La¨ıcit´e in Reverse Mono-Religious Democracies.pdf

Lacite in Reverse: Mono-Religious Democraciesand the Issue of Religion in the Public Sphere

Nadia Urbinati

Some months ago, the Speaker of the Italian Low Chamber, Mr. Gianfranco Fini, felt in needof specifying something that might seem redundant in a constitutional liberal democracy.Mr. Fini declared that the Parliament should not pass laws that are inspired by religiousprecepts. Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a prominent Catholic theologian very active in thepublic debate, replied immediately: The issues on which Catholics intend to be activein politics are not definable as religious precepts because they pertain to fundamentalrights that are written in human nature, demonstrable by reason, and endorsed by the Italianconstitution. . .Catholics are in the right position for actively participating in the public andparliamentary debate against abortion and euthanasia and to protect family.1 As this briefexchange shows, the Italian Parliament and the Roman Catholic Church are engaged in apolitical confrontation that is radical because it involves sovereignty. But contrary to olderconfrontations between the state and the church, in contemporary constitutional democraciesthe conflict over the control of civil authority is performed in deliberative style, through theposture of reasoning and the language of rights. This dialogic transformation of politics hasopened the public sphere to religious citizens in a new way. At the same time, it also posesa new set of potentially serious problems for constitutional democracy.

In his answer to Mr. Fini, Monsignor Sgreccia adopted a style of reasoning that JohnRawls revisited public reason would consider legitimate. Indeed, while publicly proclaim-ing principles that he derived from his comprehensive doctrine, Monsignor Sgreccia madean effort to reach out to non-religious citizens by arguing that those principles can alsobe accepted by them because they are in agreement with the principles of public reasoncontained in the Italian constitution although expressed not in the form of public reason(like constitutional rights) but in the philosophical language of natural rights, according tothe Thomistic tradition. Endorsing this discursive style would seem to be a secure passportfor citizens with comprehensive doctrines to actively participate in the public sphere ofdeliberation. Hence, Jurgen Habermas has argued that in post-secular democratic societyreligious citizens have the right to participate in public discourse with their own principlesand convictions. In fact, Habermas is even more generous than Rawls and thinks that thelimits on individual liberty that Rawls injunction of translation of private reasons intopublic reasons contemplates is still too demanding and, moreover, unequally demandingsince it demands more on religious citizens than non-religious ones. In Habermas view,thus, Monsignor Sgreccia should be allowed even to claim publicly that the law of the Italianstate should be consistent with his religious precepts without bothering to engage in anysort of stylistic translation. Indeed, as an ordinary citizen who participates in public opinionformation but not lawmaking, Monsignor Sgreccia should not be asked, not even in the nameof what Rawls would call an informal or moral duty of civility, to rephrase his religiousarguments so as to make them in agreement with the language of civil rights.2

In this paper, I would like to challenge this view. In particular, I intend to criticizeHabermas position and on a lesser degree Rawls revisited public reason. Both positions,although in different ways, are tailored to a philosophical reflection of the liberal societies

Constellations Volume 17, No 1, 2010.C 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, OxfordOX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 5that are the home of genuine religious pluralism. However, they are Habermas more thanRawls hardly suitable and safe if extended or applied to liberal societies in which onereligion enjoys a strong majority and pluralism is only predicated in the constitution but isnot a lived experience in society. In relation to the place of religion in the public sphere, itwould be important that along with Rawls distinction between liberal societies and despoticsocieties (whether decent or not) we make also a distinction within liberal societies, amongthose in which religious pluralism is both a juridical and a social reality, and those in whichreligious pluralism is protected by the law but not a social reality or an ethical culture thatinspires the public reasoning of ordinary citizens. This distinction between the juridicaland the ethical level is meant to suggest that we must regard the norm (of constitutionaldemocracy) always in its porous relationship to the actual cultural life of the society, anddemocracy always as both a set of principles and procedures and an actualization that iscontextually specific.

My conclusion can be rendered as follows: In matters that have a direct impact on theindividual freedom of religion and social peace such as the presence of religion in the publicsphere, political theorists should pay close attention to the ethical context and the historicaltradition of a given society without deducing practical conclusions from an ideal conceptionof democracy. This pragmatic suggestion of going back and forth from the ideal norm tothe context is an admission of the fact that a political practice that is liberal in a religiouspluralistic environment may turn to be anti-liberal in a mono-religious society. Pluralism isthe essential condition within which we should situate the discourse of the role of religionsin the public sphere. Without pluralism (as a social fact or as actual plurality of religions,not only a formal declaration of rights) a constitutional democracy may generate decisionsthat are not more liberal or tolerant than those made in a non-constitutional democracy (orin a decent illiberal society, to paraphrase Rawls). The advice to pay critical attention to thehistorical and social context is particularly urgent in the case of Habermas position, which isoptimistic to the point of underestimating the actual fact (or a contrario the lack) of pluralismin the making of a safe and open public sphere. The Italian case is exemplary of the weaknessof post-secularism as a recipe deducible from an ideal deliberative conception of democracy.

Civil Law, Religious Law, and the Place of Political DecisionThe first step of my argument focuses on the interpretation of the issue at stake when we dealwith religion in the public sphere. I propose the following maxim: Any reflection on theplace of religion in the public sphere should be situated within the context of an authoritativepolitical decision or the domain of civil lawmaking because, contrary to a dialogue amongfriends or private discussion, public debates are always performed, directly or indirectly, inview of making new laws or criticizing and changing existing laws. What makes deliberationpublic is not only the style and principles that define it but also the goal, which consists inmaking decisions which all must comply with. The place of decision in democratic politicsis the crucial issue at stake in the dialogue between Mr. Fini and Monsignor Sgreccia. Theissue is the relationship between civil or secular law (I am going to use these two adjectivesas synonyms) and religious or canonic law (but the same can also be said of Islamic andJudaic law). This issue is crucial because it goes straight to the foundation of the legitimacyof civil law (thus of authoritative decisions) in a constitutional democracy. Unfortunately,the deliberative theory of democracy seems to underrate the role of decision.

The theory of deliberative democracy lessens the role of decision in order to exalt theinformal process of reasoned discourse. Its goal is to prove that since any democratic decision

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6 Constellations Volume 17, Number 1, 2010

is open to revision, the process of critical understanding and informal deliberation reflectsthe character of democratic politics much more genuinely than the act of decision or votingper se. The claim that democracy has a moral legitimacy along with an institutional oneis well-established and important. To paraphrase Ciceros description of Socrates role inAthens, we might say that through public deliberation Habermas has brought reason downfrom the heavens of pure theoretical deduction and set her in the city, thus compelling hisfellow citizens to ask questions about life and morality and answer them with reliable andreasonable accuracy. Deliberation is an extended process of public justification, an exercisein intellectual honesty, reciprocal recognition of one anothers dignity and equality, and asign of true autonomy.3 These three moral characteristics make democracy more than simplyinstitutionally legitimate because any decision that fulfills them may be universalizable andthus contains a validity claim addressed to humanity as a whole, not merely the will of thespecific community that made it. After Kant, the moderns are capable of achieving what theancients couldnt: a truly universalistic and egalitarian perspective and the emendation ofarbitrariness from politics in a way that democracy as decision-making procedure (majorityrule) cannot do. It is not hard to predict that this achievement is primed to have enormousconsequences. Certainly, it may encourage an expansion of the meaning of democracy frompolitics to morality, and moreover from a state-based government to an ethical way ofcollective life, domestic as well as cosmopolitan. Per effect of deliberative theory, todaydemocracy is not simply the name of a form of government; its meaning is unavoidablyprescriptive, enriched by a moral content that ascribes to participation and peoples self-determination an ethical, educational and cognitive efficacy. In the end, democracy is thename of a holistic project, not simply a matter of popular consent. In fact it is performedthrough but somehow exceeds voting and decision.

