Political liberalism and religious claims

Abstract

This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being either ‘liberal’ or ‘fundamentalist’ and ignores a third, in-between group, namely traditionalist religious actors and their claims. After having explained what makes traditionalist religious actors different from liberal and fundamentalist religious actors, the author develops 4 areas in which political liberalism should be pushed further theoretically in order to correctly theorize the challenge which traditional religious actors pose to liberal democracy. These 4 areas (blind spots) are: (1) the context of translation; (2) the politics of exemptions; (3) the multivocality of theology; and (4) the transnational nature of norm-contestation.

What are Morality Policies? The Politics of Values in a Post-Secular World

“…She draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas on post-secularism to argue that current value-based conflicts in the areas of gender and family, life/death issues, and freedom of religion are the product of a post-secular age characterized by the revival of religion in the public sphere and by the permissibility of religious arguments in democratic deliberation and decision-making. In such a context, religiously motivated actors pursuing a traditionalist agenda gain strength in the political arena in a way that defies political liberalism’s credo that the liberal democratic constitutional order must be based on an “overlapping consensus” between groups with different worldviews and substantive conceptions of the good (Stoeckl, 2017).…”

“…Thus, religiously motivated traditionalist actors enter into public debates using arguments that are adapted to secular legalistic terminology, often using the language of rights, even though they are highly critical of the egalitarian individualism and universalism of modern law (Stoeckl, 2017). For example, Islamic States propagating blasphemy laws at the UN justify restrictions of free speech by reference to the right of religions not to be offended (Marshall, 2011).…”

Translating Islam into the language of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church

“…This distribution of roles helps to displace responsibility for what is said from the mufti to an abstract figure of the Supreme Being (Keane 1997, 58). In the context of presentday Russia, actors who enter public debates with religious arguments and advance religious claims, enjoy the support of the conservative political establishment (Stoeckl 2017). For instance, the ROC leadership has been actively using religious arguments in public debates: supported by the state, the Church tends to act as a moral entrepreneur that promotes conservative norms (Stoeckl 2016).…”

Laicidad y anticlericalismo

“…35 Es probable que en los países europeos en los que la Iglesia católica es mayoritaria y recibe tratamiento preferencial, por ejemplo, Italia o España, la laicidad anticlerical sea también relevante. De acuerdo con un artículo recientemente publicado por Kristina Stoeckl (2016), en los países en los que la Iglesia católica ortodoxa es mayoritaria, los "actores tradicionalistas", esto es, actores afines a la religión dominante que adoptan el clericalismo según se ha definido en este artículo, justificarían la implementación de una forma de laicidad anticlerical.…”