Hegel on Religion and Politics

10 Religion, Civil Society, and the System of an Ethical World

10 Religion, Civil Society, and the System of an Ethical World Hegel on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Andrew Buchwalter Hegel advances a unique and nuanced account of the relationship of religion and politics.1 On the one hand, he espouses a view of the relationship of church and state that exhibits important affinities with liberal positions on the issue.2 He rejects the idea of a state religion, he condemns religious interference in the affairs of state and political life generally, he acknowledges the plurality of religious confessions, he claims that the state must remain agnostic as regards any particular religious creed, he assigns the state the task of protecting the right of conscience and the free expression of belief, he denies ecclesiastical organizations any special exemption from state law, and he asserts that religious argumentation can play a role in political life only if it acknowledges public norms of rationality. 213 214 Andrew Buchwalter Yet if Hegel thus advocates the separation of church and state, he does not defend any principled separation of religion and politics. On the contrary, both in his political philosophy and his philosophy of religion he goes to great lengths to thematize their interrelationship. This is so simply because the two spheres, central as both are to human experience, will inevitably overlap and conflict with one another. “It is silly to suppose that we may try to allot them separate spheres, under the impression that their diverse natures will maintain an attitude of tranquility one to another and not break out in contradiction and battle.”3 More positively, he claims that, whatever their differences, both express a common principle —that of freedom, at least as it pertains to conditions for human self-definition, self-determination, and self-realization.4 He asserts further that any complete account of societal life must acknowledge the degree to which religion and politics not only share common assumptions but contribute to a shared reality. Claiming that a people or nation is properly constituted and sustained in the interplay of institutional structures and forms of cultural sentiment, he asserts that religion and politics are themselves two constitutive elements, “two contrapuntal aspects,”5 of a single social body. In addition, Hegel maintains that the two spheres directly implicate one another, indeed that they are codependent. Political community, dependent on forms of civic engagement and committed to processes of collective self-definition, requires the presence of dispositions rooted in religious modes of human self-understanding. Conversely, religion cannot fulfill its vocation without institutional structures that safeguard the right of conscience and the exercise of belief, accommodate attention to what is collectively binding in a meaningful way, and allow religion to probe the domain of interiority and inward spirituality. Religion and politics are thus “reciprocal guarantees of strength,”6 and each is conceptually unintelligible without the other. Hegel’s complex view of the interdependency of religion and politics is illustrative of what may be termed his “dialectical” account of the relationship of the secular and the spiritual, at least under conditions of modernity. On the one hand, he claims that the core principles of modern social and political life derive from religious assumptions and conceptions . Thus modern notions of right, liberty, moral responsibility, social reciprocity, and legitimacy all have their origin in Protestant notions of the individual believer and his/her relationship to the divine. Conversely, religion itself—at least in the form of modern Christianity—depends for its realization on the institutions and modes of social being specific to modern “secular” existence. Protestant Christianity is rooted in a 215 Religion, Civil Society, and the System of an Ethical World notion of freedom understood as selfhood in otherness (Beisichselbstsein). So understood, however, religion cannot be expressed only subjectively or inwardly, but requires the formation of institutions objectively committed to the principle of freedom.7 While differentiating the domains of the spiritual and the secular, Hegel is also committed to an account of their wide-ranging interdependence. Indeed, it is a measure of this interdependence that the institutional arrangements needed for a full mediation of the infinite and finite mandated by Christianity depend for their support and ongoing stability on a self-reflexive worldly public culture —for Hegel, “the self-consciousness of ethicality”8 —that articulates the idea of religion itself. In appealing to Protestantism and Lutheran Christianity to articulate the conjunction of religion and politics, Hegel is not...