Professor Habermas presents his point of view cogently, but I do not believe he has responded to the objections I raised.
Habermas radically distinguishes the institutional from the public sphere. He pits the institutional sphere of the "parliaments, tribunals, ministries, administrative authorities," but more in general of the "institutional processes of consultation and decision," against the public sphere as a place of the "informal participation of the citizens in the forming of opinions" (since he previously stigmatized the "politics from the pulpit" of the Adenauer period, such "consultation," which other contexts seem to limit to parliamentary debate alone, may also refer to election campaigns). In the institutional sphere "all norms, if they are to gain juridical approval, must be formulated, and publicly justified, in a language that all the citizens can understand." This rules out arguments put forward in the language of a particular faith (or of the syncretism of all faiths, if possible).
Habermas appears peremptory: in the entire institutional dimension "[religious] citizens and [religious] organizations have to know that the cognitive content of their contributions can justify politically binding decisions only on the condition of their being previously translated," i.e., rigorously stripped of references to faith and to God. In short, in the deliberative process of law and in that of its application the God-argument must be ostracized. By contrast, in the public sphere, which includes all the places of informal discussion (television first of all), believers not only have the right to utilize the language of God and the arguments of faith, but in so doing they bring to democracy an inalienable wealth.
The objection I raised against Habermas is that the decision-making process in a democracy - and all the more in democracy as Habermas understands it, as deliberative and not merely procedural - does not permit this sharp and normatively significant separation between the two spheres. Habermas skips over this objection - which is certainly not the same as demonstrating its groundlessness.
Let us put our two contrasting convictions to the test in the concrete case of religious faiths that, in the public sphere, put the God-argument forward in one of the most recurrent forms it takes today: namely, that of the sacredness of Life as religiously deduced from human "creaturality."
Concretely speaking: on television, in the newspapers, in conferences, in universities and in schools, in churches, synagogues and mosques, the dogmatically religious conviction of human "creaturality" constitutes a crucial argument in favor of the "sacredness of Life" from the very instant of the fertilization of the ovum, and in the nonnegotiable defense of such sacredness it harbors an intransigent pathos. This pathos sees in whomever takes part in an abortion (woman, doctor, nurse) the perpetrator of a homicide - indeed, of the most hateful of homicides, infanticide; indeed, of the vilest form of infanticide, since the fetus and the embryo, the farther they be from birth - albeit humans by all rights - with their still shapeless appearance spare their killer the risk of any sense of guilt.
And, since abortions are now legion, we are - allegedly - confronted with an exponential holocaust. The woman, the doctor, the nurse, are, in this case, the moral equivalent of the SS who hurl the Jewish child into the crematorium. All this follows logically from this religious assumption (which, in the public sphere, has in fact been flaunted punctually by the last two Popes, in emotionally crucial circumstances: the voyage to Poland; the visit to Auschwitz).
But subsequently, perhaps already in election campaigns, most certainly in parliamentary debates, such an argument ought to be inexorably banned, since in the institutional sphere Habermas (quite rightly) admits only a logos that addresses common rationality (which excludes on principle "un-translated" faiths), and an argumentation that "all the citizens can understand" can make no appeal to "creaturality." Thus "Life" would prosaically and secularly drop its capital "L" and be divided into the domains - even with their at times disputed borders - of life-of-the-morula, life-of-the-balstocyst, life-of-the-embryo, life-of-the-fetus, and of a human life whose attribute, up to the last stages of pregnancy, is - in the absence of the God-argument - highly problematic (to put it mildly).
This radical separation of political life into two spheres, governed by opposing criteria as far as the admissibility of their arguments are concerned, thus proves, in the first place, to be factually impossible. Any parliamentary pleading in favor of penal sanctions for abortion reverberates with the unmistakable echo of religious anathema ("the sacredness of Life"), which constitutes the evident, albeit tacit, content of the argumentation; and thus the two spheres are reunified de facto.
Moreover, any claim to keep these two spheres radically separated constitutes an unpardonable offense against the principle of democratic representation. It demands, in fact, nothing less than socially widespread politico-argumentative schizophrenia. When citizens debate the selection of their political representatives one may, indeed, have recourse to God; but these representatives, in legislating in the name of their electors, cannot do so, even when the God-argument cannot be replaced by equally convincing rational arguments. The participation of the citizen and of the parliamentarian in the deliberative process would thus come about according to mutually exclusive dia-logical modalities, and the argumentative impermeability between the two spheres would render the former no longer representable in the latter, thus confirming the conservative theory of democracy as nothing more than a procedural fiction for the turnover of "elites."
What is more: if - as Habermas does - one encourages the use of "untranslatable" religious arguments in the public sphere (and "creaturality" - as he himself admits - is indeed "untranslatable"), this will influence that "liberal political culture" which is like a "friable slope of detritus," whose elements "shift continually, since it is susceptible to the impulses of public communication." And the shift is precisely towards progressive legitimization - through cumulative effects - of recourse to the God-argument throughout the deliberative process, once it has first been rendered "obvious" in the existential domain. The reasonableness of banning it in parliamentary debate will become increasingly indefensible and, ultimately, incomprehensible to common sense, which comes to realize that what is at stake is always the same, whether it be debated by parliamentarians deliberating over laws, or by the citizens in choosing who will be doing the deliberating.
How is it possible, in fact, to taboo an argument as soon as it comes into Parliament or into the courts when it has already been legitimized in the programs on TV, that all-pervading (and meta-legitimizing) cathodic hearth which has come to "con-form" the contemporary life-world nearly to the point of saturation? Encouraged in the public sphere, the argument will colonize the institutional sphere as well. Indeed, public opinion in Habermas's sense is, precisely, the interface between civil society and institutions, between interests and norms, the place in which the democratic ethos - the ultimate and only "foundation" of our individual and collective freedoms - is modified, intensified, or exhausted.
And then, "from the left," the postmodern hermeneutics of the politically correct - as disagreeable to Habermas, I believe, as it is to me - goes precisely in the direction of accepting the validity of logics (irrational, after all) that are incapable of addressing everyone, as long as they are representative of traditional communities - and this, in paradoxical synergy with the clerical claims of all monotheisms. Thus in Italy the Communist Refoundation party (analogous to die Linke in Germany, but not - I hope - in this respect) refused to vote for a law against the sexual mutilation of little girls, judging it to be too severe because deaf to the traditional and religious roots of these identity practices; while in Great Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury - schismatic ever since the Tudors, never mind Catholic Italy! - asks that Common Law incorporate significant elements of the sharia, in the name of the same logic.

