HABERMAS'S RELIGIOUS “COURSE-CORRECTION” OF POLITICAL LIBERALISM

Contemporary political science continues to be insufficiently interested in learning from religion (Kettell Reference Kettell2012; Wald and Wilcox Reference Wald and Wilcox2006). Having failed to anticipate the resilience of religion in modernity, its assumptions and methods remain more appropriate for explaining the behavioral power of religious identification, than in ascertaining the contribution of religious ideas to liberalism (Kettell Reference Kettell2016; Philpott Reference Philpott2009). In spite of its preoccupation with the challenge of religion, much of contemporary political theory, in turn, takes its bearings from John Rawls's Political Liberalism. In that work, Rawls proposed that democratic deliberation should be conducted without appeal to controversial truth claims, with citizens drawing on a fund of “public” or neutral principles that are already “widely shared” in a liberal society (Reference Rawls2005, 224–225, 247). Many liberal theorists interpreted Rawls's call to take “the truth of religion off the political agenda” as requiring a general duty of self-restraint in public debate (Rorty Reference Rorty1999; Audi Reference Audi2000; Macedo Reference Macedo1998). This “exclusivist” theory of “public reason” has set the agenda for academic liberal theory for over two decades, although it has been challenged by “inclusivists” who have argued that its requirements are unfair to devout citizens, and ultimately impractical in democracy, where they impoverish our civic and moral lives (Weithman Reference Weithman2002; Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff and Weithman1997; Eberle Reference Eberle2002; Waldron Reference Waldron1993, Reference Waldron2012; Stout Reference Stout2004; cf. March Reference March2013).

This article evaluates Jürgen Habermas's recent attempt to bridge the divide between the “exclusivist” and “inclusivist” camps through his new framework of “post-secular” society (Habermas Reference Habermas2006a). Habermas deserves special attention because over the last decade he has gone further in his opening to religion than even most “open secularists” (Chambers Reference Chambers2010) in liberal theory: he claims that religion offers “important resources of spiritual explanation” (Habermas Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001) and “articulations of moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions, especially “regarding vulnerable domains of social life” (Habermas Reference Habermas2009, 76–77). Siding with critics of political liberalism, Habermas argues that “the democratic state should not overhastily reduce the polyphonic complexity of the range of public voices,” because doing so risks cutting “society off from scarce resources for generating meaning” that are offered by religion (Reference Habermas2009, 76; cf. Reference Habermas2006a, Reference Habermas, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013). In a significant correction of Rawls, Habermas welcomes comprehensive doctrines (religious and nonreligious) in the informal sphere of “opinion- and will-formation” where no Rawlsian duty of self-restraint obtains (Habermas Reference Habermas2005, Reference Habermas2006a; cf. Rawls Reference Rawls2005a, 220–222; cf. Rawls Reference Rawls2005b, 443–444). By so relaxing the constraints of public reason, Habermas hopes that believing and nonbelieving citizens can engage in a “cooperative search for truth” by “translating” moral and ethical concepts “out of the religious idioms into a universally accessible language” (Reference Habermas2005, 11).

I show that Habermas's “religious-course correction” of political liberalism fails to resolve (and indeed may exacerbate) the fundamental challenge posed to Rawlsian public reason by its religious critics. Habermas remains ambivalent as to whether the failure of secularization constitutes a mere temporary derailment or a permanent repudiation of the Enlightenment's broader project of advancing rationalistic political norms. Unrestrained modernization, which unleashes exploitative economic globalization and instrumental rationality, leads to societal disintegration, and to a “crumbling of citizens’ solidarity.” Although he turns to religion in search of the “moral intuitions” that can counteract these trends (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b; cf. Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001), Habermas maintains that we are not thereby compelled to rethink our understanding of the limits of secular (scientific) rationalism—which he continues to regard as the ultimate authority for adjudicating the dogmas of religious faith as well as the social debates to which believing citizens seek to contribute their views. Habermas therefore never considers the possibility that the persistence of publicly active religions may be a sign of the incapacity of secular reason to conclusively settle all fundamental moral debates that continue to transpire in modern liberal societies.

Although Habermas proposes his framework of “postmetaphysical thinking” as a more accommodating alternative to Rawls's conception of public reason, his understanding of the epistemic requirements of a “reasonable” religion reveals the theologically transformative presuppositions of liberalism. Habermas is simultaneously both more and less accommodating of religion than is Rawls. While Rawls's “freestanding” liberalism explicitly abstains from any connection to truth (and thus relinquishes the right to judge religion) (Rawls Reference Rawls2005a, xxii, 94, 135, 152, 171, 442, 481), Habermas acknowledges that religion is a depository of certain moral truths, awareness of which is not a matter of indifference for a liberal society. But this new inclusivity comes at the expense of the foundational neutrality of liberal theory. Unlike Rawls, Habermas insists that religious traditions must modernize, both by transcending their attachment to theological dogmas and by accepting science as the ultimate arbiter of truth (Habermas Reference Habermas2005, 16; Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b; cf. Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013). Liberalism, even in its postmetaphysical form, remains “transformative” (Macedo Reference Macedo1998) or foundationalist, since the epistemic requirements of modern rationalism and its scientific conception of truth require an abandonment of a key feature of Rawlsian neutrality.

By endorsing such a conception of a modernized religion, Habermas adopts a highly attenuated understanding of learning from religion. Like many other liberal theorists, he assumes that democracy benefits only to the extent that religious perspectives converge with (by being “assimilated” or “translated” into) our secular norms (March Reference March2013; Rawls Reference Rawls2005a, Reference Rawls2005b; cf. Gaus and Vallier Reference Gaus and Vallier2009; cf., Cooke Reference Cooke2006; Chambers Reference Chambers2010; Lafont Reference Lafont2009). In contrast, I show that “taking religion seriously” entails being open to its insights not only when they agree with the conclusions of secular reason, but even and especially when they challenge them. Because the truth claims of religion are interwoven with their own unique moral and theological vocabulary, a great deal of religion's insight (and motivational power) is “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm. This is especially the case with any traditional faith system that appeals to sources of truth (such as revelation, the historical and theological tradition of religion, and foundational moral assumptions about human nature) that go beyond modern natural science and democratic consensus. In particular, because traditional Christian teachings do not imagine the human person as an “unencumbered self,” but rather as a creature of God, they can serve as a corrective of the excessively individualistic assumptions about morality and politics that sometimes characterize liberal societies. Of course, religious believers need not be communitarians, and communitarians need not be theists. But the types of religious contributions from the Christian tradition that are most consequential for political liberalism lend themselves to communitarian claims of obligation and justice.

