TAKING RELIGION SERIOUSLY?

HABERMAS ON RELIGIOUS TRANSLATION AND COOPERATIVE

LEARNING IN POST-SECULAR SOCIETY 1

Forthcoming in American Political Science Review (Fall 2017)

Abstract: This article evaluates Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to reopen political liberalism to religion.
In trying to “take religion seriously,” Habermas goes further than John Rawls and other liberal
theorists by affirming that religious traditions articulate truths on which democratic societies
continue to depend for their civic and moral health. “Post-secular” societies, in his view, should
learn from religion by translating its “moral intuitions” into universal secular language. Although
Habermas in this way appears friendlier to religion than Rawls, unlike Rawls he also calls for the
“modernization of religious consciousness.” This theological transformation not only reveals the
foundationalist presuppositions of liberalism, but also points to a highly attenuated conception of
learning from religion. Taking religion seriously will require us to be open to its insights not only
when they agree with, but especially when they challenge, our secular presuppositions. This
dimension of religion is at risk of getting “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm.

Giorgi Areshidze is Associate Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He is the

author of Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama: Faith and the Civic Life of Democracy
(University Press of Kansas, 2016)

Mailing Address: 850 Columbia Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711

Email: giorgi.areshidze@gmail.com; gareshidze@cmc.edu

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The author would like to thank the following individuals for their comments and suggestions on

earlier versions of this article, as well as for help with developing the ideas that this article

investigates: Tom and Lorraine Pangle, Devin Stauffer, Jeff Tulis, Christopher Nadon, Mark Blitz,

Justin Dyer, Ariel Helfer, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the two editors (Steven Forde and

Leigh Jenco) at American Political Science Review.

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Habermas’s Religious “Course-Correction” of Political Liberalism

Contemporary political science continues to be insufficiently interested in learning from

religion (Kettell 2012; Wald and Wilcox 2006). Having failed to anticipate the resilience of religion

in modernity, its assumptions and methods remain more appropriate for explaining the behavioral

power of religious identification, than in ascertaining the contribution of religious ideas to liberalism

(Kettell 2016; Philpott 2009). In spite of its preoccupation with the challenge of religion, much of

contemporary political theory, in turn, takes its bearings from John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. In

that work, Rawls proposed that democratic deliberation should be conducted without appeal to

controversial truth claims, with citizens drawing on a fund of “public” or neutral principles that are

already “widely shared” in a liberal society (Rawls 2005, 224-225, 247). Many liberal theorists

interpreted Rawls’s call to take “the truth of religion off the political agenda” as requiring a general

duty of self-restraint in public debate (Rorty 1994; Audi 1997 and 2000; Macedo 1997). This

“exclusivist” theory of “public reason” has set the agenda for academic liberal theory for over two

decades, although it has been challenged by “inclusivists” who have argued that its requirements are

unfair to devout citizens, and ultimately impractical in democracy, where they impoverish our civic

and moral lives (Weithman 1997 and 2002; Wolterstorff 1997; Eberle 2002; Waldron 1993 & 2012;

Stout 2004; cf. March 2013 and Hertzberg 2015).

This article evaluates Jürgen Habermas’s recent attempt to bridge the divide between the

“exclusivist” and “inclusivist” camps through his new framework of “post-secular” society

(Habermas 2006). Habermas deserves special attention because over the last decade he has gone

further in his opening to religion than even most “open secularists” (Chambers 2010) in liberal

theory: he claims that religion offers “important resources of spiritual explanation” (Habermas 2001)

and “articulations of moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions, especially “regarding vulnerable

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domains of social life” (Habermas 2009, 76-77). Siding with critics of political liberalism, Habermas

argues that “the democratic state should not overhastily reduce the polyphonic complexity of the

range of public voices,” because doing so risks cutting “society off from scarce resources for

generating meaning” that are offered by religion (2009, 76; cf. 2006 & 2013). In a significant

correction of Rawls, Habermas welcomes comprehensive doctrines (religious and nonreligious) in

the informal sphere of “opinion- and will-formation” where no Rawlsian duty of self-restraint

obtains (Habermas 2005 and 2006; cf. Rawls 2005, 220-222; cf. 443-444). By so relaxing the

constraints of public reason, Habermas hopes that believing and nonbelieving citizens can engage in

a “cooperative search for truth” by “translating” moral and ethical concepts “out of the religious

idioms into a universally accessible language” (2005, 11).

I show that Habermas’s “religious-course correction” of political liberalism fails to resolve

(and indeed may exacerbate) the fundamental challenge posed to Rawlsian public reason by its

religious critics. Habermas remains ambivalent as to whether the failure of secularization constitutes

a mere temporary derailment or a permanent repudiation of the Enlightenment’s broader project of

advancing rationalistic political norms. Unrestrained modernization, which unleashes exploitative

economic globalization and instrumental rationality, leads to societal disintegration, and to a

“crumbling of citizens’ solidarity.” Although he turns to religion in search of the “moral intuitions”

that can counteract these trends (2006b; cf. 2001), Habermas maintains that we are not thereby

compelled to rethink our understanding of the limits of secular (scientific) rationalism—which he

continues to regard as the ultimate authority for adjudicating the dogmas of religious faith as well as

the social debates to which believing citizens seek to contribute their views. Habermas therefore

never considers the possibility that the persistence of publicly active religions may be a sign of the

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incapacity of secular reason to conclusively settle all fundamental moral debates that continue to

transpire in modern liberal societies.

Although Habermas proposes his framework of “post-metaphysical thinking” as a more

accommodating alternative to Rawls’s conception of public reason, his understanding of the

epistemic requirements of a “reasonable” religion reveals the theologically transformative

presuppositions of liberalism. Habermas is simultaneously both more and less accommodating of

religion than is Rawls. While Rawls’s “freestanding” liberalism explicitly abstains from any

connection to truth (and thus relinquishes the right to judge religion) (Rawls 2005, xxii, 94, 135, 152,

171, 442, 481), Habermas acknowledges that religion is a depository of certain moral truths,

awareness of which is not a matter of indifference for a liberal society. But this new inclusivity

comes at the expense of the foundational neutrality of liberal theory. Unlike Rawls, Habermas

insists that religious traditions must modernize, both by transcending their attachment to theological

dogmas and by accepting science as the ultimate arbiter of truth (Habermas 2005, 16; 2006b; cf.

Wolterstorff 2013). Liberalism, even in its post-metaphysical form, remains “transformative”

(Macedo 1998) or foundationalist, since the epistemic requirements of modern rationalism and its

scientific conception of truth require an abandonment of a key feature of Rawlsian neutrality.

By endorsing such a conception of a modernized religion, Habermas adopts a highly

attenuated understanding of learning from religion. Like many other liberal theorists, he assumes

that democracy benefits only to the extent that religious perspectives converge with (by being

“assimilated” or “translated” into) our secular norms (March 2013; Rawls 200t5 and 2005b; cf. Gaus

and Vallier 2009; cf., Cooke 2006; Chambers 2010; Lafont 2009). In contrast, I show that “taking

religion seriously” entails being open to its insights not only when they agree with the conclusions of

secular reason, but even and especially when they challenge them. Because the truth claims of
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religion are interwoven with their own unique moral and theological vocabulary, a great deal of

religion’s insight (and motivational power) is “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm.

This is especially the case with any traditional faith system that appeals to sources of truth (such as

revelation, the historical and theological tradition of religion, and foundational moral assumptions

about human nature) that go beyond modern natural science and democratic consensus. In

particular, because traditional Christian teachings do not imagine the human person as an

“unencumbered self,” but rather as a creature of God, they can serve as a corrective of the

excessively individualistic assumptions about morality and politics that sometimes characterize

liberal societies. Of course, religious believers need not be communitarians, and communitarians

need not be theists. But the types of religious contributions from the Christian tradition that are

most consequential for political liberalism lend themselves to communitarian claims of obligation

and justice.