However, lowering the domain of decision and focusing on the informal and moral aspectof deliberation may encourage misleading conclusions, particularly in the case of religion.What I propose instead is that we locate all political deliberation in every case in relationto lawmaking. This means highlighting the political character of all public deliberationincluding those involving religious citizens. Only if we presume a law-oriented perspectivecan we understand and fully evaluate the role and place of religion in the public sphere.Religious citizens (as ordinary believers, intellectuals, and members of the clergy) questionand criticize existing laws or propose new laws when they enter the public sphere. This barefact should invite theorists of democracy to keep in mind the central role of decision andidentify democracy with a free process of opinion formation whose end is voting (by citizensand their representatives as well). The final station and natural goal of the public sphere ofdeliberation is decision; and civil law is the form decision takes in modern constitutionalstates. Within the context of lawmaking, the issue of the place of religion in the public sphereof a democratic society acquires a feature that is less ambiguous and directly tied to thedistinction between civil authority and religious authority.

The distinction between secular law and any religious law played a crucially importantrole in the political history of modern Europe. Its ethnocentric origin does not make it lessvaluable because no democratic public life is possible outside or against this distinction.History and daily news prove abundantly that religions can be an intractable source of war,illiberty and incivility whenever they claim an authority over civil law or try to blur thedistinction between secular jurisprudence and sacred jurisprudence.

In Federalist 10, James Madison explained the nefarious (as illiberal and bellicose) po-tential of religions by resorting directly to the nature of religious passion, which he thoughtcapable of predisposing human beings toward intolerance because its main goal is that of


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 7making the social order in agreement with its own principles. Because of their insatiablenature, passions (first of all those associated with God and property) are the latent causesof factions, which in turn are the direct causes of social conflicts and intolerance becauseof their unavoidably monopolistic tendency. As we know, the solution Madison advancedwas pluralism (divide et impera) rather than the repression of factions or their expulsionfrom civil society in the attempt of depressing passions, because his goal was to achieve andpreserve civil peace and liberty together, not civil peace alone. The state, he argued, must notembrace or bend toward any faction but guard instead over a society that should be the homeof many factions that act freely and limit one another while co-existing under the same civillaw. Social and religious pluralism on the one hand and a monistic civil power (the sourceof legitimate law must be only one, the government) on the other are the twin strategies thatmake individual liberty and social peace secure in a constitutional democracy.

The Permanently in fieri Immanent Character of Democratic PoliticsIn modern Europe, the process of secularization (by which we should first of all mean theprocess of emancipation of civil authority from religious authority) has coincided with thefull affirmation of religious liberty, that is to say the end of continental Christian uniformity(Concordia Christiana) and the elimination of any civil restriction on minority religions (orreligious pluralism). The sixteenth century formula cuius regio, eius religio (also translatedas one king, one law one faith4) was overcome only after the civil order succeeded inemancipating itself from the task of fulfilling goals that were external to it, such as decidingon which faith was the right one or using the coercive power of the state to prepare thesubjects to the eternal life or the salvation of the soul.

In a 1966 seminal article on the history of the idea of freedom of conscience, JosephLecler showed that freedom of conscience as freedom of a person, not simply of a Christian,advanced along with the recognition of religious pluralism.5 Briefly stated, the formulacuius regio, ius religio was the result of (although not explicitly formulated by) the Peace ofAugsburg (1555) and made its appearance in Protestant Europe first. The practical outcomeof that formula was twofold: the end of the religious and imperial unity of the old continentand the beginning of the pluralism of sovereign states. Its meaning was that a sovereignwho expressed his preference for a creed could not be forced to change his faith by anothersovereign. As for the subjects, although in theory the formula said nothing against theirfreedom of conscience, their freedom ended de facto when and if their faith did not coincidewith that of their king. The break of Concordia (which occurred along with the erosion of theHoly Roman Empire) transmigrated in the affirmation of the principle of equal sovereigntyand the identification of the sovereign with the king, and the king with his territory andhis subjects (Concordia as the unity of the realm under one sovereign). Absolute monarchywas the outcome. This entailed that: a) freedom of conscience was first enjoyed by kings orsovereigns and its affirmation started as an affirmation of state sovereignty; and b) freedomof conscience became a full principle of freedom, and thus also of religious freedom, whenthe subjects vindicated their own freedom not only or simply against other churches or thePope but also against their own sovereign. It is in this sense entirely correct to link the historyof religious freedom and secularization to the history of the democratic and constitutionaltransformation of European modern states.6

As for the character of modern states, what Max Weber called the privatization of religionsdid not simplistically entail that religions were confined within the believers inner life withno social visibility, or that freedom of religion and conscience meant seclusion and invisibility



of ones creed from outside. It is doubtful that this could even be possible since any religion iscomposed of rituals and social practices along with dogmatic precepts and beliefs.7 It did noteven mean that civil codes and religious codes stopped interacting in the moment the formerbecame autonomous and hierarchically superior (according to Harold Berman they wereactually in a relationship of separation and competition and in this sense interaction).8Secularization meant on the contrary that religious contents and principles were expelledfrom state apparatuses, and in particular from civil and criminal legal codes. To mentionone example, after the French revolution, in most European states the institution of marriagebegan to be codified by civil law and was taken away from religious authority.9 As a FrenchCatholic, Pierre Lafitte, said in 1893, God has ceased to be an issue of public law. He isnow only an issue of private law that is to say, God became an issue of individual freedomof religion and private morality.10

That the state extricated itself or disassociated its legitimacy from religion meant twothings at once: a) that the state renounced expressing its preference for one religion insteadof or against another; and b) that religions (or more precisely, churches) renounced claimingprerogatives on civil law. The separation of civil law and religious law (in Europe it wasessentially a separation of civil law from canonic law) was a tormented process that reachedits destination with the recognition by states and constitutions that the foundation of civillaw is immanent (peoples will), and not transcendent (Gods will). Eighteenth centuryAmerican and French constitutionalism epitomized the apex of a process of liberalizationthat had started in the sixteenth century with the end of Europae Concordia Christiana.

