The temptations of faith and the democratic necessity for a radical, egalitarian and libertarian Enlightenment (preferably atheist and materialist - perhaps).

1. For some years now Habermas has been proposing a squaring of the circle: upholding liberal-democratic principles according to a demanding republican scheme (rigorous neutrality of the State with respect to faiths, ideologies and world views; the real - delegated/participatory - sovereignty of one and all; deliberation through universally accessible rational arguments; the necessity for a widespread - practically all-pervasive - constitutional ethos) while, at the same time, recognizing religious "reasons" as such (the argumentations and the political motivations that have recourse to God) not only as legitimate but, indeed, as useful and, ultimately, essential elements of liberal-democratic sociality.
Such recognition, for Habermas, entails nothing less than the duty, for nonreligious citizens, to translate into secular terms the "intuitions" and the "reasons" that religious citizens are able to express only in comprehensive terms of their experience of faith. Without this cooperative attitude, religious citizens - compared to secular citizens - would shoulder the burden of the tolerance toward competing world views asymmetrically. They would, in short, be discriminated against.
What is more, citizens without religious faith are required to recognize the "potential truth" also of "religious world views" (118). Indeed, such citizens are required to "open themselves up" to this potential truth (138). In Habermas's escalation of his civic-democratic encomium on faiths, not only must "the religious communities be paid public recognition for the practical contribution they make to the reproduction of desirable motivations and attitudes" (116). No, there is more: modernity must be normatively experienced by nonbelievers as "a complementary learning process" (116), in which "the citizen insensitive to religion" is obliged "to define the relation between faith and science self-critically" (118), thus abandoning traditional atheism. And all this within the sphere of a more general "practice of a self-reflexive relation with the limits of the Enlightenment" (117-118) that concludes in the "self-reflexive overcoming of a secular hardening and exclusive self-comprehension of the modern" (145).
The incessant reaffirmation of constitutional patriotism - where sociality is regulated "autonomously and rationally with the instruments of positive law [Rechts]" (126), which means, inevitably, etsi Deus non daretur [as if God did not exist] - is no less incessantly reversed. Habermas, that is, transforms his constitutional patriotism into the self-critical Lenten asceticism into which the culture, political practice and existential experience of the Enlightenment are forced, as atonement for the asymmetrical affliction with which they have, allegedly, vexed the believers for a number of centuries.
We can well understand why another highly influential German, Joseph Ratzinger, looks with such favor upon this Habermasian "post-secular reason."

2. In what sense, then, does the believer shoulder the heavy burden of an alleged asymmetry on the part of the State, whose traditional secular neutrality is thus, allegedly, by no means impartial? In the first place because the "right of religious citizens to contribute to public discussions in religious language" is unjustly contested (118). In other words, the clause "etsi Deus non daretur" is, allegedly, persecutory, since it compels the believer to renounce the God-argument. This, for the believer, is a heavy burden indeed, while for the secular citizen it is, obviously, no burden at all.
In fact, the deliberative character of liberal democracy, i.e. the obligation of a public argumentation that produces reasons "accessible to all" (125) - a commitment, Habermas insists, that is constitutive and inalienable (democracy itself is at stake) - demands the same self-limitation of all citizens, be they believers or not: namely, that every peremptory principle of authority be banished. It is inadmissible to reply to the unimpeachable request for argumentation - why? - with the absolutism of the "just because!" (Perché? Perché sì! Pourquoi? Parce que! Dla czego? Dla tego! etc.). For this very reason "the democratic constitutional State ... represents a demanding form of government" (150).
It is not true, then, that the believers alone have to renounce their "just because." The public use of reason excludes the fideistic "It is God's will" (and it is always one's own God) exactly as it excludes any other ideological assumption, be it agnostic, pagan or atheist: from the predatory naturalism of land and blood to radical pacifist nonviolence, from the morals of all-pervasive hedonism to the ethics of a self-sacrificing solidarity. All citizens - believers and nonbelievers alike - have to renounce their own value assumptions.
As Habermas tells us, "the assumption of a common human reason is the epistemic foundation" (125) of the democratic constitutional State, which is threatened by the "potential of conflict ... still unchanged ... between the existentially significant convictions of believers, of nonbelievers, of the followers of other religions" (125) if the public space is not guaranteed as a common argumentative dimension precisely by excluding the various value assumptions. Except, of course, for that "egalitarian civic ethos" (144) that constitutes the very foundation of the democratic constitutional State and is, indeed, an integral part of it. At the same time, however, this ethos is problematic; as we shall see, it is not to be taken for granted.