To sustain this hypothesis, I evaluate Habermas’s claim that the Christian idea of divine

creation of the human person in the image of God can be translated by secular reason into a rational

and universal notion of egalitarian human rights. Although there are important areas of

convergence between Christian (especially Catholic) and liberal rational notions of human dignity, I

point to enduring tensions between these two perspectives that render the Habermasian and

Rawlsian notion of “translation” unfeasible. This is helpfully illustrated by how Catholicism came to

justify religious freedom in the twentieth century. The Catholic conception of the human person as

a “social being” endowed with responsibilities by and to the Creator played a particularly important

role in the Second Vatican Council’s convergence on religious liberty. But this convergence was

carried out from within the Catholic tradition, and it resulted in a conception of religious freedom

(and of human rights more generally) that differs from secular justifications that are based on

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individual autonomy. Accordingly, although it makes possible the coexistence of Christian and

secular citizens within the same liberal democratic civic space, this partial convergence does not

constitute a genuine “overlapping consensus,” and covers over deeper disagreements whose

implications for moral debates are exhausted neither by “public reason” nor by scientific rationalism.

While this explains the dissonance that certain traditional Christian ideas create in public debates in

liberal societies, it also shows us how they can enhance the possibility of enlisting communitarian

obligations of justice—a truth that Habermas senses, but whose implications for rationalism and for

political liberalism he does not wish to accept.

A Post-Secular Society or the Unfinished Project of Modernity?

The first four decades of Habermas’s intellectual development were animated by the

Weberian assumption that modernization of the state (and the triumph of “modern structures of

consciousness”) would lead to the religious “disenchantment” of the world. Accordingly, in The

Theory of Communicative Action (widely regarded as his magnum opus), Habermas endorses the

classical theory of secularization without hesitation: “the socially integrative and expressive functions

that were at first fulfilled by the ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of

the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus” (1985, 77). Like his

predecessors in the first generation of the Frankfurt School of sociology (Max Weber, Walter

Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno) (Mendieta 2014), the early Habermas expects this historical

process of rationalization to reach an end-point, when the “spellbinding power” of religion will be

“sublimated into the binding/bonding force” of argumentative rationality (Habermas 1985, 77; cf.

Gordon 2013). Over the course of the next decade, however, Habermas’s expectations about the

prospects of secularization become partially chastened. In Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992),

Habermas begins to stress that religion is an existential necessity that is “indispensable in ordinary
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life for normalizing intercourse with the extraordinary,” and, accordingly, communicative reason

must “coexist abstemiously” with religion, “neither supporting it nor combatting it” (1992, 51, 145;

cf. Cooke 2006 189; Harrington, 2007).

Habermas presents this evolution in large part as a response to the failure of “the

secularization hypothesis” to bear fruit (Habermas 2009, 59- 62). In his 2005 Holberg International

Memorial Prize acceptance speech, Habermas notes that the “conventional wisdom of mainstream

social science had assumed that modernization inevitably goes hand in hand with secularization in

the sense of a diminishing influence of religious beliefs and practices on politics and society at large”

(Habermas 2005, 10; cf. 2009, 60). But this assumption, as some of the sociologists that Habermas

cites have been stressing in recent decades, is no longer tenable in light of the resurgence of public

religion (2005, 11; cf. Berger 1999), at least when one looks beyond Western Europe (Berger 1999;

Casanova 1994; Habermas 2008). While America’s persistent religiosity “was long-regarded as the

great exception to the secularizing trend” observable in Europe, Habermas has come to recognize

that the U.S. “now seems to exemplify the norm” in terms of the resurgence of religion throughout

the world, whereas secular Europe represents “the deviant path” (Habermas 2009, 60, and 2008, 2;

Berger 1999). 2 In an effort to help liberal theory catch up with this “post-secular” sociological

reality, Habermas concludes that modernization must be decoupled form the “Enlightenment’s

assumption of a necessary decline of religion” as a substantive social and cultural force (Lima 2013,

57 and 61; cf. Habermas 2008, 2; cf. Berger 1999, 9-11).

2
Thus, Habermas claims that “the Evangelical upsurge” and its “opposition to cultural modernity

and political liberalism” reminds him of “its counterpart in the Muslim world” (2005, 11).

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 This brief sketch prompts us to inquire whether Habermas’s recognition of the post-secular

situation requires a reassessment of modernity’s underlying rationalist presuppositions. After all, as

he himself admits, “[t]he fastest growing religious movements, such as the Pentecostals and the

radical Muslims, can be most readily described as ‘fundamentalist.’ They combat the modern world

or they withdraw from it. Their forms of worship combine spiritualism and adventism with rigid

moral conceptions and literal adherence to holy scripture” (Habermas 2009, 61-61; cf. Norris and

Inglehart 2004, 3-4; Berger 1999). Fundamentalists, Habermas has claimed, “insist—even to the

point of violence—on the universal binding character […] of their doctrine” and thus reject the

“epistemic situation of a pluralistic society” (2003, 31; cf. 2002, 151). Although Habermas

acknowledges that these religious movements both defy the classical theories of secularization and

spiritually resist the theological and cultural trends being advanced by liberal rationalism, he

continues to speak of “the unfinished dialectic of our own Western secularization process” (2001; cf.

Habermas 1987, 1997) as if it were a historical necessity. In the remainder of this section, I show

that the failure of secularization should point Habermas to deeper problems in modern rationalism,

and thus to deeper objections to his project of religious modernization, than he recognizes.

At first glance, Habermas’s recent writings on liberalism and religion appear to present

precisely such a reevaluation of the supremacy of rationalism in the quarrel between faith and

reason. In 1991 Habermas already conceded that his earlier position betrayed an excessively “one-

sided functionalist” account of religion because it failed to note that “even in traditional societies

high religions do not function exclusively as legitimation for state domination” (1991, 141). More

recently, Habermas has claimed that “post-metaphysical” thought discloses what his youthful and

hard-headed rationalism had concealed: “philosophy cannot provide a substitute for the consolation

whereby religion invests unavoidable suffering and unrecompensed injustice, the contingencies of

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need, loneliness, sickness, and death, with new significance and teaches us to bear them” (2002, 108,

148-149). From this more mature perspective, Habermas sees that religion is an enduring source of

social solidarity, indispensable for both individual psychological and spiritual well-being as well as

for the civic health of democracy (2006; 2006b; 2010). Habermas has come to recognize that

religion is neither unnatural nor “simply irrational” (Habermas 2006b, 51), and, apparently, that it

“will always have the power to communicate truth” (Chambers 2007, 219-220).