To sustain this hypothesis, I evaluate Habermas's claim that the Christian idea of divine creation of the human person in the image of God can be translated by secular reason into a rational and universal notion of egalitarian human rights. Although there are important areas of convergence between Christian (especially Catholic) and liberal rational notions of human dignity, I point to enduring tensions between these two perspectives that render the Habermasian and Rawlsian notion of “translation” unfeasible. This is helpfully illustrated by how Catholicism came to justify religious freedom in the 20th century. The Catholic conception of the human person as a “social being” endowed with responsibilities by and to the Creator played a particularly important role in the Second Vatican Council's convergence on religious liberty. But this convergence was carried out from within the Catholic tradition, and it resulted in a conception of religious freedom (and of human rights more generally) that differs from secular justifications that are based on individual autonomy. Accordingly, although it makes possible the coexistence of Christian and secular citizens within the same liberal democratic civic space, this partial convergence does not constitute a genuine “overlapping consensus,” and covers over deeper disagreements whose implications for moral debates are exhausted neither by “public reason” nor by scientific rationalism. While this explains the dissonance that certain traditional Christian ideas create in public debates in liberal societies, it also shows us how they can enhance the possibility of enlisting communitarian obligations of justice—a truth that Habermas senses, but whose implications for rationalism and for political liberalism he does not wish to accept.

A POST-SECULAR SOCIETY OR THE UNFINISHED PROJECT OF MODERNITY?

The first four decades of Habermas's intellectual development were animated by the Weberian assumption that modernization of the state (and the triumph of “modern structures of consciousness”) would lead to the religious “disenchantment” of the world. Accordingly, in The Theory of Communicative Action (widely regarded as his magnum opus), Habermas endorses the classical theory of secularization without hesitation: “the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by the ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus” (Reference Habermas1985, 77). Like his predecessors in the first generation of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno) (Mendieta Reference Mendieta and Fuller2014), the early Habermas expects this historical process of rationalization to reach an end-point, when the “spellbinding power” of religion will be “sublimated into the binding/bonding force” of argumentative rationality (Habermas Reference Habermas1985, 77; cf. Gordon Reference Gordon2013). Over the course of the next decade, however, Habermas's expectations about the prospects of secularization become partially chastened. In Postmetaphysical Thinking (Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992), Habermas begins to stress that religion is an existential necessity that is “indispensable in ordinary life for normalizing intercourse with the extraordinary,” and, accordingly, communicative reason must “coexist abstemiously” with religion, “neither supporting it nor combatting it” (Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, 51, 145; cf. Cooke Reference Cooke2006, 189; Harrington Reference Harrington2007).

Habermas (Reference Habermas2009, 59–62) presents this evolution in large part as a response to the failure of “the secularization hypothesis” to bear fruit. In his 2005 Holberg International Memorial Prize acceptance speech, Habermas (Reference Habermas2005, 10; cf. Reference Habermas2009, 60) notes that the “conventional wisdom of mainstream social science had assumed that modernization inevitably goes hand in hand with secularization in the sense of a diminishing influence of religious beliefs and practices on politics and society at large.” But this assumption, as some of the sociologists that Habermas (Reference Habermas2005, 11; cf. Berger Reference Berger1999) cites have been stressing in recent decades, is no longer tenable in light of the resurgence of public religion, at least when one looks beyond Western Europe (Berger Reference Berger1999; Casanova Reference Casanova1994; Habermas Reference Habermas2008a). While America's persistent religiosity “was long-regarded as the great exception to the secularizing trend” observable in Europe, Habermas has come to recognize that the U.S. “now seems to exemplify the norm” in terms of the resurgence of religion throughout the world, whereas secular Europe represents “the deviant path” (Habermas Reference Habermas2009, 60, and Reference Habermas2008a, 2; Berger Reference Berger1999).Footnote ¹ In an effort to help liberal theory catch up with this “post-secular” sociological reality, Habermas concludes that modernization must be decoupled form the “Enlightenment's assumption of a necessary decline of religion” as a substantive social and cultural force (Lima Reference Lima, Calhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, 57 and 61; cf. Habermas Reference Habermas2008a, 2; cf. Berger Reference Berger1999, 9–11).

This brief sketch prompts us to inquire whether Habermas's recognition of the post-secular situation requires a reassessment of modernity's underlying rationalist presuppositions. After all, as he himself admits, “[t]he fastest growing religious movements, such as the Pentecostals and the radical Muslims, can be most readily described as ‘fundamentalist.’ They combat the modern world or they withdraw from it. Their forms of worship combine spiritualism and adventism with rigid moral conceptions and literal adherence to holy scripture” (Habermas Reference Habermas2009, 61-61; cf. Norris and Inglehart 2004, 3–4; Berger Reference Berger1999). Fundamentalists, Habermas has claimed, “insist—even to the point of violence—on the universal binding character [. . .] of their doctrine” and thus reject the “epistemic situation of a pluralistic society” (Reference Habermas and Borradori2003a, 31; cf. Reference Habermas2002, 151). Although Habermas acknowledges that these religious movements both defy the classical theories of secularization and spiritually resist the theological and cultural trends being advanced by liberal rationalism, he continues to speak of “the unfinished dialectic of our own Western secularization process” (Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001) as if it were a historical necessity. In the remainder of this section, I show that the failure of secularization should point Habermas to deeper problems in modern rationalism, and thus to deeper objections to his project of religious modernization, than he recognizes.

At first glance, Habermas's recent writings on liberalism and religion appear to present precisely such a reevaluation of the supremacy of rationalism in the quarrel between faith and reason. In an essay originally published in 1991, Habermas already conceded that his earlier position betrayed an excessively “one-sided functionalist” account of religion because it failed to note that “even in traditional societies high religions do not function exclusively as legitimation for state domination” (Habermas, Reference Habermas2002, 79). More recently, Habermas (Reference Habermas2002, 108, 148–149) has claimed that “postmetaphysical” thought discloses what his youthful and hard-headed rationalism had concealed: “philosophy cannot provide a substitute for the consolation whereby religion invests unavoidable suffering and unrecompensed injustice, the contingencies of need, loneliness, sickness, and death, with new significance and teaches us to bear them.” From this more mature perspective, Habermas (Reference Habermas2006a; Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b; Reference Habermas2010b) sees that religion is an enduring source of social solidarity, indispensable for both individual psychological and spiritual well-being as well as for the civic health of democracy. Habermas (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 51) has come to recognize that religion is neither unnatural nor “simply irrational,” and, apparently, that it “will always have the power to communicate truth” (Chambers Reference Chambers2007, 219–220).

