Habermas and Gauchet on religion in postsecular society. A critical assessment

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate that in his recent reading of the role of religion in the postsecular public realm, Habermas overlooks a most fundamental dimension of religion: its power to symbolically institute communities. For his part, Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this fundamental dimension is central. In his evaluation of the role of religion in postsecular society, he therefore arrives at results which are very different from those of Habermas. However, I believe that Gauchet too underestimates the extent to which religion's power of symbolic community institution has remained intact within modern, postsecular society. In support of this position, I show how relatively heterogeneous phenomena within Western societies, such as the renewed importance of religion in the public realm, the revival of certain forms of nationalism and the associated demand for recognition of group rights and hence for forms of legal pluralism, may prefigure a new transformation of the public realm.

Meditation and the post‐secular condition

“…The human thirst for the sacred did not find satisfaction in the fragmentary self-reference of post-modern culture. The longing for the sacred in all its forms gave rise to the post-secular turn (Braeckman, 2009;Braidotti, 2008;McLennan, 2010;Staudigl & Alvis, 2017). But what is the post-secular?…”

“…immanence, meditation, post-secular A relatively new phenomenon, the post-secular turn (Braeckman, 2009;Braidotti, 2008;Habermas, 2010;Mclennan, 2010;Staudigl & Alvis, 2017) generally denotes a variety of theories that explore the reappearance of religious ideas in a cultural Milieu that has been dominated, particularly in the West, by secularism. Its emergence is partly due to the increasing recognition that there is something missing in the secular societies many of us live in and, more generally, that there is something missing within the secularist worldview (Habermas, 2010).…”

Social Services Offered by Faith-based Organizations in the Post-Secular Society

“…The debate on the participation of religiously orientated stakeholders is correlated with the attempt to answer the question about what should be and which really is the place of faith-based organizations and, through them, of religion in today's society. Braeckman points out that debates about the role of religion in the public sphere primarily refer to its moral and epistemic moral content, when, in fact, the fundamental dimension of any religion is its ability to build communities symbolically, thus instituting them from an identity perspective (Braeckman, 2009). The deconstruction of charity in post-modern post-secular society aims at moving away from the model of charity based on philanthropy, to the welfare state based on socialinstitutionalized and compulsory solidarity, as well as to the professionalization of social work (Nistor, 2019b).…”

Phenomenology and the Post-secular Turn: Reconsidering the ‘Return of the Religious’

“…From its violent potential found in the 'auto-immune' reactions of the West toward religious extremism and fundamentalism (Derrida 2002), to the not so subtle 'secular hypothesis' , which wagered that religion can be tamed through civil society's proliferation of education, deliberation, and emphases on the hard sciences, secular reason has turned out to be all but innocent and neutral. Secular orders and states often have purported faith as a mere option relegated to the private realm (Joas 2014), and thus endorsed a dangerous underestimation of the factual community-instituting power of religion (Braeckman 2009), be it symbolic or performative, as in the case of religious violence. But even when religion is taken seriously, it still often is instrumentalized as but a power for domesticating a society's citizens to a higher morality, praised only for its community-instituting power, or reluctantly accepted for the reasons of sustaining and proliferating the cherished values of democracy and deliberation (Calhoun et al 2011).…”