Социология религии_материалы / Towards_Postsecular_Sociology

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which they are opposed might prosper. Since the same cannot be said for religious fundamentalists, the rhetorical equation of ideological secularism with ideological non-secularism completely falls apart. Meanwhile, holding even to ‘moderate’ secularism still requires considerable intellectual commitment, and it is difficult to depict faith-led political engagement as equivalently ‘moderate’ without it amounting to some sort of principled, rather than merely opportunistic, accommodation with secularism itself. In that sense, the gap between moderates and radicals on the non-secularist side is either much narrower than multiculturalists would have us believe, or it is much wider.

Epistemic Dialogism

Jurgen Habermas (2003, 2005, 2006) is the most prominent social thinker to take up the notion of postsecularity, and his perspective – which we might call epistemic dialogism – is the final module that I want to touch upon. Habermas has been particularly affected by the promise of postsecularity since ‘9/11’. Before then, as Fred Dallmayr (2003) has emphasized, whilst Habermas showed consistent interest in questions of religion and modernity, overall he shared little of the utopian messianism, or the feel for the unrepresentable, of the first generation Frankfurt thinkers. For middle-phase Habermas, it was truth claims rather than souls that had to be redeemed; the sacred was unapologetically ‘linguistified’; and ‘methodical atheism’ was installed as the basis of post-metaphysical social philosophy. Correlatively, Habermas was getting evercloser to the ‘thin’ proceduralism of Rawls. But just as Rawls himself had to think harder about the ‘thick’ cultural preconditions of viable liberal politics in a pluralist age, so Habermas, already better attuned to ‘lifeworld’ values, had to reconsider the question of religion. What he now promotes is a ‘postsecular self-understanding of society as a whole, in which the vigorous continuation of religion in a continually secularizing environment must be reckoned with’ (Habermas, 2005: 26).

Habermas is still, unquestionably, a secularist – the ‘opaque core of religious experience’, he says, cannot ultimately be ‘penetrated by’ philosophical reflection. Nevertheless, post-metaphysicians should now become philosophically ‘agnostic’ rather than methodically atheist (2006: 17). Above all, they must overcome the ‘narrow’ secularism according to which ‘in the long run, religious views will inevitably melt under the sun of scientific criticism and … religious communities will not be able to withstand the pressures of some unstoppable cultural and social modernization’ (2006: 15). These thoughts are hardly original, it has to be said (see Turner, 2001, for a more thorough recent discussion of religion and modernity). But what does distinguish Habermas’s postsecularism is his attempt to give responsive cultural politics a socio-epistemological grounding.

Like the multiculturalists, Habermas is disturbed by the apparent asymmetry in the respective burdens that are borne by religious and secular/non-religious

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citizens in conforming to the terms of the modern liberal polity. Hitherto, secularists have been expected to ‘tolerate’ the religious life to the point of untroubled indifference, with believing citizens, for their part, painfully split in their personal and political identities (because secular politics can only be conducted in value-terms that are available to everyone). But this overview is now inadequate, Habermas insists. Yes, religious cultures must adapt, with difficulty, to four inescapable conditions of modern secular life – the presence of other strong faiths, the authority of science, the universalist mode of positive law, and a pervasive profane popular morality. But they should not be subjected to unfair psychological or socio-cultural pressure in so doing. Postsecular culture must therefore openly recognize religion not just as a set of private beliefs but as an all-embracing source of energy for the devout, and, actually, for society in general too. Except at the highest institutional levels, the case goes, the demand that people cease to speak politically in religious terms must be dropped (2006: 7–10).

Without such postsecular adjustments, the asymmetrical burdens of participation would amount to nothing less than social injustice. Fortunately, the responsibility for creating a responsive, deliberative democratic culture is more equally shared than first appearance suggests. In Habermasian postsecularism, non-believers, just like believers, are required to undergo an equivalent, and intertwined, learning process. They too have to overcome ‘cognitive dissonance’, by accepting the continuing value of the religious consciousness and by genuinely appreciating not only the human motivation for, but also the possible truth-content of, religious worldviews (2006: 11–16, 2005: 28). Only when these epistemic conditions are met will democratic citizens be able to give to each other the fully human reasons for political stances that all are due. In this way, Habermas (2003: 102–3) wants to break the idea of modernity as a ‘zero sum’ game between faith and reason, and to cultivate the kind of ‘enlightened common sense’ that can act as a ‘third party’ operating between and beyond the two.

In many ways, this is an attractive and good scenario, coalescing with other critical reflections on secularism and scientism that also regard (reformed, managed) secularism as unavoidable (Asad, 2003; Toulmin, 1990). Indeed, sociology itself could readily be positioned as the very discourse that could sustain Habermas’s vision of ‘enlightened common sense’ and the ‘unfinished dialectic’ of secularization, seeing as the kind of social naturalism we would want to defend is far from the physicalist reductionism and ‘depersonalized’ scientific naturalism that Habermas and others distrust.