The Primacy of Freedom or of Faith?

What, then, does democracy (particularly in Habermas's deliberative, and not merely procedural, version) have the right to demand of the religious "communities of interpretation," to keep them from contributing to the piecemeal landslide of the common liberal cultural, culminating in the collapse of the God-argument taboo in Parliament and in the courts?
Let us go back to the question of "Life" - a nonnegotiable question for the believer. To keep the discourse of faith from overflowing from the public sphere into the institutional domain, the "communities of interpretation," apart from claiming that Life is sacred since God is its author and lord, ought to add that God will judge in the fullness of time and in the highest of heavens, while on earth - here and now - human law will have to permit the citizens (which means also the nonbelievers) to violate and suppress that which they consider not yet, or no longer, to be human life.
As a matter of fact, some "communities of interpretation" do so (the Waldensian Christians in Italy, many Protestant confessions in Germany and throughout the world, and even many Catholics in disobedience of the hierarchical Church). They rigorously insist that a deadly sin must not be considered a crime of law. Hence they have voted in favor of laws allowing divorce and abortion, and are ready to do so for euthanasia.
It is not fortuitous that we are talking about a minority. Their practice, which democracy, moreover, has the right/duty to demand (I want the law to permit you - nonbeliever - to practice that which my faith judges to be a deadly sin) entails the primacy of the freedom of others (even against Life!) over the moral values of one's own Truth, relativized in social co-existence, even if lived personally as unshakeable.
If one should reply that it is unrealistic to ask religions to promote a pro-co-existence attitude in which the common reasons (not, therefore, "creaturality") prevail over the nonnegotiable Truth of one's own morality (pro "Life"), then let us note that Habermas's intimation of legislative, executive and judiciary branches of government with an exclusively secular or secularly "translated" logos (which is the same thing) is no less illusory.
Habermas's remark that "after all, for good reasons, we have never seen a European president in public prayer" is, indeed, ironic - not, however, with respect to the peripheral provincialism of mono-confessional Italy, but rather to the extreme multi-confessionalism of the United States. In the USA, heart and empire of the democratic West, the case is exactly the opposite: for decades we have not seen a President - or even a presidential candidate - who has not been immortalized in a place of worship, and has not made reference to God in his institutional actions. Bush Jr.'s nominations to the Supreme Court have, in fact, been shamelessly guided by the fundamentalist religious criterion, honoring the infamous pact he made during the election campaign, before the people, with the highly powerful "communities of interpretation" of the evangelical right. And the judges of the Supreme Court are the institutional "community of interpretation" that, with its sentences, has reversed and can reverse the US constitutional outlook.
In short, here it is not a question of knowing whether the religious communities are inclined to have God (in whatever shape or form) be taboo in political argumentation, but whether, in a democratic context, and all in more so in a deliberative democracy à la Habermas, such behavior is proper. This would seem to be the case, since Habermas emphasizes how, even "when they address [only] their own faithful, churches have to speak to them as religiously oriented members of the political community, without exercising any moral constraint." But foregoing "moral constraint" means that priests and pastors, rabbis and mullahs cannot threaten to inflict even spiritual punishment on their flocks to obtain their obedience, and - a fortiori - can all the less claim to impose it by law on the nonbelievers (in which case we would clearly have gone from moral to the far more fearful constraint of the secular arm).
This would peremptorily seem to be the case, since Habermas adds that the religious communities "cannot put their spiritual authority in place of that type of reasons that are capable of gaining general resonance," and thus thinks he can liquidate all my criticisms of his presumed weaknesses with respect to religious fundamentalism with an: "excluded from the start is any interpretation of the separation between state and church that leads to the toleration of such things" as "discrimination against homosexuals, practices of clitoral mutilation, domestic violence, forced marriage, polygamy, refusal to give medical assistance." "We both" - Habermas began - "set out from the premise that the democratic state of law guarantees equal rights for all."
Both of whom? Habermas and I, to be sure. But God? And what about all the religions, all the actually existing "communities of interpretation"? Precisely this is the stumbling block. When one claims that churches and faiths have the right as religions to participate in public life, also with untranslated and untranslatable arguments, the question arises (or ought to, at least): are the contributions of these communities always, in fact, compatible with democratic values?
By no means. Many of them are not. For that matter, if they always and exclusively constituted that wealth of solidarity which in democracy, at the mercy of a cynical-hedonistic drift, is sorely missed, the question would never have arisen. If it does, it is because in mono-confessional Italy a legal and "integrated" immigrant demands that the police bring his wife back home by force, and in multi-confessional Germany demands family reunification for a second wife (an application granted by the courts, unless the Italian newspapers manipulated the story), and in the mosques one asks for more and for worse, while a German Pope seeks to bring back penal sanctions for abortion - in Italy and in Spain, in Poland and in Ireland, and wherever he deems the power relations to be favorable - and for the morning-after pill and for RU846 and for the selection of healthy embryos in artificial insemination, to say nothing of the elementary right of all persons over their own lives (in plain words: euthanasia).