In spite of this impression, however, in all of these statements Habermas qualifies his

recognition of the persistence (and the value) of religion with the hope that the project of

secularization may yet be salvaged as an unfinished legacy of modern rationalism. Thus, as he

develops the idea of “post-metaphysical philosophy” in the 1990s, Habermas begins highlighting the

continuous process of rational appropriation of religious meaning in the modern world:

“philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion

as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even

indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language

and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses” (1994, 51, emphasis added). Peter

Gordon refers to this as Habermas’s “chastened secularism,” one that is open to the possibility that

the “linguistification of the sacred may never come to an end, and [that] democracy may forever

need the instruction only religion can provide” (Gordon 2013, 196-197; cf. Gordon 2011). But it

seems to me that the secular continuity that is implied in Habermas’s ambivalent parenthetical

question is both more intriguing and revealing: Habermas continues to hold out the hope that even

if the “semantic potential” of “monotheistic traditions” is “not yet exhausted” (2002, 71),

nevertheless reason can eventually replace religious meaning. As he argued as recently as 2010, the

continuing potency of religion “in no way precludes the possibility that this source, protected in the

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meantime by religious communities and often used toward politically questionable ends, will run dry one

day” (Habermas 2010b, 5, emphasis added). 3

This seemingly unresolved ambivalence about religion’s permanence is further complicated

by Habermas’s reassessment of the civic and moral effects of modern rationalism. Echoing

contemporary communitarian and Tocquevillian critiques of liberalism (MacIntyre 1981; Sandel

1992 & 1994), in his exchange with the then-Cardinal Ratzinger (future Pope Benedict XVI)

Habermas warns of the depressing prospect of “the transformation of the citizens of prosperous

and peaceful liberal societies into isolated monads acting on the basis of their own self-interest”

(2006b, 35; cf. Waldron 2010b). He now grants that the secular state suffers from a “motivational

weakness” (2010, 74): rational self-interest cannot alone guarantee that citizens “accept sacrifices

that promote common interests,” and such self-sacrificial dispositions are often “nourished by

springs that well forth spontaneously—springs that one may term ‘pre-political’” (2006b, 30-31).

Moreover, “[t]he sources of this solidarity,” Habermas warns, “can peter out as a result of a

‘derailed’ secularization of society as a whole” (ibid). But in spite of these uncertainties about the

civic consequences of secular modernization, Habermas explicitly distances himself from such critics

of liberal rationalism as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss (ibid, 38-39). He does not

wish “to push too far the question whether an ambivalent modern age will stabilize itself exclusively

on the basis of the secular forces of a communicative reason,” and prefers to leave this as an “open,

empirical question” (ibid, 38). Dismissively, Habermas claims that “we need not understand” the

3
When Eduardo Mendieta asked him in 2002 “whether religion will forever resist all efforts” by

philosophy “to completely assimilate” and “translate” it, Habermas responded, “I don’t know”

(2002, 163).

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question of the limits of rationalism “in such a manner that it offers the educated defenders of

religion an argument in support of their case” (ibid, 37).

As we are starting to see, Habermas has settled on a deeply conflicted position. He wishes

simultaneously to concede to conservative and religious critics that secularization and rationalization

entail a moral flattening and civic loss in liberalism, even while he brushes aside the possibility that

these same critics may be right about the limits of rationalism (and about the permanence of

religion) as well. But I think more hinges on this question than Habermas is willing to admit. After

all, our assessment of the feasibility and the desirability of secularization has important implications

not just for how deeply and for how long political liberalism should accommodate religion, but more

importantly for what secular citizens should aim to learn by engaging religious believers in the first

place. If Habermas is right, if the “discursive translation” of religious content is “not yet exhausted”

and secularization is an “unfinished project,” then liberal societies should (in essence) continue the

endeavor that began in the early modern Enlightenment: the submission of religious dogma and

authority to (scientific) reason and the reinterpretation (or translation) of revealed theology into the

language and norms of rationalism. On the other hand, if religious critics are correct that this

secularizing project was always misguided and hubristic, because scientific rationalism is ill-equipped

to reproduce the moral meaning supplied by religious traditions once it has jettisoned both revealed

theology as well as its broader metaphysical “baggage,” then we have much greater reason to be

cautious than Habermas seems to appreciate. This was the meaning of Ratzinger’s rejoinder to

Habermas that reason and faith should “restrict each other and remind each other” of their mutual

“limits,” an approach that he emphasizes presupposes our willingness to “doubt the reliability of

reason” at least in some areas of human life (2006, 65).

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 Similar doubts have been raised by others who do not share Ratzinger’s Catholicism, or even

his religious orientation more generally. Writing in the wake of what he considered to be the

twentieth century’s loss of confidence in modern scientific rationalism, Leo Strauss called for a

recovery of an earlier (Socratic) version of rationalism that would be open to the challenge of

revelation. For Strauss, this did not mean that political philosophy in our day and age could simply

bypass modernity, nor did it mean a return to orthodoxy as a replacement of pluralism. But it did

entail the willingness to interrogate what Strauss described as the “anti-theological ire” of modern

rationalism and to accept a more chastened view of modernity’s ambition to ground politics and

morality exclusively on rational foundations. 4 Can Habermas ultimately avoid confronting the

difficulty to which Strauss’s critique of modern rationalism points? Strauss is joined by

communitarian (Sandel 1994), post-modern, and deliberative critics of liberalism (Garsten 2011),

who have all converged on the view that the contemporary discontents that beset liberalism cannot

be resolved simply by doubling-down on familiar forms of rationality in politics (cf., Zerilli 2012a).

For it is precisely the dissatisfaction with exclusive norms of discursive rationality that these critics

point to as the source of religious resentment, theological insularity and political disenchantment

among some citizens in liberal societies (Stout 2004; Sandel 1996 and 2011; Talisse 2009; Sikka 2016;

Garsten 2006; cf. March 2013). All of these thinkers call for a version of what Michael Sandel

describes as “a politics of moral engagement” (2011) that welcomes substantive and even heated

disagreement as a transformative force in democratic deliberation.

Indeed, this openness to the morally transformative possibility of the encounter between

reason and religion should be a necessary consequence of Habermas’s own life-long commitment to

the ideal of deliberation. Signs of this are apparent in Habermas’s concession to communitarian

4
Strauss 1988, 44; see also, in general, Strauss 1953.

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critics that Enlightenment rationality “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any

impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action” (2010, 74; cf. Fish 2010).

This turns out to be a significant deficiency of modern rationalism, since reason “decoupled from

worldviews” does not have “sufficient strength to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of

secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of

what is missing, of what cries out to heaven” (2010, 19). In light of this partial disenchantment with

reason, and with its “depoliticization of citizens” (2006b), it is not surprising that Habermas has

turned to religion. Many (and often traditional) religious perspectives emphasize communitarian and

moral obligations and are therefore critical of the excessive trust in instrumental rationality and

individual self-interest that characterizes modernity and that has recently worried Habermas (2001).

Accordingly, Habermas’s own reflections, I will show below, should lead him to be more open to

types of moral reasoning and conceptions of truth that are not tied exclusively to scientific

rationality.

In the remainder of this article, I turn to Habermas’s conceptions of “post-metaphysical

thinking” and “cooperative translation,” the epistemic and discursive frameworks he proposes to

sustain mutual learning between secular and religious citizens, and evaluate whether they can

constructively tap into the motivational power and accommodate the moral insights of religion in a

post-secular society.

Epistemic Requirements of Post-Metaphysical Thinking and the Modernization of

Religious Consciousness

According to Habermas, the persistence of religion demands nothing less than a cultural and

intellectual reorientation among Westerner liberals. “The secular awareness that we live in a post-

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secular world,” Habermas argues, “is reflected philosophically in the form of post-metaphysical

thought” (2006, 16). Unlike the Enlightenment and Rawlsian approaches, which were (respectively)

either skeptical of or indifferent to religion, post-metaphysical thought aims at mutual

accommodation and engaged learning between faith and reason. Post-metaphysical thought rejects

“a narrow scientistic concept of reason and the exclusion of religious doctrines from the genealogy

of reason” (2006, 16); it is simultaneously “prepared to learn from religion,” while “remain[ing]

agnostic in the process” (2006, 17). This has important implications for Habermas’s understanding

of how democratic citizens should engage each other in the public forum. Acknowledging the

criticism that Rawlsian public reason and its duty of self-restraint imposes “asymmetrical” “cognitive

burdens” on religious citizens (Habermas, 2006, 7, 11-12; cf. 2005, 14-15; cf. Weithman 2002;

Wolterstorff 1997), Habermas urges secular citizens to accept “the limits of secular reason” (2006,

15) and “to determine the relation between faith and knowledge in a self-critical manner” (2008, 112

and 138; cf. 2006, 15; 2001, 27). In a clear attempt to expand the Rawlsian concept of

“reasonableness,” Habermas concludes that “secular citizens must grasp their conflict with religious

opinions as a reasonably expected disagreement” (2006, 15) that cannot be wished away by an appeal to a

discursive consensus rooted in public reason.