The meaning and implication of the separation of civil law and religious law was effectivelycaptured in 1938 by R.G. Renard, a Dominican and Law Professor at the University of Nancy:French, Italian, Spanish and even Japanese legal codes, different as they are, walk in thesame direction, which is very different from the direction taken by canonic law. Indeed, whilecivil law disciplines society according to a perspective and within a horizon that is temporallylimited, canonic [religious] law treats mundane society as the home of spiritual society, whichhas eternity as its destiny. The comparison [between civil law and religious law] is possibleon the condition that we understand this great divide.11 Renard was right to think that thedivide goes straight to the foundation of legitimacy: in the one case, the foundation is withinhumanity itself and its finite temporal dimension; in the other, the foundation is God, who isoutside human temporality and history. This divide acquired its most eloquent and effectiveexpression with the gradual democratization of the political order, which eroded the lastremnants of transcendence from the polis (like nobility and honor or any other principlethat claimed to be above or outside the will of the subjects).12 Democracys proceduresof decision-making presume a permanent legal changeability because they presume humanfallibility along with the awareness that decisions, all of which rest on subjects consent, arealways and in principle emendable. Democracys political order cannot tolerate any ultimatefoundation that is outside itself i.e. outside the principles of consent and majority rule although this does not mean that democratic citizens do not experience the tension betweentheir public identity and their private or religious one. This illuminates the meaning of thesecular as the immanent character permanently in fieri of democratic politics.

However, the process that brought about the separation of secular authority and religiousauthority has not resulted in a society in which religion is confined within the inner life ofthe individual, as sociologists have simplistically suggested (thus helping create the blatantconfusion between the secular character of civil law and the ideology of secularism).13Rather, it is a society in which a judge like the Catholic R.G. Renard is required to silencehis religious faith when making an authoritative judgment. The unavoidable tension between


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 9the judges foro interno and foro externo must never be allowed to resolve in the victoryof the former over the latter. In addition, however, democratic society is one in which thetension between these two domains is neither repressed nor, above all, solved once and forall. The dialectic between the civil and the religious is permanent and never resolved. Thispermanence not the repression or the privatization of ones religious belief is what makesfor the character of a society that is democratic and secular at once.

In sum, the fact that religion does not have a directly political role does not mean that itdoes not have any role in the process of public judgment formation, which takes place outsidestate institutions as an expression of freedom of speech and of religion. As Charles Taylor hasrecently argued (but Karl Marx had reached this understanding already in 1843), the secularage made room for religion rather than eliminating it, because by disengaging religion frompolitics and the state, it opened up new conditions for religious belief and made religiona permanent dimension of the search for meanings that transcend the empirical normalityof our ordinary life. The liberation of the political from the religious had the unintendedconsequence of making reason and autonomy (the most distinctive products of the secularage) also instruments in the service of faith. As a result, religious faith is glorified as thefruit of individual free choice instead of the result of imposition by state authority or anun-reflected tradition. The creation of this favorable condition went hand in hand with theconstruction of a public space as a domain that is separated and autonomous from both thesphere of the coercive norms of the State and the discretionary will of the individuals beliefand interest.14

Two are the conclusions we can draw from this argument: historically, the formation ofa civil public sphere took place along with the distinction or differentiation between legalor civil codes and religious codes; and in addition, in a democratic society, lawmaking isnot a work that is made in isolation by elected representatives but is the result of a complexpolitical process of communication between institutional domains and extra-institutionalones. Civil society movements, pressure groups, media, and parties are all active voices inthe democratic decision-making process, although only indirectly involved in lawmaking.Hence, in a democratic society, the secularization of the public sphere does not entail thatthe public sphere exclude discourses that are religious.

Habermas Critique of Rawls Public Reason RevisitedIn his Religion in the Public Sphere (2006), Habermas has advanced some critical reflec-tions on the nature of secularism in modern democracy. He has asked whether the separationof spheres which liberalism deems essential is still a valid model in a deliberative demo-cratic society in which the borders between the spheres of life are neither simple nor clear.In particular, Habermas has critically discussed Rawls revisited public reason and askedwhether the republican constitution (Rawls political liberalism) does not in fact imposeitself at the expense of other loyalties, as for instance religious loyalty, and does not becomeitself a new kind of religion.

Habermas revision of political liberalism evolves from a critique of the classical liberaldualism between public and private as it appears in Rawls famous distinction betweencomprehensive doctrines (among them religions) and political reasoning (the state and itsinstitutions) and reflects somehow the continental model of co-participation, which, contraryto liberal (Rawls) dualism, rests on three legs rather than two: the individuals, the state butalso the communities of faith (as established churches), a model in which the juridicalconflicts between individual freedom and church prerogatives are not unfailingly solved by



giving priority to individual freedom. The goal that Habermas ascribes to his revision of thedualistic liberal model of separation between religion and politics is that of expanding therole of religion by fully incorporating it in the public sphere of deliberation. This solution,one might surmise, is actually more secularist than Rawls because it invites us to think thatan open discussion would have the power of transforming doctrinal or dogmatic distinctionsinto differences of interpretation to be evaluated and judged by reason.15 The actors of thepublic sphere in a democratic society are individuals that associate in order to pursue theirmundane interests or ideals but also their religious aspirations and world views. The outcomeof Habermas revision of liberal dualism is meant to offer a view of democratic society thatis more inclusive than Rawls political liberalism.16 The question is that Habermas proposalmay at the same time be less friendly to individual freedom. This problem becomes moreclearly visible in the case of constitutional democracies in mono-religious societies. Societieslike the Italian one are an important test to probe the weakness of Habermas theoreticalview of a post-secular public sphere. The paradox is that, on the one hand, Habermas theorygains its normative or a priori status at the cost of becoming blind to empirical specificity (forinstance to non-religious-pluralist democracies), and, on the other, it elevates to theory whatis a factual reality, which is that religions do play a role in the public sphere of a democraticsociety.

Habermas revisits the critical arguments of political liberalism in the name of what hecalls a post-secular conception of the public sphere. In a democratic public sphere, heargues, religions are no longer compelled to exist only as private creeds but are recognizedas full participants in political opinion and will formation. As we have explained above, ina democratic society, the public sphere, although formally distinct and separated from theauthoritative power of lawmaking, is deeply intertwined with it. Habermas unacknowledgedyet important assumption with no factual demonstration is that in Western societies, reli-gions have now come to accept the liberal constitutional state (they are beyond liberalism asmodus vivendi), and for this reason the public can allow itself to be less restrictive with thepresence of religions; it can allow itself not to endorse French laicite. It seems that as far as re-ligion is concerned, advanced and mature democratic societies can be less traditionally liberaland more trustworthy in the educating effects of democratic participation.17 But Habermaspost-secular conception rests on an unexamined assumption that is highly contextual andnot generalizable. His theory is an idealization or theoretical reflection of the most secularamong Western societies. In other words, Habermas post-secularism presupposes societieswithin which religious pluralism is an existing and an accepted fact (reasonable pluralism).But pluralism (even reasonable pluralism) entails more than two religions and moreover itentails religions that are equipollent or similar in size and strength, that, moreover, one majorreligion does not cover the entire geo-political space of a country.18 Habermas idealizationwould be hardly applicable to democratic mono-religious societies.