3. Habermas articulates his "Kantian republicanism" (107) with a contradiction: even though "every religion is originally a comprehensive doctrine" that "claims the authority to structure a form of life in its totality" (117), believers "have to obtain the guarantee to express and justify their convictions in a religious language even when they find no secular 'translations' for them" (136). But religious language "without secular translations" is characterized essentially by the diriment nature of the resource "It is God's will!" and, therefore, precisely by the demand (perennially lying in ambush) to "structure a form of life in its totality" by adjusting the laws of the State to its dogma.
So glaring is this "contraddizion che nol consente"* that Habermas has to uphold the contrary as well: "the inclusion of religious justifications in the legislative process violates the very principle" of the separation (Trennung) of Church and State, which he reaffirms to be inalienable. He thus logically deduces that "religious citizens can express themselves in their language only with the reserve of translation" (137-138).
Habermas, then, legitimates the religious argument only if and when it is translatable into nonreligious terms: disregarding the God-argument, and thus in the common and binding dimension of the "etsi Deus non daretur." This, accordingly, means that the religious argument is valid only if and when it is superfluous. Habermas attempts to rectify his first contradiction with a further contradiction.
The believers, moreover, can also elude the burden of "translation." For Habermas, this is a burden that the nonbelievers (asymmetrically) must shoulder: it is "the secularized citizens who are expected to participate in initiatives designed to translate significant contributions from religious language into a language that is publicly accessible" (118), a practice by which "religious reasons emerge in the changed form of universally accessible argumentations" (138).
And what if, in spite of all secular endeavor, such translation proves to be impossible? In the name of God one can impose norms that no rational argumentation can render compatible with the values that Habermas - rightly - considers to be constitutive of a democratic constitutional State ( and therefore inalienable). There are so many of these anti-democratic norms that their name is "legion." And such demands are not things of the past, but are ever more impending.
The diktat of the "cooperative operations of translation" (138) with which Habermas wants to burden the nonbelievers therefore conceals the decisive circumstance: namely, that the expected translation - in secular-democratic terms - is often impossible. Such expectation is nothing but wishful thinking. For that matter, all the current polemics - all this talk of a "clash of civilizations" - stem from the impossibility of translating crucial religious demands into secular-rational terms. Even Cardinal Tattamanzi, today Archbishop of Milan, and, like his predecessor Martini, a prelate who is very much open to the secular reasons of the last two Roman Pontiffs, had to admit in a dialogue with me that "only on the basis of an anthropological conception that contemplates the reality of God - of the Christian God - can one say absolutely 'no' to euthanasia" (MicroMega, 1/2001).

4. It is thus the case - also for Habermas - that "the existential convictions rooted in religion, thanks to their reference - rationally defended if need be - to the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths, elude that type of discursive discussion without reserve to which other life orientations are exposed" (135). To put it bluntly: the believer as believer is unable to dialogue rationally.
Habermas attempts to escape from this spiral of contradictions in which he is entangled by distinguishing the strictly state and political sphere from that of public opinion. The imperative of secularity, of "etsi Deus non daretur" ought to hold rigorously and without exceptions only in the first-mentioned sphere. "The principle of the separation of Church and State obliges politicians and bureaucracies in the domain of state institutions to formulate and justify laws, judicial decisions, ordinances and provisions exclusively in a language that is equally accessible to all the citizens" (127-128, my italics).
Habermas, however, dispenses citizens as such and their political organizations (in addition to those of the civil society) from this obligation, because "extending this principle from the institutional plane to the choices of organizations and of citizens in the political public sphere" would be "a secularistic excess of generalization" (134). But this assumes two separate universes of communication, supported by opposite and incompatible rules. Paradoxically, Hillary (a member of the Senate), when she's asking for votes, ought not to bring up God, while her husband Bill, asking for the same votes for her, has every right to do so.
Yet Habermas reasserts absolutely that "the discursive character" of the consultations that precede a legislative decision ranks as an essential and inviolable component of the democratic constitutional procedure (140). How is it possible, then, to preserve this bond for those who hold elective office, and nullify it for candidates, opinion makers and citizens? Not even the most rigid institutionalization of the doubleness would do the job. In representative democracy, the elective/legislative process is in fact a circular continuum of public opinion>political association>institutional power>public opinion.
Habermas attempts to escape from his theoretical antinomies with an unfeasible pragmatic "solution." He conceals a "non sequitur" with a mirage. The reality, moreover (and the drama of the problem), is that in the public sphere everyone (or too many at any rate, and more all the time) is invoking the name of God.