The Ambivalence of Religions and Liberal Political Culture

Habermas maintains that "in vulnerable spheres of social co-existence, religious traditions have the strength to articulate moral intuitions in a linguistically convincing manner," i.e., with a forceful emotive persuasion that the cold medical-scientific-sociological specialism of secular welfare no longer possesses, or has never possessed. In some cases he may be right. But what shall we say about the intuitions that are "morally wrong"? About women who have abortions equated with the SS? Or - less repugnant but no less "wrong" - about homosexuality as a "serious disorder" and, substantially, a sickness; about the Islamic girls to be immunized against sexual freedom by means of social ostracism or worse; about the children of Jehovah's Witnesses who are not permitted to have transfusions; and about the entire Pandora's box of demands that actually existing religions effectively make (and multiply)?
In short, the problem arises when the religious communities express "moral intuitions" that are incompatible with individual constitutional freedoms, when they seek to impose them on their faithful with moral constraint, and when they demand that also the nonbelievers bow to them, imposing judicial and earthly sanctions, besides the spiritual and heavenly penalties to which the nonbelievers are insensible. If it were not for this constellation of attitudes, which often characterize the actually existing faiths, then we would be dealing only with the churches and the believers (probably the same ones) that both Habermas and I like and whom I exemplified, for national-religious par condicio, in the German Protestant Bonhoeffer and in the Italian Catholic "street priests."
But it is just not so. The religious communities more or less exceptionally manage to separate in themselves and in their faithful the believer from the citizen, and thus to root the taboo of the God-argument in the institutional sphere. Very often they consider the Truth of their own morality a more than sufficient reason to request its conversion into a law of the State; indeed, Habermas has legitimized their flourishing it as a viable argument in the public sphere (television, etc.). After all, if they had not done so they would have renounced the God-arguments, and limiting themselves to arguments of - or translatable into - common reason, the problem, once again, would never have arisen.
It is not a question, then, of "preferring a liberal public sphere" (in Habermas's sense: which admits truths of faith, untranslated) to my secularistic excesses (which reject such arguments), because "whoever is unwilling, or unable, to separate his moral convictions and his vocabulary into their sacred and profane components, must nonetheless be able to participate in the political formation of opinion also with a religious language." Habermas, in fact, is speaking of "those who are unwilling, or unable" to neglect the - crucial - cases in which it is impossible to separate the two components without compromising the substance of the argument: "creaturality" in the debate on abortion and euthanasia, for example.
Contrary to Habermas's accusation, I have nothing against the translation of values from religious to secular language. But we must keep it clearly in mind that religious language is never univocal, which means that its translation will never be univocal either. The religious arsenal offers infinite suggestions for equality and justice, but it is equally inexhaustible - if not more so - also in the opposite direction. Churches in the USA reverberate with as many antiracial homilies as they do with homilies on God's will for white supremacy. One may try to "translate" from the sacred scriptures to condemn torture, as in Habermas's example, but efforts to justify it are galore: to justify torture, and holy wars, and bonfires for dissidents. Today, for that matter, the overwhelming majority of priests, rabbis and mullahs exploit the God-argument of "creaturality" to impose torture to the last instant upon the terminally ill.
It would truly be ingenuous - a quality I would not dream of attributing to Habermas - to close one's eyes to the structural ambivalence of religious traditions. Indeed, we find legitimate interpretations of such traditions in both Saint Francis and Torquemada, legitimate translations in the "socialist" peasant war and the reactionary insurrection of the Vendée, or more modestly in the reactionary values of the Bavarian Catholic Strauss and the progressive values of the theologian Hans Küng. The relativism of the interpretations, and of the ethics that derive from them, is the heart of every religious message, which otherwise would rapidly be exhausted on the historical plane.
And so we are back where we began: the "communities of interpretation" are a resource for democracy if they go in one direction, and a threat if they go in the other. Will only the voices in consonance with the republican ethos be allowed? In that case they are translatable on principle, and on principle constitute no problem. But who shall decide when an untranslatable God-argument, rather than infuse solidarity into a parched republicanism, endangers essential and inalienable elements of liberal culture? Parliament? the government? the courts?
Because it may seem easy to avoid the difficulty by invoking as a diriment criterion censorship of the God-argument only if and when it instigates violation of the law (instigates jihad and terrorist martyrdom, for example, but also "discrimination against homosexuals, practices of clitoral mutilation, domestic violence, forced marriage, polygamy, refusal to give medical assistance"). To be consistent, however, this means muzzling in the public sphere anyone who wants to subvert the current laws. Not only the Jehovah's Witness, but also the Catholic who defames those who take part in abortion as homicidal. But if it is legitimate to argue in the name of "creaturality" on euthanasia and abortion, why not on the family hierarchy and polygamy in the name of the visions of the Prophet, an argument that is equally untranslatable? Is the God of Jesus more God than the Allah of Muhammad?
In short, if only that in religions which is common with the values of constitutional republicanism is lawful, then discrimination between churches will have to be made, generating conflict and uncertainty: shall the "communities of interpretation" that do not internalize constitutional values be disbanded? And after how many violations? And who shall be the judge? Here, it is not only a question of preventing the instigation of crimes, but also of blocking any preaching that, through the semantics of ambiguity - which is particularly effective in the suggestion of religious references - weakens constitutional loyalty and thus that "political culture" which, for Habermas, has the right to "establish the parameters of public discourse."
Moreover, we already know how the "liberal political culture," which lays down "the parameters of public discourse," "shifts continually," since "it is susceptible to the impulses of public communication." Allowing this culture to be swelled with the hormones of untranslatable God-arguments means encouraging the synergy of such arguments, which are irrational by definition (otherwise they would be accessible to all, not just to the faithful), with other modes of persuasion - also released from the bonds of rational argument - that now dominate the public sphere, in television spots and entertainment formats. Even though the remark may sound irreverent, the TV spot, which overwhelms the critico-rational immune defense mechanisms, and the appeal to an untranslatable God, both share the same pre-rational or irrational seductiveness, and both contribute to the forced obsolescence of the idea of logico-argumentative rigor as an inalienable keystone of democratic society. The philosophies of "everything is interpretation" add their spice of "high" legitimization.
In short, I would say that there is no way out: in egalitarian and participatory democracy, the public sphere (television in primis), with all the motivations admissible in it, must constitute the reservoir of a democratic ethos without which liberal democracy, devitalized and reduced to a procedure for oligarchic turnover, runs the risk of succumbing at the first crisis. But religion as religion, as untranslatable God-argument, can contribute to this ethos but can also undermine it, in virtue of the structurally ambivalent character of its discourse. While the Habermasian double register, in distinguishing between behaviors admissible either in the public or in the institutional sphere, functions only by assuming that which is not the case: namely, that the religious communities, in enriching social life with a pathos orientated to the solidarity the secular world has, allegedly, lost, never weaken the democratic ethos.
This was my second objection, which Habermas does not take into consideration - which is not to say that he has refuted it.

