Challenging beliefs about modernity and secularism

World View:The boy still believed in Santa and the tooth fairy at the age of 11, so his parents decided it was time to disabuse him, my friend explained the other day. They sat him down and said: "Look, there is no Santa. He doesn't come with presents on his reindeer. And the tooth fairy is just a story we tell at Christmas. We're sorry to have to tell you this, but you're old enough to understand it now". "Right", said their son, "and Jesus Christ?"

Until recently it has been widely assumed that religion is destined to disappear from modern societies, withering away as people become more rational and sophisticated. Europe is taken to be the exemplar of secularised modernity, in which religion is restricted to the sphere of private belief. Politicians, social scientists, journalists and ordinary people have agreed that modernity and secularism go hand in hand. This seems best to explain the general falling away of religious practice and decline of established churches.

That assumption is now being challenged. Increasingly the term "post-secular" - coined by the influential left-liberal German philosopher Jurgen Habermas - is used to describe European society. There is a growing understanding that Europe is the exceptional continent, not only compared to the United States where religious belief and practice have flourished, but to other world regions as well. The issue has been provoked by arguments over how to accommodate Islam in Europe's secularised societies. They remain perplexed by Islamists' public religious affirmation and worried by their supposed inability to recognise European norms of tolerance and enlightenment.

Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on an eventful year just before Christmas, mentioned the dialogue he had several years ago with Habermas in which the philosopher expressed to the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger the need for "thinkers able to translate the coded convictions of the Christian faith into the language of the secularised world to make them more effective in a new way."

Pope Benedict went on to say: "Ever more evident is the urgency the world has for a dialogue between faith and reason," when "the cognitive capacity of the human being, his dominion over the material thanks to the force of thought, has obtained unimaginable progress." This could become "a danger that threatens the person and the world."

Habermas shares these concerns. His book In Defence of Humanity caught Ratzinger's attention for its passionate attack on the risks of biological engineering and human cloning and its defence of the right to a unique human identity which cloning imperils.

In other works, Habermas argues that laissez-faire's success as a universally revered economic model means global capitalism encounters few genuine oppositional tendencies. Religion, as a source and repository of transcendence, has an important role to play, so this argument goes. It prevents modern secular societies from being overwhelmed by the all-encompassing demands of functional life and worldly success.

It offers a much-needed dimension of otherness: The religious values of love, community, and godliness help to offset the global dominance of competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and manipulation that predominate in the vocational sphere. Religious convictions encourage people to treat each other as ends in themselves rather than as mere means. Such concerns find contemporary religious expression. In his homily at the Pro-Cathedral this Christmas, for example, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said: "Social peace presupposes an ability to dialogue, to be firm in one's principles without becoming intolerant or disrespectful of the other. A culture which attempts to impose its views and interests through force or violence undermines the rule of law and is a threat to democracy."

Given the history of Catholic intolerance in Ireland it is good to hear such an affirmation of the need to respect the other. If the decline of religious belief and practice is indeed an established and progressive fact it is easier for liberal secularists to welcome this. But they should beware of a complacency which merely exposes their own intolerance of public religiosity, especially in the faces of new trends and influences raising serious questions about whether religions are definitely on the way out. It is the fact of their revival which gives rise to the more widespread use of the term post-secular.

The German sociologist Klaus Eder is among a number of recent writers on the subject brought together by the excellent online journal www.eurozine.com. He explains that religion did not disappear during European secularisation but rather became invisible and inaudible.

These societies therefore have a problem with its re-emergence and revival. It is happening in several different ways. Surveys show a disjunction between the sharp decline of participation in institutional churches and the persistence of religious beliefs.

José Casanova, one of the principal sociologists studying these issues, points out that only in the former East Germany does a majority (51 per cent) describe itself as atheist. There are great contrasts in professed religiosity - between France and Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic for example, and between Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox societies. In the Netherlands, where religious practice declined sharply from the 1960s, it is now reviving strongly and in public. Thus many Europeans believe without any longer belonging. But the opposite also applies, in that many think they belong to Christianity even though they no longer believe in it.

Confronted with these paradoxical changes Casanova discerns an interesting pattern: due to the privatisation of religion, which among many European societies has become a taken-for-granted characteristic of secular modernity, they now have a much greater difficulty in recognising its legitimate role in public life and in the organisation and mobilisation of collective group identities.

Muslim organised collective identities and their public representations become a particular source of anxiety not only because of their religious otherness as a non-Christian and non-European religion, but more importantly because of their religiousness itself as the other of European secularity. Hence the temptation to identify Islam and fundamentalism becomes more pronounced. Islam, by definition, becomes the other of Western secular modernity. This combination of secular and traditional intolerance explains a lot about hostility to Turkey's EU accession. That may be why Pope Benedict (and Habermas) have warmed to it.