"Post-secular" society. In one sense, this description doesn’t fit us at all. If one means that society passed a phase of being secularized, and now religion is "returning", then this is quite wrong. Certain processes of secularization, meaning the decline of religion continue. But it’s also true that these processes were more complex than people thought; many people are profoundly ambivalent about them; they retain some sort of religious identity without going to Church, or some belief in the transcendent without belonging to a Church, and so on. So the supposed "returns" of religion aren’t really such. In many respects, "religion" never really left. Its imprint on our culture is too great just to disappear. For instance, when it comes to admitting or not admitting Turkey to Europe, many "lay" people object: Turkey isn’t "European". Why? Because it is not Christian.

The reality is very mixed, with a great fragmentation, in which people are occupying all sorts of spiritual and anti-spiritual, religious and anti-religious positions. The proportions of each vary from society to society in the West, all the way from the US at one extreme to East Germany on the other. But all this is no cause to talk of a "post-secular" period. Perhaps we can nevertheless give this word a sense. It refers to our understanding of our age. For a long time intellectuals and scholars, and following them journalists and the rest of us, bought into a narrative that modernity must bring secularization in the sense of a decline of religion. Now we realize that this isn’t necessarily true. Reality is more complicated.

And so all the problems we must manage, including those of religious pluralism within our societies, appear in a new light. Religion is not a declining phenomenon, which can just be ignored. It will remain part of the picture, and so religious pluralism has to be faced. Simple notions of "Laïcité", à la française, which simply tried to marginalize religion, are no longer adequate to our situation. We need states which are really neutral, not just between religions, but also between religion and unbelief. Militant secularism cannot be the basis of the state, but is another view which has to find a place among the whole range of religious and metaphysical commitments. This is a hard thing to adjust to, not only for Churches who used to provide the glue for the whole society, but also for the ideologies of secularism.

Böckenförde is undoubtedly right; there is a problem here. People have to have strong and profound moral convictions about the value of freedom, equality, tolerance for, perhaps even openness to others, and so on. But the state itself can’t espouse or foster any particular such profound, comprehensive moral understanding – be it religious or lay – which might sustain these essential values. This was the old model of Christendom: society is defined and sustained by a Church, which inculcates the values by which it lives (these values didn’t always give as much importance to freedom as we do today). There is no possible solution along these lines today. Hence the sense of danger which Böckenförde articulates. But in fact, it is possible to imagine a society in which religious, metaphysical and moral views are inescapably plural (this is our situation), but in which people of these different views accept to sustain together the same basic political values: freedom, human right, equality, democratic rule. Some Western societies approach this model. This basis is perhaps fragile: what if this plurality of views ends up weakening all of them? Then the deep basis for these values would be threatened.

But there also are potential strengths. In fact these different views, religious and lay, which support our basic political values, each do so in a different way. They have a somewhat different reading of these values. One can see this with issues like abortion, or gay marriage (not that the differences simply reflect the division between believer and unbelievers, because each of these are also split on some of these questions, but it is clear that certain conceptions of religion make one more hostile to gay marriage than others). Now this may also mean weakness, because we argue over our basic values and their meaning. But it can also be a strength, because it means that while people who share one basis for these values may ignore some issue which doesn’t seem salient to them, others who have a different foundation will raise this question and force us to consider it. Thus while churches may stand outside the liberal consensus on issues like gay marriage, they will often also do so on issues of war and peace. They may be less willing to have recourse to violence than the liberal consensus in a situation like that of post-9/11. A plurality of voices may hold us back (as in the first case), but it will often be a salutary reminder of what we are too quick to forget (as in the second).

Charles Taylor, emeritus professor at McGill University in Montréal, has in recent years taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Northwestern University of Chicago. Among other things he is author of Hegel e la società moderna (Hegel and Modern society) (1984), Radici dell’io. La costruzione dell’identità moderna (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity) (1993), Il disagio della modernità (Malaise of Modernity) (1994), La modernità della religione (A Catholic Modernity) (2004) e Gli immaginari sociali moderni (Modern Social Imaginaries) (2005).

This article was published in Reset, Number 101.