"A Public Sphere that Is Not Deformed"

This repression seems to be generated by Habermas's radical pessimism, which sees the hedonistic-egotistic-standardizing drift of the current free-market liberalism as anthropologically irreversible, and the freeze of the progressive movements it has produced as definitive. Professor Habermas ends up by raising the deficit of the endogenous resources of solidarity in secularized democracy to an ontological principle.
But this raises a major question: why, "in the difficult cases - for example in the emotionally charged discussion regarding the use of torture in the case of terrorists" can "only these religious images bring the moral sentiments of justice out from under the rubble of political prejudices - even in secular dispositions"? This remark would appear to reflect Habermas's own prejudice, and quite a surprising one: namely, the idea - implicit, but necessary for the statement's sense - that the atheist and the agnostic can have no other motivations beyond naked utilitarian interest, reason of State included. Apart from the fact that the cold secular legalism of the cult of procedures could itself suffice for an opposition to torture with "no ifs, ands, or buts," why in the world should there not be a sense of justice - indeed, a pietas, a charity, a love for one's neighbor, a solidarity for the "last" ["the last shall be first," Matthew 20:16] - also of a nonreligious and nontranscendent origin? Humanitarian organizations such as "Doctors Without Borders" and others, which reward sacrifice and certainly not "individual success," have developed in a perfectly secular, and even atheist, atmosphere.
What is more, Habermas connects this desert of secular solidary-egalitarian passions with the historical demise of the labor movement. Therefore, an ethos and a pathos oriented to support of the exploited and abandoned is possible in principle, even without religion. Without and even against religion: as we know, the agape of revolutionary brotherhood and of the struggles for universal emancipation has often had to take on anticlerical and atheistic tints.
But personal sacrifice and loving one's neighbor, the "human warmth" that democracies need more than ever if they are to take root rather than decline, of itself does not guarantee an analogous propensity for equal rights for all. It can, unfortunately, join forces with the denial of the most basic freedoms. This has been the tragic and recurrent lesson of the revolutions "in the name of the proletariat"; this, today, is the everyday reality of the fundamentalist "communities of struggle," which from the Gaza Strip to entire regions of Pakistan (without forgetting Taliban Afghanistan and the enduring Khomeinism in Iran) owe their success to a spirit of solidarity and of sacrifice for their neighbors that blends perfectly with the all-pervasive obscurantist denial of the civil liberties of these very "neighbors" (and with hatred for the "enemy" to the point of terrorism).
A twofold error, then, belies Habermas's claim that "it is often in the religious life of the communities that we find still intact that which has been lost elsewhere." The capacity of solidarity to cope with the "failure of existential projects" and "lacerations in the fabric of life" constitutes not the "intact" but, rather, the spurious privilege of religious traditions. In the Christian sphere brotherly charity on the side of the "last" co-exists easily with the hierarchical authoritarianism of Opus Dei and with "get rich!" Pentecostalism, which are far more akin to turbo-capitalism than to the Gospel anathemas against the rich. And why, then, among nonreligious citizens is a feeling of solidarity considered something not to be found?
The cynical-hedonistic drift of the Western democracies, at the mercy of egotism and conformism now in exponential growth, is certainly a fact. The constant endogenous generation of an orientation to values of equality and solidarity is therefore the - essential and undelayable - problem of our democracies, if we wish to keep turbo-capitalism from paving the way to their extinction. To this point, Habermas and I fully agree. What I fail to see, however, is why secularity (even in its extreme form of atheism) is to be identified - as the engine and cause of this drift - with the wild laissez-faire liberalism of the current globalization. After all, Reagan was a believer, as was Bush Senior, and Bush Junior speaks directly with Jesus; and all three championed the Chicago Boys.
For Habermas the antibodies have to consist in "a public sphere that is not deformed" and in "a cultural tradition that is not impoverished." Let us consider the first point. I agree with Habermas wholeheartedly. To be "not deformed" the public sphere must have communicative symmetry among the citizens, i.e., an equal and reciprocal being heard, and not a mere and hypothetical right to speak (a mockery, if relegated to Hyde Park Corner and similar apologetic formalisms). To come as close to this ideal as possible, even in this epoch dominated by television and search engines, is therefore an absolute democratic imperative. Hence a movement for the reform of television systems is a necessity even where "regulation thought" ["pensée unique"] has not attained the pomp of Putin's Russia or Berlusconi's Italy. What we need is a veritable kaleidoscope of information pluralism, based, however, on the common loyalty toward that which Hannah Arendt called "humble factual truths." Such loyalty is on the wane not only when the desiderata of the Pentagon on "weapons of mass destruction" is passed off as news, but also when one sells the most corroborated of scientific theories - the evolution of the species according to "chance plus necessity" - and the most recent of metaphysical fantasies, Intelligent Design, as opinions, equally legitimate in factual caliber.
But - as we have seen - the equal and reciprocal "being heard" of the public sphere rests, for its very possibility, on the premise that whoever speaks addresses everyone, which is exactly what cannot come about in the case of an untranslatable religious argument.
Therefore, without prejudices on the anthropological structural egotism of homo saecularis and on the charitable vocation of homo religiosus, the problem of the deficit of motivation-for-solidarity in the democratic societies of turbo-capitalism can be posed, fully, as follows: how shall we promote, provide incentives for, and reinforce civic-solidary motivational resources, which, however, are univocal in founding and fueling the democratic ethos, and can never be converted into a factor of denial of the freedoms of the "dissident"?
If "the condition of this [democratic] culture depends on the delicate balance between the vital force of traditions and their openness to incessant revision," we have seen that such a contribution can come from religious sensibilities only if they are capable of internalizing the supremacy of other people's freedoms over their own moral Truth, to the point of violating it if those freedoms do not violate analogous freedom of others (which in euthanasia is impossible on principle, and in abortion only with antiscientific acrobatics). And while excluding the adaptive capacities of the agnostic and atheistic Enlightenment-egalitarian traditions is an inadmissible prejudice, attention should in any case be focused on the endogenous "vital force" that a consistently democratic daily practice can develop in maintaining and strengthening the civic-solidary ethos, giving rise to a virtuous spiral set over against its progressive weakening in the institutional and mass-media routine of the establishments, which in the exercise of daily power trample on and dishonor the principles solemnly embroidered in the constitutions.