There is much to admire in Habermas’s attempt to remind secular liberals of the need and

value of religious contributions. But in trying to alleviate the asymmetric burdens of Rawlsian

liberalism, Habermas ends up imposing a set of “epistemic burdens” of his own on religious citizens.

Where Rawls refused to make his political liberalism dependent on any epistemic foundations

(Rawlsian “reasonableness” “is not an epistemological idea” [2005, 48; cf. 54-58, 150]), Habermas

makes it clear that his project of post-metaphysical thinking requires a comprehensive

“modernization of religious consciousness.” Religious believers (and especially “traditional

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communities of faith”) must acquire “self-reflective” “epistemic attitudes” necessitated by the

emergence of pluralism, natural sciences and secular law and morality (Habermas 2006, 13-14, 18).

By reducing the category of “religion” to either the fundamentalist or the modernized variety,

Habermas simplifies the religious-secular divided, and neglects traditional religious perspectives

(such as post-Vatican II Catholicism) that have embraced religious freedom without relinquishing

their broader theological and revealed traditions. Thus, Habermas’ theory of modernization has a

built-in bias in favor of liberalized, and at the expense of traditional, religious outlooks. This

Habermasian instinct to liberalize religion not only fails to resolve the difficulties that Habermas and

other critics identified in Rawls, but also yields a concept of “learning” that has trouble accounting

for (and accommodating) the transformative power of religious interventions in public debate.

Habermas distinguishes his post-secular society from the more radical version of secularism

that he associates with laicism and the French Revolution (2006, 15; 2011, 23-24). A post-secular

society will “not transform the requisite institutional separation of religion and politics into an undue

mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith” (2006, 9; 2011, 25-26).

This means that unbelieving citizens in post-secular societies should not think of religious traditions

(and the citizens of faith who subscribe to them) as “archaic relics of pre-modern societies,” for

doing so means concluding that “religion no longer has any intrinsic justification to exist” (2006, 15).

Taking “religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously,” as Habermas repeatedly

insists, means being willing “not to deny from the outset any possible cognitive substance” that it

has to offer (ibid; 2005; 2006b). Furthermore, a “secularist attitude” that denies the cognitive value

of religion short-circuits the possibility of learning: it forecloses the willingness “to help assess”

religious contributions “for a substance that can possibly be expressed in a secular language and

justified by secular arguments” (2006, 15). In Habermas’s estimation, only if they accept these two

15
conditions can unbelieving citizens participate in (and thus share the burden of) the “cooperative

task of translation” that Habermas hopes can take place in “the pre-parliamentarian domain” of

political society (ibid, 10).

At least on the surface, Habermas appears to buck a powerful trend in liberal theory, and his

recent writings on religion have engendered their share of critical reactions from liberals. While

generally friendly to Habermas, Christian Lafont is among a number of critics who holds that the

cognitive possibility that some religious reasons may contain truths does not generate any genuinely

new civic obligations among non-believing citizens. The obligation “to take seriously religious

views” should not entail being “cognitively [open] to the possible truth of creationism, the perversity

of homosexuality, or any other religious views.” (Lafont 2009, 137, 141-142). This criticism is

reflective of a broader trend in liberal theory that resists ceding to religion any unique cognitive

substance, either out of suspicion of authoritarianism or out of insistence that secular reason is self-

sufficient (Lafont 2007; cf. Leiter 2012, March 2013; Cf. Dworkin 2013). Going even further than

Lafont, another critic (Paul d’Arcais) echoes Richard Rorty by pointedly asking, “Why in the world

should we learn to adopt - to make our own - extremely anti-democratic perspectives?” As Jeremy

Waldron has recently pointed out (Waldron 2012, 849; cf. Sikka 2016, 100), many liberal theorists

today are quick to associate religiously-based political viewpoints with “theocratic ambition” and

political authoritarianism because of their apparent dogmatic intransigence and epistemological

insularity (Rorty 1994; cf. Bernstein 2013 and Lima 2013).

Paradoxically, in spite of his call for greater learning from religion, Habermas has indicated

that his understanding of religious beliefs overlaps in important respects with these interpretations.

He has argued, for instance, that “religiously rooted existential convictions, by dint of their if

necessary rationally justified reference to the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible
16
revealed truths, evade that kind of unreserved discursive examinations to which other ethical

orientations and world views i.e., secular ‘conceptions of the good,’ are exposed” (2006, 9; cf. 2008b,

129; 2002, 150-151). Habermas believes that religious convictions are uniquely insulated from

discursive rationality due to their dogmatic core as revealed truth claims. As he argues elsewhere,

“[o]nly conflicting religious beliefs teach us a fortiori that a justified consensus cannot be reached,”

and accordingly they are disqualified from inclusion in consensus-oriented political engagement

(Habermas, 2006, 22n32; cf. Cooke 2013, 249-254). It is clear from these words that Habermas

glides over the possibility that a religion could be constituted by a discursive tradition (as most

religions are), one in which multiple voices (including reason, revealed theology, and practical moral

reflection) are involved, and one which could simultaneously converge and diverge from secular

reasoning without simply becoming indistinguishable from it.

On the other hand, if one accepts Habermas’s account of religion as being entirely insulated

from reason, it is easier to understand why he insists that religious traditions must first undergo a

“modernization of religious consciousness” that can make them compatible with democratic life

(Habermas 2005 and 2006). According to Habermas, religious believers that have modernized their

faith traditions meet three conditions: (i) they adopt a “self- reflective” attitude towards “competing

doctrines of salvation” (2005, 14; cf. 2011, 26-27), i.e., they accept religious pluralism as an

incontrovertible fact of human nature; (ii) they respect “the independence of secular from sacred

knowledge and the institutionalized monopoly of modern scientific experts” as the arbiter of truth

(over and against, as we will see, religious dogma) (ibid); and, finally, (iii) modernized “religious

citizens […] develop an epistemic stance toward the priority that secular reasons enjoy in the

political arena” (ibid), i.e., they embrace a strong version of separation of church and state and the

neutrality of the political domain. Needless to say, if religious traditions could embrace all of these

17
attitudes without losing their essence, then the objections that Lafont, d’Arcais and many other

liberals raise would automatically be addressed. Indeed, for that very reason, Enlightenment

thinkers as far back as John Locke and Immanuel Kant had tried to develop precisely these types of

“rationalized” (and liberalized and tolerant) forms of Christianity, 5 and Habermas appears to be

calling for a return to this earlier effort to harmonize faith and scientific rationalism.

Let us focus in particular on the second criterion—Habermas’s insistence that religious

traditions bow to scientific rationalism. Presumably, such a “religion of reason” (to use the phrase

employed by early Enlightenment rationalists) will no longer be dependent on revealed dogma for its

conception of truth, at least not in any crucial area that may contradict the authority of scientific

rationalism. But that would be highly paradoxical, both because this requirement of a modernized

religion would seem to be in tension with political liberalism’s alleged neutrality, and because it

would mean that whatever truth religion could teach us in a post-secular society would simply

coincide with the pronouncements of scientific rationalism. The latter possibility would imply that

religion is superfluous as a source of truth or moral insight about human nature, and would defeat

from the outset whatever Habermas hoped liberal societies could learn by becoming more open to

religion. On the other hand, it may be the case that this sort of “transformative appropriation” (as

Habermas eventually labels this process [2013, 353]) benefits the philosopher and the secular liberal

citizen (insofar as a rationalized religion may be not only more moderate in politics, but more willing

5
See John Locke Reasonableness of Christianity, especially 222-227. See also Locke’s claim in the

Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book 4, Chapter 19 that “Reason must be our last Judge

and Guide in Everything,” including in theology—both natural and revealed.

