The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere

Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Cornel West, Eduardo Mendieta, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527255
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Deconstruction in Philosophy

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics.

WHY WE NEED A RADICAL REDEFINITION OF SECULARISM

CHARLES TAYLOR

1

It is generally agreed that modern democracies have to be “secular.” There is perhaps a problem, a certain ethnocentricity, involved in this term. But even in the Western context the term is not limpid. What in fact does it mean? I believe that there are at least two models of what constitutes a secular regime.

Both involve some kind of separation of church and state. The state can’t be officially linked to some religious confession; except in a vestigial and largely symbolic sense, as in England or Scandinavia. But secularism requires more than this. The pluralism of society requires that there be some kind of neutrality, or “principled distance,” to use Rajeev Bhargava’s term.¹

If we try to examine it further secularism involves in fact a complex requirement. There is more than one good sought here. We can single out three, which we can class in the three categories of the French Revolutionary trinity: liberty, equality, fraternity. 1. No one must be forced in the domain of religion or basic belief. This is what is often defined as religious liberty, including of course, the freedom not to believe. This is what is also described as the “free exercise” of religion, in the terms of the U.S. First Amendment. 2. There must be equality between people of different faiths or basic belief; no religious outlook or (religious or areligious) Weltanschauung can enjoy a privileged status, let alone be adopted as the official view of the state. Then 3. all spiritual families must be heard, included in the ongoing process of determining what the society is about (its political identity), and how it is going to realize these goals (the exact regime of rights and privileges). This (stretching the point a little) is what corresponds to “fraternity.”

These goals can, of course, conflict; sometimes we have to balance the goods involved here. Moreover, I believe that we might add a fourth goal: that we try as much as possible to maintain relations of harmony and comity between the supporters of different religions and Weltanschauungen (maybe this is what really deserves to be called “fraternity,” but I am still attached to the neatness of this schema, with only the three traditional goods.)

Sometimes the claim seems to be made, on behalf of one or other definition of secularism, that it can resolve the question of how to realize these goals in the domain of timeless principle and that no further input, or negotiation is required to define them for our society now. The basis for these principles can be found in reason alone or in some outlook that is itself free from religion, purely laïque. Jacobins are on this wavelength, as was the first Rawls.

The problem with this is that a. there is no such set of timeless principles that can be determined, at least in the detail they must be for a given political system, by pure reason alone; and b. situations differ very much, and require different kinds of concrete realization of agreed general principles, so that some degree of working out is necessary in each situation. It follows that c. dictating the principles from some supposedly higher authority above the fray violates 3. It deprives certain spiritual families of a voice in this working out. And therefore d. this leaves us very often with difficult conflicts and dilemmas between our basic goals.

We have a good illustration of b in the way that the issues concerning secularism have evolved in different Western societies in recent decades, because the faiths represented in those societies have changed. We need to alter the way in which we proceed when the range of religions or basic philosophies expands: e.g., contemporary Europe or America with the arrival of substantive communities of Muslims.

In relation to c, we have the recent legislation in France against wearing the hijab in schools. Normally, this kind of thing needs to be negotiated. The host country is often forced to send a double message: i. you can’t do that here (kill blaspheming authors, practice FGM) and ii. we invite you to be part of our consensus-building process. These tend to run against each other; i hinders and renders ii less plausible. All the more reason to avoid where possible the unilateral application of i. Of course, sometimes it is not possible. Certain basic laws have to be observed. But the general principle is that religious groups must be seen as much as interlocutors and as little as menace as the situation allows.

These groups also evolve if they’re in a process of redefinition of this kind in a democratic, liberal context. José Casanova has pointed out how American Catholicism was originally targeted in the nineteenth century as inassimilable to democratic mores, in ways very analogous to the suspicions that nag people over Islam today. The subsequent history has shown how American Catholicism evolved and, in the process, changed world Catholicism in significant ways. There is no reason written into the essence of things why a similar evolution cannot take place in Muslim communities.² If this doesn’t happen, it will in all likelihood be because of prejudice and bad management.

Now I believe that one of our basic difficulties in dealing with these problems is that we have the wrong model, which has a continuing hold on our minds. We think that secularism (or laïcité) has to do with the relation of the state and religion; whereas in fact it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity. If we look at the three goals, they have in common that they are concerned with 1. protecting people in their belonging to and/or practice of whatever outlook they choose or find themselves in; with 2. treating people equally whatever their choice; and 3. giving them all a hearing. There is no reason to single out religion, as against nonreligious, “secular” (in another widely used sense), or atheist viewpoints.