5. Nevertheless, Habermas insists on the alleged persecution of believers: "the burdens of tolerance are not distributed symmetrically between believers and nonbelievers, as the more or less liberal abortion regulations demonstrate" (117). But in fact it is the other way around. There is not one single Western abortion law, even if inspired by the most abominable (for a believer) permissiveness, that compels one single woman. Not one. Every law leaves her free to choose. It is Ratzinger, by contrast, who wants to impose a criminally sanctioned prohibition on women who are not believers, or who follow other faiths.
The asymmetry is even more evident - and opposite to the one Habermas laments - if from abortion we go on to euthanasia. In this case there is not even the excuse of a second "person" (the fetus), whose rights need to be protected. In assisted suicide (this is what euthanasia is, certainly not the Nazi "euthanasia" - murder of the NON-consentient - dragged in by the Church in a spirit of indecent polemical fakery) there is only the right of terminally-ill (and innocent) persons to shorten their torture (and, in countries where capital punishment is still in force, even the worst criminals are granted the right to an execution not preceded by torture!).
In sum, once again: the alleged secular "asymmetry" leaves the believer free to make use of a right or not. By contrast, the imposition of the believer's viewpoint through law compels the nonbeliever, who is barred from doing everything the Pope holds to be "sin," on pain of incarceration.
What does it mean, then, that "a State cannot impose upon citizens whose religious freedom it guarantees any obligation that is incompatible with their life as believers" because this would mean "asking them the impossible" (131)? Does it mean that it cannot ask them to practice compulsorily abortion (euthanasia, contraception, etc.) or that it cannot ask them to renounce imposing upon others (followers of other faiths or atheists), with the force of the secular arm, their own lifestyles, even when they represent the overwhelming majority?
The first thing is never asked by any nonbeliever, while the second right is inalienable for a liberal democracy and, indeed, is indivisible from the definition of constitutional patriotism.
But Habermas means just the opposite, when he insists that "the liberal State must not transform the due institutional separation between religion and politics into a mental and psychological burden for its religious citizens" (135).

