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The separation of religion and politics in a post-secular society

Alessandro Ferrara Philosophy Social Criticism 2009 35: 77 DOI: 10.1177/0191453708098755 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/35/1-2/77

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Alessandro Ferrara

The separation of religion and politics in a post-secular society

Abstract This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also need to be informed by further reection on the confessional context and other empirical features of postsecular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point. Key words neutrality religion and politics secularism toleration public reason

Religion, once thought to be on its way to withering away or at least withdrawing into the private sphere, is now contending for a more prominent place in the public arena and demanding that the received wisdom surrounding the implementation of the separation from politics, not the principle of separation itself, be reconsidered. My purpose in this article is to highlight what the main problematic areas are in this respect and the range of solutions that are currently on offer. Let me start with a brief restatement of the three most important narratives that currently are available for making sense of what has changed in the relation of religion to politics recently. These three narratives all concern the meaning of secularism. The rst is a narrative of the rise of political secularism, the second is a narrative that concerns
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 nos 12 pp. 7791
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http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453708098755

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the rise of social secularism and the third is a narrative that concerns the phenomenological transformation of the experience of believing. Then in the next section, on the assumption that indeed the changes highlighted urge on us a broad rethinking of the way in which the separation of religion and politics has been institutionalized in western societies, I will address two normative problems that stand out most prominently in this respect. Finally, in the third section, on the assumption that the reconsideration of the ways of separating religion and politics somehow entails a recognition of the legitimacy of the presence of religious voices in the public sphere, I will address the question of the threshold which separates legitimate participation, on the part of communities motivated by religious concerns, and questionable interference with the working of a political process which should remain religiously neutral.

Three meanings of secularism

A rst meaning of secularism refers to the fact that the exercise of legitimate state power what we might call the coercive dimension of law takes place in secular terms, the fact that all citizens can freely exercise their religious freedom and worship one God, another God or no God at all, and the fact that the churches and the state are neatly separated. In the classical version of the separation between the state and the churches religious faiths are protected in their freedom to articulate revealed knowledge and paths to salvation, to administer the interpretation of what is holy, to regulate rituals, to infuse transcendence in daily life, to celebrate the bond shared by the faithful, as long as they never invoke support from the states coercive power, never pretend to turn sin into crime and always allow their believers to change their mind and turn to another religion or no religion. It is secularism in this sense which is captured by the French term lacit, the Italian laicit, the Spanish laicidad and which in English must be somewhat tortuously translated as religious neutrality and is captured by the two clauses of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. We could call secularism in this rst meaning political secularism: the narrative of its rise is coextensive with the narrative of the modern separation of church and state at the end of the religious wars. A second meaning of secularism refers instead to social, rather than political, phenomena. In this second sense secularism concerns the fact (1) that religious communities in modern societies cease inuencing law, politics, education and public life in general and become functionally specialized sub-groups, communities of like-minded believers, (2) that people less and less frequently use religious rituals and symbols to mark

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signicant moments of their lives, (3) that religious boundaries of faith become of marginal importance in dening ones social networks, (4) that religious categories shape peoples thoughts, commitments and loyalties less and less frequently relative to other considerations, (5) that religiously motivated action retreats into special areas of lesser and lesser importance for social life. An immediate and quite salient indicator of this process is the utter disappearance of religion as a subject for artistic inspiration. How many 20th- and 21st-century paintings, sculptures, musical compositions have at their center religious subjects? This distinction between political and social secularism is useful for a number of purposes. First, it allows us to pinpoint asymmetries and unbalances in complex processes of secularization that are inuenced by local historical contexts. In some countries at a certain time, political secularization may proceed at a faster pace than societal secularization. Such is the case of Italy, where the secular character of state institutions has been dened a supreme constitutional principle by the Constitutional Court in 1989, yet the ongoing exhibition of religious symbols like the crucix in state-owned buildings continues to be upheld by civil and administrative courts, which evidently are more receptive to the pressure of a less secularized civil society, and the teaching of religion in public schools continues to be centered around one confession alone. Second, the distinction is useful because it allows us to see through a certain ideology of secularization that has dominated western social and political thought for a while. There is no doubt that religion has forcefully returned to the political scene within the new scenario that has emerged since 1989. Sociologists such as Peter Berger, Jos Casanova and Adam Seligman have warned us about de-secularization processes under way, about the re-emergence of a need for the sacred that has in fact never really vanished, about the increasing importance assumed by religious symbols and themes for a constantly growing number of individuals and groups.1 In the course of time, the idea that secularism in its rst sense the institutional separation of religion and politics and the bracketing away of controversial religious issues from the public arena would inevitably result in a prevailing of secularism in the second sense, namely as the waning away of religion from the motivations, commitments and allegiances of more and more people, turned out to be yet another philosophy of history driven by an ideological thrust. Empirical research in the sociology of religion reminds us that even the fact that people attend religious services less frequently does not mean that their lives are less shaped by religious ideas. The picture is not yet complete, however. We need to address a third notion of secularism, which has been highlighted by Charles Taylor in his monumental volume A Secular Age.2 The greatest advantage of Taylors approach lies in the experience-near or phenomenologically

