Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion

On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion Jürgen Habermas 1 The suggested theme for our discussion today is reminiscent of a question that Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde, in the mid-1960s, succinctly put as follows: Is the liberal secular state nourished by normative preconditions that it cannot itself guarantee?1 The question expresses doubt that the democratic constitutional state can renew the normative preconditions of its existence out of its own resources. It also voices the conjecture that the state is dependent upon autochthonous conceptual or religious traditions—in any case, collectively binding ethical traditions. Were the doubt substantiated and the conjecture proven true, the state would find itself in trouble, for it is obliged to maintain ideological neutrality in the face of the ‘‘fact of pluralism’’ (Rawls). This conclusion doesn’t, however, invalidate the conjecture. I would like to begin by specifying the problem in two respects. Cognitively, the doubt refers to the question of whether, once law has been fully positivized, political rule is at all open to a secular, that is, a nonreligious or postmetaphysical justification. Even if such legitimation is granted, with respect to motivation it remains doubtful whether such an ideologically pluralist community could be stabilized normatively— that is, beyond a mere modus vivendi—by presuming an at best formal background consensus, one limited to procedures and principles. And even if this doubt could be removed, it remains a fact that liberal systems are dependent upon the solidarity of their citizens—a solidarity whose sources could dry up completely as a result of a ‘‘derailed’’ secularization of society. While this diagnosis cannot be dismissed, it must not be understood to mean that the learned among the defenders of religion can generate an argumentative ‘‘surplus,’’ as it were, on the 2 51 J ÜR G E N H A B E R M A S basis of it. Instead, I will suggest that cultural and societal secularization should be understood as a twofold learning process, one that requires both Enlightenment traditions and religious doctrines to reflect upon their respective limits. With regard to post-secular societies, the question finally arises: Which cognitive views and normative expectations must the liberal state demand of its religious and nonreligious citizens as they interact with one another? Political liberalism (which I defend here in the special form of Kantian Republicanism2 ) understands itself to be a nonreligious and postmetaphysical justification of the normative foundations of the democratic constitutional state. This theory is part of the tradition of rational law [Vernunftrecht], which does without the cosmological or divinehistorical [heilsgeschichtlich] assumptions found in classical and religious teachings of natural law. The history of Christian theology in the Middle Ages—particularly late Spanish scholasticism—belongs, of course, in the genealogy of human rights. But the fundamental principles that legitimize the ideologically neutral authority of the state are, in the end, derived from the profane sources of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Only much later did theology and the church come to terms with the intellectual challenges of the revolutionary constitutional state. If I understand correctly, however, from the perspective of Catholicism, given its relaxed attitude toward the lumen naturale, nothing in principle stands in the way of an autonomous foundation of morality and law—a foundation independent of the truths of revelation. The post-Kantian foundation of liberal constitutional principles has, in the twentieth century, been forced to come to terms less with the painful aftermath of objective natural law (such as material value ethics [materiale Wertethik3 ]) than with historicist and empiricist forms of critique. In my opinion, weak assumptions concerning the normative content of the communicative condition of socio-cultural forms of life are sufficient for defending a nondefeatist notion of reason against contextualism and a nondecisionistic concept of law’s validity against the positivism of law. The central task lies in explaining the following: 1. Why the democratic process counts as a legitimate legislative procedure: insofar as the democratic process complies with the conditions of an inclusive and discursive opinion- and will-formation, it justifies the presumption that the results are rationally acceptable; and 2. Why democracy and human rights co-originally interpenetrate each other in the process of drafting a constitution: the legal institutionalization of the procedure of democratic legislation requires that both liberal and political basic rights [Grundrechte] be guaranteed simultaneously.4 This grounding strategy refers to the constitution that the consociated citizens give to themselves and not to...