18
to simply endorse a liberal morality). But would it not also risk draining religion of the very strength

and meaning of the “moral intuitions” that Habermas thinks can be beneficial to democracy?

There are indeed important signs that Habermas’s call for this religious modernization

transcends the foundational neutrality of Rawlsian liberalism. Thus, when he takes up the second

condition of religious modernization (“the authority of modern science”), Habermas claims that

religious believers must “conceive the relationship of dogmatic and secular beliefs in such a way that

the autonomous progress in secular knowledge cannot come to contradict their faith” (2006, 15, emphasis added).

“This arduous work of hermeneutic self-reflection,” Habermas continues, “must be undertaken

from within religious traditions,” and requires the “reconstruction of sacred truths” (ibid). In this

picture, faith and reason must no longer be regarded as two alternative (although ultimately

complementary and mutually interdependent) paths to truth about human nature (as had been the

case, for instance, in the Christian Thomistic tradition). Instead, Habermas has re-conceptualized

them as two different languages that express essentially the same truths—truths which are ultimately

determined by the “discursive power” or the hegemony of science. As I show in the next section,

although a commitment to pluralism and tolerance places considerable demands on believing

citizens, it does not necessarily privilege the type of secular (or scientific) reasoning that Habermas

has in mind. In particular, religious institutions and believers can embrace religious freedom from

within their own theological traditions (as happened with Catholicism) without necessarily

relinquishing the insights of either revelation or tradition (including natural law). Accordingly, a

religion need not be fundamentalist or dogmatic simply by virtue of its refusal to cede the entire

cognitive field to modern natural science and its ethic of rational skepticism (Wolterstorff 2013,

102).

19
 Thus although Habermas is aware of the idea of “multiple modernities,” ultimately he is

unwilling to extend the implications of this idea to his account of the supremacy of scientific

rationalism over religiously-informed and tradition-bound forms of reasoning in modernity (cf.

Casanova 1994; Rosati & Stoeckl 2012). As Habermas himself indicates, the acceptance by religious

traditions of science as an arbiter of truth is intended not merely for intellectual and theological

purposes, but also because it delivers concrete political benefits from the perspective of political

liberalism. A religion that accepts reason as the judge of its theological dogma will also be more

likely to accept reason as the ultimate authority in politics and morality. Thus, the second criterion

of religious modernization requires believers to “convincingly connect the egalitarian individualism

and universalism of modern law and morality with the premises of their comprehensive doctrines”

(2006, 14). For Habermas, a modernized religious tradition, therefore, bows to rationalism not just

in theology, but even and especially in morality and politics: a modernized religion is a religion that

has democratized itself and accepted a liberal and individualistic morality. By leaving the spectrum

of non-liberal religious actors undifferentiated and unexplored, such an approach does not leave any

constructive room for traditional (as well as non-Western) religious contributions which draw upon

perspectives that are critical of liberal moral assumptions.

This is especially problematic for Habermas because the conflict between tradition and

liberalism is endemic to modern societies, and is often reflected in religious objections to the view

that scientific rationalism can arbitrate all moral questions. Concrete policy debates about abortion,

euthanasia, capital punishment, to name just a few examples, reveal deep divergences between the

views of religious and secular citizens. As Habermas himself observes, “in the controversy […]

about the way to deal with human embryos, many voices still evoke [….] Genesis 1:27,” and its

traditional teaching on divine creation of the human person in the image of God (2001; cf. 2003a).

20
Similarly, the debate over abortion is animated by the enduring disagreement in moral perspectives

informed by revelation and natural science on whether or not a fetus qualifies as a human life.

Earlier in his career, Habermas claimed that “[a]t this stage of the debate, both sides in this dispute

appear to have good, perhaps even equally good, arguments” (1993a, 59). Indeed, it may happen,

Habermas averred, that the question of abortion “cannot be resolved from the moral point of view

at all,” because “descriptions of the problem of abortion are always inextricably interwoven” with

competing “tradition[s]” and “ideals of life” (ibid). Yet shortly after making this claim, Habermas

attempts to evade the difficulty this poses to the possibility of rational consensus by claiming that

“in the long run” this question “could be decided […] on the basis of good reasons” acceptable to

all, and that, at least in the meantime, liberal societies can occupy themselves with the less

controversial task of “legitimate ordering of coexistent forms of life” (ibid). 6

Clearly, if or insofar as Habermas is willing to accept the stand-off between the pro-life and

pro-choice sides of the debate, he can do so only by remaining open to conceptions of truth and

moral meaning that are not exhausted by scientific rationality. In other words, accepting such a

stand-off presupposes an ability to ask whether or not, in Habermas’s words, “modern science [is] a

practice that is completely understandable in its own terms, establishing the measure of all truths and

falsehoods?” (2006, 20). But if this is a question that Habermas is still willing to entertain, then the

most pressing task facing post-secular societies is not so much the transformation of religious

traditions in light of scientific rationalism, but rather open-ended engagement with those traditions

and with their perspectives.

6
Habermas recently acknowledged that “liberal regulations on abortion place a greater burden on

believing Catholics, or any supporter of a pro-life position.” But he continues to insist that “citizens

[…] can nonetheless accept” abortion laws as “just” (Habermas 2005).

21
 Given what we have seen, it is unclear to me that Habermas will be able to sustain such an

open-ended engagement with religion—even with a non-fundamentalist religion that has undergone

some degree of modernization. As I showed in this section, post-metaphysical philosophy, short of

remaining “agnostic” towards religion and its theological tradition, presupposes a particular (and

contestable) conception of truth, viz., modern scientific rationalism and secular morality, around

which faith and reason should seek to build a consensus. Because such a morality demands not just

acceptance of pluralism, but also resignation to “the individualizing and rationalizing pressure

exerted […] on traditional ways of life,” it leaves little to no room for traditions that do not share all

of these values. Such an account of modernization will have reverberating implications for

Habermas’s understanding of how liberal societies should “learn” from religious traditions. The

more we are confident that we are in possession of truth (or that natural science is the exclusive and

ultimate arbiter of truth), the more we will think of learning as translation from religion, i.e. as the

affirmation (as opposed to the transformation) of our preconceived social and moral conceptions. In

the last section of this article, I turn to this consensus-oriented conception of learning that

underwrites Habermas’s attempt to translate or appropriate religious ideas, and then evaluate it in

light of a competing understanding of learning that emphasizes the mutually transformative power

of faith and reason.

Habermas’s Project of Discursive Translation of Religion and the Example of Creation of

the Human Person “in the Image of God”

Habermas’s injunction that religious traditions need to “modernize” is based on his

assumption that believing citizens are subject to more demanding metaphysical encumbrances,

rooted in revelation and its comprehensive vision of morality and justice, than are their secular

counterparts. Habermas contrasts the religious believer with “[t]he secularized citizen traveling with
22
light metaphysical baggage,” i.e., a citizen “who can accept a morally ‘free-standing’ justification of

democracy and human rights” (2008, 309). Echoing Rawls’s freestanding liberalism, Habermas

argues that for a secular citizen, “the ‘right’ can without difficulty be accorded priority over the

‘good’’’ (cf. Rawls 2005, Lecture V). 7 In Habermas’s (admittedly disputable) reading, secular citizens

are not committed to a controversial ‘world-view’ (which they regard as universally true) or to a

notion of a “correct life” (2008, 309) that shapes all their public positions. Accordingly, they can co-

exist with deep pluralism with greater ease than their religious counterparts: for the secular citizen,

“different forms of life only embody different value orientations. And different values are not mutually

exclusive like different truths” (ibid). By contrast, “for the believer who travels with heavy

metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right,” precisely because the

believer draws his or her political and civic self-understanding from beliefs that claim universal

validity but are not shared by other citizens. The contrast that Habermas wants to establish between

these two outlooks is crystalized when he distinguishes the inflexible “dogmas” and “certainties of

faith” from “fallible beliefs of a secular nature.”