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thick quality of his reformulation of the concept of secularism. Taylor characterizes secularism neither in terms of the questions What do institutions look like in a secularized polity? What role does religion play in their perceived legitimacy? nor in terms of questions such as Has the importance of religion in the shaping of peoples intentions, commitments, loyalties, social networks diminished over time? or Has the number of people who believe in God diminished?, but rather in terms of a question asked entirely from within lived experience. The key questions for grasping this third meaning of secularism are: What does it feel to believe? What is it like to live as a believer or an unbeliever? To sum up a long argument, secularism in this third sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.3 One of the reasons for coining a new philosophical concept is that it allows us to see the world in different and richer terms than we are able to beforehand. Indeed, Taylors third notion of secularism enables us to see the case of the United States and its peculiar combination of religious fervor and secular politics in a different light. From the perspective of social secularism the USA may appear to be a less secular society than France or Germany, but certainly is no less secular from this phenomenological point of view. The US believer, no less than the French or the German believer, is bound to understand her or his faith as one of the many existential options that are possible. On the other hand, church attendance in the USA may come close to mosque attendance in Pakistan or Jordan, but the experience of what it means to believe remains very different. From the standpoint of this third notion of secularism, belief and non-belief, theism and atheism are not to be seen as rival theories, competing in cognitive terms, but rather as different ways of being in the world, of living ones life. The world which has not yet been secularized is a place according to Taylors notion of secularism in which everybody, not just me, takes for granted that the source of value and meaning and fullness lies outside human reach in something transcendent. So the experience of believing gets transformed completely in the world we inhabit. It is not just a matter of whether a larger percentage of people believed in God in 1500 relative to the percentage of believers in 2000. What matters is that the subjective experience of believing has entirely changed. That experience has undergone a transformation from being the unquestioned framework shared by everybody in a natural, unreective way, to the experience of being one among many options available, none of which can be seen as having a privileged status within society. The believer is condemned to see his or her own faith as one among several choices. He may continue to believe, but no longer in the

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unreective and nave way which characterized societies that are not secularized. She may continue to believe, but her faith is now experienced from within what Taylor calls the prevailing immanent frame, namely a whole cultural horizon that identies the good life with human ourishing, accepts no nal goals beyond human ourishing and no allegiance or obligation to anything beyond this ourishing.4