Lets briefly revisit the main argument of Rawls political liberalism before discussingHabermas criticism. In his The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, Rawls argues that areligious doctrine can be interpreted in such a manner that it may be correlative with aconstitutional conception of rights and according to styles of reasoning that although notin the ordinary form of public reason may legitimately participate in the formation ofpublic judgment. These forms of reasoning are: from declaration, from conjecture, andfrom testimony or as witnessing. Rawls insists that none of these three styles of judgmentprefigures a pure translation from private reasons into public ones.19 In the first case, religiouscitizens declare (without assuming that their fellow citizens will do the same) the principlesof their faith while showing that these principles contain a constellation of moral conceptions


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 11that citizens holding different religious beliefs or no religious belief at all could accept. Inthe second case, non-religious citizens conjecture what religious citizens could infer fromwithin their own faith (thus reasoning according to an as if model of judgment), with thegoal of showing to religious citizens that they too could accept the reasonability of publicreason. The clause of this as if reasoning is that it is sincerely performed, not made withmanipulating intention or in order to obtain religious citizens consent on a given policy.In the third case, finally, religious citizens, whose creed brings them to disagree with theopinion of the majority and thus also with the law, express publicly their disagreement in thename of their faith, although they are not allowed to transform their critical testimony into apractice of civil disobedience.20

These three forms of reasoning presume that citizens can resort to their specific culturalbackground in their public discourse and are not compelled to either divorce their privatereason from their public reason (the man from the citizen) or to translate one into theother.21 According to Rawls, reasonable pluralism of this kind can contribute to strengtheningtoleration and public reasoning itself because it is primed to involve all citizens regardlessof their faith in an exercise that is sincerely oriented toward finding good reasons to makedecisions that are in the general interest.

A critical analysis of these non-public reasoning styles of public discourse exceeds thegoal of this article. To make a quick example, the Italian case I mentioned at the start is a goodillustration of Rawls argument from declaration because, as I have explained, MonsignorSgreccia used an argument from St. Thomas Aquinas ius naturalis in order to make his casefor a revision of the Italian law regulating procreation. From Rawls perspective (and evenmore so Habermas) this would be a legitimate articulation of public reason and the sign ofa culture of toleration that is deeper than a merely legalistic one.22

However, the fact that Catholic citizens make their anti-abortion claims in the name of theThomistic conception of ius naturalis does not give any certainty that Catholic citizens willnot form a voting block and employ their arguments in order to influence representatives inthe Parliament. In a country in which there is one major religion (baptized Catholics are moreor less the 90% of the Italian population), this possibility cannot be ignored. Using argumentsby natural rights instead of religious precepts directly is no guarantee that the outcome willnot be a confessional law, or the violation of the separation between civil law and religiouslaw. This is especially true if we take into account the character of democratic society as onein which as I shall explain below it is not only unlikely but moreover undesirable that theinformal sphere of opinion formation and the formal sphere of lawmaking are kept separateand not in communication. The democratic character of representation rests on the fact thatthe elected are not an elite that is self-referential and sheltered from society.

Foreseeing this, Rawls added two important conditions, one empirical and one prescriptive,to his revisited public reason: first of all, that civil society enjoys an effective pluralityof religions and second, that religious citizens like any other citizen should feel themoral duty of civility to look in their own religious culture for those ideas that are morein agreement with basic civil rights, among them those rights that guarantee freedom ofconscience and full toleration. Without these two conditions, the above mentioned revisionof public reason can be a threat to constitutional democracy.23 Yet Habermas criticizesprecisely the prescription of the moral duty of civility, while he undervalues pluralism asa fundamental condition for a safe presence of religions in the public sphere.24

I shall illustrate how crucial Rawls conditions are by returning to the Italian case. Incommenting on Mr. Finis argument in favor of the autonomy of civil law from religiousprecepts, a Catholic member of the Italian Parliament, Roberto Buttiglione, made a sibylline



declaration. Mr. Buttiglione asserted that Catholics do not deem something as true becausethe Pope said so; to the contrary, they think that if the Pope deems something as true it isbecause it really is true. Since Catholic citizens commit themselves only to the authority ofTruth, their critique of civil laws cannot be accused to violating the principle of toleration andthe separation of state and the church. Catholic citizens should thus be engaged in articulatingthe Truth with reasonable arguments in order to convince their fellow citizens that theyshould shape their civil law accordingly. In this way, Mr. Buttiglione invited his fellowCatholic citizens to use reasonable arguments in a strategic and non-deliberative manner,or in order to smuggle a dogmatic and a priori Truth by means of a deliberative process.

To be clear, the strategic use of reason is not a characteristic that belongs only to religiousor Catholic citizens. To paraphrase Madison, this is the way in which individuals holding afaith or a particular interest behave when they are active in the public sphere. Yet the strategicuse of reason is particularly in tune with the character of religion, which does not approachTruth as something to be reached by human reason through a trial and error method, but assomething that is given to us by God and revealed through faith. Reason is ancillary to Faithor Religion since is employed to deduce from the Truth those good precepts that ought toguide human conduct in general, not only that of the Catholics. Here, civil law is conceivedas a means to achieve an end that is beyond it or, as we have said above, beyond humantemporality and in view of the salvation of the soul. The city of man is in the service of thecity of God; it is neither autonomous nor, therefore, properly democratic.25

Habermas idea of the public role of religion and Rawls revision of public reason to makeroom for styles of reasoning that are not directly political or civil presume some conditionswithout which those revisions may be detrimental to individual freedom of religion andprimed to jeopardize the liberal character of society: pluralism of faiths, or a society in whichno religion enjoys a de facto position of monopoly or primacy. Thus pluralism is essential, notoptional, because it is the natural check on the insincere or manipulating use of deliberativereasoning and the monopolistic tendency that religious beliefs possess no less than economicinterests. The essential correlation between security of social peace and individual freedomof conscience was captured already by Jean Bodin in his Colloquium of the Seven aboutSecrets of the Sublime (1588), a fundamental work concerning religious concord-discordthat has unfortunately been neglected in this literature. Without religious pluralism or, Bodinmade Curtius to say, with either one or only two dominant and rival religions, politicalsociety lacks a constraint that is effective enough to curb the instrumentalist use of the publicsphere by religious citizens and churches without resorting to state repression.26 Otherwise,if one opposite were joined to another opposite with no middle ground between, there wouldnecessarily be continual battle.27

I can now return to Habermas critical remarks on Rawls political liberalism. In order tojustify the public presence of churches or religious communities (and not merely individualswith religious beliefs, as I anticipated above), Habermas advances three critiques of polit-ical liberalism: a) it violates the principle of equality because it imposes disproportionaterequirements on particular (religious) citizens; b) it jeopardizes pluralism by making oneidentity (the political one) superior in value; and c) it may impoverish the moral culture ofdemocratic society.28

I shall focus on Habermas first critique. This critique materializes in the objection ofpretentiousness and an unequal distribution among religious and non-religious citizens of themoral duty of civility to follow the norms of public reason: this is, according to Habermas,an asymmetrical burden. Rawls, in other words, was too demanding with all citizens ingeneral (his view of citizenship was quasi republican and echoed a kind of secular religion)


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 13and moreover with some citizens (the religious ones) more than others. Indeed, the idea ofcitizenship as public reason asks all citizens to sacrifice their personal culture (interests andvalues) and endlessly engages them in a work of translation from their private languagesto a public political language. This, according to Habermas, is asking too much of liberalcitizens. In addition, and in violation of the democratic principle of equality, it is asking toomuch to those who want to live consistently with the precepts of their religious creed. In aconstitutional State [or political liberalism] religious communities are expected not only toadapt to the unstable modus vivendi of the secular contest, but moreover to accept the secularprinciples of legitimacy.29 As I mentioned above, unlike Rawls, Habermas does not speakof individual citizens solely, but also of religious communities. This terminological shift isclearly unbalanced on the side of an ethical model of democracy structured not accordingto individual citizens but individual citizens and groups. Along with individuals, it includesgroups such as religious communities and churches that are more organic than mere civilassociations. This shift seems to prefigure an incorporated society, whose model is moreHegelian than Kantian.