In this section, I first challenge the liberal association of religious contributions with

dogmatic intransigence and deliberative inaccessibility. I then empirically test Habermas’s proposal

that religious conceptions can be translated into secular language. Habermas points to the Christian

doctrine of the creation of the human person in the image of God as an illustration of how an

effective translation may work: secular reason can preserve the moral intuitions of Christian

egalitarianism by separating them from their theological foundations and repurposing them into the

foundation of a universally accessible conception of human rights. Although this is an appealing

7
As Walhof observes, Habermas’s seems to assume that “the worldview of non-religious citizens

substantially overlaps with the tenets of liberalism itself” (2013, 228).

23
example that seems to vindicate the possibility of an overlapping consensus, the attempt to

appropriate the idea of the creation of humankind in the image of God in the service of human

rights blurs crucial differences between two distinct traditions of thinking about human dignity. I

show this though a case study that on the surface suggests considerable convergence between

Christian and modern liberal traditions: the Catholic embrace of religious freedom with the Second

Vatican Council. The Catholic understanding of human dignity produces a fundamentally different

conception of religious freedom than when that right is justified on the basis either of neutrality or

of secular conceptions of individual autonomy. The distinctive contribution of religious

perspectives, at least in their traditional Christian form, is that they re-conceptualize liberal rights as

expressions of moral duties to community, humanity, and especially the created order which

transcend the liberal emphasis on individual autonomy.

In both Habermas as well as Rawlsian theory more broadly, the requirement that religious

contributions should be “translated” into public reason is intended to bridge the epistemological gulf

between religious and secular citizens by providing a shareable language of deliberation that is not

entangled with contestable foundations. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, much like Rawls,

Habermas subscribes to an understanding of reasoning that resolves “certain moral-political issues”

in a manner that “can legitimately satisfy any honest, unconfused thinker.” Thus, in a dialogue with

Taylor, Habermas argues that “secular reasons do not expand the perspective of one’s own

community, but push for mutual perspective taking so that different communities can develop a more

inclusive perspective by transcending their own universe of discourse” (Habermas 2011, 66,

emphasis added). Habermas claims that “by using any kind of religious reasons, you are implicitly

appealing to membership in a corresponding religious community,” which means that your

arguments can be understood “[o]nly if one is a member […of that…] particular religious tradition”

24
(Habermas 2011, 61). Mutual learning, on the other hand, can only take place when “all parties

appeal to the common reference point of a possible consensus,” and hence the insistence on shared

reasons of deliberation as a criterion of legitimacy. (Habermas 1993, 138). We note here that this

framework of convergence through “translation” entails a very narrow conception of “learning.” It

assumes that conversations across traditions that disagree about both social norms and even methods

of reasoning are inherently futile.

There are a number of reasons why the seemingly simplistic dichotomy that Habermas sets

up between religious and secular forms of reasoning does not sustain itself in practice. To begin

with, liberalism’s promise of a paradigm of public reasoning free from controversial moral

entanglements has proved elusive, since the very epistemic assumptions that liberals make about

“reason” itself presuppose a contestable conception of the human person (Sikka 2016; Sandel 1994).

Furthermore, most religious interventions in public debate do not simply appeal to the

incontrovertible authority of revelation or the church to justify coercive measures in democracy.

Instead, as Waldron points out, when religiously-informed citizens “draw on the teachings of their

church,” they tend to appeal to it “as theoretical authority,” “that is, as a heritage of deep thinking

about the matter that can inform their own thinking and their own conclusions” when they engage

others in debate (Waldron 2012, 853; cf. March 2013). Similarly, Simone Chambers has argued that

even “[q]uoting scripture, for example, need not be an appeal to unquestioned authority but an

opening move in a discussion,” one that “can be challenged with alternative interpretations,” even of

the scripture in question (Chambers 2010, 19; cf. Cooke 2006; Cooke 2007; Cooke 2001). In other

words, scripture never simply interprets itself, and neither do “liberal” assumptions. Thus, a

religiously-informed engagement, one which draws on tradition in order to invite debate and

discussion with competing viewpoints, is clearly far from a “conversation-stopper” (Rorty 1994),

25
and indeed constitutes its own form of reasoning. The vast majority of religious contributions (both

contemporary as well as historic) in American civic life resemble the version depicted by Waldron

more than they do the one presented by Rawls, Habermas and Rorty.

If many religious arguments are not as inaccessible as some liberal critics claim, what then

differentiates them from both secular and public reasons and what is their unique deliberative

contribution? The argument proposed here is that religious perspectives, at least in their traditional

Christian form, present a distinctive understanding of humanity’s role in the created order, which

issues in a richer and more demanding conception of justice than the one espoused by secular and

non-foundational forms of public reason. Unlike the modern natural rights tradition, which begins

with the priority of an individual’s natural liberty in the state of nature, traditional Christianity

circumscribes human autonomy with responsibilities that derive from the human person’s creaturely

nature. As a result, traditional Christian perspectives can help us reimagine existing moral debates

and reconsider our settled answer—especially in a society that is already constitutionally secular and

one that prioritizes individualism and rationality in politics and morality. In particular, Weithman

and Waldron stress that Catholic and Evangelical contributions make the foundation of their moral

thinking “the premise that human beings have inviolable dignity because they are made in God’s

image” (Weithman, 51; cf. Waldron 2012, 855). This has significant political and moral

consequences for both of these faith traditions. Thus, the National Association of Evangelicals

proclaims, “We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image,” and goes

on to emphasize the “responsibilities,” i.e. duties, of that “mandate” for “different institutions,

including governments, families, churches, schools, businesses, and labor unions.” Similarly, in

affirming the link between “the dignity of the human person and his social nature,” the Catholic

Church emphasizes “the reciprocal duties” that human beings owe to one another.

26
 To be sure, there are important examples of Christianity’s endorsement of parts of the liberal

political order, especially in the twentieth century, that underwrites the peaceful coexistence of

secular and Christian citizens in democracy. Whether in the case of the Civil Rights movement,

women’s suffrage, or abolitionism, American Protestantism has historically been an impetus for

liberal social reforms and advances in liberty and equality. Beginning with the Second Vatican

Council, the Catholic Church embraced religious freedom, endorsed democracy, and promulgated a

qualified teaching of human rights. Moreover, as Andrew March, Jeremy Waldron, and others have

pointed out, contemporary Catholic and Evangelical social justice teachings (especially on issues

such as poverty, environmentalism, and torture) may helpfully overlap with certain liberal policy

prescriptions (March 2013; Waldron 1993 & 2012). Although both friends and critics of liberal

public reason appeal to these examples as evidence that religious ideas “express judgments and

intuitions whose validity already does not rest on theological premises” (Sikka 2016; March 2013;

Gutmann 1999), and thus echo Habermas’s approach to religion, something more complicated is

actually going on here: to the extent these religious perspectives converge with certain liberal

commitments to equality and individual rights, these commitments are refracted and intensified

through a prior communitarian prism of moral obligations. As David Hollenbach has observed

about post-Vatican II Catholicism, “Catholic teaching on human rights today presupposes a

reconstruction of the classical liberal understanding of what these rights are,” a reconstruction that

takes a communitarian emphasis because it is rooted in “the traditional natural-law conviction that

the human person is an essentially social being” (Hollenbach 1994, 128). This characterization can

be applied to important areas of contemporary Evangelical social engagement as well.

