 1987), pointing out the changing forms of religion’s public presence, rather than its disappearance, but it was especially in the 2000s that the topic of religion in the contemporary world came to the fore, mostly by means of the religiously inspired acts of terrorism, and the growing presence of public controversies related to religion. Concepts like ‘post-secular societies’, ‘de-secularization of contemporary societies’, ‘re-enchantment of the world’ (see Beckford 2000 for a discussion; Eder 2008; Habermas 2008; Partridge 2004), became part of the common discernment – and the ways of dealing with the public presence of religion in contemporary democracies became a topic of political concern.

Religion and democracy: where lie the concerns?

The role of religion in European countries is a widely debated topic, as shown by the controversy on the Christian roots of Europe, the rise of Islamophobia all over Europe (Koopmans et al. 2005), and the politicization of issues related to life and death (Engeli et al. 2012).

Indeed, the compatibility of religion and democracy has been a matter of many public and political discussions for a long time: religious and political powers have been ascribed as having opposing and incompatible loyalties, generating irreconcilable controversies between religion and democracy. ² Since the French and American revolutions, and until the mid-nineteenth century, the focus was Christianity and Christian political parties, and the main issue considered whether Christian believers could be loyal citizens of a democratic State (Kalyvas 1996). With little changes in both arguments and frames, in the last decades, mainly fueled by the migration processes and the changes in the religious and cultural landscapes, the focus switched from Christianity to Islam, the issue being whether or not Muslim believers can be loyal democratic citizens, and what role can Muslim parties and movements have within a democratic State. ³ Christianity, which posed a problem to democracy until recent times, was re-framed as part of national, European, or Western identity: a mark of distinction from ‘the others’.

Indeed, at the heart of the compatibility debate the question lies on how a democratic State may respect the values and the cultural differences of its citizens by maintaining its political unity (see, for example, Gutmann and Taylor 1994; Milot et al. 2010; Rovisco and Kim 2013). It is not within the scope of this introduction to reconstruct this strand of literature (for an overview, see Nevola 2011): for our purposes, it is nevertheless important to point out the dilemma expressed in Böckenförde’s well-known formulation on the non-secular foundations of the secular State (1991). While in the pre-modern State the unity of a political community was rooted on what the philosopher called ‘external’ sources (like religion), the modern State bases its foundation (and, thus, its legitimation) on ‘internal’ sources. Therefore, the question is what are the grounds of unity and how can they be secured? Scholarly answers to this question vary significantly. Some scholars underline the importance, for social solidarity and political unity, to identify a core of common values that represent a country’s cultural identity. Bellah discussed the concept of ‘civil religion’, the sacralization of political rituals, values, and symbols (1967; Bellah and Hammond 1980). Other scholars propose the consensus over democratic procedures as an alternative that does not require a previous agreement over a set of values, but on a set of basic rules and principles (see, for example, Habermas 2006b; Rawls 1988). In this frame, the legitimization of democracy (and the fundaments of social solidarity) relies on the previous agreement on the ‘rules of the game’ – that guarantee equality between alternatives, preferences, and religious values. This position is grounded on the assumption (which has been widely questioned, see, for example, Putnam 2002) that values and norms can be separate. Nonetheless, as Habermas himself underlines, agreement on basic rules does not assure that citizens will feel part of a political community (2006b). From a more sociologica...