Rethinking the relation of religion to politics: normative challenges

The facts of the matter are now somewhat outlined: no tendency to the decline of religiosity can be conclusively detected, the proselytizing activity of the major world religions is as active as ever and within each religious community the most conservative tendencies are on the rise. Everywhere we can see a growing demand for a public recognition of religion, even in hypersecularist states such as Turkey. But the most interesting question is instead a normative one. If our perception of the relationship between modernization and the religious phenomenon has changed, should we also reconsider the relationship between politics and religion as we have come to understand it in the modern western world? Can the way in which the separation of religion and politics has been institutionalized against a background expectation of the gradual fading away of religion remain the same once that expectation proves ideological and religion comes to be accepted as a stable and positive aspect of social life?5 Elsewhere I have explored various normative implications of this thorough reorientation of our philosophical horizon.6 Here it sufces to recall the two most important challenges that need to be addressed. Both are connected with the implications of the principle of equality one of the undisputed pillars of any liberal polity once it is applied in a rigorous way in matters religious. The rst challenge concerns the demands of equality as they affect the access of religious and secular citizens to the public space. The second concerns the demands of equality as they affect our way of conceptualizing the standard for the tolerable and the intolerable in religious matters. Let me discuss the rst challenge and outline some responses to it. To the extent that in the liberal-political arena only non-religious, secular reasons constitute a legitimate basis for binding decisions (statutory laws, court and jury ndings, supreme or constitutional court opinions) an additional burden can be argued to be imposed on those citizens who experience their faith in an authentic and deep way. If the only currency used in the public arena of politics is constituted by penultimate (as opposed to ultimate) reasons, namely by the reasonable secular reasons shareable by believers and non-believers alike, then due to the

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religious nature of their most profound beliefs, citizens who are believers are required to go an extra hermeneutic mile, compared to those embracing secular beliefs, in order to formulate reasons that can be legitimately used in the political arena. A form of redressing this imbalance is necessary, not as a tribute to a changed Zeitgeist but in the name of the principle of equality. Rawls and Habermas independently offer two mainly converging, but in some interesting ways differing, ideas for reestablishing the egalitarian equation that forms the normative keystone of the liberal polity.7 Both offer us a similar recipe with an important variation. Both understand the public space of a complex society as differentiated in an institutionally and strictly political subdomain on the one hand, and an equally public as opposed to limited to the domestic walls or to the foro interno but not equally structured environment, in which believers instead enjoy a total freedom to express ideas based on their religious credo. The difference between these two kinds of public spaces revolves around the presence or absence of a requirement and expectation that binding decisions will be generated. In Rawls terminology these two parts of the public space are called respectively the public forum (where binding decisions are expected) and the background culture, while Habermas conceives of them as the space inhabited by the strong publics on the one hand basically, parliaments, courts and the state administration and a more informal political public sphere on the other hand.8 Furthermore, both of them consider the kind of public space not structured and not geared to binding decisions as one that should be more open and receptive to religious voices than traditional liberal doctrine has been willing to accept. Rawls explicitly rejects a restrictive interpretation of his concept of public reason and of reasonableness: on the basis of the so-called wide view of public political culture, citizens may at any time legitimately bring their most profound beliefs, inspired by religion, to the public arena on the condition that when and if what they propose ever makes it into some formal proceeding of the public forum (be it parliament or court), these initially religious grounds should be accompanied by other, secular reasons, fully shareable by citizens who are non-believers.9 Habermas too emphasizes how within the public sphere there cannot be restrictions placed on the kind of reasons invoked in order to justify or criticize a proposal.10 The idea of neutrality in the strictest sense is applied only to formal decision-making in the political sphere: in parliamentary records or in court rulings controversial religious references are not permitted. Habermas makes a distinction fully parallel to Rawls distinction between public reason and secular reason between secular reason, often with a scientistic basis, and so called post-secular