Turbo-Capitalism and Secular-Progressive Engagement

Habermas is absolutely right, of course, when he remarks that "the old intellectuals of the left" cannot "boast they are capable of successfully combating the depoliticization of a public sphere influenced by Berlusconi's television stations"; but this is certainly not due to an excess of secularism. Empirically speaking, it is just the opposite: in Italy, for years, the mass struggles that have been contesting Berlusconi's excessive power (and the subalternity of the official parties of the left) have very often been characterized also by a secular radicalism, branded by these parties as "sclerotized secularism" and the like, with a perfectly Habermasian accent.
So, if the problem today is the apathy that seems to have attacked and, indeed, "deep-frozen" secular-progressive engagement in many Western countries, the reasonable suggestion would be to work for its thawing, individuating its cultural, social, political and organizational conditions and committing ourselves to their "implementation," instead of celebrating the subrogatory ruse of a supplement of soul that comes from religions. Once the progressive movement "thaws out" and starts up again, common action with religious progressivism will come right along with it, as it always has in the past, against the conservative or reactionary interpretations of the "communities of faith."
Having recourse to the aid of religion as a deus ex machina means resigning ourselves to the inexorable decline of the endogenous production of egalitarian values and solidary motivations that, today, are effectively lacking in the West with its vindication of laissez-faire, its opulent conformism, its "society of winners." But the root of such deficits is not the excess of antireligious activism (three or four bestsellers!) that Habermas accuses of seeking to secularize not only institutions, but also the consciousness of individuals and society as a whole, but rather the real process of stripping the citizens of their sovereignty - that is, of the equal shares of freedom/power promised by democracies, beyond the differences in economic and social conditions. Not only has this promise not been kept but, today, it has been less and less approximated and, indeed, more and more glaringly betrayed. And this is not just in virtue of a supranational dislocation of powers due to globalization but, all the more, through the progressive emptying out of representation, monopolistically sequestered by increasingly self-referential party machines. As I wrote a quarter of a century ago, professional politicians have come to constitute an out-and-out guild, which excludes the citizens from any genuine political action.
This expropriation of actual freedom/power triggers a vicious circle of demotivation: frustration of political participation, retreat into private egotisms and depression of the republican virtues oriented to solidarity, increased power of the "guild," further frustration of civic-participatory political passion. The circle is all the more devastating, since a widespread republican ethos is the only "foundation" of democracy, a political form forced to hold itself up in the void by its pigtail (or was it the collar?) like Baron Munchausen, since it is born by destroying every transcendent and heteronomous foundation.
But the motivation to solidarity is activated or re-activated in the first place in the practice of democracy, not in the spurious and ambivalent aid of religion. From this standpoint, a transformation of television programming is far more important than a transformation of religions (and at a rough guess ought to be less arduous), as is a critical education from early childhood (pedagogical experiments show that very young children understand Darwinism more "spontaneously" than they do religious fables), in a school that by its very mingling of races and religions relativizes the all-pervasive sense of the faith received in the family. As are all the other Enlightenment-solidary actions and political and social reforms that progressive engagement can invent and carry out.
It is not secularism that dries up altruism, but wild laissez-faire liberalism. Secularism and wild liberalism do not overlap. Neither do the libertarian individual and egotistic individualism. On the contrary, the highest degree of individuality, i.e., of freedom/power for the individual as irreplaceable, can (and even must) be united with the highest degree of solidarity, of acting-with, as Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus knew perfectly, with Camus even coining the expression solitaire-solidaire for this existential and political program.
I have preferred to respond in great detail to Habermas's remarks, even at the risk of being tedious and, at times, muddled, because Habermas has long been the most important Continental philosopher, has become influential also in very important areas of American political thought, and because today his theses on the relation between religion and democracy are becoming a koiné utilized by highly conservative Churches and theologies (Ratzinger included), in search of a reconquista of the postmodern world.
Let me respond, then, also to some "minor" remarks.

Secularistic Extremism?