In spite of this impression, however, in all of these statements Habermas qualifies his recognition of the persistence (and the value) of religion with the hope that the project of secularization may yet be salvaged as an unfinished legacy of modern rationalism. Thus, as he develops the idea of “postmetaphysical philosophy” in the 1990s, Habermas begins highlighting the continuous process of rational appropriation of religious meaning in the modern world: “philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses” (Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, 51, emphasis added). Peter Gordon refers to this as Habermas's “chastened secularism,” one that is open to the possibility that the “linguistification of the sacred may never come to an end, and [that] democracy may forever need the instruction only religion can provide” (Gordon Reference Gordon2013, 196–197; cf. Gordon Reference Gordon2011). But it seems to me that the secular continuity that is implied in Habermas's ambivalent parenthetical question is both more intriguing and revealing: Habermas continues to hold out the hope that even if the “semantic potential” of “monotheistic traditions” is “not yet exhausted” (Reference Habermas2002, 71), nevertheless reason can eventually replace religious meaning. As he argued as recently as 2010, the continuing potency of religion “in no way precludes the possibility that this source, protected in the meantime by religious communities and often used toward politically questionable ends, will run dry one day” (Habermas Reference Habermas2010b, 5, emphasis added).Footnote ²

This seemingly unresolved ambivalence about religion's permanence is further complicated by Habermas's reassessment of the civic and moral effects of modern rationalism. Echoing contemporary communitarian and Tocquevillian critiques of liberalism (MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981; Sandel Reference Sandel1992, Reference Sandel1996), in his exchange with the then-Cardinal Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI) Habermas warns of the depressing prospect of “the transformation of the citizens of prosperous and peaceful liberal societies into isolated monads acting on the basis of their own self-interest” (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 35; cf. Waldron Reference Waldron2010b). He now grants that the secular state suffers from a “motivational weakness” (Reference Waldron2010a, 74): rational self-interest cannot alone guarantee that citizens “accept sacrifices that promote common interests,” and such self-sacrificial dispositions are often “nourished by springs that well forth spontaneously—springs that one may term ‘pre-political’” (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 30–31). Moreover, “[t]he sources of this solidarity,” Habermas warns, “can peter out as a result of a ‘derailed’ secularization of society as a whole” (ibid.). But in spite of these uncertainties about the civic consequences of secular modernization, Habermas explicitly distances himself from such critics of liberal rationalism as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss (ibid., 38–39). He does not wish “to push too far the question whether an ambivalent modern age will stabilize itself exclusively on the basis of the secular forces of a communicative reason,” and prefers to leave this as an “open, empirical question” (ibid., 38). Dismissively, Habermas claims that “we need not understand” the question of the limits of rationalism “in such a manner that it offers the educated defenders of religion an argument in support of their case” (ibid., 37).

As we are starting to see, Habermas has settled on a deeply conflicted position. He wishes simultaneously to concede to conservative and religious critics that secularization and rationalization entail a moral flattening and civic loss in liberalism, even while he brushes aside the possibility that these same critics may be right about the limits of rationalism (and about the permanence of religion) as well. But I think more hinges on this question than Habermas is willing to admit. After all, our assessment of the feasibility and the desirability of secularization has important implications not just for how deeply and for how long political liberalism should accommodate religion, but more importantly for what secular citizens should aim to learn by engaging religious believers in the first place. If Habermas is right, if the “discursive translation” of religious content is “not yet exhausted” and secularization is an “unfinished project,” then liberal societies should (in essence) continue the endeavor that began in the early modern Enlightenment: the submission of religious dogma and authority to (scientific) reason and the reinterpretation (or translation) of revealed theology into the language and norms of rationalism. On the other hand, if religious critics are correct that this secularizing project was always misguided and hubristic, because scientific rationalism is ill-equipped to reproduce the moral meaning supplied by religious traditions once it has jettisoned both revealed theology as well as its broader metaphysical “baggage,” then we have much greater reason to be cautious than Habermas seems to appreciate. This was the meaning of Ratzinger's rejoinder to Habermas that reason and faith should “restrict each other and remind each other” of their mutual “limits,” an approach that he emphasizes presupposes our willingness to “doubt the reliability of reason” at least in some areas of human life (Ratzinger Reference Ratzinger, Schuller and McNeil2006, 65).

Similar doubts have been raised by others who do not share Ratzinger's Catholicism, or even his religious orientation more generally. Writing in the wake of what he considered to be the 20th century's loss of confidence in modern scientific rationalism, Leo Strauss called for a recovery of an earlier (Socratic) version of rationalism that would be open to the challenge of revelation. For Strauss, this did not mean that political philosophy in our day and age could simply bypass modernity, nor did it mean a return to orthodoxy as a replacement of pluralism. But it did entail the willingness to interrogate what Strauss described as the “antitheological ire” of modern rationalism and to accept a more chastened view of modernity's ambition to ground politics and morality exclusively on rational foundations (Strauss Reference Strauss1988, 44; Strauss Reference Strauss1953). Can Habermas ultimately avoid confronting the difficulty to which Strauss's critique of modern rationalism points? Strauss is joined by communitarian (Sandel Reference Sandel1992), postmodern, and deliberative critics of liberalism (Garsten Reference Garsten2011), who have all converged on the view that the contemporary discontents that beset liberalism cannot be resolved simply by doubling-down on familiar forms of rationality in politics (cf., Zerilli Reference Zerilli2012a). For it is precisely the dissatisfaction with exclusive norms of discursive rationality that these critics point to as the source of religious resentment, theological insularity, and political disenchantment among some citizens in liberal societies (Stout Reference Stout2004; Sandel Reference Sandel1996; Reference Sandel2009; Talisse Reference Talisse2009; Sikka Reference Sikka2016; Garsten Reference Garsten2006; cf. March Reference March2013). All of these thinkers call for a version of what Michael Sandel describes as “a politics of moral engagement” (Reference Sandel2009) that welcomes substantive and even heated disagreement as a transformative force in democratic deliberation.

Indeed, this openness to the morally transformative possibility of the encounter between reason and religion should be a necessary consequence of Habermas's own life-long commitment to the ideal of deliberation. Signs of this are apparent in Habermas's concession to communitarian critics that Enlightenment rationality “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action” (Reference Habermas2010a, 74; cf. Fish Reference Fish2010). This turns out to be a significant deficiency of modern rationalism, since reason “decoupled from worldviews” does not have “sufficient strength to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven” (Reference Habermas2010a, 19). In light of this partial disenchantment with reason, and with its “depoliticization of citizens” (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b), it is not surprising that Habermas has turned to religion. Many (and often traditional) religious perspectives emphasize communitarian and moral obligations and are therefore critical of the excessive trust in instrumental rationality and individual self-interest that characterizes modernity and that has recently worried Habermas (Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001). Accordingly, Habermas's own reflections, I will show below, should lead him to be more open to types of moral reasoning and conceptions of truth that are not tied exclusively to scientific rationality.

In the remainder of this article, I turn to Habermas's conceptions of “postmetaphysical thinking” and “cooperative translation,” the epistemic and discursive frameworks he proposes to sustain mutual learning between secular and religious citizens, and evaluate whether they can constructively tap into the motivational power and accommodate the moral insights of religion in a post-secular society.