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reason, which results from a learning process internal to the Enlightenment tradition, has come to renounce all claim to be exhaustive of all forms of validity and value, and is ready to accept all that religious faith can teach.11 Distinctive about Habermas conception of the new relation of religion and politics in a post-secular society is a concern, not to be found in equally focused terms in Rawls, for what he denes as an undue mental and psychological burden,12 an asymmetrically distributed burden of translation, that aggravates the citizen of faith given the fact that the currency used by democratic politics can only be that of religiously neutral reason. It is a burden that elicits pragmatic concerns for example, the increasing alienation of large masses of religiously oriented citizens or the cultural systems lowered integrating capability when facing a split between institutionalized secular values and widespread religious ones but also raises a genuine normative concern. If the principle of the equality of all citizens is taken seriously then it does matter, from a normative point of view, that the religiously minded citizen is forced, by the secular lingua franca of the liberal polity, to do translation work which is mentally costly and often hard to carry out. Some compensation, whose institutional form remains to be determined, seems to be in order. The proposal put forward by Habermas and not to be found in Rawls work is that such additional burden of translation should be shared among believers and non-believers in order to fully realize the principle of equality across the religious divide, by way of ensuring that also those citizens who nd it impossible to translate reasons linked to their faith into religiously neutral reasons, not be deprived of political inuence. These reections on the implications of the principle of equality for the separation of religion and politics in a post-secular society should be completed, however, with a thematization of the difference in the evolutionary rhythms of the religious and the religiously neutral public conscience and the impact of such difference on the principle of toleration. In fact, also in this respect the principle of equality raises normative demands that call for a rethinking of the original understanding of toleration. Let us briey recall the classical statement of the liberal doctrine of toleration. Where exactly is the line separating the tolerable from the intolerable in matters of religiously motivated conduct? Should religiously motivated behavior involving mutilation of the body, ill-treatment of animals, human sacrices or compulsory holy prostitution be tolerated? John Lockes answer to questions such as these, as articulated in his Letter Concerning Toleration, is insuperably clear from a philosophical point of view. Every Church is free to regulate as it thinks best all practices related to the cult place, time and modality of these practices

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on condition that these practices are legal according to civil law. A church never has the right to establish cults including acts that are against the law a reciprocal counterpart to the requirement that the civil authorities of the state should refrain from supporting or enforcing religious beliefs and practices via the coercive power of the law.13 While the fact should be duly mentioned that Lockes concept of tolerance was meant to apply only to intra-Protestant relations, excluding Catholics, atheists and the faithful of non-Christian religions, one wonders what reasons there might be for claiming that it needs reconsideration in the context of a post-secular society. These reasons all rest on the observation after over three centuries from 1690, the date of publication of the Letter that secular civil law evolves according to a totally different and more accelerated pace than religious conscience. This differential in evolutionary pace can be explained from a causal point of view on the basis of a whole host of factors, but once again the most interesting questions concern the normative implications of this asynchronic evolution. Among these causal factors, let me mention three specic circumstances. First of all, the religious conscience experiences a very intense relationship with its own tradition, a relationship that nds only a weak equivalent in the importance of precedent for legal argumentation. This applies to highly institutionalized forms of religiosity, such as Catholicism, which envisages an explicit Magisterium of the Church on the subject of articles of faith, cult modalities, as well as an equally explicit principle of the infallibility of the Pope, but also to those forms of religiosity that allow the believer greater autonomy. As far as the great historical religions are concerned, tradition is often the interpretative tradition of a holy text that by denition can never be corrected, let alone replaced, but only reinterpreted. The internal structure of juridical consciousness is different and even more different from this model is political consciousness. There are no texts placed beyond correction. The Constitution itself is open to revision, even on fundamental issues. Juridical interpretation too is in a sense oriented by the importance of a precedent, but only because conformity with a precedent is functional to the objective of ensuring the legal systems overall coherence and the predictability of legal consequences what Max Weber used to call the rational calculability of the legal consequences of ones actions. Second, in modern society the juridical consciousness operates in a manner autonomous both from morals and politics, but nonetheless is always immersed within a political context characterized by the presence of a plurality of values, interests and options nding support within a plurality of more or less organized groups. Its binding force and its capacity to orient conduct consists more in the coherence of its pronouncements and decisions with certain basic values freedom and