Habermas acknowledges Rawls commitment to go beyond a de facto pluralism, as wellas his awareness that this may entail asking the conscience of a religious person to make aremarkable sacrifice. He actually appreciates Rawls awareness of the burden that politicalliberalism implies.30 Nonetheless, he criticizes Rawls burden of civility as the outcomeof a view of public reason that is outcome of an abstract dualism between the private andpublic sphere. In a word, Rawls would ask citizens (religious and non-religious) to split intotwo identities (private and public reason), although it is not clear how this split would notengender epistemic and moral contradictions. Habermas critique of Rawls dualism recallsKarl Marxs critique of republican citizenship splitting the social man and the publicman in order to create an abstract general interest.31

The separation of, and tension between spheres of life is ingrained in constitutionaldemocracy as both a condition for impartiality of judgment by public officers, and for citizensability to reason in general terms, rising above their own private interests or passions. Ineffect, the request of separation pertains to all the spheres of life, not only the spiritual one. Asa matter of fact, all modern constitutions contain articles declaring that all citizens are de jureequal regardless of their natural, sociological, and material conditions such as sex, economicstatus, race and religion, etc. Clearly the injunction of separation also involves the economicsphere (interests) and the sphere of family (values). In these cases, moreover, the violationof the principle of separation is signified with negative adjectives like patrimonialism andfamilism. Now, if we follow the logic of Habermas critique of an asymmetrical burden,we should conclude that in all these cases political liberalism asks too much of its citizens,and moreover that it asks more of some than of others. For instance, it asks more to thosewho have more substantive economic interests to defend or to those with children and afamily. But clearly, this is not a conclusion that Habermas would endorse. Why, then, shouldthe request that political liberalism makes of religious beliefs be treated differently than therequest it makes of economic interests or family values? Why should a religious perspectivereceive a different treatment, and why should its request to participate in the public debateenjoy less constraint? Why is our effort to transcend economic interest or family values andtranslate them into the political language of rights to be seen as a good or desirable thing butthe same effort is judged too onerous when applied to religious beliefs?

These questions are not rhetorical, particularly if we consider the nature of representativedemocracy as a system in which the informal power of judgment plays a crucial and weightyrole in the making of political decisions. Moreover, such questions are especially relevant



in light of the fact that the separation of spheres is difficult to achieve and, as we shall seebelow, somehow undesirable. Starting from these very considerations, however, Habermasconcludes that thanks to modern democracys complex system of indirectness, ordinarycitizens can be spared of the moral request of a duty of civility and the sacrifice oftranslation. It would seem as if Rawls request would make sense only in a direct democracy,because only there do citizens act directly as lawmakers and thus can never be exoneratedfrom thinking politically. But representative democracy circumvents this problem, and allowsthe large majority to retain their private beliefs at all times. As Benjamin Constant notedmore than two centuries ago, representative government is able to be more respectful of theprivate domain of life because it does not rest on citizens direct participation.

Habermas seems to suggest that elections and representation have inaugurated a welcomedivision of labor thanks to which religious citizens can avoid translating their religiousbeliefs into public reason while perceiving themselves part of the civitas terrena no less thannon-religious citizens. Representative democracy engenders a new kind of civic cooperationthat makes it possible for religious citizens to choose not to renounce making arguments fromwithin their religious principles, because they know that someone else (the representatives)will do the job of translation and they can participate in the civitas terrena indirectly. Asa matter of fact, Habermas argues, participating in the political game even indirectly andthrough our personal beliefs is in itself a tacit recognition of the rules of the political game;and this is enough for the preservation of a liberal society.32

In substance, representative democracy has contributed to the birth of a post-secularsociety by offering the best solution to the problem of the relationship between politicsand religion. Indeed, modern democracy has opened public space to religions by allowingreligious citizens to participate in political life without putting the liberal state in jeopardy.

Influence and Distance: Citizens-Electors and Citizens-RepresentativesHabermas proposal to emend liberalism from an abstract dualism is interesting; however itopens a front of discussion that introduces a set of new problems. Certainly, his optimisticdepiction of public space in post-secular democracy does not help us to face hard cases likethe Italian one or any mono-religious society. Yet it is precisely in relation to intractable casesthat we are most in need of normative guidance. The issue is that while Habermas positionis a reflective idealization of the way the public sphere operates in democratic pluralisticsocieties, it is heavily problematic when we apply it to democratic societies that have noreligious pluralism. In these societies, Habermas revision of liberalism may create new risksto representative democracy precisely because this system of government as Habermashimself has acknowledged is one in which formal sovereignty (the act of voting) is onlya minimal component of politics, while the role of the soft power of judgment and publicinfluence is of fundamental importance. At the same time, the latter are hardly controllablewithout putting civil liberty at risk.

As I illustrated through the Italian case, the fact that religious citizens use deliberativestrategies does not make their influence less pervasive or less problematic. Actually, it maymake it more. It is the density and pervasiveness of public discourse in a representativedemocracy that makes important and timely Rawls injunction that all citizens should feelthe moral duty not to use the public sphere as a means to fulfill or sponsor their own privatevisions or beliefs. Contra Habermas, this is anything but an excessively burdensome request.In most societies except for the exceptional and few societies in which religious pluralismis effective it is the necessary condition for preserving constitutional democracy.


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 15It is actually the nature of the representative system that amplifies the problem of the

relationship between religion and politics. As Monsignor Sgreccias clever use of the iusnaturalis argument demonstrates, the pervasive soft power of public judgment is a cru-cial component of religions continued potential to present fundamental challenges to civilconstitutionalism. The source of the problem lies in the relationship between electors andelected. The problem is not translation per se, because thanks to the device of elections andrepresentation all private languages pass through a sort of translation or filtering processbefore and in order to enter the institutional sphere. The problem is that in the case ofreligion the discrepancy of viewpoints between ordinary citizens (who are not required totranslate) and representatives (who are required to translate) may create a sense of duplicity,insincerity or a distance between electors and elected that is itself corrosive to representativedemocracy.