EPISTEMIC REQUIREMENTS OF POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING AND THE MODERNIZATION OF RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS

According to Habermas, the persistence of religion demands nothing less than a cultural and intellectual reorientation among Westerner liberals. “The secular awareness that we live in a post-secular world,” Habermas argues, “is reflected philosophically in the form of post-metaphysical thought” (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006a, 16). Unlike the Enlightenment and Rawlsian approaches, which were (respectively) either skeptical of or indifferent to religion, post-metaphysical thought aims at mutual accommodation and engaged learning between faith and reason. Postmetaphysical thought rejects “a narrow scientistic concept of reason and the exclusion of religious doctrines from the genealogy of reason” (Reference Habermas2006a, 16); it is simultaneously “prepared to learn from religion,” while “remain[ing] agnostic in the process” (Reference Habermas2006a, 17). This has important implications for Habermas's understanding of how democratic citizens should engage each other in the public forum. Acknowledging the criticism that Rawlsian public reason and its duty of self-restraint imposes “asymmetrical” “cognitive burdens” on religious citizens (Habermas Reference Habermas2006a, 7, 11–12; cf. Reference Habermas2005, 14–15; cf. Weithman Reference Weithman2002; Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff and Weithman1997), Habermas urges secular citizens to accept “the limits of secular reason” (Reference Habermas2006a, 15) and “to determine the relation between faith and knowledge in a self-critical manner” (Reference Habermas and Cronin2008d, 264; cf. Reference Habermas2006a, 15; Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001, 27). In a clear attempt to expand the Rawlsian concept of “reasonableness,” Habermas concludes that “secular citizens must grasp their conflict with religious opinions as a reasonably expected disagreement” (Reference Habermas and Cronin2008c, 264) that cannot be wished away by an appeal to a discursive consensus rooted in public reason.

There is much to admire in Habermas's attempt to remind secular liberals of the need and value of religious contributions. But in trying to alleviate the asymmetric burdens of Rawlsian liberalism, Habermas ends up imposing a set of “epistemic burdens” of his own on religious citizens. Where Rawls refused to make his political liberalism dependent on any epistemic foundations (Rawlsian “reasonableness” “is not an epistemological idea” [Reference Rawls2005a, 48; cf. 54–58, 150]), Habermas makes it clear that his project of postmetaphysical thinking requires a comprehensive “modernization of religious consciousness.” Religious believers (and especially “traditional communities of faith”) must acquire “self-reflective” “epistemic attitudes” necessitated by the emergence of pluralism, natural sciences and secular law and morality (Habermas Reference Habermas2006a, 13–14, 18). By reducing the category of “religion” to either the fundamentalist or the modernized variety, Habermas simplifies the religious-secular divided, and neglects traditional religious perspectives (such as post-Vatican II Catholicism) that have embraced religious freedom without relinquishing their broader theological and revealed traditions. Thus, Habermas’ theory of modernization has a built-in bias in favor of liberalized, and at the expense of traditional, religious outlooks. This Habermasian instinct to liberalize religion not only fails to resolve the difficulties that Habermas and other critics identified in Rawls, but also yields a concept of “learning” that has trouble accounting for (and accommodating) the transformative power of religious interventions in public debate.

Habermas distinguishes his post-secular society from the more radical version of secularism that he associates with laicism and the French Revolution (Reference Habermas2006a, 3, 15; Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 23–24). A post-secular society will “not transform the requisite institutional separation of religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith” (Reference Habermas2006a, 9; Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 25–26). This means that unbelieving citizens in post-secular societies should not think of religious traditions (and the citizens of faith who subscribe to them) as “archaic relics of premodern societies,” for doing so means concluding that “religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist” (Reference Habermas2006a, 15). Taking “religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously,” as Habermas repeatedly insists, means being willing “not to deny from the outset any possible cognitive substance” that it has to offer (ibid.; Reference Habermas2005; Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b). Furthermore, a “secularist attitude” that denies the cognitive value of religion short-circuits the possibility of learning: it forecloses the willingness “to help assess” religious contributions “for a substance that can possibly be expressed in a secular language and justified by secular arguments” (Reference Habermas2006a, 15). In Habermas's estimation, only if they accept these two conditions can unbelieving citizens participate in (and thus share the burden of) the “cooperative task of translation” that Habermas hopes can take place in “the preparliamentarian domain” of political society (ibid., 10).

At least on the surface, Habermas appears to buck a powerful trend in liberal theory, and his recent writings on religion have engendered their share of critical reactions from liberals. While generally friendly to Habermas, Christian Lafont is among a number of critics who holds that the cognitive possibility that some religious reasons may contain truths does not generate any genuinely new civic obligations among nonbelieving citizens. The obligation “to take seriously religious views” should not entail being “cognitively [open] to the possible truth of creationism, the perversity of homosexuality, or any other religious views.” (Lafont Reference Lafont2009, 137, 141–142). This criticism is reflective of a broader trend in liberal theory that resists ceding to religion any unique cognitive substance, either out of suspicion of authoritarianism or out of insistence that secular reason is self-sufficient (Lafont Reference Lafont2007; cf. Leiter Reference Leiter2012, March Reference March2013; Cf. Dworkin Reference Dworkin2013). Going even further than Lafont, another critic (Paul d'Arcais) echoes Richard Rorty by pointedly asking, “Why in the world should we learn to adopt – to make our own – extremely anti-democratic perspectives?” (d'Arcais Reference d'Arcais2009) As Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out (Waldron Reference Waldron2012, 849; cf. Sikka Reference Sikka2016, 100), many liberal theorists today are quick to associate religiously based political viewpoints with “theocratic ambition” and political authoritarianism because of their apparent dogmatic intransigence and epistemological insularity (Rorty Reference Rorty1999; cf. Bernstein Reference Bernstein, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013 and Lima Reference Lima, Calhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013).

Paradoxically, in spite of his call for greater learning from religion, Habermas has indicated that his understanding of religious beliefs overlaps in important respects with these interpretations. He has argued, for instance, that “religiously rooted existential convictions, by dint of their if necessary rationally justified reference to the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths, evade that kind of unreserved discursive examinations to which other ethical orientations and world views i.e., secular ‘conceptions of the good,’ are exposed” (Reference Habermas2006a, 9; cf. Reference Habermas2008b, 129; Reference Habermas2002, 150–151). Habermas believes that religious convictions are uniquely insulated from discursive rationality due to their dogmatic core as revealed truth claims. As he argues elsewhere, “[o]nly conflicting religious beliefs teach us a fortiori that a justified consensus cannot be reached,” and accordingly they are disqualified from inclusion in consensus-oriented political engagement (Habermas Reference Habermas2006a, 22n32; cf. Cooke Reference Cooke, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, 249–254). It is clear from these words that Habermas glides over the possibility that a religion could be constituted by a discursive tradition (as most religions are), one in which multiple voices (including reason, revealed theology, and practical moral reflection) are involved, and one which could simultaneously converge and diverge from secular reasoning without simply becoming indistinguishable from it.

