Habermas and Religion

Abstract

At 86, Jürgen Habermas remains one of the most influential living social philosophers in the world. Since the 9/11 attacks, he has focused on the problem of religion in the public sphere and helped to popularize the term ‘post‐secularism’. Despite this recent shift in his work, religion has always been a theme in his complex critical theory. In this paper, I trace the ways in which Habermas has situated religion over the span of his career, including significant shifts, and the ways in which his theory has been taken up by others. In conclusion, I point toward some directions for future engagement with his work in the study of religions.

Habermas, Islam, and theorizing the “Other”

“…One task for philosophy, then, is to trace such connections to better understand the relationship between them. At this stage in the development of his work, Habermas does not view religious concepts as providing sources of meaning and motivation for society writ large , but only for the lifeworlds of particular communities that must find a way to align their particular worldviews with postmetaphysical (secular) reason (Sheedy, 2016).…”

“…the demographics of church affiliation) versus the more normative political act of making decisions and ranking preferences based on one’s considered judgment as a result of deliberation. As Habermas develops his political theory from the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, engaging with the semantics of religious concepts will come to play a more prominent role in his thinking (Sheedy, 2016).…”

“…If the strong public sphere is to be held accountable and reflect the will of the people, it must come out of civil society. Habermas’s political theory is therefore thoroughly procedural , seeking to uncover optimal conditions for shared citizenship and the deliberative procedures that should ideally follow, while aiming to avoid group-specific norms in the interest of developing a universal model of discourse ethics that could potentially be shared by all (Sheedy, 2016).…”

“…Accordingly, a more “subversive” approach toward questions of religion in the public sphere might look to highlight the ways in which “religion” is always and already caught up in political, cultural, and economic contexts (Cavanaugh, 2009); how “secularism” today is entangled in neoliberal ideologies (Wilson, 2017); and how secular ontologies, to quote Wilson (1087), attempt “to categorize ‘religion’ as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’” rather than seeks “to engage … with the category ‘religion’ and its various actors and dimensions in contextually sensitive ways.” Yolande Jansen (2011) picks up a similar line of critique in relation to Habermas’s theory of “postsecularism,” arguing that he defines religion in terms of “faith” and alleged “beliefs,” and in this way confuses “religion” with doctrinal authority, which has the consequence of naturalizing a Protestant model as the gold standard for all. This move not only privileges a Eurocentric point of view but also works to classify religious actors that are seemingly unable to meet a liberal democratic ideal in their speech acts as regressive or even akin to fanatics or “fundamentalists” (Sheedy, 2016). What none of these critics have addressed, however, are the discursive uses of “religion” (including “Muslims” and “Islam”) as a conceptual and, more specifically, tropological category that most often limits our perception of complex identities (e.g.…”

“…Yolande Jansen (2011) picks up a similar line of critique in relation to Habermas's theory of "postsecularism," arguing that he defines religion in terms of "faith" and alleged "beliefs," and in this way confuses "religion" with doctrinal authority, which has the consequence of naturalizing a Protestant model as the gold standard for all. This move not only privileges a Eurocentric point of view but also works to classify religious actors that are seemingly unable to meet a liberal democratic ideal in their speech acts as regressive or even akin to fanatics or "fundamentalists" (Sheedy, 2016). What none of these critics have addressed, however, are the discursive uses of "religion" (including "Muslims" and "Islam") as a conceptual and, more specifically, tropological category that most often limits our perception of complex identities (e.g.…”