Let us try to explain this crucial point. Habermas writes: This strict demand [to justifypolitical statements] can only be laid at the door of politicians, who within state institutionsare subject to the obligation to remain neutral in the face of competing world views; in otherwords it [a Rawlsian proviso] can only be made of anyone who holds a public office or is acandidate for such.33 But if it is sufficient that only the representatives embark in translationwe are in the paradoxical situation that those citizens who can make the translation (and thusenter politics) have presumably less strong religious beliefs than those who prefer not to makethe translation and thus not to run for election. Following Habermas logic, it would seemthat representatives have religious beliefs that are neither strong nor perhaps truly sincere or,and this is even worse, that they are Machiavellian enough to be willing to practice the artof translation in view of achieving consent on proposals that are inspired by their religiousprecepts.

The problems and moral ambiguities implied in Habermas formula (only public officialsshould be required to translate, not ordinary citizens) bring to light the nature of repre-sentative democracy and its difficult relation with rational deliberation. Indeed, democraticrepresentation is not a form of delegation because representatives do not simplistically sitin the Parliament in the place of citizens but act along with them and by their authorizationin order to make laws that all must obey.34 The distinction between elected and electorsdesignates a form of inter-dependence rather than a separation or dualism because thosewho make the translation from within the institutions are or should be in a permanent re-lationship with those who are, in Habermas words, not required to translate because theyoperate outside of the institutions. Thus, even in the case that decision-making procedures arehonoured and the Parliament is not like a tower of Babel made of representatives of corporategroups, the influence of public judgment (and religious opinions) on lawmaking is hardlycontainable and controllable. As I said, it is representative democracy itself that presumesthat the extra-institutional domain exercises a permanent influence on representative insti-tutions. Yet, as Habermas himself implicitly suggests, particularly in the case of religion, itwould be desirable that representatives do not listen too much or too closely to their electorsbecause if they did, religion would directly enter the lawmaking process and jeopardize civillaw (in parliament, he writes, the standing rules of procedure of the house must empowerthe house leader to have religious statements expunged from the minutes.35) The questionis that, unless state institutions are sealed from or impermeable to civil society (somethingnot only impossible but also undesirable in a representative democracy that aspires to bemore than a form of elite authorization by the people), the presence of religious ideas willnever be only among those who can avoid translation (ordinary citizens). It will unavoidablybe also among those who sit in state institutions and pass laws.36



It is not hard to foresee the truly concrete risk (and the Italian case is exemplary) thatreligious groups construct factions and lobbies and use their representatives in order totranslate religious precepts into argument of public reason so as to attain the goals ofreshaping civil law and making it more in agreement with their religious codes, and thus lesscivil. This confirms that ordinary citizens as well as public officials ought to be inspired bythe civil duty of translation, and not the astute will to transfer their belief in their politicaldiscourses (even if, one must stress, that duty is and must be only moral, not legal). Particularlyin societies in which there is no religious pluralism, citizenship should be felt by the largemajority of citizens as a civil identity that requires a sacrifice of personal views from allmembers. All in all, precisely because pluralism cannot play a deterrent role against themonopolistic temptation of religious faiths, the presence of religions in the public spherewould require more, not less constitutional ethos.

To summarize the main argument of this chapter, I would say that the issue of translationfrom religious arguments into public deliberation arguments is not an abstract activity withoutany practical dimension. Rather, it brings to the fore the relationship between the sociologicalposition of religious institutions on the one hand, and the discourse its intellectuals andspokespeople use in public on the other. The problem is not just that we should pay attentionto both of these levels as Habermas suggests, but also that, precisely because of the nature ofpolitical representation, the former plays an important role in determining the character of thelatter. In other words, in genuine religious pluralism, the translation attempts of religiouspublic speech may be initially strategic, but they have to aim at political persuasion as a matterof fact since they are not already a majority. Whereas in a mono-religious society, translationcan be skin-deep and superficial or even absent because there is no real need to persuadeanyone who doesnt already share the same comprehensive doctrine. So the rationality ofthe political translation is not so much a question of strategic versus communicativeorientation. It is a function of social conditions, of whether or not religion is in the positionof having to actually persuade those who do not share its comprehensive doctrine, i.e. makea political translation.37

An Example of Post-Secular DemocracyAs a conclusion, I would like to corroborate the argument I have been making by proposinga concrete example of what a post-secular democracy might look like in a mono-religiousconstitutional democracy. In 2000, the Italian Court of Cassation stated the principle that thepublic space should be neutral in order to be friendly to all religions (in fact to non-Catholicreligions). But in Italy, the discussion about the meaning of laicite has never been easilyresolved. In 2005, the Administrative Tribunal of the Veneto Region (TAR) rejected a requestby some parents to remove the crucifix from a classroom of a public elementary school. Onthat occasion, the Constitutional Court was asked to intervene and declared that the issuebelonged to the domain of administration since the issue of a crucifix in public spaces dependsnot on a law but on old statutes (older than Italian Constitution of 1948) and can thus beresolved by the local administration in question; in that case, by the elementary public schoolof Abano (in the Province of Padua). Clearly, the Constitutional Court endorsed a position thatwas friendly to the notoriously strong federalist sentiments and Catholic public sensitivityof the Veneto Region (where the Northern League has a majority in local government). Butthis is not what interests me here. I would like instead to focus on the argument that the TARof the Veneto Region devised as order to justify the legitimacy of the crucifix in a publicschool. Before proceeding I need to offer some background information.


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 17We need to know that the Italian Constitution guarantees equality, freedom of individual

conscience and pluralism of religion (Articles 3, 8, 19, 20) and moreover that, with the1984 Revision of the Concordat between the State and the Vatican (originally sealed in 1929under the Fascist regime), Italy no longer recognizes Catholicism as the official religionof the State. In 1984, Italy ceased to have an official religion. Since then, many importantefforts have been made to make civil and criminal codes consistent with the new Concordatbetween the State and the Church, although with a mix of success and timidity. The recentconservative turn in national politics has increased this ambiguity. The decline of ideologicalpolitical parties and the growth of the Churchs direct influence in politics are the essentialcomponents of the ambiguity. However, my aim here is not to offer a political analysis of thetransformations of the Italian society; it is to contextualize a case study so as to prove howcautious we should be in welcoming the presence of religion in the public sphere.38

Let us turn to the argument in defense of the crucifix in the classroom. The TAR arguedthat the display of the crucifix does not violate the principle of laicite sanctioned by theConstitution and is not in disagreement with the norms of the 1984 revision of the Concordatbecause the crucifix expresses, in a symbolic yet adequate way the religious origins oftoleration, of reciprocal respect, of the valorization of persons, their rights, respect of freedom,and the autonomy of individual conscience in relation to the secular authority, and therejection of any form of discrimination.39 A civil tribunal interpreted the crucifix as anargument or a symbol of toleration and freedom of conscience because it would show thatChrist was crucified as a consequence of the violation of toleration and freedom of religiousconscience! Religious citizens actually public magistrates who reflect (unavoidably aswe saw) the background culture of their fellow citizens have here translated their privateprecepts of faith into public reasons. They have declared that while it connotes Italiancivilization, the crucifix is also in perfect agreement with the civil values and the normsexpressed by and contained in the democratic constitution. This is how public reason isinterpreted by an organ of the state in a society in which no religious pluralism can guardover the theocratic and monopolitistic tendency of religion.