On the other hand, if one accepts Habermas's account of religion as being entirely insulated from reason, it is easier to understand why he insists that religious traditions must first undergo a “modernization of religious consciousness” that can make them compatible with democratic life (Habermas Reference Habermas2005; Reference Habermas2006a). According to Habermas, religious believers that have modernized their faith traditions meet three conditions: (i) they adopt a “self-reflective” attitude towards “competing doctrines of salvation” (Reference Habermas2005, 14; cf. Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 26–27), i.e., they accept religious pluralism as an incontrovertible fact of human nature; (ii) they respect “the independence of secular from sacred knowledge and the institutionalized monopoly of modern scientific experts” as the arbiter of truth (over and against, as we will see, religious dogma) (ibid.); and, finally, (iii) modernized “religious citizens [. . .] develop an epistemic stance toward the priority that secular reasons enjoy in the political arena” (ibid.), i.e., they embrace a strong version of separation of church and state and the neutrality of the political domain. Needless to say, if religious traditions could embrace all of these attitudes without losing their essence, then the objections that Lafont, d'Arcais, and many other liberals raise would automatically be addressed. Indeed, for that very reason, Enlightenment thinkers as far back as John Locke and Immanuel Kant had tried to develop precisely these types of “rationalized” (and liberalized and tolerant) forms of Christianity,Footnote ³ and Habermas appears to be calling for a return to this earlier effort to harmonize faith and scientific rationalism.

Let us focus in particular on the second criterion—Habermas's insistence that religious traditions bow to scientific rationalism. Presumably, such a “religion of reason” (to use the phrase employed by early Enlightenment rationalists) will no longer be dependent on revealed dogma for its conception of truth, at least not in any crucial area that may contradict the authority of scientific rationalism. But that would be highly paradoxical, both because this requirement of a modernized religion would seem to be in tension with political liberalism's alleged neutrality, and because it would mean that whatever truth religion could teach us in a post-secular society would simply coincide with the pronouncements of scientific rationalism. The latter possibility would imply that religion is superfluous as a source of truth or moral insight about human nature, and would defeat from the outset whatever Habermas hoped liberal societies could learn by becoming more open to religion. On the other hand, it may be the case that this sort of “transformative appropriation” (as Habermas eventually labels this process [Reference Habermas, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, 353]) benefits the philosopher and the secular liberal citizen (insofar as a rationalized religion may be not only more moderate in politics, but more willing to simply endorse a liberal morality). But would it not also risk draining religion of the very strength and meaning of the “moral intuitions” that Habermas thinks can be beneficial to democracy?

There are indeed important signs that Habermas's call for this religious modernization transcends the foundational neutrality of Rawlsian liberalism. Thus, when he takes up the second condition of religious modernization (“the authority of modern science”), Habermas claims that religious believers must “conceive the relationship of dogmatic and secular beliefs in such a way that the autonomous progress in secular knowledge cannot come to contradict their faith” (Reference Habermas2006a, 15, emphasis added). “This arduous work of hermeneutic self-reflection,” Habermas continues, “must be undertaken from within religious traditions,” and requires the “reconstruction of sacred truths” (ibid.). In this picture, faith and reason must no longer be regarded as two alternative (although ultimately complementary and mutually interdependent) paths to truth about human nature (as had been the case, for instance, in the Christian Thomistic tradition). Instead, Habermas has reconceptualized them as two different languages that express essentially the same truths—truths which are ultimately determined by the “discursive power” or the hegemony of science. As I show in the next section, although a commitment to pluralism and tolerance places considerable demands on believing citizens, it does not necessarily privilege the type of secular (or scientific) reasoning that Habermas has in mind. In particular, religious institutions and believers can embrace religious freedom from within their own theological traditions (as happened with Catholicism) without necessarily relinquishing the insights of either revelation or tradition (including natural law). Accordingly, a religion need not be fundamentalist or dogmatic simply by virtue of its refusal to cede the entire cognitive field to modern natural science and its ethic of rational skepticism (Wolterstorff Reference Wolterstorff, Callhoun, Mendieta and VanAntwerpen2013, 102).

Thus, although Habermas is aware of the idea of “multiple modernities,” ultimately he is unwilling to extend the implications of this idea to his account of the supremacy of scientific rationalism over religiously informed and tradition-bound forms of reasoning in modernity (cf. Casanova Reference Casanova1994; Rosati and Stoeckl Reference Rosati and Stoeckl2012). As Habermas himself indicates, the acceptance by religious traditions of science as an arbiter of truth is intended not merely for intellectual and theological purposes, but also because it delivers concrete political benefits from the perspective of political liberalism. A religion that accepts reason as the judge of its theological dogma will also be more likely to accept reason as the ultimate authority in politics and morality. Thus, the second criterion of religious modernization requires believers to “convincingly connect the egalitarian individualism and universalism of modern law and morality with the premises of their comprehensive doctrines” (Reference Habermas2006a, 14). For Habermas, a modernized religious tradition, therefore, bows to rationalism not just in theology, but even and especially in morality and politics: a modernized religion is a religion that has democratized itself and accepted a liberal and individualistic morality. By leaving the spectrum of nonliberal religious actors undifferentiated and unexplored, such an approach does not leave any constructive room for traditional (as well as non-Western) religious contributions which draw upon perspectives that are critical of liberal moral assumptions.

This is especially problematic for Habermas because the conflict between tradition and liberalism is endemic to modern societies, and is often reflected in religious objections to the view that scientific rationalism can arbitrate all moral questions. Concrete policy debates about abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, to name just a few examples, reveal deep divergences between the views of religious and secular citizens. As Habermas himself observes, “in the controversy [. . .] about the way to deal with human embryos, many voices still evoke [. . ..] Genesis 1:27,” and its traditional teaching on divine creation of the human person in the image of God (Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001; cf. Reference Habermas2003b). Similarly, the debate over abortion is animated by the enduring disagreement in moral perspectives informed by revelation and natural science on whether or not a fetus qualifies as a human life. Earlier in his career, Habermas claimed that “[a]t this stage of the debate, both sides in this dispute appear to have good, perhaps even equally good, arguments” (1993a, 59). Indeed, it may happen, Habermas averred, that the question of abortion “cannot be resolved from the moral point of view at all,” because “descriptions of the problem of abortion are always inextricably interwoven” with competing “tradition[s]” and “ideals of life” (ibid.). Yet shortly after making this claim, Habermas attempts to evade the difficulty this poses to the possibility of rational consensus by claiming that “in the long run” this question “could be decided [. . .] on the basis of good reasons” acceptable to all, and that, at least in the meantime, liberal societies can occupy themselves with the less controversial task of “legitimate ordering of coexistent forms of life” (ibid.).Footnote ⁴

Clearly, if or insofar as Habermas is willing to accept the stand-off between the pro-life and pro-choice sides of the debate, he can do so only by remaining open to conceptions of truth and moral meaning that are not exhausted by scientific rationality. In other words, accepting such a stand-off presupposes an ability to ask whether or not, in Habermas's words, “modern science [is] a practice that is completely understandable in its own terms, establishing the measure of all truths and falsehoods?” (Reference Habermas2006a, 20). But if this is a question that Habermas is still willing to entertain, then the most pressing task facing post-secular societies is not so much the transformation of religious traditions in light of scientific rationalism, but rather open-ended engagement with those traditions and with their perspectives.