If this description of contemporary Christianity is correct, then any attempt at translation of

its “moral insights” poses the risk of mischaracterizing their true meaning, and thus a great deal may

27
be “lost in translation” in the Habermasian paradigm. We need a more precise conception of

learning form religion that merely unidirectional translation, for the purpose of religious

contributions may be to challenge, correct, or enlarge, rather than simply endorse, the prevailing

individualistic and secular norms of a liberal society. In all of his recent writings Habermas insists

that when a liberal society learns from religion, it succeeds at “appropriating” its moral intuitions in

“secular language” in such a way that they no longer depend on the theological and moral bedrock

provided by revelation. Thus Habermas writes that “translation” ensures the “wider accessibility”

and “appeal of reasons” “which are secular in the sense of transcending the semantic domains of a

particular religious community” (Habermas 2011, 114). While I do not believe that the “moral

intuitions” of religion traditions are reducible exclusively to the revealed theological dogmas of those

traditions, I maintain that the Habermasian approach misses the fact that Christianity and

Enlightenment rationalism are working with divergent conceptions of human dignity. Whatever

partial overlaps may emerge between these two traditions when they participate in the shared civic

space of liberal democracy, they cover over deeper and enduring dissonances that continue to shape

the way believing and unbelieving citizens think about moral questions.

Let me illustrate this point by evaluating Habermas’s invocation of divine creation of the human

person “in the image of God” as an example of a successful translation of religious concepts into

secular reason (2006, 45; cf. 2001). In his debate with Ratzinger, Habermas invokes divine creation

as an example of “the assimilation by philosophy of genuinely Christian ideas” (2006, 44), one which

provides the foundation of individual human rights:

One such translation that salvages the substance of the term is the translation of the
concept of ‘man in the image of God’ into that of the identical dignity of all men that
deserves unconditional respect. This goes beyond the borders of one particular religious
fellowship and makes the substance of biblical concepts accessible to a general public that
also includes those who have other faiths and those who have none (2006, 44-45).
28
 Here Habermas explains that in order to be effective, such translation must free “the

cognitive content” of religion, so that it becomes “decoupled from the ratcheting effect of truth

of revelation.” To be a “salvaging” translation, however, philosophy must do so “without

emptying [the religious symbols] through a process of deflation and exhaustion.” Crucially,

Habermas explains that this means preserving the “inspirational power” and the “intuitions of

transgression and salvation” that religious symbols contain, and not just their cognitive meaning

(Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, 44–5). This enigmatic meaning of translation becomes clearer

when Habermas’s brings up Genesis 1:27 in the context of genetic engineering: the “creatural

nature of the image expresses an intuition which […] may even speak to those who are tone-

deaf to religious connotations,” by reminding them that human beings (including in their

embryonic form) possess inviolable dignity with which no other “human being [may] intervene”

(2001). As Habermas has repeatedly argued, modern philosophy “has long since appropriated

biblical motifs,” and the “modern concept of the individual person […] borrow[s] [its]

connotations of uniqueness, irreplaceability, and inwardness from the biblical notion of a life

for which everybody is responsible before God” (RR, 41; cf. 2006, 150-151). But to what

extent is this view of “appropriation” of religious meaning coherent? Would this not imply that

liberalism and its idea of universal rights operates on the basis of borrowed theological capital

which it inherits from its Christian past but which secular reason is unable to replenish on its

own (cf. Mendieta 2005, 249-250)?

One way out of this difficulty is to realize that Habermas himself admits that what secular

reason accomplishes is not so much a translation, but rather a transformation of the traditional

theistic egalitarianism of Christianity. “With his conception of autonomy,” Habermas admits,

“Kant certainly destroyed the traditional conception of being ‘a child of God’” (2001; cf. 2008b,

29
211-216). Thus, Habermas acknowledges that “[s]omething was lost when sin became guilt.

The desire for forgiveness is, after all, still closely connected with the unsentimental wish to

undo other injuries as well” (2001). In fact, “the lost hope of resurrection has left behind a

palpable emptiness,” since it leaves us “unsettled by the irreversibility of any suffering that has

been caused” by human beings and remains “beyond any measure of restitution within the

power of man” (ibid). Even Habermas senses that what is particularly difficult to preserve

through translation into secular reason is precisely the communitarian dimension of obligation

to humanity and to the Creator that is imposed by a theistic conception of the human person as

created in the image of God. This is an important admission by Habermas that translation (at

least the way most liberal theorists have conceptualized it) is not a neutral process, and it

explains the enduring dissonance between religious and secular perspectives that characterizes

contemporary liberal societies (cf. 2008b, 240-241).

Although the Dignitatis Humanae (the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on

Religious Freedom) does not mention the doctrine of creation in the “image of God” explicitly,

it presupposes a comprehensive view of humanity’s relationship to the created order. 8 John

Courtney Murray later explained that as the only Vatican II document “formally addressed to

the whole world—Christian and non- Christian, religious and atheist”—it “first considers

religious freedom in light of reason.” However, this argument of reason rests on a conception

8
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church stresses that the “human person” is

“created in the image of God,” and states that “the Church sees” in the affirmation of human rights

an “extraordinary opportunity […] for more effectively recognizing human dignity and universally

promoting it as a characteristic inscribed by God the Creator in his creature.”

30
of human dignity that is much less subjective than Habermas’ liberal notion of equality of

rights. For example, in the Gaudium et Spes, which lays out the Second Vatican’s teaching on

dignity, the Council claims that man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for

itself,” and “[t]he root reason for human dignity lies in man’s communion with God.” The

Dignitatis Humanea, in turn, proclaims that “religious freedom has its foundation in the very

dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by

reason itself.” The idea of religious freedom that emerges from this line of reflection differs

crucially in meaning, purpose and scope from secular conceptions of that human right. The

Council grounds religious freedom not in indifference to religious truth, nor in skepticism about

the possibility of discovering it, but rather in the explicit affirmation of the fact that “all” human

beings are “impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially

religious truth.” This view of humanity’s religious nature provides a particularly strong basis for

religious freedom understood as immunity from “external coercion:” “the right to religious

freedom has its foundation not in the subjective attitude of the individual but in his very

nature,” and “this right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to

their obligation of seeking the truth.”

There are significant civic implications to this conception of religious freedom. Because

this view of religious freedom is oriented towards a transcendent standard of truth and a

supreme deity, the Council proclaims that the “religious acts” of human beings “transcend by

their very nature the order of terrestrial and temporal affairs.” Human beings are obligated not

only to seek, but also to “adhere to the truth, once it is known,” and indeed “to order their

whole lives in accord with the demands of truth.” Although this means that the state is

incompetent in theology, it does not lead to official government indifference to or even

31
neutrality with respect to religion in general: the state “ought […] to take account of the

religious life of the citizenry and show it favor.” Furthermore, the Council understands this

freedom to have a distinctly communitarian dimension, since “[r]eligious communities are a

requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.” As Vincent Philip Muñoz

and Michael McConnell have argued (in different ways), in the area of constitutional law this

conception of religious freedom leads to the view that religion is beyond the reach of the

state—a position that culminates either in presumptive constitutional invalidation of any law

that substantially burdens religious practice (Muñoz 2016), or in judicially and legislatively

enforced exemptions from such a law (McConnell 1990 & 1992).