The astonishing argument by the TAR of the Veneto Region was consciously framedin an attempt to prove that civil language and religious language may co-operate and onsome occasions overlap; that the language of religion coincides, in the case of the crucifix,with both universal rights (individual human rights) and the cultural, juridical and ethicaltradition of the Italian democratic society. Many legal scholars have pointed out insteadthat this revisionist argument signifies a confessionalization of the principle of laicite.40The method of the judges was opposite to the method that Rawls thought political officialsshould adopt in a liberal state: trying to translate nonpolitical languages, and in particularlanguage belonging to comprehensive conceptions, into a language in which all citizenscan recognize themselves, regardless of their personal belief. But the Italian judges situatedthemselves fully within the religious ethical culture of the majority in order to prove that thislanguage can be used along with and actually instead of the civil or political language that theItalian constitution contains. In this way, they transformed the crucifix into a secular symbol,making it trespass its naturally religious meaning in order to become a national-culturalsymbol incorporated within the civil law. The public role of religion turned out to be anexplicit threat to the secular interpretation of the constitution as a civil law document.

As a matter of fact, a Christian believer should feel irritated with the transfiguration of areligious value produced by a secular authority in order to achieve a political goal, namely,making a decision in tune with the majority culture. Laicite Italian style is a kind of laicitethat refuses to proclaim indifference to religious phenomena; it wants to be not equidistant



from all existing religions but equiclose to them (but in fact to the majority religion). Ratherthan a-confessional pluralism, Italian democracy claims to endorse a kind of pluralism thatis confessional friendly. This laicie in reverse, which expresses a favorable attitude towardreligion in the public sphere, would encounter no opposition from Habermas proposal(although Habermas would not approve of a state institution that does not make the transla-tion). If we apply Habermas conception of a post-secular public sphere to a mono-religiousdemocracy such as Italy, post-secularism becomes an excuse to bypass the liberal dualismbetween private reason and public reason and directly recognize the cultural patrimony ofthe large majority of the population; it becomes an excuse to translate into institutionallanguage the influence that religion exercises in a public sphere that has no religious plural-isms constraint. Italian democracy is a post-secular democracy that employs constitutionalrights to pursue an agenda that, if fully implemented, would bury the democratic state in itsfoundations.

CodaOn November 3rd, 2009, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected the decision of theItalian tribunal with the following motivation: The presence of the crucifix could easilybe interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign, and they would feel that they werebeing educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion. The decisionof the European Court was negatively received and strongly opposed by all Italian politicalleaders with no exception from the right to the left. In his book on The Force of Judgment,which was published before the ECJ decision, Alessandro Ferrara commented favorablyon the decision of the TAR of Veneto, which, seems less in conflict with the principle ofreligious neutrality because of course Is it not the case that Christianity was one of theroots of the Italian constitutional experience and played a leading role in inspiring theRepublican Constitution?41 Certainly, the culture of the majority shapes the interpretationof rights. But this empirical fact should not be elevated to a theory. On the contrary, it shouldbe critically evaluated because the preponderance of the majority or national culturetranslates here into a clear violation of the basic recognition of the individuals to enjoy anequal consideration by the state, its tribunals and within public places. But if we uncriticallycondescend the contemporary mood of treating religious issues as cultural issues (becauseafter all, Christianity is a part of the public consciousness of a country like Italy, but notonly), of translating issues that pertain to freedom of religion into minority right issues, thenwe retreat to what I called laicite in reverse, a post-secular adaptation of the old formulacuius regio, eius religio.

NOTES

The following article is a revised and extended version of the keynote lecture I delivered at the IstanbulSeminars 2009 organized by Reset Doc and Bilgi University. I would like to thank Nina zu Furstenberg,Giancarlo Bosetti and all the participants for their helpful comments. In this final version, the paper waspresented in the meeting of Constellations, December, 2009: I thank all the participants for their challengingcomments.

1. See the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, May 18, 2009.2. I am referring respectively to John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in Collected

Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Jurgen Habermas,Religion in the Public Sphere, European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 125; Habermas articlehas been recently republished with minor changes and the title Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 19Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, Between Naturalism and Religion (London: PolityPress, 2008): 11447 (in this essay I shall refer to the 2006 article).

3. A communicatively achieved agreement has a rational basis; it cannot be imposed by either party,whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly [force], or strategically through exertinginfluence on the decisions of one party on the basis of a calculation of success [rhetoric]; Jurgen Habermas,Social Action, Purposive Activity, and Communication (1981), On the Pragmatics of Communication,ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 120.

4. Joseph Lecler, Les origins et le sens de la formule: Cuius Regio, Eius Religio, Recherches deScience Religieuse, 38 (1951): 11920. For an excellent historical analysis of the formation of the politicsof toleration in a Catholic country (i.e. France), see Church, State and Society under the Bourbon Kings ofFrance, ed. R.M. Golden (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1982).

5. Joseph Lecler, Liberte de Conscience. Origines et sens divers de lexpression, Recherches deScience Religieuse, 54 (1966): 370406. But see also Rainer Forst, Pierre Bayles Reflexive Theory ofToleration, Toleration and Its Limits, Nomos XLVIII, ed. Melissa S. Williams and Jeremy Waldron (NewYork and London: New York University Press, 2008): 78113.

6. Joseph Lecler, Histoire de la tolerance au sie`cle de la Reforme, 2 vols., Aubier: Editions Montaigne,1955, v. 2:chapters 2 and 3. See also Mario Turchetti, Religious Concord and Political Tolerance inSixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France, The Sixteenth Century Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring, 1991): 1525. For an historical reconstruction of the anti-tyrannical thought as it developed during the struggle fortoleration in France see, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978), v. 1: Part Three.

7. On the thesis of privatization of religion as one of the salient characters of modernity see JoseCasanova, Rethinking Secularization. A Global Comparative Perspective, The Hedgehog Review specialissue on After Secularization (Spring/Summer 2006). Yet Weber went beyond this interpretation andbrought to theoretical systematization more than a century old process of scientific transformation ofphilosophy and social disciplines; within this project he defined secularization as a chapter in the process ofrationalization, whereby more and more spheres of human action were to become increasingly subjectedto the methods of rational calculation and scientific explanation; See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), in particular, 267301.

8. Harold J. Berman, Diritto e rivoluzione. Le origini della tradizione giuridica occidentale (Bologna:Il mulino, 1998), 107 (original edition with the title, Law and Revolution: the Formation of the WesternLegal Tradition, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999).

9. Berman, Diritto e rivoluzione, 1529 and 49. But an important interpretation of the process ofsecularization of the legal system (international not only commercial, criminal and civil) is to be found inCarl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans.G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), Parts II and III.

10. Cited in Silvio Ferrari, Lo spirito dei diritti religiosi. Ebraismo, cristianesimo e islam a confronto(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 46.

11. R.G. Renard, La contribution du droit canonique a` la science du droit compare, in Introductiona` letude du droit compare, Recueil detudes en lhonneur dEdourad Lambert (Paris: Sirey, 1938), 109.