Habermas writes: "Can post-metaphysical thought rule out the hypothesis that religious traditions carry semantic potentials able to inspire the entire society, once the profane contents of truth have been made explicit? From Kierkegaard to Benjamin, Lévinas and Derrida, there have always been "religious writers" who - regardless of their personal beliefs - have brought theological contents into secular thought." First, it is not at all clear that Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Lévinas and Derrida ever managed to "inspire the entire society" (Habermas's italics). But in the second place, it is completely arbitrary to describe their elaboration inspired by the "semantic potentials" of "religious traditions" as "profane contents of truth" (my italics). That which such philosophies, and many others, may manage to produce are, rather, proposals of sense, fascinating for some but for others absolutely questionable, to the point of senselessness or even disvalue. In any event, such philosophical proposals in no way constitute of themselves a rational argument in the deliberative dia-logos of the citizens and/or of their representatives, in-view-of-the-law. And even less, then, do they give foundation to the claims that a theological content as theological can enter the domain of such dia-logos, which to be inclusive must in principle be able to address everyone.
Habermas, opportunely, is concerned not only with the juridico-political side of the equal dignity of all, but also with the psychological attitudes that can endanger it. And so, "civic solidarity demands that, in civil society and in the political public sphere, agnostics do not look down upon their religious fellow citizens, taking them as specimens of a protected species." Yet priests and pastors and rabbis, even quite "liberal" and progressive ones (let alone imams and mullahs), almost inevitably consider the atheist a person "in search of...," who "has not yet found..." - that is, as respectable but mutilated, lacking something that is essential for a complete humanity. Will Habermas stigmatize also this attitude as a "looking down upon"? But how could anyone who truly believes that only God is salvation not feel this way? And how could anyone who is convinced that atheism is the inescapable result of a nondogmatic vision of reality, which critically takes to heart the results of science and the unavoidable contradictions of theodicy - how could such a person not consider religious faith to be a form of irrational consolation?
Neither of these cases, however, automatically leads to a "looking down upon." The believer will look upon me, with charity, as an incomplete being, and I will look upon him, with solidarity, as someone still ensnared in superstitions, because this is what the one thinks of the "ultimate" convictions of the other, if we are not hypocrites. But our political, and also human, relationship can express genuine mutual respect, and even more, as experience shows us every day.
In saying that a "particularly militant secularism" that ends up "mistaking the secularism of the constitution for the demand to secularize society," in the sense of "discrediting the doctrines of faith as scientifically groundless," arises "certainly not by chance in the Catholic 'monoculture' countries of Europe," Habermas makes quite a blunder, since the episodes he is clearly referring to are a number of bestsellers (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, etc.), all of them of Anglo-Saxon, and often American, origin - worlds apart, then, from any Catholic monoculture!
And in any case I fail to see why the attempt to "discredit the doctrines of faith as scientifically groundless" should not be part of the normal exercise of the criticism of opinions - as Habermas did with me and, earlier, I with him - even when such opinions express venerable "visions of the world." Otherwise we shall have to take offense at the "particularly militant secularism" of Feuerbach, and of the Freud of The Future of an Illusion, and of the Monod of Chance and Necessity, and of who knows how many other classics. And we shall end up by calling into question, to avoid offending the believers of one faith or another, the right to write The Satanic Verses, or to draw irreverent satirical cartoons, or to make films like those of Buñuel and of many others.
Habermas concludes peremptorily: "Secular [säkular] persons and nonbelievers have an agnostic attitude toward religious claims, while secularistic [säkularistisch] persons have a polemical attitude toward the public influence of religious doctrines." The first attitude would be acceptable, the second reprehensible. But why?! Nonbelievers, without distinction, have all the right in the world to be both positively atheist (theoretical plane) and atheistically polemical (practical plane) with respect to religions; i.e., to consider arguable on the rational plane both the nonexistence of God and of the immortal soul and the republican duty to exclude God from the public debate. In my "theses" and in this reply I have attempted to demonstrate that this duty, indeed, is the attitude that is most consistent with democracy (especially if, à la Habermas, it is not merely procedural) - ready to change my mind only in the face of punctual convincing arguments to the contrary. That agnosticism, i.e., the impossibility of demonstrating rationally either the existence of God or its contrary, be philosophically tenable but atheism not, is a legend that, while repeated like an oath, is in fact highly debatable and controversial.
To demonstrate this, Dawkins and Dennet have chosen the way of a naturalism that Habermas describes as hard. We cannot discuss all their argumentations here, which I personally find nearly always convincing in terms of destructive criticism. By contrast, I find that the authors of this line of argument are wrong when they (not all of them) imagine they can explain naturalistically the taking hold and the evolution of moral and religious contents. I cannot go into this criticism here, but I remark en passant that these claims belong to the dimension of ethical cognitivism (which Habermas - in a different version - defends, and I reject).

Which Faith?

The attitude of the democratic nonbeliever may have to differ according to the type of faith proclaimed by the believer.
Confronted with faith as faith, aware of its collision with ascertainable knowledge - the faith Paul referred to as foolishness (the term is repeated five times in just a few verses, incessantly: 1 Corinthians, 1: 17-25) - the atheist can even be solidary, rather than coldly agnostic: it is your salvation, it depends on the worldly use you make of it, if taking the Gospel seriously, and therefore on the side of the "last," we are engaged in worldly matters together, since only the values of the common struggle in fact concern those who think that everything is decided in the finitude of existence.
When, by contrast, faith claims to be also reason, i.e., to be knowable truth (at least as regards the doctrine of God and of the immortal soul), as in John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio and the more recent statements by Joseph Ratzinger (co-author, in fact, of the encyclical), so that faith can never, on principle, come into conflict with the results of a correct use of reason, then secular thought has every right - and, as critical thought, I would dare to say has the duty - to contest this abnormal ambition, showing the inexhaustible panoply of irremediable contradictions in which such a claim is entangled.
Then again, the possibility of "extracting" a rational core from faiths is, obviously, quite another matter. Such a core proved to be plausible only post factum, when reason had performed on faiths operations of inventive hermeneutics, as with the Greek tragedians and Plato with respect to the mythical polytheism of the day, but above all after it had conquered its definitive autonomy, in mortal conflict with the authorized religious hermeneuts - priests and theologians.
Habermas, then, takes it for granted that it is the traditional "churches" that represent "the natural successors of those four or five world religions that, since the axial age, have unceasingly shaped the cultural models of the great civilizations." But this is factually untrue. As Olivier Roy remarks in one of the most up-to-date studies on the subject, the current religious "revival" regards not the traditional "churches" (not even in the Muslim world) but rather "more fundamentalist and charismatic forms of religious experience (Evangelism, Pentecostalism, Salafism, Tabligh, neo-Sufism)" that compensate for the decline "of the traditional forms of religion (Catholicism, Muslim Hanafism, classical Protestant denominations such as Anglicanism and Methodism)" and that are all "relatively recent movements. Salafism derives from the Wahhabism that was founded at the end of the eighteenth century. Evangelisms are part of the tradition of Protestant 'revivals' of the seventeenth century, and Pentecostalism dates from the early twentieth century. Also the forms of Buddhism and Hinduism that 'convert' and are exported are recent formulations, from the late nineteenth to the twentieth centuries (Soka Gakkai, Fa Lun Gong, Hare Krishna, but also the political Hinduism of the Indian BJP and the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka)" to say nothing "of the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, which also date back to the nineteenth century and at the end of the twentieth century greatly increased throughout the world."
It is with the influence of these forms of faith, a full and proper "mutation" through "currents that in France are defined as 'sects,' in the United States as 'cults,' and more in general as 'new religious movements,'" and of their demands to assert the God-argument in the public sphere, that we will increasingly have to settle accounts in the future, and not with theologians à la Hans Küng, who have entirely internalized the civic duty to guarantee by law even that which for faith is a deadly sin (euthanasia included, in Küng's case).
Now, let me turn to the certainly not "minor" but, indeed, crucial objection Habermas raised against my advocacy of ethical non-cognitivism, which he considers to be irreconcilable with the "deliberative core of democratic procedure," which "requires more than a mere ascertainment of opinions and 'values' that are inaccessible to arguments." Let us see.