6. Let us pay close attention. Not imposing "mental and psychological burdens" or, indeed, "any obligation that is incompatible with their life as believers" does seem fair and reasonable, but it can open up a Pandora's box of vicious intolerance. It depends, in fact, on what their "life as believers" demands. If it demands the stake for heretics (or even for the authors of "satanic cartoons"), then the State not only can but must impose on the believer the "mental and psychological burden" of renouncing this eminently religious drive. If it demands the sexual mutilation of girls, then the State non only can but must punish (with pitiless severity).
It is unquestionably and tragically true, in fact, that for many believers "their concept of justice founded on religion tells them what is or is not politically right, so that they are unable 'to discern any "pull" from any secular reason'" (133). But Habermas fails to realize that accepting toto corde [wholeheartedly] this "objection" of Weithmann's as "in my view decisive" (133) ends up by potentially legitimating all religious intolerance.
The kamikaze believer, in fact, is precisely the one who less than any other "discerns the 'pull' of a secular reason." The same is true of the believer who demands the stake for an "offensive" page, or holds his daughter prisoner because she is "tempted" by the "Western lifestyle," or beats her to a pulp (and sometimes kills her) if she refuses to adapt to an arranged marriage, or as a good Jehovah's witness lets his son who needs a transfusion die. And why not polygamy, cannibalism, pedophilia, the exposition of newborn babies or ritual human sacrifice, since for millenary and grandiose religions such practices have represented duty and pietas?
"The liberal State that protects all forms of religious life equally" (135) is therefore liberal only in this anti-secular idiosyncrasy of Habermas's. The liberal State cannot and must not protect all the "forms of life" but exclusively the constitutional freedoms of all the citizens, and therefore "forms of life" (religious or otherwise) only if they are compatible with republican democracy.
Hence, to guarantee citizens symmetrically, liberal constitutionalism must impose an asymmetrical "mental and psychological burden" upon each of them. Whether or not it is perceived as a burden (and a more or less heavy one) for one who holds a certain religious or philosophical conviction is nothing other than a measure of the distance, the conflictuality, or possibly the incompatibility between those convictions and the liberal State.
This "learning and adaptation effort" required of religious citizens is, to be sure, by no means "spared the secular citizens" (142). It is absolutely essential for democracy, and thus it is required also of an atheist who considers to be a "law of nature" a predatory vitalism leading to racism, or homosexuality a disease, or to advocate the elimination of the handicapped. The fact is, such an effort can never be spared those who are against democratic values, lest democracy renounce itself.

7. Hence the public sphere will be public, a space symmetrically open to all citizens, only if it is kept free from any God-argument.
It is totally false, in fact, that "fair rules can be formulated only if the interested parties learn, time and again, also to adopt the perspectives of others" (125-126). Why in the world should we learn to adopt - to make our own - extremely anti-democratic perspectives? To adopt the viewpoint of the Nazi, the racist, the fundamentalist? On the contrary! We need to banish all the claims of any "just because," expressions of mere and totalitarian "will to power," incompatible with democracy (even in the most minimalist sense of the word). And the God-argument is a particularly pernicious "just because," followed like a shadow by the temptation of "God with us" (recently: Gott mit uns).
Obviously, renouncing the God-argument cannot be imposed by law. One can, nonetheless, render it socially indecent and psychologically insurmountable to involve God in matters of law, just as racial superiority, sexual inferiority (or preference) and other "diversities" are taboo subjects today, but only yesterday were utilized liberally and efficaciously.
Why do we have priests and rabbis, pastors and imams, in civil ceremonies? And why is their presence obligatory on TV whenever morals are discussed, as if religion entailed some privileged ethical importance? And if they are considered a necessary comfort in the armed forces and in prisons, then why is provision not made for agnostic and atheist "spiritual advisors," of every "school"?
But above all, Darwinism in the schools from the very first grades (with teaching instruments adapted for the pupils' age, ça va sans dire), and the plurality of faiths (or of the atheist rejection of religions) - that is, the relativity of the family cultures of origin - made to come alive for the children as the wealth of our human adventure. And laws that allow no objection to or abuse of the rights of others. A democratic State cannot tolerate (see the case now in England) the fact that a pharmacist, in the name of his God, refuses to give a young woman the day-after pill, or that a doctor refuses to examine a patient of the opposite sex. At this rate, a football player will soon be able to refuse to play against a team of "negroes" or of "infidels," or simply of Israelis. Indeed, we have seen such things already.
Basically, it is just a question of the first commandment: you shall not take the name of God in vain. Because utilizing it on the public scene means exposing the conflict of opinions and the democratic dialectic to the risk of an interminable ordeal.