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equality, but not exclusively than in the continuity with a tradition as such: fundamental values of the polity are often better fullled by institutional transformation (for example, the abolition of forms of discrimination, the creation of new rights, of new institutions, etc.) rather than by preserving existing conditions. So the juridical consciousness often plays an ongoing transformative role in the context of modern societies that religious consciousness plays only in specic historical circumstances such as, for example, the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Moreover, the juridical consciousness in our times is naturally immersed in a democratic political context and this obviously contributes to the dynamism and uidity of the legal fabric itself. After all, following centuries during which the democratic form of government has remained more or less the same, in the course of the last 100 years innovations such as universal suffrage, social legislation, laws about the public administrations transparency, the protection of privacy, cultural rights and the international protection of human rights have revolutionized democracy. No other form of political order has proven so dynamic. The effects of this dynamism intrinsic to a democratic form of government, with its public sphere and the market as natural accelerators of the renewal of traditions, are obvious.14 While Lockes concept of tolerance identies what can be tolerated in the religious sphere on the basis of what is allowed by civil law, it is clear that such pronounced evolutionary dynamism will soon unbalance the equation. Three centuries after the Letter Concerning Toleration the borders of the tolerable have moved unilaterally on the side of civil law. Religious customs and ritual forms of conduct, which were once solidly within the area of civil legality, soon end up outside it due to changes in the law following the intrinsic dynamism of the secularized juridical consciousness and later of the democratic process. Immediately obvious examples are womens inferior position in many ecclesiastical communities, the religious rejection of non-traditional forms of families and discrimination against homosexuals. Denying women authorization to administer sacraments and to celebrate mass within Christianity is a form of religiously sanctioned discrimination that could be objected on moral grounds but certainly did not infringe civil law and could thus not be rejected as intolerable up to when anti-discrimination laws and constitutional provisions were enacted in many liberal regimes. According to the Lockean formula, then, after those statutes and constitutional provisions are in place, Churches can no longer be allowed to regulate such matters according to their traditional wisdom. The more general point is that a democratic, pluralistic context, characterized by a host of intersecting and connected struggles for recognition and by a public sphere in which the constant presentation and discussion of new expectations will most likely lead to a greater probability of

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social and cultural change and hence also of juridical-legal change than is the case with an ecclesiastical community bound to the continuity of one single tradition and integrated via one single source of authority. The normative question then is: Is it fair to ask religious communities to keep pace with the democratic conscience, is it fair to move the border between the tolerable and the intolerable, strictly observing Lockes principle, at the promulgation of every new law? Is this imperative of keeping pace not another additional burden, different than that of translation, imposed on religious traditions and not on those secular cultural traditions which share an elective afnity with the dynamism of democratic political culture? Should forms of compensation be devised, and if so which ones, for the intrinsically disadvantaged predicament of the religious conscience? These are open questions at the moment, yet they are at the center of the philosophical agenda for rethinking the relation of politics, law and religion in a post-secular society.

Public voice and illegitimate interference: where to set the threshold

Finally, our assessment of the proper role of religion in the public space of a post-secular society must come to terms with the challenge of dening the threshold past which religious reasons are no longer legitimate in public discourse and of dening the correct way in which religious authorities should address the believers in the public space. If we manage to address these challenges we can claim to have made some progress toward a reformulation of the principle of separation that measures up to our critical distancing from the ideology of secularization. As we have seen, Habermas converges with Rawls in distinguishing a broad public sphere, where every contribution even if couched in religious terms is legitimate, and a more restricted institutional realm where binding decisions are made (parliaments, courts, governmental agencies, etc.). Between these two realms a lter must be operative, which lets only secular contents and arguments pass through. The problem is where exactly this lter has to be metaphorically located and what it should block. Let us now focus on this dividing line between the broader sphere where non-secular arguments are permissible and the institutional one where they are not admissible. Habermas illustrates his own understanding of where the line should be drawn by means of an example: in parliament, for example, the standing rules of procedure of the house must empower the house leader to have religious statements expunged from the minutes.15 Thus a fortiori we should assume that such religious statements cannot be allowed in statutes and resolutions passed by the