Given what we have seen, it is unclear to me that Habermas will be able to sustain such an open-ended engagement with religion—even with a nonfundamentalist religion that has undergone some degree of modernization. As I showed in this section, postmetaphysical philosophy, short of remaining “agnostic” towards religion and its theological tradition, presupposes a particular (and contestable) conception of truth, viz., modern scientific rationalism and secular morality, around which faith and reason should seek to build a consensus. Because such a morality demands not just acceptance of pluralism, but also resignation to “the individualizing and rationalizing pressure exerted [. . .] on traditional ways of life,” it leaves little to no room for traditions that do not share all of these values. Such an account of modernization will have reverberating implications for Habermas's understanding of how liberal societies should “learn” from religious traditions. The more we are confident that we are in possession of truth (or that natural science is the exclusive and ultimate arbiter of truth), the more we will think of learning as translation from religion, i.e. as the affirmation (as opposed to the transformation) of our preconceived social and moral conceptions. In the last section of this article, I turn to this consensus-oriented conception of learning that underwrites Habermas's attempt to translate or appropriate religious ideas, and then evaluate it in light of a competing understanding of learning that emphasizes the mutually transformative power of faith and reason.

HABERMAS'S PROJECT OF DISCURSIVE TRANSLATION OF RELIGION AND THE EXAMPLE OF CREATION OF THE HUMAN PERSON “IN THE IMAGE OF GOD”

Habermas's injunction that religious traditions need to “modernize” is based on his assumption that believing citizens are subject to more demanding metaphysical encumbrances, rooted in revelation and its comprehensive vision of morality and justice, than are their secular counterparts. Habermas contrasts the religious believer with “[t]he secularized citizen traveling with light metaphysical baggage,” i.e., a citizen “who can accept a morally ‘free-standing’ justification of democracy and human rights” (Reference Habermas and Cronin2008c, 309). Echoing Rawls's freestanding liberalism, Habermas argues that for a secular citizen, “the ‘right’ can without difficulty be accorded priority over the ‘good’’’ (Ibid; cf. Rawls Reference Rawls2005a, Lecture V).Footnote ⁵ In Habermas's (admittedly disputable) reading, secular citizens are not committed to a controversial ‘world-view’ (which they regard as universally true) or to a notion of a “correct life” (Reference Habermas and Cronin2008c, 309) that shapes all their public positions. Accordingly, they can co-exist with deep pluralism with greater ease than their religious counterparts: for the secular citizen, “different forms of life only embody different value orientations. And different values are not mutually exclusive like different truths” (ibid.). By contrast, “for the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right,” precisely because the believer draws his or her political and civic self-understanding from beliefs that claim universal validity but are not shared by other citizens. The contrast that Habermas wants to establish between these two outlooks is crystalized when he distinguishes the inflexible “dogmas” and “certainties of faith” from “fallible beliefs of a secular nature.” (Reference Habermas and Cronin2008, 263-264).

In this section, I first challenge the liberal association of religious contributions with dogmatic intransigence and deliberative inaccessibility. I then empirically test Habermas's proposal that religious conceptions can be translated into secular language. Habermas points to the Christian doctrine of the creation of the human person in the image of God as an illustration of how an effective translation may work: secular reason can preserve the moral intuitions of Christian egalitarianism by separating them from their theological foundations and repurposing them into the foundation of a universally accessible conception of human rights. Although this is an appealing example that seems to vindicate the possibility of an overlapping consensus, the attempt to appropriate the idea of the creation of humankind in the image of God in the service of human rights blurs crucial differences between two distinct traditions of thinking about human dignity. I show this through a case study that on the surface suggests considerable convergence between Christian and modern liberal traditions: the Catholic embrace of religious freedom with the Second Vatican Council. The Catholic understanding of human dignity produces a fundamentally different conception of religious freedom than when that right is justified on the basis either of neutrality or of secular conceptions of individual autonomy. The distinctive contribution of religious perspectives, at least in their traditional Christian form, is that they reconceptualize liberal rights as expressions of moral duties to community, humanity, and the created order which transcend the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy.

In both Habermasian as well as Rawlsian theory more broadly, the requirement that religious contributions should be “translated” into public reason is intended to bridge the epistemological gulf between religious and secular citizens by providing a shareable language of deliberation that is not entangled with contestable foundations. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, much like Rawls, Habermas subscribes to an understanding of reasoning that resolves “certain moral-political issues” in a manner that “can legitimately satisfy any honest, unconfused thinker” (Taylor Reference Taylor, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 53). Thus, in a dialogue with Taylor, Habermas argues that “secular reasons do not expand the perspective of one's own community, but push for mutual perspective taking so that different communities can develop a more inclusive perspective by transcending their own universe of discourse” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 66, emphasis added). Habermas claims that “by using any kind of religious reasons, you are implicitly appealing to membership in a corresponding religious community,” which means that your arguments can be understood “[o]nly if one is a member [. . .of that. . .] particular religious tradition” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 61). Mutual learning, on the other hand, can only take place when “all parties appeal to the common reference point of a possible consensus,” and hence the insistence on shared reasons of deliberation as a criterion of legitimacy (Habermas Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, 138). It should be noted here that this framework of convergence through “translation” entails a very narrow conception of “learning.” It assumes that conversations across traditions that disagree about both social norms and even methods of reasoning are inherently futile.