Thus, even here where one would expect a strong ground for principled agreement and

overlap between the Christian and liberal traditions, the Second Vatican’s convergence on

religious liberty from within the Catholic tradition does not fit Habermas’s model of “translation”

of religious ideas into shareable secular or neutral reasons. We see this as soon as we consider

the implications for religious freedom when the idea of human dignity rooted in divine creation

of the human person is reinterpreted in the putatively “public” (or at least non-religious) terms

of individual autonomy. In both political theory and constitutional law, the strategy of

grounding religious freedom on human autonomy (and, more generally, human rights on self-

determination) is intended to prioritize an abstract right independently from any controversial

conceptions of the good, in order to maximize both the possibility of consensus and the

breadth of protection afforded by the right. Often, the underlying transformation in the

meaning of human dignity that this shift reflects is expressed through the substitution of

“freedom of conscience” for “religious liberty.” In his Religion Without God, Ronald Dworkin

recommends “abandoning the idea of a special right to religious freedom with its high hurdle of

32
protection” in favor of “only the more general right of ethical independence” (2013, 131-132).

Similarly, in their Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor

(2011) propose to define “freedom of conscience” as an individual’s “right to choose his or her

own conception of what a successful life is” (2011, 71), within which they include “different

philosophical conceptions that stand as the secular equivalents of religions” (13). While the

ultimate outcome of this approach is supposed to be neutrality between “religion and

nonreligion,” in practice it amounts to constitutionally balancing (i.e., subordinating) religious

rights against compelling state interests (Munoz 2016), and, more broadly, to the cultural

prioritization of liberal individualism as a comprehensive good.

The myriad political and constitutional implications of this transformation are beyond

the scope of this article. What is most important for my argument is that it demonstrates that

the two sides in this debate are in fact operating with competing conceptions of human dignity

and this makes sustaining an “overlapping consensus” between them about the meaning of

religious freedom difficult, especially as the two sides increasingly diverge and clash on cultural

issues that intersect with religious practices and beliefs. This also demonstrates why

Habermas’s broader attempt to learn from religion by appropriating its insights into shareable

norms is incomplete both philosophically and practically: foundations matter, and religious

foundations will not leave our understanding of human rights unchanged, even when they

converge with the core liberal individualistic right of religious freedom. The Catholic

interpretation of religious freedom is oriented towards the divine, and in asserting that the

genuine purpose of that freedom is the quest for religious truth, it affirms the goodness (and

priority) of religion as such. It therefore places certain responsibilities on the exercise of that

right. The justification of freedom of conscience on the basis of autonomy, on the other hand,

33
shifts the emphasis to an individual’s quest for meaning, expression, or self-fulfillment, one that

(as Muñoz points out) “may or may not involve worship, religion, or a sense of the divine.”

Although partial overlaps between these religious and secular approaches are both possible and

necessary for the civic stability of a liberal society, they are likely to cover over deeper

substantive disagreements about how that society should prioritize and protect rights, especially

when they come into conflict with each other.

Conclusion

My first conclusion is that liberal theory would benefit from a more dynamic and

precise account of learning from religion than is offered by the idea of “translation.” As I have

shown, the attempt to think of religious contributions through the framework of translation

risks implying that religious and secular reasons are just two different languages for expressing

the same insights on a particular issue. Embracing this view, Andrew March argues that

“religious arguments are most potent and enduring precisely in those cases where revealed

religion is not a source of exclusive moral knowledge” (March 2013), and Sonia Sikka claims

that “what we are really doing when we claim to be ‘translating’ religious reasons […] is

isolating the intuitions and judgments” within religious traditions which do “not require appeal

to theological doctrines” (Sikka 2016). While I agree with Habermas, March and Sikka that

religious citizens should try to make their viewpoints accessible to those who do not share their

faith (or any faith at all), I question whether the moral and political implications of religiously-

based viewpoints can be understood without engaging the distinctive theological and

metaphysical “baggage” that gives them their shape and content. Thus, I am inclined to agree

with Jeremy Waldron’s conclusion that learning from religion “should not be conceived simply

as the attempt to find something equivalent in conventional secular wisdom on the topic”
34
(Waldron 2010, 9; cf. 2012). After all, religious contributions are inherently transformative

because their distinctive foundations help us reimagine our “social obligation[s] in a radical and

challenging way” (ibid) that differs from conventional secular approaches.

Second, it is true that the success of the liberal political project depends on the creation

of a certain kind of shared civic space. This is especially so when a liberal society is composed

of enduring pluralistic commitments—religious and nonreligious. But the creation and

maintenance of this civic space should be imagined in terms that are less unidirectional than the

ones that Habermas and Rawls propose. Peaceful co-habitation between religious and secular

citizens depends not on translation and rationalization of religion, but rather on the partial

convergence of religious traditions on certain liberal political and civic norms, especially on the

principle of religious freedom. As my discussion of the Second Vatican Council demonstrates,

this requires embedding the idea of toleration within the theological tradition of a particular

religion. Whether this can be replicated in non-Christian religions with different theological

genealogies remains an open question. But because such a convergence on religious freedom

does not require believing citizens to accept all the epistemic criteria of modern rationalism and

secularism at the expense of their own religious traditions, it provides a much more appealing

route to religious moderation in the modern world than the one that Habermas presents. Since

Habermas’s “post-secular” project is not narrowly construed for the Christian world, but aims

to provide guidance for a multicultural Europe, the path to a tolerant religion that I have

outlined may ultimately prove to be more appealing to Islamic reformers who may be

suspicious of the bargain with secularism that appears to be the cost of integration in Europe.

Third, and contrary to Habermas’s understanding of “learning” from religion, we

should neither expect nor hope that Christianity, which already co-inhabits the civic space of
35
liberalism, will become thoroughly liberal and individualistic in all respects. Nor should we

hope that increasing rationalization of politics will lead to a fundamental weakening of

traditional ways of thinking and institutions and their replacement by an individualistic ethic of

belief. Indeed, such a complete liberalization of religion is undesirable even and especially from

the perspective of the civic health of liberalism itself, because traditional religion has something

important to contribute to a liberal society. An attractive feature of Habermas’s reflections is

that he senses that liberalism in particular needs religion because it suffers from a cultural deficit

induced by subjective individualism, a deficit that can be counterbalanced precisely by the

communitarian dimensions of religion and its capacity to nourish what Habermas calls

“solidarity.” As we saw, the Catholic conception of the human being is that man is “a social

animal,” and this conception includes within it the duty to care for the spiritual and moral

health of the political community. Such a religious conception of obligation is particularly

effective at drawing human beings out of their isolated cocoons and at engaging them with their

communities.

Fourth, Habermas’s encounter with religion should remind liberal theorists to guard

against the tendency to either homogenize the concept of “truth” (by reducing it to scientific

rationalism) or to assimilate it with consensus. Partly due to Rawls’s influence, contemporary

political theory is committed to the exclusion of controversial truth-claims from politics, under

the assumption that contestation over first principles can easily devolve into violence. While

Habermas for his part is not as distrustful of truth claims as is Rawls, as we have seen his

commitment to Enlightenment rationalism leads him to subscribe to a remarkably

homogenizing notion of truth: “concepts like truth, rationality, or justification,” Habermas

counterintuitively maintains, “play the same grammatical role in every linguistic community”

36
(1996, 417). In his most recent engagement with religion, Habermas makes the standard of

adjudication “natural science,” and indeed attempts to reshape religion in light of scientific

rationalism. But as Linda Zerilli has pointed out, Habermas’s rational conception of truth

“might lead to a further sedimentation of the idea that science (and its method) is the sole

claimant to and arbiter of truth and knowledge” (Zerilli 2012b, 57). Insofar as this may close us

off from unfamiliar moral claims advanced in religious traditions, it would do a disservice to

liberalism. Instead of seeking to rationalize religious contributions or to translate them and

appropriate them into secular reason, we would be better off if we remained open to religion by

growing accustomed to the dissonance its contributions will inevitably generate in our moral

and civic life.

37
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