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house. But are they to be banned also from the representatives speeches in debates or in their voting declarations? Also from their questioning of government activities in parliamentary governmental reports? After all, not all the activities taking place ofcially in Parliament are strictly of a decision-making nature. And Rawls, certainly a champion of liberalism, explicitly counted as legitimate forms of public discourse, along with public reason, what he called declarations, conjectures and witnessing, namely forms of discourse in institutional settings where (1) we express deep convictions of ours that we do not expect others to share, (2) we conjecture from the comprehensive convictions of others and (3) we object to otherwise legitimate decisions on the basis again of deep convictions not expected to be shared by our interlocutors.16 Thus, if public reason cannot be reasonably said to exhaust the universe of forms of public discourse, it seems that we have to allow for the full legitimacy of introducing religious arguments and reasons within certain kinds of communicative activity on the part of members of Parliament. After all representatives and parties often receive votes from their constituencies in order to give voice to certain concerns, to strengthen certain positions, to make them visible to the leading media, to obtain and increase public recognition of the existence and worth of these positions. Representatives would be less than perspicuous in the exercise of their mandate if they did not voice these concerns in the appropriate settings in the form of declarations and statements. But then, if these declarations and statements are legitimate during debates, why should they be excluded from minutes? Should minutes of parliamentary debates be subject to censorship and reect less than faithfully what has been said on the oor? To state my point more generally, it seems that the dividing line between public discourse, legitimate reference to religious arguments and illegitimate religious interference with secular institutional activity is not to be drawn at the parliaments entrance, or at the doorway of any institutional body, but well inside the in-house activities of parliaments and other institutions in ways which remain to be dened according to the nature of the diverse communicative activities which take place in institutional settings. Finally, I should like to address the question of the limits that apply to religious communities or churches in exercising their right to freedom of expression in the public sphere. Where should we place the threshold past which the legitimate public voice of religious communities turns into a disputable interference with the democratic process? How far can a religious congregation or a church desirous to act as a community of interpretation within the democratic rule of law go in supporting its favorite policies and trying to block those found questionable? It goes without saying that such activity is fully legitimate if backed up by

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public reasons, acceptable to members of other religious communities and to secular citizens. However, as Habermas suggests, the limits of propriety are trespassed if a church addresses its members in the public sphere in an instrumental way and tries to reach political goals by an immediate appeal to the faith-bound conscience of its members.17 For in this case a church would substitute its spiritual authority for those reasons that can be shared by all. An example of this religious malpractice is a sermon designed to induce believers to vote for a certain party or candidate. This sensible view should be completed, however, with a reflection on a contextual element that compounds the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of the public voice of religion. A distinction should be introduced between mono-confessional and multiconfessional contexts. The specicity of an overwhelmingly Catholic country like Italy certainly does not lie in contradicting the basic idea of the religious neutrality of institutions. Italian institutions are certainly religiously neutral, though by no means militantly secular. The particularity of the Italian context consists rather in the fact that historically the line of what is tolerable has been drawn with respect to one and only one faith, embraced by the vast majority of Italians, and has been drawn jointly by two institutional actors, not one as in the classical liberal picture. This particularity resulted in what I do not hesitate to dene as the concordats distortion, namely the idea that the religiously neutral character of public institutions is based on their tting the terms of a concordat between two powers one secular, the state, and the other religious, namely the Catholic Church, always rigorously used in the singular each occupying a position on either side of the dividing line between the temporal and the spiritual realm and each reigning with full sovereignty within separate realms yet on the same geographical territory. Within this framework the religious neutrality of the states institutions is understood not as a function of the peoples public autonomy an autonomy neutral vis--vis the different religions but as a function of the more or less stable negotiating balance achieved by two powers, independent and sovereign, each with its own order. Obviously in other countries too a concordat is operative, but the crucial difference is that these other countries do not host the concordant power on their domestic territory, at least when the concordant power is the Catholic Church. Thus, while to use spiritual inuence for political ends is always a violation of the liberal idea of a free and neutral public space, this violation is more oppressive in a country with only one dominating confession, because in such context controversial religious claims are less likely to be counterbalanced by other different religious cultures, and it is all the more disputable in a country where the organizational centre of the