There are a number of reasons why the seemingly simplistic dichotomy that Habermas sets up between religious and secular forms of reasoning does not sustain itself in practice. To begin with, liberalism's promise of a paradigm of public reasoning free from controversial moral entanglements has proved elusive, since the very epistemic assumptions that liberals make about “reason” itself presuppose a contestable conception of the human person (Sikka Reference Sikka2016; Sandel Reference Sandel1992). Furthermore, most religious interventions in public debate do not simply appeal to the incontrovertible authority of revelation or the church to justify coercive measures in democracy. Instead, as Waldron points out, when religiously informed citizens “draw on the teachings of their church,” they tend to appeal to it “as theoretical authority,” “that is, as a heritage of deep thinking about the matter that can inform their own thinking and their own conclusions” when they engage others in debate (Waldron Reference Waldron2012, 853; cf. March Reference March2013). Similarly, Simone Chambers has argued that even “[q]uoting scripture, for example, need not be an appeal to unquestioned authority but an opening move in a discussion,” one that “can be challenged with alternative interpretations,” even of the scripture in question (Chambers Reference Chambers2010, 19; cf. Cooke Reference Cooke2006, Reference Cooke2007, Reference Cooke2011). In other words, scripture never simply interprets itself, and neither do “liberal” assumptions. Thus, a religiously informed engagement, one which draws on tradition in order to invite debate and discussion with competing viewpoints, is clearly far from a “conversation-stopper” (Rorty Reference Rorty1999), and indeed constitutes its own form of reasoning. The vast majority of religious contributions (both contemporary as well as historic) in American civic life resemble the version depicted by Waldron more than they do the one presented by Rawls, Habermas, and Rorty.

If many religious arguments are not as inaccessible as some liberal critics claim, what then differentiates them from both secular and public reasons and what is their unique deliberative contribution? The argument proposed here is that religious perspectives, at least in their traditional Christian form, present a distinctive understanding of humanity's role in the created order, which issues in a richer and more demanding conception of justice than the one espoused by secular and nonfoundational forms of public reason. Unlike the modern natural rights tradition, which begins with the priority of an individual's natural liberty in the state of nature, traditional Christianity circumscribes human autonomy with responsibilities that derive from the human person's creaturely nature. As a result, traditional Christian perspectives can help us reimagine existing moral debates and reconsider our settled answer—especially in a society that is already constitutionally secular and one that prioritizes individualism and rationality in politics and morality. In particular, Weithman and Waldron stress that Catholic and Evangelical contributions make the foundation of their moral thinking “the premise that human beings have inviolable dignity because they are made in God's image” (Weithman Reference Weithman2002, 51; cf. Waldron Reference Waldron2012, 855). This has significant political and moral consequences for both of these faith traditions. Thus, the National Association of Evangelicals proclaims, “We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image,” and goes on to emphasize the “responsibilities,” i.e. duties, of that “mandate” for “different institutions, including governments, families, churches, schools, businesses, and labor unions.” Similarly, in affirming the link between “the dignity of the human person and his social nature,” the Catholic Church emphasizes “the reciprocal duties” that human beings owe to one another.

To be sure, there are important examples of Christianity's endorsement of parts of the liberal political order, especially in the 20th century, that underwrites the peaceful coexistence of secular and Christian citizens in democracy. Whether in the case of the Civil Rights movement, women's suffrage, or abolitionism, American Protestantism has historically been an impetus for liberal social reforms and advances in liberty and equality. Beginning with the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church embraced religious freedom, endorsed democracy, and promulgated a qualified teaching of human rights. Moreover, as Andrew March, Jeremy Waldron, and others have pointed out, contemporary Catholic and Evangelical social justice teachings (especially on issues such as poverty, environmentalism, and torture) may helpfully overlap with certain liberal policy prescriptions (March Reference March2013; Waldron Reference Waldron1993; Reference Waldron2012). Although both friends and critics of liberal public reason appeal to these examples as evidence that religious ideas “express judgments and intuitions whose validity already does not rest on theological premises” (Sikka Reference Sikka2016; March Reference March2013; Gutmann Reference Gutmann1999), and thus echo Habermas's approach to religion, something more complicated is actually going on here: to the extent these religious perspectives converge with certain liberal commitments to equality and individual rights, these commitments are refracted and intensified through a prior communitarian prism of moral obligations. As David Hollenbach has observed about post-Vatican II Catholicism, “Catholic teaching on human rights today presupposes a reconstruction of the classical liberal understanding of what these rights are,” a reconstruction that takes a communitarian emphasis because it is rooted in “the traditional natural-law conviction that the human person is an essentially social being” (Hollenbach Reference Hollenbach, Douglas and Hollenbach1994, 128). This characterization can be applied to important areas of contemporary Evangelical social engagement as well.

If this description of contemporary Christianity is correct, then any attempt at translation of its “moral insights” poses the risk of mischaracterizing their true meaning, and thus a great deal may be “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm. We need a more precise conception of learning from religion that merely unidirectional translation, for the purpose of religious contributions may be to challenge, correct, or enlarge, rather than simply endorse, the prevailing individualistic and secular norms of a liberal society. In all of his recent writings Habermas insists that when a liberal society learns from religion, it succeeds at “appropriating” its moral intuitions in “secular language” in such a way that they no longer depend on the theological and moral bedrock provided by revelation. Thus Habermas writes that “translation” ensures the “wider accessibility” and “appeal of reasons” “which are secular in the sense of transcending the semantic domains of a particular religious community” (Habermas Reference Habermas, Mendieta and Vanantwerpen2011, 114). While I do not believe that the “moral intuitions” of religion traditions are reducible exclusively to the revealed theological dogmas of those traditions, I maintain that the Habermasian approach misses the fact that Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism are working with divergent conceptions of human dignity. Whatever partial overlaps may emerge between these two traditions when they participate in the shared civic space of liberal democracy, they cover over deeper and enduring dissonances that continue to shape the way believing and unbelieving citizens think about moral questions.

Let me illustrate this point by evaluating Habermas's invocation of divine creation of the human person “in the image of God” as an example of a successful translation of religious concepts into secular reason (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 45; cf. Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001). In his debate with Ratzinger, Habermas invokes divine creation as an example of “the assimilation by philosophy of genuinely Christian ideas” (Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 44), one which provides the foundation of individual human rights:

Here Habermas explains that in order to be effective, such translation must free “the cognitive content” of religion, so that it becomes “decoupled from the ratcheting effect of truth of revelation.” To be a “salvaging” translation, however, philosophy must do so “without emptying [the religious symbols] through a process of deflation and exhaustion.” Crucially, Habermas explains that this means preserving the “inspirational power” and the “intuitions of transgression and salvation” that religious symbols contain, and not just their cognitive meaning (Habermas Reference Habermas, Schuller and McNeil2006b, 44–45). This enigmatic meaning of translation becomes clearer when Habermas's brings up Genesis 1:27 in the context of genetic engineering: the “creatural nature of the image expresses an intuition which [. . .] may even speak to those who are tone-deaf to religious connotations,” by reminding them that human beings (including in their embryonic form) possess inviolable dignity with which no other “human being [may] intervene” (Habermas Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001). As Habermas has repeatedly argued, modern philosophy “has long since appropriated biblical motifs,” and the “modern concept of the individual person [. . .] borrow[s] [its] connotations of uniqueness, irreplaceability, and inwardness from the biblical notion of a life for which everybody is responsible before God” (cf. Reference Habermas2006a, 150–151).Footnote ⁶ But to what extent is this view of “appropriation” of religious meaning coherent? Would this not imply that liberalism and its idea of universal rights operates on the basis of borrowed theological capital which it inherits from its Christian past but which secular reason is unable to replenish on its own (cf. Mendieta Reference Mendieta2005, 249–250)?