8. On the cognitive plane, this obligation equal for all citizens - whether sensitive to a religious faith or not - means renouncing omnilaterally any claim to ethical Truth. The "determinate cognitive premises" that Habermas rightly demands as conditio sine qua non so that "the obligation of the 'public use of reason' can be fulfilled" (142) lead to the rigorous application of Hume's principle that a value can never be obtained from a fact, a prescription from a description, an "ought" from an "is," a moral law from a scientific law.
Moreover, Habermas emphasizes that "the competition between world pictures and religious doctrines, which claim to explain the position of human beings in the entire world, cannot be settled at the cognitive level" (141). In other terms, familiar to philosophy but today "out of style," values are not rationally decidable. To affirm a value one must have recourse to another value. And the "first" (or "ultimate") value, which grounds the entire chain of our deontic reasoning, is itself definitively ungroundable.
It is not true, then, that "weak assumptions on the normative content of the constitution communicating socio-cultural forms of life" (107) are sufficient for us to rid ourselves of Kelsen's "defeatist" rationality. Highly differentiated, communicatively complex and technologically extremely modern socio-cultural forms of life are, indeed, perfectly compatible with radically anti-communicative and illiberal political practices and constitutions. China docet, today, as the Führerprinzip did yesterday.
That (capitalist) development and technology bring democracy is an illusion peddled by the establishment ideologies. Democracy value presupposes the choice-for-democracy. From communication fact one cannot obtain communication value (the ethics of communication); that is, from communication as a techno-social necessity one cannot deduce communication as a symmetry of rights-freedoms-powers, exactly as from the scientific assertions of Darwinism one cannot obtain the prescriptions of predatory vitalism (social "Darwinism").
Relative to the public sphere, then, as far as values are concerned we have to limit ourselves to the democratic least common denominator of constitutional patriotism (as we shall see).
All the other ethico-political Truths have every right to be professed, and to motivate existences and behaviors, but cannot rank as argument.

9. This also holds for "scientistic" truth, of course, which is Habermas's true bugbear. For him, "hard naturalism," which is to be understood "as a consequence of the scientistic premises of the Enlightenment" (8), "also betray a secret complicity" with "the advocates of religious orthodoxy" (8), such that "fundamentalist and secularist mentalities" (151), full-fledged opposing extremisms, "endanger the stability of the political community with their polarization of world views" (8). Khomeini and Dawkins united in the struggle? Come on now!
The cognitive assumption that can save democracy against the "scientistic" drift is, for Habermas, "multidimensional reason, not fixed exclusively on the relation with the objective world" (148). Kant and Hegel are its tutelary deities (149).
The philosophical defect of "radical naturalism" is, for Habermas, the "reduction of our knowing to the throng [Menge] of statements that represent the 'state of the sciences' at various times" (147). While its ethico-political defect lies in the substantially nihilistic conclusion of a "naturalization of the mind that calls into question our practical vision of ourselves as persons who act responsibly and leads to demands for a revision of criminal law" (148).
This caricature of naturalism constitutes, for Habermas, a convenient butt; polemizing with it he restores his own version of ethical cognitivism and wrests democracy and secularity from the cognitive "premises" of Hume's principle.
Science tells us "only" that the neocortex releases the evolved ape we all are from the compulsoriness of the instincts and compels us to replace them with a norm. It does not tell us (and does not claim to do so, as long as it remains science) what norm. Any norm is fine, as long as it works. Thus it declares us lords and masters of the norm, absolutely responsible to it. Far indeed from a "scientifically objectivized self-conception of persons" (7).
Rather, the Hegelian "Reason" to which Habermas burns incense is not reason, it is theology. What is more, it is the all-pervasive restoration of theology against the conquests of modern critico-empirical skepsis. In fact the more-than-ever metaphysical fantasies of "intelligent design" are pure Hegel: the empirical and contingent events of the evolution of the cosmos, of the earth and of human history, recounted as res gestae of the Spirit, finalistically oriented.
Thus the possible "speculative elaboration of scientific information" (118), i.e., the illicit ideologization of science into a world view (rara avis, in fact), which presumes to obtain the human "ought" from the mapping of neuronal connections, can be coped only with the rigorous application of the separation between fact and norm. The very rule that Habermas rejects.

