The fact that the 'Eleven Theses Against Habermas' (which I have only been able to read in English translation) were published a while ago makes it easier for me to look beyond their bellicose rhethoric. As I was reading the piece, I frequently asked myself who the author might possibly be addressing. After all, we both start from the premise that a contitutional democracy guarantees the same fundamental rights to all citizens. Such a legal system punishes discrimination against homosexuals, the practice of female genital mutilation, domestic violence, forced marriage, polygamy, the refusal of medical aid and even more so paedophilia or cannibalism. Hence every interpretation of the separation of church and state which would require toleration of such crimes is precluded from the beginning. Paolo Flores d'Arcais, who should grant me this logical insight, should therefore have asked himself what his misunderstanding is based on.

He should have known that we also share his second premise (which he develops in his last thesis), according to which a democratic constitution remains just a facade so long as the material and cultural conditions for an inclusive, equitable and autonomous use of the rights of participation is not fulfilled. The systematically induced external costs of failing markets and bureaucratic intervention must not be imposed upon those social groups which in any case cannot defend themselves. Equal rights of membership in a polity are irreconcilable with the growing social inequality which we see reflected, among other things, in the divisions of our own society. To safeguard the political and cultural preconditions for a political participation based on truly equal rights, however, is just as important as questions of social policy. This point - which can explain the attack on my rather trivial proposals for the public role of religion - is what I presume to be the source of the first divergence of our views.

Our first difference concerns the deliberative understanding of politics, while the second concerns the confessional monoculture of Italy and the third concerns the mentality of secularism.

(1) Though Paolo Flores d'Arcais pays lip service to „deliberative democracy", his eighth and ninth theses betray a non-cognitivistic understanding of moral norms and values, a positivistic understanding of law and a voluntaristic understanding of democracy. These underlying philosophical assumptions are not conformable with the deliberative core of the democratic process. They explain a certain lack of understanding of the functions which the political voices of citizens - their use of „public reason", as Rawls would say, following Kant - must perform in a political public dominated by the mass media. Without the use of such voices, politics will be unable to safeguard the democratic character of our societies, colonised by the market as they are. For the democratic process demands more than the bare act of consulting and aggregating dispositions and „values" which are inaccessible to arguments. We must, instead, be concerned with problems that need to be solved in a manner which respects the equal concern owed to all citizens, and hence is as just and as appropriate to the question at hand as possible.

If politics is understood as a problem-solving process in this manner, then democractic will-formation has a cognitive content from the perspective of justice no less than from that of pragmatism and empiricism. The democratic process can only create legitimacy in the same measure as it combines inclusion - the participation of, if possible, all citizens - with the discursive formation of opinions and the prospect of sensible results. This explains the central role of a public which is not deformed and of a cultural inheritance which is not faded. It must make possible a critical appropriation of vital content.

A liberal public constitutes the loosely structured periphery which surrounds the dense centre of the state; this public, in its own right, is rooted in civil society's even more fleeting networks of communication. The liberal public assures the circulation of political communication between civil society and the state institutions which make binding decisions. In its turn, civil society is embedded in a political culture which lays down the parameters of public discourse. A liberal political culture is like a movable scree constituted by time-tested empirical, ethical and moral reasons. Since it is receptive to impulses stemming from public communication, its elements can shift.

The condition of such a culture is measured by the precarious balance between the vibrant force of its inheritance and its openness for necessary revisions. Churches fit into this picture of a deliberatively-understood democratic will formation when in the political public they inhabit the role of „interpretative communities" - and limit themselves to it! Attached to their religious communities, churches have strong roots in civil society and draw upon historical sources. With their technically highly developed praxis of interpreting holy texts they are the heirs of those four or five world religions which, since the Axial Age, have woven the cultural pattern of the great civilisations without interruption. Often, something which has been lost elsewhere has remained intact in the life of religious communities; something which cannot easily be reproduced even with the professional knowledge of doctors and psychologists - I mean the sensibilities and sufficiently differentiated forms of expression necessary to grasp the manifestations of a failed life.

Especially since the rupture in the tradition of the labour movement and the weakening of all progressive movements, our hyper-capitalist societies - which reward only the exclusive focus on one's own success - are less and less sensitive to societal pathologies, to the failure of individual life plans, and to the deformation of life worlds. The Italy of Berlusconi is undoubtedly a good example. When it comes to clashes of values which have to be regulated politically, our religiously and ethically pluralistic societies are increasingly divided. This is why interpretative communities, which are at least still able to provide articulate contributions to repressed questions about a way to live together in solidarity, can resonate so strongly in them.

In that sense, MicroMega and its editor [Paolo Flores d'Arcais] may be exceptions. But can most formerly left-wing intellectuals really pride themselves on having forcefully resisted the de-politicisation of a purely mediatic public fashioned in the image of Berlusconi-TV? In any case, they should deny churches and religious communities neither the right nor the ability forcefully to make substantive contributions to disputes about legislation concerning abortion and euthanasia, bioethical questions concerning reproductive medicine or questions of animal rights and climate change. In most such cases, I myself have a different opinion. But in this and other questions the argumentative topography is so unclear that it is by no means a foregone conclusion which party can invoke the right moral intuitions. Concerning vulnerable areas of social life, religious traditions have the force convincingly to articulate moral intuitions in their own language.