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religious community is located and is in a position to deploy all of its political inuence. In the case of Italy, furthermore, the effect of this use of spiritual authority for political ends is compounded by the newly emerging bipolar division of the political space, which assigns great inuence to citizens, movements and organizations located at the centre of the bipolar division and susceptible of switching allegiance. These political forces are overwhelmingly Catholic and thus the spiritual authority of the church can receive additional political leverage from the decisive inuence of the addressees of its messages. To measure the distance that separates the peculiarity of the Italian context from a normal liberal-democratic rule of law, let me compare the vicissitudes of legislation on same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy. Canada is certainly not a country embracing the secularistic model of the public space typical of France or the locus of a contest between a secularist government and the Catholic Church, on the model of Spain. The Canadian Parliament, however, on 20 July 2005 voted a statute regulating same-sex marriage in whose preamble the radical statement can be read: only equal access to marriage for civil purposes would respect the right of couples of the same sex to equality without discrimination, and civil union, as an institution other than marriage, would not offer them that equal access and would violate their human dignity, in breach of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.18 In the Italian liberal democracy, where the religious neutrality of institutions and of the rule of law is placed under the spell of a concordat regime, and where pastoral inuence is systematically used for political ends, not only is same-sex marriage a utopian prospect (not a single statutory proposal in this sense has ever been so much as announced) but even those civil unions, which the Canadian Parliament found to fall short of full compatibility with respect for human dignity, are well beyond any realistic democratic agenda, vetoed by a concordant power that inuences the political conduct of the most inuential niche of voters. In the Italian public sphere, the public voice of religion is in a position to silence, indeed to terminate the career of, any politician who would embrace the cause of same-sex marriage. So, when discussing the limits of the legitimate public role of religion, before assessing the seriousness of the illiberal use of spiritual authority in the light of cultural variables, we should perhaps assess the impact of structural variables like the monoconfessional or multiconfessional quality of the context and the presence or absence of a concordat-type relation between state and church. To conclude: once secularization, understood as the expectation that religious conduct would rst conne itself within private walls and subsequently would disappear from modernized societies, has conclusively

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proven to be yet another of the ideologies of the 20th century and has given way to a post-secular appreciation of the persistence and positive role of religion, the traditional way of understanding the separation of politics and religion could not remain unaffected. In a sense, we are only at the beginning of unravelling and thinking through the host of new normative questions that the transition to a post-secular perspective raises: I have simply highlighted two questions related more directly to the demands of the principle of equality once it is applied to a postsecular democratic polity and two questions related to the rethinking of the line that separates the legitimate exercise of a religious voice in the public space from questionable interference with a democratic process that, even after the critique of secularization, is best understood as religiously neutral. Universit di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy

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Notes
1 Peter L. Berger (ed.) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999); Jos Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Adam B. Seligman, Modernitys Wager (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Steve Bruce (ed.) Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a critical appraisal, see Charles Larmore, How Much Can We Stand?, The New Republic, 9 April 2008, pp. 3944. For a very interesting discussion of Taylors theses, see the excellent postings on the website http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ 3 ibid., p. 3. 4 On the notion of the immanent frame, see Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 53993. 5 On the reection of this broad change in the perception of religion onto Supreme Court jurisprudence, Steven H. Shiffrin, The Pluralistic Foundations of the Religion Clauses, Cornell Law Review 90(1) (2004): 996. 6 See Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 185203. 7 John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in The Law of Peoples with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 12980 and Jrgen Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, European Journal of Philosophy 14(1) (2006): 125.

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91 Ferrara: Religion and politics in post-secular society

8 See Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), ch. 7, where he adopts a distinction suggested by Nancy Fraser in her Rethinking the Public Sphere, in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 9 See Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, pp. 152. 10 See Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, pp. 89. 11 ibid., p. 16. 12 ibid., p. 9. 13 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in John Locke, On Politics and Education, with an introduction by Howard R. Penniman (Roslyn, NY: Black, 1947), p. 45. On toleration in the light of contemporary concerns, see also Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Toleration as Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konikt. Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines umstrittenen Begriffs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003). 14 On the broad theme of acceleration, from a political and social perspective, William E. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 187224; Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung. Die Vernderung der Zeitstruktur in der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), pp. 16198 and 396427; Matthias Eberling, Beschleunigung und Politik (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotexte, 1986) and Reinhart Kosellecks Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?, in his Zeitschichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 15076. 15 Jrgen Habermas, La voce pubblica della religione, Reset 104 (2007): p. 6. 16 See John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (1997), in The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 1556. 17 Habermas, La voce pubblica della religione, p. 7. 18 Statutes of Canada, chapter 33, Bill C-38, assented to 20 July 2005, Preamble.

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