10. Disenchantment is, however, for Habermas also (and today perhaps above all and for the most part) waste land.
"The progress of cultural and social rationalization" has contributed to the production of "abysmal destruction" (13) and a "secularizing 'derailment' of society as a whole" (106) that dries up the sources of solidarity among citizens. And on this solidarity "the democratic State must totally depend, without being able to impose it by law" (11-12).
This is why, to aid democracy, "the religious communities must be paid public recognition for the practical contribution they make to the reproduction of desirable motivations and attitudes" (116). In short, they are the inviolable pillars of the republic ethos.
What is more, only religions, with their "expressive possibilities," can redeem us from "social pathologies, the failure of what we have planned for our lives, and the deformation of what makes our lives cohere" (115).
Ratzinger has already translated Habermas's secularity into the language of Catholicism: if democracy is not to plunge into nihilism, everyone - believers and atheists alike - must behave "sicuti Deus daretur." Modernity completely turned upside-down.
But the contribution of religion is inextricably double faced. In the hands of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (or of many "street" priests who contribute to MicroMega) it is certainly a great force for freedom. In the hands of infinite other - and more widespread - hermeneutic constellations, it is a sure and permanent temptation to confessional abuse against democracy. And the support of religious communities, once aroused, can no longer be controlled at will.
Then again, there is no need for this threatening aid since, as Habermas recalls, it is not true "that the liberal State is incapable of reproducing its motivational assumptions out of its own secular existence" (110). He is right: the "political virtues ... essential for the existence of a democracy" (110) can be preserved and encouraged iuxta propria principia [on their own], without having to "learn" anything from religious faiths.
For "the principles of justice to penetrate the closely-woven fabric of the cultural orientations of value" (111) - without which, as Habermas rightly affirms, democracy is jeopardized - it will suffice that the democratic constitutional State, in its substantive policies, remain faithful to the common denominator of values logically deducible from the minimum procedural principle "one head, one vote." This, at least, is a principle that not even the most extreme conservative contests. And, what is more, it is not so minimum, if reasoned in earnest. As we shall see.

11. Liberal democracy is autos-nomos, sovereignty of the citizens to lay down the law on their own. And we refer here to concretely existing citizens, to one and to all, not to an abstract, unfindable "general will," bordering on the totalitarian. But a free and equal vote presupposes material and cultural conditions of autonomy for each and for all. The vote is not free (one head, one vote) in a climate of mafia-style intimidation (one bullet, one vote), or of corruption (one kickback, one vote); but neither is it free if need dominates the citizens' existence or the lack of critical tools and of information pre-judices their choice. Or if the disparity of resources among them pre-judices the results (one dollar, one vote), or if advertising takes the place of argumentative debate (one spot, one vote).
Substantive policies of radical welfare (independence from need), television impartiality and pluralism, egalitarian schools and permanent education - these are pre-conditions of a free and equal vote. As such, they are to be guaranteed in the Constitution, free from the hazards of majorities. Substantive policies that promote participation, movements, the non-bureaucratization of political parties, truly equal treatment in the judicial system and, more generally, the ethos of the dissident against homologation, conformism, unfreedom of thought - all of these are inalienable for democracy.
The list would be a very long one. Hyper-libertarian and hyper-progressive permanent measures are the transcendental of a liberal Constitution, because this "throng" of substantive policies - socially and culturally highly demanding and radical - constitute the conditions of possibility of the procedural minimum "one head, one vote." Without socio-cultural conditions of autonomy, the vote as an instrument of democracy fades and dies away (as all populisms and plebeianisms know).
Habermas, instead of tackling the problem of present-day democracies - i.e., the democratic deficit produced by policies that are anti-libertarian and/or un-egalitarian and/or culturally and socially conformist, i.e., anti-democratic even if majority - calls on religions to help out with a supplement of soul, of sense, and of solidarity. But in this way he begs the question: the struggle for democracy within democracy, against the forces of privilege and of conformism that reduce it to flatus vocis.
The secret of the "waste land" risk is not disenchantment, the relativism of values and the alleged secular barrenness of democracy, but is incomplete democracy - legally, socially, culturally, politically incomplete. There is no faith that can save it, in fact, if democracy does not live daily on policies of equality-for-freedom and freedom-for-equality.
Thus it is not with the self-criticism of the Enlightenment but rather with its completion, not with the fear of disenchantment - i.e., of the autos-nomos of human beings, which Ratzinger with anti-Enlightenment coherence blames for the totalitarianisms of the last century and for the ills of this one - but with its radicalization into radical democracy, that modernity can face up to the contradictions, injustices and risks it generates, fundamentalisms and nihilisms included.