Representing religion in the public sphere: a moral theory of multicultural

engagement

The relation between religion and democracy has been one of the main concerns
of contemporary political theorists and political actors in Europe, involving
debates related to the politics of identity and the principles of democratic reason.
European history has been shaped by several attempts to reconcile the diversity
of religious worldviews through secular political arrangements designed to
establish peace and order within and between the States, while disputed
philosophical conceptions were articulated in order to justify them. From Hugo
Grotius to Immanuel Kant, an immanent frame to use Charles Taylors definition
aimed to bring legitimation to the State through appeals to a secular reason,
providing moral imperatives as if God did not exist.
Religion, however, continued to play an important role in binding society and its
political communities together. In Hobbes, Bodin and Bossuet, the Church was
submitted to the purposes of the secular State, whereas the liberal critique of the
Old Regime brought forward distinct interpretations of the role of religion in the
public sphere. Rousseau, for example, defended that citizens should be free to
profess any particular faith in private as long as its principles did not clash with
the precepts of the civil religion. On the other hand, Toquevilles analysis of the
American society portrayed Christian religion as a fundamental moral resource
that delineated the very process of law making.
Contemporarily, the public place of religion is still a contentious matter, dividing
liberals following the Kantian approach to practical reason, with Rawls and
Dworkin advocating a public sphere devoid of religious ethical worldviews, and
communitarians who, resorting to the Hegelian and neo-Aristotelian critique of
the Enlightenment, value tradition as a source of public morals. In their own way,
Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre are representatives of this latter approach,
while Jrgen Habermas is located in-between those trends.
Immigration and the enlargement of the European Union poses a challenge to
the liberal conception of citizenship to the extent that traditional communities
articulates religious worldviews in their decisions on fundamental principles of
justice. Whereas Habermas departs from Rawls in recognising that religious
reasons can inform the public debate with its moral intuitions and possible truth
contents, his conception of communicative rationality is still procedural, requiring
them to be translated into a universal, immanent, language. With the
communitarian critique of the unity of language and reason, one can question
whether this liberal account can still make justice and represent the voices of
those communities that advance moral claims based on religious reasons. In
England, Germany and elsewhere, this challenge is particularly visible in recent
government speeches about the failure of multiculturalism, followed by top-
down policies aimed to inculcate liberal common values.
This work aims to discuss these theoretical trends, arguing that
accommodationist policies in contemporary Europe should rely on a
communicative engagement that brings different languages and ethical
worldviews together in dialogue. A search for moral truth contents is needed to
avoid societal fragmentation, but this encounter involves language
transformation, rather than its conformation to a unitary practical reason.