WORLDVIEW/Derek Scally: A will-they-won't-they sideshow accompanies the swearing in of every new German government.
Will the new chancellor and cabinet ministers end their oath of office with the optional Gottesformel, comprising the words "so help me God"? Chancellor Schröder didn't, but Chancellor Merkel did last month in the Reichstag, as did all but one of her ministers.
For a stoicly secular state, the obsession with the Gottesformel is a curious yet appropriate endnote in a year that marked the end of the political road for Germany's 1968 student revolution generation and the simultaneous return of religion to intellectual discourse.
Two elderly German men can take most of the credit for the latter development. The first is Joseph Ratzinger, the 1968 generation's worst nightmare. The left-wing Tageszeitung newspaper marked his election as Pope Benedict with a front page entirely black but for a tiny headline: "Oh God!"
The ecstatic welcome for him on his return to Germany in the summer for World Youth Day was a striking moment in the development of religion in German public discourse.
A second striking development came from Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher and self-described "methodical atheist" who has spent his half-century career arguing that religious belief has no place in modern public discourse.
His writings made him a dominant influence on Germany's 1968 student revolution generation and, through '68 generation politicians like former foreign minister Joschka Fischer, modern Germany.
Now Habermas has started a lively discussion in Germany about whether, in his new collection of essays, "Between Naturalism and Religion", he makes landmark concessions to religion.
The collection is a work of two halves, examining two opposing developments in western society: advances in biogenetics and what Habermas calls "an unexpected revitalisation and worldwide politicisation of belief groups and religious teaching".
Religion has always been a feature of Habermas's writings, but this book continues a new train of thought that began after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
These new essays have been attacked by some as blind end-of-days" writings, and welcomed by others as a treatise for a post-secular society, with Habermas arguing for "the secularly hardened and exclusive self-conception of the modern to be overcome".
The central religious essay is "Religion in Public Life", in which Habermas questions whether secularism is a European Sonderweg, a special case or unique path.
He considers the theory of one of his students that the 70 million evangelical Christians in the US weren't "reborn" overnight and that it was precisely the separation of church and state which ensured the continuity of religion, particularly in fundamental forms.
"For philosophy, the revival of religious power, from which only Europe seems to be excluded, is the challenge of a fundamental critic on the postmetaphysical and non-religious self-understanding of western modernity," he writes.
But rather than further exclusion, Habermas suggests that, just as religious citizens have had to accept secular political institutions in modern western society, the non-religious should reciprocate and try to find a "general argumentation" in the statements of religious figures.
Any liberal state should have an interest in "releasing religious voices in the political public life", he writes, to see "whether the secular society is otherwise cutting itself off from otherwise important resources for sense-building".
He warns of a "secret complicity" of the two polarised world views which, through a lack of self-reflection, endanger the cohesion of the society.
"A political culture that polarises irreconcilably along the faultlines of secular-religious differences - be it on questions such as research on human embryos, abortion or the treatment of coma patients - calls into question civic common sense even in the oldest democracies," he writes.
"The constitutional state can only protect its religious and non-religious citizens if they not only find a civic modus vivendi but live together out of conviction for democratic order."
Some hostile reviewers have suggested that Habermas has set himself a hopeless task in trying to separate worthwhile theological content from worthless and dangerous anti-modern elements.
Other critics have said that his apparent embrace of religion is, in fact, nothing of the sort. They point to his argument that religious convictions are acceptable in the public sphere as long as they submit to "unreserved argument" and prove their convictions are rational and explainable.
This reading suggests that religion must modify itself to fit secular society, something that is sure to have an undermining effect.
More enthusiastic critics have seen "Between Naturalism and Religion" as a plea for a secular state but against secularism.
"In the long term, the liberal state is reliant on mentalities that it cannot create from its own resources," writes Habermas.
Perhaps the most unusual section of the book is a transcript of the discussion last year between the then Cardinal Ratzinger and Habermas at the Catholic Academy in Munich, which has been termed the marriage of fides et ratio, faith and secular thought.
Around the time of the discussion in Munich, Cardinal Ratzinger attacked secularism for no longer being a neutral influence ensuring freedom for all in society, but an ideology that "presents itself as the only voice of rationality" and "leaves no public for the Catholic and Christian vision".
Habermas says he remains a non-believer, but at the same time has stoked up the debate on religion and secularism in his 2004 essay, "A Time of Transition".
"Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilisation," he writes. "To this day, we have no other options [ to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is post-modern chatter."
The jury is out on the intellectual odd couple of Pope Benedict and Jürgen Habermas. Perhaps it really is a meeting of two great German minds. Or perhaps, in an age of Islamic fundamentalism and scientific supremacy, it is merely two elderly thinkers seeking intellectual comfort in the kindness of strangers.