Ethical Non-cognitivism

What is implied, negatively and positively, by this duty to argue our preferences rationally, which both Habermas and I defend as essential to a democracy taken seriously? Negatively, it means that, since opinions must be argued and not simply counted, but since, nonetheless, it is the vote that is the moment of the verdict (which, however, can always be revised), the rules of the election campaign will have to reduce to the minimum terms possible all the irrational factors in the persuasive process of gaining consensus. Not only by not influencing the will of the voter "from outside, by hook or by crook, with threats or enticements" - Mafia intimidation or corruption, for example - but by binding the forms of propaganda as far as possible exclusively to the format of rational argumentation. This, in election campaigns dominated by television, is, in fact, not utopian. It would suffice that neither TV spots nor interviews with individual candidates be allowed, but only debates, "slow" and of sufficient duration, and other formats that reward argumentative rationality and discourage other, well-known and today dominant, rhetorical forms.
But not even measures of this kind, which many may consider highly illiberal or unrealistic, and not even if in completion of measures that will have structurally and permanently multiplied the possibility of civic participation, through movements and associations (again, oriented to rational debate, but now with the exclusion of untranslated religious languages), would be sufficient to configure "politics as a process that resolves problems [...] from the standpoint of the equal interest of all the citizens, and so in the objectively most useful way, and from the standpoint of justice." But this "equal interest of all the citizens," here flaunted by Habermas as the lever of his reasoning, still seems to me something not to be found - indeed, it sounds to me like an apologetic reactionary myth. And the same holds for the "objectively most useful solution," even if identified with the "prospect of reasonable results."
The idea of a "common interest" in fact already implies a society that is absolutely egalitarian, as well as absolutely homogenous in its basic values. Wherever there is - more or less - social inequality there cannot but be interests that are - more or less - conflictual. But even the most radical socio-economic equality imaginable would not immunize society against "spiritual" conflicts, of the kind that bioethics presents us with every day. How could a rational argumentation lead to a solution that is "objective" because "reasonable" and therefore "common," on controversial issues such as abortion and euthanasia, without the preliminary sharing of extremely "strong" substantive values?
Neither is this "common interest" to be found at the purely procedural level, of the rules of the game, of the Constitution, unless republican values have already been internalized by everyone (but the problems arise precisely because this is not so). Against the Islamic fundamentalist who prefers the Qur'an as his constitution, or the Nazi fan of the Fürerprinzip, there is no possibility of producing rational arguments for the superiority of liberal democracy that have not already been presupposed in nuce. This, then, is a conflict that pits God, or the Destiny of the Nation, against the equality of the citizens' opinions - a conflict that cannot be settled rationally because it is between ultimate values. And the fact that the Nazi and the Islamic fundamentalist are willing to participate in democratic life and its relative discussions implies no contradiction (not even a pragmatic one) with their ultimate values, but rather the coherence of an instrumental use of democratic opportunities.
Now, ethical non-cognitivism, in its variegated tendencies, puts forward as its essential claim nothing other than the following: a norm can never be justified without rational argumentation having, at a certain point, to have recourse to another norm (at a higher level) that acts as its criterion and ground of justification (the case is analogous if instead of norms we speak of values). Is it truly impossible to escape this logico-existential horizon (or curse, for some)? In which an evident infinite regression means that the last value (or the first, if you prefer) cannot, in its turn, be rationally grounded, but is ineluctably chosen (common or conflictual that it thus prove to be for the interlocutors).
No one has ever found a way out. Otherwise, any non-cognitivist - since, of course, the passion for truth is his North Star (as it is for all philosophers) - would have already gone over - lock, stock, and barrel - to the camp of ethical cognitivism.
But let us assume - for the sake of argument - that a choice, for example in favor of or against the lawfulness of euthanasia, is truly a question of "rational learning." Against the claim made by Tom, that euthanasia - understood as the assisted suicide of one who is tortured by a terminal illness - must be lawful because the decision regarding one's own life clearly belongs to the one who lives it, Dick will attempt to raise all the well-known objections, from the "slippery slope" to the cases of diminished responsibility (children, the mentally disabled). But, in the end, he will have nothing more to object, in the circumscribed case of responsible adults, apart from "life belongs to God," rather than to the individual who lives it; that is, a religious dogma. As a result Dick will not be able to assert this claim as an "argument" for the issuing of a law, since a law cannot discriminate against one who is not a believer, subjugating him to a "Truth" - "creaturality" - that is such only for faith.
But if he intended to continue to do so, thereby already violating the purely rational character of the discursive interaction, and as a diriment invoked the recourse to a vote (i.e., to the "mere ascertainment" of the relative weight of the two conflicting "opinions"), he ought to accept the condition that his own morality be put to the vote against some other morality advocated no less dogmatically. For example, against the morality that forces one to drink the cup of a life reduced to torture to the last drop, Harry could advocate a morality that demands it be snuffed out, because inhuman. And yet Dick would judge this vote to be inadmissible, even though Harry's morality is of a decisionistic and thus an irrational caliber that is certainly not greater than the dogmatic caliber of the God-argument.

