Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

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

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

II. Prospective Reflections on Islam and Democratization

In the following section I try not so much to engage in the dubious exercise of positivist forecasting as to reflect upon what appear to be some potentially relevant trends in the hope of elucidating the present context of practical action. Although I cannot offer a systematic comparison of Islam and Catholicism (since I can claim at most a superficial acquaintance with some of the secondary literature on contemporary Islam), I believe that a look at the ongoing contemporary reformulations of the Islamic tradition from the comparative perspective of the Catholic aggiornamento may be instructive. At the very least, it should serve to relativize constructions of a clash between "Islam" and the "West" based on essentialist conceptions of both.