CENTRALITY, NOT MONOPOLY:

Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam (Jose Casanova, Winter 2001, Social Research)

So what are the conditions under which the church's privileged autonomous spaces can be constitutive of civil society? To put it bluntly, the church only becomes an institution of civil society when it ceases being a church in the Weberian sense of the term: when it gives up its monopolistic claims and recognizes religious freedom and freedom of conscience as universal and inviolable human rights. This is what happened in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, and with the church's appropriation of the modern discourse of universal human rights beginning with Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra (1961). From now on the discourse of human rights will be central to papal encyclicals and to the pastoral letters of national Conferences of Bishops throughout the world, leaving behind a long history of repeated categorical official condemnations of modern human rights doctrines that goes back to Pius VI's condemnation of the French National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man in his Brief Caritas (1791). John Paul II particularly has made "the sacred dignity of the human person" the cornerstone of his global preaching (Casanova, 1997, 1999).

Significantly, the most eloquent voices in the crucial and very heated debate at the floor during the council came from opposite blocs: from the American bishops, who unanimously defended religious freedom not only on grounds of practical expediency but on theological grounds provided to them by their peritus, the great American theologian John Courtney Murray (1960, 1966), and from Cardinal Karol Wojtyaa from Cracow, who had learned from the experience of trying to defend the freedom of the church under communism that the best line of defense, both theoretically and practically, was the defense of the inalienable right of the human person to freedom of conscience. Theologically, according to Murray (1964), this entailed the transference of the principle of libertas ecclesiae that the church had guarded so zealously through the ages to the individual human, from libertas ecclesiae to libertas personae. Only now could the church play a truly positive role in the constitution of civil societies and in processes of democratization throughout the Catholic world.

The relocation of the church to civil society implies not only voluntary disestablishment from the state (grudgingly in Poland), but also disengagement from political society proper. From a political science perspective, one of the most surprising outcomes of the third wave of democratization was that the prominent role of Catholic elites, groups, and social movements in so many transitions notwithstanding, and despite the influence and prestige gained thereby by the church almost everywhere, not a single major Catholic party has emerged anywhere out of the third wave: not in Spain, not in Brazil, not in the Philippines, not in Poland. Indeed, we can speak confidently of the end of the era of Catholic parties, of the end of Christian democracy (though some Christian democratic parties may survive with a diminished Christian identity in countries such as Germany or Chile), and of the collapse of Catholic Action, the main form of Catholic political mobilization throughout the twentieth century.

This relocation of the church from the state and from political society to civil society--and this is the third step in my reconstruction--does not necessarily mean the privatization of Catholicism. On the contrary, this relocation is the very condition for the possibility of a modern public religion, for a modern form of public Catholicism (Casanova, 1994b). Indeed, if the significance of religion for civil society formation and renewal is not to be restricted to this peculiar and historically specific opportunity structure--this narrow window of opportunity that emerges in the original constitution of civil society in the moment of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes when the church ceases being a state church--then the argument has to be generalizable to already existing democratic civil societies.

This is not the place to develop systematically the argument or to show empirically how religion, religious groups, and religious movements have been central components of American civil society, at least since the second Great Awakening. One could reconstruct such an argument along Tocquevillian lines and bring it up to date with Robert Putnam's discussion of social capital. The role of religion is central in both analyses. And leaving aside the merits and relevance of Putnam's (2000) current attempts at quantifying social capital, or his thesis about the decline of social capital in American civil society, his analysis clearly shows that much of American social capital is saved, invested, or circulates through churches and religious groups. Alternatively, one could develop a parallel argument, more grounded in theories of the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society: what I have called the de-privatization of religion, when religion enters the public sphere of civil society to raise normative issues, participating in ongoing processes of normative contestation (Casanova, 1994b).

Looking particularly at those forms of religious intervention in the public sphere that have emerged in an advanced modern society like the United States, one could say that the de-privatization of modern religion has assumed three main forms. There is, first, the religious mobilization in defense of the traditional life-world against various forms of state or market penetration. The mobilization of Protestant fundamentalism and, to a certain extent, the Catholic mobilization against abortion, can be seen as examples of this first form of de-privatization. Even in those cases in which the religious mobilization could be explained simply as a traditionalist response and reaction to modern processes of universalization, which are promoted or protected by state juridical interventions and which disrupt, for instance, the traditional patriarchal family or established patterns of racial or gender discrimination--even then the de-privatization of religion may have an important public function. By entering the public sphere and forcing the public discussion or contestation of certain issues, they force modern societies to reflect publicly and collectively on their normative structures. Naturally, one should not minimize the dangers that a traditionalist backlash or a fundamentalist project of restoration may pose to modern normative structures. But in the very process of entering the modern public sphere, religions and normative traditions are also forced to confront and possibly come to terms with modern normative structures. Such a public encounter may permit the reflexive rationalization of the life world and may open the way for the institutionalization of processes of practical rationalization.

A second form of de-privatization is manifested in those cases in which religions enter the public sphere of modern societies to question and contest the claims of the two major societal systems, states and markets, to function according to their own intrinsic functionalist norms without regard to extrinsic traditional moral norms. By questioning, for example, absolutist raison d'etat principles, the morality of national security doctrines, and the inhuman premises of nuclear defense policies, religions remind both states and their citizens of the human need to subordinate the logic of state formation to the "common good." Similarly, by questioning the inhuman claims of capitalist markets to function in accordance with impersonal and amoral self-regulating mechanisms, religions may remind individuals and societies of the need to check and regulate those impersonal market mechanisms to ensure that they are accountable for the human, social, and ecological damage they may cost and that they may become more responsible to human needs. Moreover, transnational religions are in a particularly advantageous position to remind all individuals and all societies that under modern conditions of globalization, the "common good" can increasingly be defined only in global, universal human terms, and that consequently, the public sphere of modern civil societies cannot have national or state boundaries.

Finally, there is a third form of de-privatization of religion connected with the obstinate insistence of religious traditions in maintaining the very principle of a "common good" against individualist modern liberal theories that would reduce the common good to the aggregated sum of individual rational choices. As long as they respect the ultimate right and duty of the individual conscience to make moral decisions, religions, by bringing into the public sphere issues that liberal theories have decreed to be private affairs, remind individuals and modern societies that morality can only exist as an intersubjective normative structure and that individual choices only attain a "moral" dimension when they are guided or informed by intersubjective, interpersonal norms. Reduced to the private sphere of the individual self, morality must dissolve necessarily into arbitrary decisionism. By bringing publicity into the private moral sphere and by bringing into the public sphere issues of private morality, religions force modern societies to confront the task of reconstructing reflexively and collectively their own normative foundations. By so doing, they aid in the process of practical rationalization of the traditional life world and their own normative traditions.