Unmutilated Reason and Minimum Reason

Let us examine the conflict between two opposing moral norms in an actual case: namely, the legal obligation to bring a pregnancy to full term (attempted by means of laws and/or referendums both in Europe and in some states of the USA) or, vice versa, the obligation to terminate it, if one already has a child (imposed by the Chinese government to avoid social collapse due to overpopulation). To settle the conflict, if the two moralities should be proposed as laws in the same democratic country, the parties would have to come to an agreement on a meta-norm, i.e., on a procedure to decide. In this case there are only two possible procedures: either all individuals will decide for themselves according to their own morality (libertarian meta-norm), or one of the two moralities will come to be binding for everyone based on a vote (majority meta-norm). Dick, as we know, rejects the first procedure. But if he chooses the second, a majority might establish legitimately (because according to a procedure also accepted by Dick) that abortion after the first child is compulsory. Dick, however, will declare this majority decision to be illegitimate, and downright totalitarian (he did so, with the name of Karol Wojtyla, for far less - for the simple possibility of abortion in highly circumscribed cases - before the first freely-elected Polish parliament since World War II).
Dick, at the most and if you twist his arm, would accept a vote that decides between his substantive norm and the libertarian meta-norm (which was the law proposed by Tom), violating the principle of the equality between voters, because it claims only for itself the right to have the vote decide a moral content (unlawfulness of abortion and/or euthanasia), but denies Harry's "compassionate" morality or the Chinese government's "Malthusian" morality that right.
In short, to deny the pro-euthanasia and pro-abortion conclusion (Tom's proposal, in the form of "freedom of," autonomously decided by each), it is necessary to introduce "creaturalitalism" as a supreme value (in one of the many possible theologies to boot), while the recourse to rational argumentation alone involves the hierarchical superiority of the values implicated in the dialogue (equal dignity/freedom/power between the dialoguers) both with respect to the God-value of the "creaturalitarist" and to the "nature"- (or "race"-, etc.) value of the "Malthusian."
The rational undecidability between ultimate values is not a scholastic hypothesis of obtuse non-cognitivists but, rather, is an everyday reality in every ethically pluralist society. With Dick however the undecidability between ultimate values is also a contradiction, if Dick, while he continues to reject the right to euthanasia, and to demand the legal obligation to "live" the terminal torture to the bitter end, claims to reaffirm (as he generally does) his faithfulness to the values of liberal democracy.
Dick, moreover, can even deny the existence of such a logical and pragmatic contradiction, making any inclination to mutual understanding impossible also on this plane (an inclination that for Habermas is inherent in communicative action). Such obstinacy is understandable, because in admitting the contradiction he would have to recognize the secondary character of his adherence to democracy, compared to the primary value of the theocratic drive to make everyone respect God's will (possibly disguised as "natural law"). What is more, in recognizing that this hierarchy is, essentially, not rationally arguable, he would also reveal the irrational essence of faith.
In the end, not only is the cognitivist claim circular - not only is it inapplicable, in any case, to any articulated and pluralistic "life-world," in which other values are felt by some "dialoguers" to be more vital than argumentative rationality - but the rationality that everyone ought to have already internalized as the criterion of supreme value would be, then, precisely that "minimum rationality" of ascertainable fact + logic which Habermas has stigmatized again and again as a reifying, and therefore unacceptable, form of rationality. Any "more" would in fact be a further assumption of value.
Indeed: an "unmutilated reason" - i.e., one that exceeds "ascertained facts + logic" - must already contain a shared idea of "justice"; i.e., it must presuppose a shared supreme criterion of value. What is more, this criterion must constitute "a background knowledge that is unproblematic on the whole" (my italics) also with respect to the "totality of all the interpersonal relations regulated in a legitimate way," which is exactly what never occurs in political action, even if only discursive, as we have seen in the examples above.
Furthermore, political action is never only cooperative, it is simultaneously conflictual, even among those engaged "on the same side." Each, in the common purpose of achieving an aim or defeating an opponent, continues to cultivate also (and often especially) his own ends, and thus to envision a future for the common action different from that of his fellow militants (a future that is his "hope"). In the Barcelona of 1937, unanimously at war against "los quattros generales que se han alzados," the Stalinist massacres of anarchists and the POUM can be considered an extreme case, but even in peaceful situations the participants cooperating in a political action pursue mutually conflictual objectives (to strengthen or weaken a certain leadership, to prepare a subsequent action not agreed upon, etc.).
And since one's own action - which, as we have seen, is irreducible to a single "reasonable common objective" - is "stolen" and "bent" by the action of others (opponents, the indifferent), so that the heterogenesis of the ends represents not the exception but rather a particularly evident case of the very structure of acting, and since, as Hannah Arendt maintains and all crucial events have confirmed, action is unpredictable by nature (and its evolution and events are not calculable, otherwise it would not be action but, rather, routine), it could, paradoxically, be more "rational" to follow the ethics of conviction rather than the ethics of responsibility.
I cannot discuss in detail Habermasian "discourse ethics" here, but shall attempt to do so on another occasion. In his reply, Habermas described his "proposals on the public role of religion" as "rather obvious," but he knows very well that this is the modesty of a skilful rhetorical move. The public role of religions is, today, one of the most controversial issues in the crisis of Western democracies, and will be even more so in the future. I hope, then, that the debate will not end here, and that a reply by Habermas to these more detailed objections will produce arguments that can convince me.