The term “postsecular” means that secularism is not an exclusive feature of modern societies and that there is no natural tendency toward secularism as the exclusive telos of the development of modern societies. Secularism is as much a cognitive construction of the world as non-secular world views are. Secularism is – from the sociological point of view – a world view among many others. That the secular world view claims normative superiority over the others is something that sociology observes but cannot prove or disprove. What it can do is to show what happens as soon as world views enter into social relations and conflict with each other. What we observe today is not a return of religion but a new social constellation regulating the social relations among these world views. Its main characteristic is that different world views compete openly in the public realm for “recognition”.

Such competition is a double-edged sword since it provokes (under ideal conditions) the debate on the basic suppositions of living together with diverging world views. This argument presupposes that there is no basic incommensurability among those world views. This assumption is to be shared by these world views in order to avoid endless conflict. Not sharing that assumption the spiral of conflict can be triggered by opposing world views that claim exclusive access to truth and revelation. Such claims are inherent in universalistic religions based on an exclusive access to the right and even (in some cases) to the true. Secularism is a universalistic world view as universalistic religions are, equally claiming access to the right and the true by defining cognitive preconditions, yet differing in one important aspect which is that these preconditions are not exclusive and not mediated by some interpreters of a tradition in which the right and the true is already contained (leaving aside for the moment the role of intellectuals which at times tried to take over such a role of interpreting the world for the others, the best example being Lenin).

Therefore there is an asymmetry among secularism and universalistic religions which is that universalistic religions force (in the good case) secularism to reflect its own universalistic assumptions that are at times in fact forgotten. This implies that universalistic religions have to accept the liberal premises that secularism assumes as the conditions of its own possibility. The public sphere in that sense is the realistic test on the acceptance of such formal principles of debating different and at times opposing world views. When these principles are violated a spiral of uncontrolled conflict is set in motion which produces the typical effects of universalistic world views trying to suppress and destroy the others with the missionary zeal of realizing the right and the true against the “devil” in this world.

The dilemma formulated by Böckenförde makes an important point: asking who in the final instance can force the others to comply with the liberal rules of the game. He proposes to look for it in the moral substance of individuals and in the idea of a homogeneous society. To rely upon the self-regulation of individuals is on fact insufficient. They easily run into the Hobbesian dilemma. The crux of his argument is the assumption of a homogeneous society as an order incapable of regulating himself. This homogeneous society is defined by its self-regulation through judicial coercion and authority. Such authority-based self-regulation implies that the state takes over the burden to regulate the inner regulation of individuals which he obviously cannot do without entering the dilemma of generating freedom with force. However, the modern formal-rational state and the society he orders has always been connected to a strong symbolic representation of itself, i.e. the idea of a nation within which this modern state is embedded. The nation therefore embodies the “transcendence” which provides the symbolic resources for emotional and cognitive attachment to the modern state. When the nation and the sovereign people were constituting each other, this solution guaranteed even rather stable democratic regimes.
The real dilemma of modern societies is that this idea of a nation no longer works. There is no longer the homogeneous society (maybe it has never really existed); increasingly modern societies are culturally heterogeneous societies which do not provide the symbolic resource upon which to draw for creating a political community beyond the mere individual interests. Here the dilemma Böckenförde speaks of comes to the fore. This situation excludes a series of possible alternatives: a shared religion, a shared culture of belonging, a shared culture of being different. To get out of this dilemma, we have basically three options. The first would be to delegate the symbolic transcendence of a political community to a democratic sovereign, a solution that radical democrats envisioned. A version of this is the idea of a civil society that acts as the external control of the state to guarantee the compatibility of state action with the freedom of the citizens. The second is to base the state on a self-justificating idea, here the idea of indifference to people and to treat them equally as individuals.

This is what Max Weber has called the formal-rational state and this is basically the secularist idea which sometimes comes with democratic, sometimes with less democratic connotations. There is thirdly the idea that neither the will of the people believing in their collective sovereign will nor formal rationality cum secularism will do but that we need to base the modern state and the modern social order on traditions out which sentiments of identification emerge creating a society ready to accept the rules of the liberal game. Such traditions are strong since they result from collective experiences and a collective memory that is deeply engrained through enculturation and socialization into a people and which provide the narrative resonance and the narrative bonds that is constitutive for social relations. The most forceful traditions are found in religious traditions; Hervieu-Leger has called religion the most durable chain of memory human beings have developed. The third solution then would be to construct a presence out of the religious traditions that are available at a certain time in a certain space where people with very different religious traditions live.

Obviously, some traditions are less and others are more prone toward strengthening sentiments that support the liberal rules of the game. This has been shown by much historical-comparative research on the link between traditions (religion) and democracy. The problem today is that these traditions can no longer be compartmentalized into separated societies following either the ideal of a religiously and/or nationally homogenized society. These attempts have rather brought to the fore the ugly side of modernity, national wars and civil wars for cultural homogeneity in the name of race, Volk, religion, ethnic identity and so on. We live in culturally heterogeneous societies which remember different things that do not by themselves become compatible, the condition for creating a self-regulating society. This impasse in option three has motivated many political theorists to could return to option two which is a strong state detached from the cultural diversity of its people trying to impose a common cultural reference. The costs will be high in terms of experiences of non-recognition of cultural groups, the typical seedbed for civil wars. Thus we are left with option one: the radical democratic one. This option excludes the idea of a consensus; it argues for a culture of debate which unites all those taking part in such debates into a self-regulating society. Debate instead of already knowing its outcome is typical for such societies. Since nothing can be excluded from debate, a radical democratic space of debate includes above the controversial remembering of traditions that come together in a space at a certain time, thus linking religious traditions, ethnic traditions and secular traditions into a system of communicative relations. The result is an endless narrative in search of a shared narrative, a tradition in the process of permanent invention.

A good case for such a radically democratic mode of constructing the transcendence of a political community is Europe and its search for an identity, for a narrative that binds together so many different people and many different religions and many different ideologies. It is a narrative which the new Europe constructs against the incursions of particularist traditions such as French secular absolute Statism or Roman Catholic exclusive Universalism. The new Europe is an experiment in finding a society which creates its transcendence in constructing a narrative of its diversity by permanent, i.e. daily democratic debate. This is a solution to the dilemma which is not only compatible but constitutively linked to the democratic self-government of the people.

Klaus Eder teaches Sociology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the European Institute in Florence. He studies the social movement of modernity, the relationship between politics and ambientalism and the problems connected with citizenship (European and national) and with the social evolution in Europe.

This article was published in Reset, Number 101.