Indeed, the point of state neutrality is precisely to avoid favoring or disfavoring not just religious positions but any basic position, religious or nonreligious. We can’t favor Christianity over Islam, but also religion over against nonbelief in religion or vice versa.

One of the ways of demonstrating the superiority of the three-principle model of secularism, over that which is fixated on religion, is that it would never allow one to misrecognize the regime founded by Atatürk as genuinely secular, making light as it does of the fundamental principles and even of the separation of state and religious institutions.

This also shows the value of the late-Rawlsian formulation for a secular state. This cleaves very strongly to certain political principles: human rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy. These are the very bases of the state, which must support them. But this political ethic can be and is shared by people of very different basic outlooks (what Rawls calls “comprehensive views of the good”). A Kantian will justify the rights to life and freedom by pointing to the dignity of rational agency; a utilitarian will speak of the necessity to treat beings who can experience joy and suffering in such a way as to maximize the first and minimize the second. A Christian will speak of humans as made in the image of God. They concur on the principles, but differ on the deeper reasons for holding to this ethic. The state must uphold the ethic, but must refrain from favoring any of the deeper reasons.

2

The idea that secularism makes a special case of religion arises from the history of its coming to be in the West (as does, indeed, the name). To put it briefly, there are two important founding contexts for this kind of regime, the U.S. and France. In the U.S. case, the whole range of comprehensive views, or deeper reasons, were in the original case variants of (Protestant) Christianity, stretching to a smattering of Deists. Subsequent history has widened the palette of views beyond Christianity and then beyond religion. But, in the original case, the positions between which the state must be neutral were all religious. Hence the First Amendment: Congress shall pass no law establishing religion or impeding the free exercise thereof.

The word secularism didn’t appear in the early decades of American public life. But this is a sign that a basic problem had not yet been faced. Because the First Amendment concerned the separation of church and state, it opened the possibility of giving a place to religion that no one would accept today. Thus, in the 1830s, a judge of the Supreme Court could argue that while the First Amendment forbade the identification of the federal government with any church, since all the churches were Christian (and in effect Protestant), one could invoke the principles of Christianity in interpreting the law.

For Judge Joseph Story, the goal of the first amendment was “to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects,” but nevertheless “Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state.” Christianity was essential to the state because the belief in “a future state of rewards and punishments” is “indispensable to the administration of justice.” What is more, “it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is a special duty of government to foster, and encourage it among the citizens.”³

This primacy of Christianity was upheld even later in the nineteenth century. As late as 1890, thirty-seven of the forty-two existing states recognized the authority of God in the preambles or in the text of their constitutions. A unanimous judgment of the Supreme Court of 1892 declared that if one wanted to describe “American life as expressed by its laws, its business, its customs and its society, we find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth … that this is a Christian nation.”⁴

In the latter part of the century, resistance began to build to this conception, but a National Reform Association was founded in 1863 with the following goal:

The object of this Society shall be to maintain existing Christian features in the American government … to secure such an amendment to the Constitution of the United States as will declare the nation’s allegiance to Jesus Christ and its acceptance of the moral laws of the Christian religion, and so as to indicate that this is a Christian nation, and place all the Christian laws, institutions, and usages of our government on an undeniable legal basis in the fundamental law of the land.

After 1870, the battle was joined by the supporters of this narrow view, on one hand, and those who wanted a real opening to all other religions and also to nonreligion, on the other. These included not only Jews but also Catholics who (rightly) saw the “Christianity” of the NRA as excluding them. It was in this battle that the word secular first appears on the American scene as a key term, and very often in its polemical sense of non- or antireligious.⁵

In the French case, laïcité came about in a struggle against a powerful church. The strong temptation was for the state itself to stand on a moral basis independent from religion. Marcel Gauchet shows how Renouvier laid the grounds for the outlook of the Third Republic radicals in their battle against the church. The state has to be “moral et enseignant” (moral and a teaching agency). It has “charge d’âmes aussi bien que toute Église ou communauté, mais à titre plus universel” (charge of souls just as does the church or religious community, but on a more universal scale). Morality is the key criterion. In order not to be under the church, the state must have “une morale indépendante de toute religion” (a morality independent of all religion), and enjoy a “suprématie morale” (moral supremacy) in relation to all religions. The basis of this morality is liberty. In order to hold its own before religion, the morality underlying the state has to be based on more than just utility or feeling; it needs a real “théologie rationnelle,” like that of Kant.⁶ The wisdom of Jules Ferry, and later of Aristide Briand and Jean Juarès, saved France at the time of the Separation (1905) from such a lop-sided regime, but the notion stuck that laïcité was all about controlling and managing religion.