(2) Paolo Flores d'Arcais argues that these considerations are misplaced, presumably because he has different examples in mind than I do. But the differences between countries which - like Catholic Italy and the confessionally divided Germany - have developed different political cultures and have arrived at different legal settlements of the relationship between church and state, don't touch upon the principles of the separation of church and state. In all cases, a democratic constitution imposes limits on the public role of churches and religious communities. If they want to convince the members of a largely secular society, they would in any case be well-advised to present arguments which invoke not just their own moral intuitions, but also the moral intuitions of non-believers and the moral intuitions of those with other religious creeds. When churches are expressly addressing their own faithful, they should be talking to them as religious members of the political community rather than exercising a form of religious dictation. They must not put their spiritual authority in the place of the kinds of justifications which could find universal resonance. For example, I find the variety of „politics from the pulpit" which was commonplace in Germany under Adenauer impermissible and I would be the first to support Paolo Flores d'Arcais in a fight against such constitutionally dubious practices.

In this context another caveat is important. In a constitutional state, all legally coercive norms must be formulated in a language which all citizens can understand and they must also be capable of public justification. This much is a matter of course; it is not a reason against the participation of churches in the political public provided that the institutionalised processes of consultation and decision-making at the level of parliaments, courts of law, ministries and administrative agencies is clearly divorced from the informal participation of citizens in the formation of public opinion. The separation of church and state calls for a filter between these two spheres, which only allows „translated" - and therefore secular - contributions to penetrate from the Babylonian chaos of voices in the wider public to the agenda of state institutions. John Rawls deduced a now-famous „proviso" from this, which is highly contested in the US. Citizens and organisations which can or want to contribute to topics of public concern in religious language alone must know that the cognitive content of their contributions can only be part of the justification of potentially coercive political decisions if it is translated.

I do not understand why these conditions should be unrealistic. To be sure, they are not currently observed in the US. But every judge, every parliamentarian and every civil servant can easily be urged to abstain from speaking in religious terms, which are not equally accessible to all citizens, in his public office. For good reason, we do not know of any presidents praying publicly in Europe.

To be sure, the domain of the state, which has legitimate coercive measures at its disposal, must not open itself up to disputes between different religious communities; were this otherwise, the government could become but an organ imposing the will of the religious majority onto the opposition. But three normative reasons speak in favour of a liberal public. First, people who are neither willing nor capable of dividing up their moral convictions and vocabulary into profane and sacred elements must be able to contribute to political will-formation even in religious language. Second, solidarity between citizens demands that secular members of the same democratic polity speak to their religious fellow-citizens as equals rather than treating them as specimens of a protected species. Third, the democratic state should not prematurely reduce the polyphonic complexity of public voices because it cannot know whether this might not entail cutting society off from the sparse resources needed for a quest for meaning and identity.

(3) Surely it is no coincidence that a particularly militant form of secularism has grown in those European societies which have a Catholic monoculture. My secularist friends should not, however, prematurely invoke the objection that they don't at all wish to banish religious communities from the public, but wish merely to impose uncontroversial constitutional limitations onto it. For then they could not mistake the demand for a secular contitution of the state with the demand for a secular society. In particular, they would then have to distinguish more clearly between „secular" and „secularist". In contrast to secular persons or non-believers, who remain agnostic towards religious claims to validity, those who are secularist strike a polemical pose towards the public influence of religious doctrines. In their eyes, religious doctrines are discredited because they are scientifically unfounded. In the Anglo-Saxon world, secularism today invokes a hard naturalism which claims that the natural sciences should enjoy a monopoly of societally-accepted knowledge about the world. I think of this scientism as pure ideology. It is irreconcilable with a post-metaphysical mode of thought which applies the discursive force of secular (but not mutilated) reason to moral, ethical and aesthetic questions without thereby blurring the difference between belief and knowledge in any way.

At this point Paolo Flores d'Arcais raises his most serious objection. He does not understand how, given such a clear demarcation between belief and knowledge, it could still be possible to expect that content should be „translated" from one language into another. It is certainly true that any translation of a thought from a religious to a secular language must entail a loss of connotations. To render the idea that human beings were made „in the image of God" as „human dignity" is to loose the original connotation of man having been „created". Nevertheless, the core of its semantic content need not be lost. The incidental associations of other biblical contexts - such as the association of the Final Judgment, when God resolves the paradox of equal attention to the uniqueness of each individual life story with a judgment which is as strict as it is merciful - might even be helpful. In difficult cases, such as affect-laden discussions about the use of torture when interrogating terrorists, it may be that only images such as these can evoke the right moral sentiments from beneath the debris of political prejudices - even in those citizens who have a secular temperament.

At the same time, the right moral judgments preserve the propositional content of the relevant feelings when these prove resilient in discursive inquiry. We consider such moral affects, as well as the ability to inquire discursively into the universalization of moral norms as the common property of all persons who understand themselves as responsible originators of their own actions. This layer of semantic content need not remain shrouded in the clothing of religious language.

The Enlightenment's polemical relationship with the secular power of religion has obscured the fact that post-metaphysical thinking has absorbed content from the Judeo-Christian tradition which is no less important than the inheritance of Greek metaphysics. And are we sure that this process of discursive absorption of religious content has been concluded? Can post-metaphysical thinking exclude the possibility that our religious inheritance might have semantic potentials which - when they offer profane truth contents - can develop an inspirational power for the whole of society? From Kierkegaard to Benjamin, Levinas and Derrida there have always been „religious authors" who - irrespective of their personal dispositions - have made theological content relevant to secular thinking.

The secular character of this mode of thinking is already evident from an anthropocentric turn which is diametrically opposed to a theocentric perspective. A dilution of the separation between „belief" and „knowledge" thus does not follow from the fact that post-metaphysical thinking has been inspired by religious doctrines. Even if semantic contents can cross this divide with a mere change of prefix, the two different modes of ‚accepting-as-true' remain unaffected. The propositions are supported by their respective - but different - justificatory foundations and are thus connected to claims to validity which differ from each other in kind and extent.