When Europe demands that religions become ‘liberal’

Recent debates in Europe and the United States about key societal issues like abortion or same-sex marriages show that, in contemporary Western societies, there is no longer a natural law common to believers and non-believers. In other words, and whatever the intellectual genealogy of contemporary secularism may be, the gap between religious and secular values has become such that there is no longer a “common Go(o)d”.

In this context, many share a concern about how to maintain cohesion within increasingly diverse societies. Far from being a theoretical issue, this question is becoming more urgent because of the growing presence of Muslims in Europe. But in essence, the debate is not limited to Islam; it deals with the meaning of religion (any religion) in a secular Europe.

Two answers are often put forward in a transnational public debate, which spans a variety of fields from philosophy (Habermas, Gauchet, Taylor, Walzer, Manent, Brague…) to law and politics.

From Christianity to ‘Christian identity’

The first approach insists on the “Christian” or preferably “Judeo-Christian” European identity, which is more or less explicitly opposed to Islam. In this kind of discourse, the reference to “Christian identity” instead of “Christianity” actually represents a means of secularizing Christianity. This trend emphasizes the notion of a “dominant culture”, while de-universalizing the concept of human rights.

The way the debate on the Christian roots of Europe was framed is instructive in this respect. Mentioning the “Christian roots of Europe” was not an issue for the founding fathers of the EU (Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasperi and others) — although they were more often than not practicing Christians — probably because, on important societal issues, there was little discrepancy between a religious-inspired and a secular worldview.

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