12. Ferrari, Lo spirito dei diritti religiosi, 4647.13. For a critical reinterpretation of secularism see Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern

World (University of Chicago Press, 1994); for an analysis of the meaning of the term secular as differentand somehow even in tension with secularism as an ideology and secularization as a political projectsee also John Keane, Secularism? Religion and Democracy, ed. David Marquand and Ronald L. Nettler(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 57.

14. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2007) 121.

15. In a Hegelian perspective, Habermas sees religions as not-yet manifested philosophies, theexpressions in a not fully rational form of principles and values that rational deliberation among openminded citizens will gradually enlighten: I defend Hegels thesis that the major world religions belongto the history of reason itself (Habermas, Introduction to Between Naturalism and Religion, 6.). OnHabermas secularist philosophy see Simone Chambers, How Religion Speaks to the Agnostic: Habermason the Persistent Value of Religion, Constellations 14, no. 2 (2007): 220. For a broader critique of thiscognitive secularism see Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism and Relativism, Boundary 2, no. 31 (2004): 17396.

16. On the contradiction between Rawls idea of translation and Habermas deliberative theory seeMaeve Cooke, A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Placeof Religion, Constellations 14, no. 2 (2007): 224238.



17. . . .secular citizens or those of other religious persuasions can under certain circumstances learnsomething from religious contributions; this is, for example, the case if they recognize in the normative truthcontent of a religious utterance hidden intuitions of their own, Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere,10.

18. This argument (which Madison made paradigmatic) was developed by Jean Bodin, who, as Ishall mention below claimed that the peaceful coexistence of more than two religions is easier because theoutcome of an exercise of self-limitation that two religions make is hard to obtain.

19. Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, 4.3.20. Rawls contemplates the solution of civil disobedience only if the later appeals to constitutional

foundations not external reasons such as religious principles; disobeying civil laws in order to be faithfulto ones creed religious or ideological does not denote civil disobedience but unlawful behavior orsubversion of the law; see Rawls, The Justification of Civil Disobedience, in Hugo Adam Bedau, ed.,Civil disobedience; theory and practice (New York, Pegasus, 1969), 240255.

21. Scholars who have criticized Rawls of imposing on all citizens to make a translation from religiousinto secular reasons do not pay attention to Rawls latest formulation of public reason; see Cooke, A SecularState for a Postsecular Society?

22. Even more optimistic are Rawlsian interpreters, as for instance Daniel A. Dombrowski, whothinks that while Until the development of liberalism, the fair terms of cooperation among Catholics andProtestants were extremely narrow, today however pluralism is seen as quite normal and this is sobecause toleration and liberalism grew hand in hand and won the challenge (Rawls and Religion: TheCase for Political Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 6).

23. Following the principle of reciprocity, and hence the duty of civility, would allow people to makeclaims from reasonable comprehensive doctrines as long as they observe the proviso that they then justifythese claims with reasoning that other participants could in principle (although not actually) accept; Rawls,The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, 576.

24. Even more radical are the critiques by Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Role of Religion in Decisionand Discussion of Political Issues, in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, ed., Religion in the PublicSquare: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997)and Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press,2002), 15560. Both of them have accused Rawls of pursuing a true secularist project.

25. Canonic fairness is the opposite of fairness in civil law: the latter is all internal to the legalorder and its deep and positive exigencies to be actualized; the former is capable instead of setting asidethe positive legal order and make room for norms that come from elsewhere; Pio Fedele, Equita canonica,in Enciclopedia del diritto, XV (Milano: Giuffre, 1966), 159 (my translation); see on this issue HelmuthPree, The Divine and the Human of the Ius Divinum, in In diversitate unitas (Louvain: Peeters, 1997). Thus,regardless of the different interpretations of Gods word in the Abrahamic religions, all of them presumethat God is the source of the law; see Ferrari, Lo spirito dei diritti religiosi, pp. 13334.

26. CURTIUS: Nothing is more destructive in a state than for citizens to be split into two factions,whether the conflict is about laws, honors, or religion. If, however, there are many factions, there is nodanger of civil war, since the groups, each acting as a check on the other, protect the stability and harmonyof the state, Jean Bodin, Colloquium of thr Seven about Secrets of the Sublime (1588) translated with anIntroduction, Annotations, and Crtical Readings, by Marion Leather Kuntz, University Park (Pennsylvania:The Pennsylvania State University Press), 151, IV, 117.

27. Ibid., 148, IV, 116.28. For an interpretation of Habermas thought see Alessandro Ferrara, The Separation of religion

and polis in a post-secular society, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35 nos. 12 (2009): 7791.29. Jurgen Habermas, La voce pubblica della ragione, in Reset, n. 104 (December 2007): 6.30. How is it possible for those of faith, as well as the nonreligious, to endorse a secular regime even

when their comprehensive doctrines may not proposer under it, and indeed may decline?; Rawls, The Ideaof Public Reason Revisited, 3.1.

31. The critique of liberal dualism neglects the fact that according to Rawls the two spheres overlapprecisely because they operate within a space that is dense with moral and political culture, not empty ofany culture; see, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Ma ce` laicita` e laicita`, in Reset, n. 104 (November-December2007): 22.

32. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, Between Naturalism and Religion, p. 129.33. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 9. For Rawls: It is imperative to realize that the idea

of public reason does not apply to all political discussions of fundamental questions, but only to discussionsof those questions in what I refer to as the public political forum. This forum may be divided into threeparts: the discourses of the judges in their decisions, and especially of the judges of a supreme court; the


Mono-religious Democracies and the Idea of Religion: Nadia Urbinati 21discourse of government officials, especially chief executives and legislators; and finally, the discourse ofcandidates for public office and their campaign managers, especially in their public oratory, party platforms,and political statements (The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, p. 575).

34. I am referring here to my Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago andLondon: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 1.

35. Habermas, La voce pubblica della ragione, 6.36. Thus Ferrara argues that there is no justification in censuring representatives speech always:

Should minutes of parliamentary debates be subject to censorship and reflect less than faithfully what hasbeen said on the floor? (The Separation of Religion, 87).

37. I thank Ian Zuckerman for helping me clarifying this crucial point.38. For a good analysis of the Italian laicite see Tania Groppi, Le principe de lacite comme

creation jurisprudentielle en Italie, rapport presente dans le colloque sur Constitution et lacite Le 80emeanniversaire de la lacite constitutionelle en Turquie, Universite de Marmara, Haydarpasa (le 10 avril 2008) unpublished paper.

39. Consiglio di Stato in sede giurisdizionale, Sezione sesta, sentenza, n. 556/2006.40. A defense of this sentence had been made by Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example:

Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 198203. I shallreturn to in the Coda.

41. Ferrara, The Force of the Example, 201.

Nadia Urbinati teaches political theory at Columbia University and is co-editor of Con-stellations. Her most recent book is Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy(The University Press of Chicago 2006; 2008); with Stefano Recchia she edited A Cos-mopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzinis Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, andIntervention (Princeton University Press 2009); and she is currently editing CondorcetsPolitical Writings with Steven Lukes for Cambridge University Press.


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