As I mentally prepared my contribution to this roundtable on “Religious Revivals and the Open Society” I found myself reacting to the wording of the title and immediately decided that I would center my very brief and schematic statement on what I perceive to be the situation “at home”, in the Western democracies where I grew up and do my job of political philosopher. In fact, I believe that the best way to serve the cause of the Dialogue of Civilization and to defuse the risk of ending up with the infamous clash thereof – that clash of civilizations that Edward Said has aptly renamed the “clash of ignorance” – if for each of us to critically assess what’s going on in his or her own home, rather than pontificate on what others should or should not be doing in their own homes. Thus in closing I’ll briefly sum up some of the most interesting thoughts offered recently by leading political philosophers on the issue of religion and politics.

However, let me begin by addressing the very notion of a religious revival or better of the rise once again of a demand for a public role for religion in Western societies and of the challenges that this reawakening and deprivatization poses for our understanding of what decent political arrangements, or an open society, should look like. The first thing that in my opinion we should be aware of is that the religious quest which we perceive as being revived has always been there in Western societies. The external manifestations of it may have been different, but religious faith has never waned even in the secular countries of the West. Most likely we have overlooked this basic fact because we have been blinded by yet another of the ideologies that have circulated perniciously throughout the 20th century, the ideology of secularization, namely the idea that progress and modernization will sort of naturally lead to the disappearance of the religious phenomenon by way of eradicating the structurally induced need for its compensatory and consolatory function.

This misconception, against which leading sociologists like Peter Berger, Adam Seligman and Josè Casanova and philosophers like Charles Taylor have warned us, leads us to misunderstand not just the nature of the religious phenomenon, but the nature of society as well. For the “religious phenomenon”, as masterfully explained by Durkheim, is part and parcel of the very fabric of society as such, for which it functions both as an idealizing and integrating element. So the term revival should be taken quite carefully in order to avoid remaining trapped in the picture of the reversal of a “secularization” which never existed in the first place, at least as described in textbooks.

Second, we have to unpack more precisely our second term, the open society. For in a way there is nothing more closed than the open society. The term was coined during the epoch of the Cold War. It embeds philosophical ambitions but is not entirely free from the reflections of that horizon. The open society stands over against the planned society, where the State tries to shape every sphere of society and culture. Where the planned society pivots around the State, the open society pivots around the market. It’s a secular society, that worships science and reason, and deeply distrusts everything which cannot be dealt with in terms of science and reason. It abhors repression and regulations but confines the horizon of the desirable to a prosperity as general and durable as possible. So it’s a closed society for all those who perceive as reductive the horizon of prosperity for all, it’s a society whose institutions speak a language foreign for the citizen of faith, a society whose public code makes the believers feel tolerated at most, and looked down upon as remnants of the past.

In order to correct this blindness, Jürgen Habermas has adopted the term post-secular society and John Rawls has coined the term political liberalism. Both terms are designed to signal a discontinuity with conceptions of democracy and the liberal polity which in the past took for granted the idea of secularization. And both authors wonder whether the classical interpretation of the religious neutrality of the State provided by liberal political theory was not excessively restrictive. Rawls describes his political liberalism as “sharply different from Enlightenment liberalism, which historically attacked orthodox Christianity”. He explicitly takes distance from a restrictive interpretation of his concept of public reason and of “reasonableness”: on the basis of a so-called “wide view” of public reason, citizens may at any time legitimately bring their most profound beliefs, inspired by religion, to the public arena on condition that, should they wish to formalise their proposal in resolution or a proposed statute, these initially religious reasons should be replaced by other, secular reasons, fully shareable by citizens who are non-believers.

Rawls also warns us against confusing “public reason” and “secular reason”. When the time comes to draft a law, also the citizens who embrace comprehensive secular beliefs, ranging from Enlightenment rationalism to communism – beliefs that in the past have generated forms of fundamentalism no less oppressive than those based on religion – are asked to transform their ultimate reasons into “penultimate” ones, shareable also by those who do not share their ideologies. Being religiously neutral but not militantly secularist, public reason therefore appears as equidistant from all forms of reasoning that start from controversial comprehensive assumptions, be these religious or secular. Its internal standard is “reasonableness”, distinct from rationality and understood as the capacity to acknowledge the fact of pluralism, the partiality of one’s own position and as the readiness to join in fair cooperation with others, a cooperation based on principles that can be shared by all.

Habermas too emphasises that within the non-institutional public sphere there cannot be restrictions to the kind of reasons invoked. But he expresses greater concern than Rawls with regard to what he defines as an additional hermeneutic burden, a burden of translation, that aggravates the believer citizen given the fact that the currency used by democratic politics can only be that of religiously-neutral reasons. This concern leads Habermas to formulate a proposal not to be found in Rawls’s work: the additional burden of translation should be shared – in ways that from an institutional point of view remain to be yet determined – among citizens who are believers and the non-believers. This to ensure that the believer citizens, who for reasons independent of their will should find it impossible to “translate” reasons linked to their faith into religiously neutral reasons, not be deprived of political influence.

This however is only the beginning of the debate. Charles Taylor, for example, in his essays entitled “Catholic modernity?” and “Religion today”, speaks of a “spiritual lobotomy” that, if assumed as exclusive, the horizon of modern humanism would impose on the Christian citizen, who does not identify with an idea of “human flourishing which recognizes no valid end beyond this”. This form of anti-transcendent humanism of “shared political values” risks appearing to the believer citizen as “a gratuitous exclusion of religion in the name of a rival metaphysical belief, and not simply as the protecting and controlling of the borders of a shared and independent public sphere”.

Walzer proposes a flexibilization of the line separating politics and religion. At times reasons of justice and the principle of equality outrank the reasons in favour of a rigid application of the separation understood as neutrality; for example, when in a compensatory vein the State establishes quotas for disadvantaged groups that in the past suffered discriminations and are systematically under-represented in certain positions. According to Walzer, on other occasions, the State can suspend its neutrality in the strictest sense for pragmatic reasons, without this actually counting as a violation of the principle. For example, should one wish to establish a weekly holiday, there is no need to draw which day it should be: the principle of separation is only applied in a flexible way, not violated, if the State chooses Sunday, adopting the tradition of the majority of its citizens. The separation would be violated if the law should forbid the believers of other religions to celebrate their festivities on other days.

It is only the beginning of the debate, but it is a clear symptom of the fact that our understanding of the separation of politics and religion is presently under reconsideration, not in its fundamental idea but with respect to the way in which it has hitherto been implemented.

Alessandro Ferrara is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” and President of the Italian Association of Political Philosophy. He studied philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and at the J.W.Goethe Universität of Frankfurt. He is the author of Modernity and Authenticity. (State University of New York Press, 1993), of Reflective Authenticity. Rethinking the Project of Modernity (Routledge, 1998) and Justice and Judgment. (Sage, 1999). He is currently guest-editing a special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism on The Uses of Judgment (forthcoming, 2007) and completing a new volume on The Force of the Example. (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2007).

This text is the transcription of the intervention held by the author at the round table organized by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations “The awakening of religion and the open society”, which took place on UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day (Rabat – Morocco, 16th November 2006). The following figures participated at this meeting: the Interior minister Giuliano Amato, the philosophers Abdou Filali-Ansary (Morocco), Fred Dallmayr (U.S.A.), Sadik Al Azm (Syria), Sebastiano Maffettone and Alessandro Ferrara (Italy), Reset Editor-in-Chief Giancarlo Bosetti and Reset DoC’s  director Nina zu Fürstenberg.