One way out of this difficulty is to realize that Habermas himself admits that what secular reason accomplishes is not so much a translation, but rather a transformation of the traditional theistic egalitarianism of Christianity. “With his conception of autonomy,” Habermas admits, “Kant certainly destroyed the traditional conception of being ‘a child of God’” (Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001; cf. Reference Habermas2008b, 211–216). Thus, Habermas acknowledges that “[s]omething was lost when sin became guilt. The desire for forgiveness is, after all, still closely connected with the unsentimental wish to undo other injuries as well” (Reference Habermas and Mendieta2001). In fact, “the lost hope of resurrection has left behind a palpable emptiness,” since it leaves us “unsettled by the irreversibility of any suffering that has been caused” by human beings and remains “beyond any measure of restitution within the power of man” (ibid.). Even Habermas senses that what is particularly difficult to preserve through translation into secular reason is precisely the communitarian dimension of obligation to humanity and to the Creator that is imposed by a theistic conception of the human person as created in the image of God. This is an important admission by Habermas that translation (at least the way most liberal theorists have conceptualized it) is not a neutral process, and it explains the enduring dissonance between religious and secular perspectives that characterizes contemporary liberal societies (cf. Reference Habermas2008b, 240–241).

Although the Dignitatis Humanae (the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom) does not mention the doctrine of creation in the “image of God” explicitly, it presupposes a comprehensive view of humanity's relationship to the created order.Footnote ⁷ John Courtney Murray later explained that as the only Vatican II document “formally addressed to the whole world—Christian and non- Christian, religious and atheist”—it “first considers religious freedom in light of reason” (Murray Reference Murray and Abbott1966). However, this argument of reason rests on a conception of human dignity that is much less subjective than Habermas’s liberal notion of equality of rights. For example, in the Gaudium et Spes, which lays out the Second Vatican's teaching on dignity, the Council claims that man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for itself,” and “[t]he root reason for human dignity lies in man's communion with God.” The Dignitatis Humanea, in turn, proclaims that “religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.” The idea of religious freedom that emerges from this line of reflection differs crucially in meaning, purpose and scope from secular conceptions of that human right. The Council grounds religious freedom not in indifference to religious truth, nor in skepticism about the possibility of discovering it, but rather in the explicit affirmation of the fact that “all” human beings are “impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.” This view of humanity's religious nature provides a particularly strong basis for religious freedom understood as immunity from “external coercion:” “the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective attitude of the individual but in his very nature,” and “this right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth.”

There are significant civic implications to this conception of religious freedom. Because this view of religious freedom is oriented towards a transcendent standard of truth and a supreme deity, the Council proclaims that the “religious acts” of human beings “transcend by their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs.” Human beings are obligated not only to seek, but also to “adhere to the truth, once it is known,” and indeed “to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth.” Although this means that the state is incompetent in theology, it does not lead to official government indifference to or even neutrality with respect to religion in general: the state “ought [. . .] to take account of the religious life of the citizenry and show it favor.” Furthermore, the Council understands this freedom to have a distinctly communitarian dimension, since “[r]eligious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.” As Vincent Philip Muñoz and Michael McConnell have argued (in different ways), in the area of constitutional law this conception of religious freedom leads to the view that religion is beyond the reach of the state—a position that culminates either in presumptive constitutional invalidation of any law that substantially burdens religious practice (Muñoz Reference Muñoz2016), or in judicially and legislatively enforced exemptions from such a law (McConnell Reference McConnell1990; Reference McConnell1992).

Thus, even here where one would expect a strong ground for principled agreement and overlap between the Christian and liberal traditions, the Second Vatican's convergence on religious liberty from within the Catholic tradition does not fit Habermas's model of “translation” of religious ideas into shareable secular or neutral reasons. We see this as soon as we consider the implications for religious freedom when the idea of human dignity rooted in divine creation of the human person is reinterpreted in the putatively “public” (or at least nonreligious) terms of individual autonomy. In both political theory and constitutional law, the strategy of grounding religious freedom on human autonomy (and, more generally, human rights on self-determination) is intended to prioritize an abstract right independently from any controversial conceptions of the good, in order to maximize both the possibility of consensus and the breadth of protection afforded by the right. Often, the underlying transformation in the meaning of human dignity that this shift reflects is expressed through the substitution of “freedom of conscience” for “religious liberty.” In his Religion Without God, Ronald Dworkin recommends “abandoning the idea of a special right to religious freedom with its high hurdle of protection” in favor of “only the more general right of ethical independence” (Reference Dworkin2013, 131–132). Similarly, in their Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor (Reference Maclure and Taylor2011) propose to define “freedom of conscience” as an individual's “right to choose his or her own conception of what a successful life is” (Maclure and Taylor Reference Maclure and Taylor2011, 71), within which they include “different philosophical conceptions that stand as the secular equivalents of religions” (Ibid., 13). While the ultimate outcome of this approach is supposed to be neutrality between “religion and nonreligion,” in practice it amounts to constitutionally balancing (i.e., subordinating) religious rights against compelling state interests (Muñoz Reference Muñoz2016), and, more broadly, to the cultural prioritization of liberal individualism as a comprehensive good.

The myriad political and constitutional implications of this transformation are beyond the scope of this article. What is most important for my argument is that it demonstrates that the two sides in this debate are in fact operating with competing conceptions of human dignity and this makes sustaining an “overlapping consensus” between them about the meaning of religious freedom difficult, especially as the two sides increasingly diverge and clash on cultural issues that intersect with religious practices and beliefs. This also demonstrates why Habermas's broader attempt to learn from religion by appropriating its insights into shareable norms is incomplete both philosophically and practically: foundations matter, and religious foundations will not leave our understanding of human rights unchanged, even when they converge with the core liberal individualistic right of religious freedom. The Catholic interpretation of religious freedom is oriented towards the divine, and in asserting that the genuine purpose of that freedom is the quest for religious truth, it affirms the goodness (and priority) of religion as such. It therefore places certain responsibilities on the exercise of that right. The justification of freedom of conscience on the basis of autonomy, on the other hand, shifts the emphasis to an individual's quest for meaning, expression, or self-fulfillment, one that (as Muñoz (Reference Muñoz2016) points out) “may or may not involve worship, religion, or a sense of the divine.” Although partial overlaps between these religious and secular approaches are both possible and necessary for the civic stability of a liberal society, they are likely to cover over deeper substantive disagreements about how that society should prioritize and protect rights, especially when they come into conflict with each other.