For all that, there are residual problems with Habermas’s postsecularism. The first is that throughout his recent discussions, Habermas tends to assume that the majority of citizens in formally liberal states are consciously secularist, either in the sense of being confirmed non-believers, or in being emphatic about the need for a clear separation between religion and state, and between public and private. But these assumptions are not empirically certain, nor is the political literacy of the electorate so uniformly advanced. Meanwhile, conceptually speaking, Habermas continually equates ‘secular’ with ‘non-believing’, and this is also questionable. After all, it is possible to be a believer and a secularist at

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868Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

the same time, accepting that a ‘neutral’ state and liberal culture are necessary to keep doctrinal and ritualistic differences from turning into full-blown social conflicts. This is pertinent, because it is the construal of secularism as necessarily atheistic and decisively majoritarian that allows Habermas to present naturalism and not religiosity as the main obstacle that stands in the way of a new, enlightened common sense.

The result is that the faith/reason polarity is consistently presented as if all the humanity and richness and morality fall on the religion side, with nothing but alienation and depersonalization on the side of secularism/scientific naturalism. But my second objection is that this balance sheet is thoroughly distorted. Religion may well cultivate a range of social and moral goods, but it may equally well poison them too, and meanwhile many of the qualities supposedly distinctive of religion – collective morality, existential meaning, love, creativity and imagination, social energy, and spirituality – are readily encompassed and celebrated within a secular humanist outlook.

Thirdly, we should question Habermas’s insistence that mutual respect and a common learning process between believers and non-believers must take an epistemic form. Indeed, this proposal strikes me as both implausible and undesirable. It is implausible because from within the perspective of secular sociological naturalism (broadly conceived), the question of the ‘truth content’ of claims about heaven and hell, God’s grace, salvation and the rest cannot really be entertained: these items are not candidates for truth and explanation. That is why the debating point sometimes scored by believers, to the effect that even if God’s existence cannot be proven, at least it cannot be disproved either, has no traction whatsoever. And the converse holds too: for a religious person whose worldview really is grounded on the notion of some ultimate Transcendent realm and an omnipotent, loving Spirit, then the explanation of life in terms of generative mechanisms, interlocking contingent material processes, and human agency can never be nearly enough.

Habermas is thus backing the wrong horse when he seeks to base democratic dialogue on epistemological reflexivity. Generally over-rated as a source of self-correction, reflexivity is more effective in matters of ethics than of truth, and in relation to life-affecting events rather than propositions. Moreover, the power of common human morality in our appreciation of other people’s motivation and purpose should not itself be sold short. We can readily respond to, and value, people as people, partly through sociological imagination of their situation and plight, even if we are unlikely to share some of their presumptions about truth, existence and causality.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the way in which ‘the postsecular condition’ is expressed, albeit rather differently, in four segments of contemporary social theory and philosophy. Whilst accepting that the postsecular concept possesses

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considerable mileage for further debate, and having no difficulty with the idea that a sheer stand-off between faith and reason is often unproductive, I have also been advising that there are strenuous intellectual issues here that resist conflation or easy compromise. In mounting these arguments, I am more comfortable than Habermas with the idea that religious citizens, and religious theorists, do indeed have a larger cognitive and political burden to bear in secular society. In that sense, ‘the expectations of civic autonomy and demands of toleration of a liberal republic’ do create a ‘reflective pressure’ that must lead religious people to worry that, in the long run, ‘theocentric or cosmocentric doctrines and life-orientations’ will be undermined (Habermas, 2005: 23).

Furthermore, I have claimed that in so far as sociology is a ‘public player’ in these debates, it cannot be other than secular in an interpretative and ethical sense. This is because sociology is definitively naturalistic in its mode of comprehension of the ways of the world, even if this is not to be equated with scientistic reductionism. But to conclude on a slightly different note, sociology as such is not a player of any kind: in current debates, ‘public sociology’ has been excessively anthropomorphized, and we run the risk of serious disappointment if we think of sociology as having some socio-political voice or presence all of its own. Sociology, rather, is an explanatory and descriptive form of understanding, generally but decisively attuned to a secular world and a naturalistic worldview. Nevertheless, important aspects of culture, democracy and personal integrity do – naturally – stretch beyond these confines.

Note

1http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyissues/key5–10.htm, consulted early 2006.

References

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Gregor McLennan

Is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981), Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (1989), Pluralism

(1995), co-author of Exploring Society (2000), and co-editor of several volumes of sociopolitical theory and cultural studies. His latest book is Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (Palgrave, 2006).

Address: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UQ, UK.

E-mail: g.mclennan@bristol.ac.uk

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