A Secular Manifesto for Europe
Abstract
The article argues that secularism in Europe needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. Everywhere European secular states face a double threat: On one hand fundamentalist religion, on the other negative secularism. Firstly, the paper explains negative secularism and the reason it is a problem rather than an asset. It then elaborates a new conception of positive secularism that can be understood either as a political or as an ethical project. Either way, the point of positive secularism is to distance itself from religion in order to embrace diversity of all types, religious and non-religious. Political secularism, however, relies on an elusive hope of reaching overlapping consensus between religious and non-religious people. Ethical secularism aims instead to protect diversity by promoting the establishment of a marketplace of religions, which acknowledges a public role for religion while regulating it. The marketplace of religions promotes religious pluralism and helps to iron out the different treatments between religions. Ethical secularism aims to be a worldview of worldviews that creates the preconditions for all religious and non-religious people to live well together.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- The Jurisprudence of Religion in a Secular Age: From Ornamentalism to Hobby Lobby
- Squaring the Circle of Multiculturalism? Religious Freedom and Gender Equality in Canada
- Early Engagements with the Constitutive Laws of Others: Possible Lessons from Pre-Modern Religious Law
- Meaning, Religion, and the State: On the Future of Liberal Human Rights
- The Protection of Holy Places
- A Secular Manifesto for Europe
- A Theory of Critical Junctures for Democratization: A Comparative Examination of Constitution-Making in Egypt and Tunisia
- Synagogue and State in the Israeli Military: A Story of “Inappropriate Integration”
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- The Jurisprudence of Religion in a Secular Age: From Ornamentalism to Hobby Lobby
- Squaring the Circle of Multiculturalism? Religious Freedom and Gender Equality in Canada
- Early Engagements with the Constitutive Laws of Others: Possible Lessons from Pre-Modern Religious Law
- Meaning, Religion, and the State: On the Future of Liberal Human Rights
- The Protection of Holy Places
- A Secular Manifesto for Europe
- A Theory of Critical Junctures for Democratization: A Comparative Examination of Constitution-Making in Egypt and Tunisia
- Synagogue and State in the Israeli Military: A Story of “Inappropriate Integration”