If we move, however, beyond such originating contexts, and look at the kinds of societies in which we are now living in the West, the first feature that strikes us is the wide diversity not only of religious views but also of those that involve no religion, not to speak of those that are unclassifiable in this dichotomy. Reasons 1, 2, and 3 require that we treat evenhandedly all of these.

3

This fixation on religion is complex, and it is bound up with two other features we often find in the debates on secularism: the first is the tendency to define secularism or laïcité in terms of some institutional arrangement, rather than starting from the goals that I propose. And so you hear mantra-type formulae like “the separation of church and state” or the necessity of removing religion from public space (“les espaces de la République,” as in the recent French debate). The second follows from the first, or may easily seem to. If the whole matter is defined by one institutional formula, then one must just determine which arrangement of things best meets this formula, and there is no need to think further. One cannot find oneself in a dilemma, as will easily happen if one is pursuing more than one goal, because here there is just one master formula.

Hence one often hears these mantras employed as argument stoppers, the ultimate decisive response that annuls all objections. In the U.S., people invoke the “Wall of Separation” as the ultimate criterion, and hyper-Republicans in France cite laïcité as the final word. (Of course, if one consulted the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution one would find two goals mentioned, the rejection of establishment and the assurance of “free exercise.” It is not inconceivable that these could conflict.)

This kind of move amounts, from the standpoint I’m adopting here, to a fetishization of the favored institutional arrangements. Whereas one should start from the goals and derive the concrete arrangements from these. It is not that some separation of church and state, some mutual autonomy of governing and religious institutions, will not be an inescapable feature of any secularist regime. And the same goes for the neutrality of the public institutions. These are both indispensable. But what these requirements mean in practice ought to be determined by how we can maximize our three (or four) basic goals.

Take, for example, the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women in public schools, which has been a hot issue in a number of Western democracies. In France, pupils in public schools were famously forbidden the headscarf, seen as a “signe religieux ostantatoire” (ostentatious religious sign), according to the notorious Loi Stasi of 2004. In certain German Laender, pupils can wear it, but not teachers. In the UK and other countries, there is no general interdict, but the individual schools can decide.

What are the reasons for this variation? Plainly, in all these cases, legislators and administrators were trying to balance two goals. One was the maintenance of neutrality in public institutions seen (rightly) as an essential entailment of goal 2: equality between all basic beliefs. The other was goal 1, ensuring the maximum possible religious liberty or, in its most general form, liberty of conscience. Goal 1 seems to push us toward permitting the hijab anywhere. But various arguments were made to override this in the French and German cases. For the Germans, what was disturbing was that someone in authority in a public institution should be religiously marked, as it were. In the French case, an attempt was made to cast doubt on the proposition that wearing the hijab was a free act. There were dark suggestions that the girls were being forced by their families or by their male peers to adopt this dress code. This was one argument, frequently used, however dubious it might appear in the light of the sociological research carried out among the pupils themselves, that the Stasi Commission largely ignored.

The other main argument was that wearing of the headscarf in school was less an act of piety than a statement of hostility against the republic and its essential institution of laïcité. This was the meaning behind the introduction of the concept of “signe ostantatoire.” A smaller, more discrete sign would be no problem, argued the Stasi Commission, but these attention-grabbing features of dress were meant to make a highly controversial statement. It was in vain that Muslim women protested that “le foulard n’est pas un signe” (the headscarf is not a sign).

So, on one level, we can see that these different national answers to the same question reflect different takes on how to balance the two main goals of a secular regime. But on another level, the dilemma and its resolution remain hidden under the illusion that there is only one principle here, say, laïcité and its corollary of the neutrality of public institutions or spaces (“les espaces de la République”). It’s just a matter of applying an essential feature of our republican regime; there is no need or place for choice or the weighing of different aims.

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of this fetishization...