The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere by Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 142 The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. By JUDITH BUTLER, JÜRGEN HABERMAS, CHARLES TAYLOR, and CORNEL WEST. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 128. $19.50 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-231-156462 . One might anticipate that a book entitled The Power of Religion in the Public Square, had it been published fifty or even twenty-five years ago, would be a mostly defensive, populist polemic against the increasing, antireligious secularism of the political culture, with the author a nonacademic, devout, conservative Christian. It is a sign of how drastically the intellectual climate has changed that in 2011 some of the most sophisticated and earnest critics of antireligious secularization and proponents of a religion-with-a-public-face are secularist academics, many of them nonreligious. One of the leading public institutions in “post-secular” thought (to use a term Jürgen Habermas favors) is the Social Science Research Council located in Manhattan. This book is a transcript of a SSRC event that included four lectures of and numerous discussions between Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Judith Butler, and Cornell West. What these four thinkers have in common, in spite of their significantly different beliefs, is a rejection of the “old” Enlightenment “narrative of secularization,” in which religion was to wither away after first being privatized, depoliticized, irrationalized, and subjectivized. With the evident and widespread resurgence and vibrancy of religious belief and practice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Western Europe, perhaps, excluded), this simplistic and anachronistic narrative has lost its credibility; and a more sophisticated, nuanced, and religion-friendly account of secularization emerged in the last half of the twentieth century, exemplified in works such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), Jose Cassanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). While secularization is an overwhelmingly evident phenomenon in the West, it is a notoriously difficult one to capture intellectually—theologically, philosophically, sociologically—as well as to accommodate politically. The sociologist José Cassanova regards the more ideologically neutral term differentiation as a more helpful, less polemical way to understand secularization: “The core and the central thesis of the theory of secularization is the conceptualization of the process of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere” (José Cassanova, Public Religions in the Modern World [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994], 19). In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes what has taken place since roughly 1500 as more of a replacement of one “constellation BOOK REVIEWS 143 of understandings” with another on the level of the “background culture,” than a simple “subtraction” of the “real” secular from an “unreal” religious overlay: We have undergone a change in our condition, involving both an alteration of the structures we live within, and our way of imaging these structures. This is something we all share, regardless of our differences in outlook. But this cannot be captured in terms of a decline and marginalization of religion. What we share is what I have been calling “the immanent frame”; the different structures we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so on, constitute such a frame in that they are part of a “natural,” or “this worldly” order which can be understood in its own terms, without reference to the “supernatural” or “transcendent.” (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007], 594) The first essay, by Habermas, “The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” reads as a warning against the resurgence of political theology in the wake of the apparent withering away of “the political” due to the globalization, bureaucratization, and marketization of the public sphere: “‘The political’ has been transformed into the code of a selfmaintaining administrative subsystem, so that democracy is in danger of becoming a mere façade, which the executive agencies turn toward their...