THERE ARE MANY indications that the relationship of Christianity to the potential hardening or exacerbation of cultural conflicts is not a peaceful one. I mean that today it would be difficult for anyone at first to take this title, “Christianity and Cultural Conflicts in Europe,” as a reference to Christianity as a means of resolving or mitigating cultural conflicts. At first blush, Christianity would appear to be, if not a specific source of conflict, at least one of the terms involved. In other words: the presence in the Western world of a Christian tradition as a continuous background, albeit a vaguely defined one without a univocal meaning, is not an element for leveling out conflicts; on the contrary, it is (or has become) a constitutive factor in promoting them, and can exacerbate them. What happens here is similar to what happens in the interpretation of the relationship between religion and politics, as can be observed in several recent debates, where this relationship is almost naturally felt to be a risk for the autonomy of politics. Rarely or never has religion been seen as a potentially positive contributing factor to the enrichment and improvement of politics. It seems clear that here we are facing the outcome of specific historical experiences. For instance, in Italy the reason for a defensive approach to the relationship between religion and politics lies in the long history of interference on the part of the Catholic Church in the electoral process. But, in much more general terms, the notion that the Christian tradition might take part in or promote cultural conflicts arises at the end of Eurocentrism: European civilization is no longer seen as representing the natural, normal development of all human cultures, which it has the legitimacy to bring together under its aegis. Thus Christianity no longer appears as the revelation of truth, which sheds light on the darkness of “other” cultures and frees them of errors and limitations. Rather, it is a religion—and a culture—that confronts other traditions as one of the terms involved in cultural conflicts, rather than as the solution to those conflicts.
After all, not even within the Western world does Christianity appear to operate as a unifying factor. Here, too, are the more remote—and less obvious—origins of the suspiciousness of politics toward religion: even in the West, Christianity has promoted conflict more often than unity and peace. In eliminating religious themes from the lay realm, Western societies have tried to solve the problem of Christianity’s transformation from element of cohesion to element of conflict. This transformation coincides with the beginning of European modernity itself, the Protestant Reformation, and the wars of religion, and extends into our epoch. Liberalism has meant the reduction of religion to the private sphere, or at most to the realm of civil society. Once excluded from the areas of struggle for political power and distribution of economic resources, religious choice and belonging cease to represent a threat to social peace. But is the liberal solution to this issue still viable when new religious subjects, that is, “other” cultures that in the meantime have settled among us, are involved? Can we take it as a model for dealing with intercultural conflicts?
The answer is probably negative. Rather, the situation seems to be the following: the lay space of politics, which seems to be well established in Western liberal societies, does not succeed with equal certainty in peacefully including other cultures present in our societies, or at least some of them. These tend to see the very secularity of the political as a threat to their authenticity, and therefore take it less as a condition of liberty than as a negative limitation that must be overcome. An emblematic example is the story surrounding the prohibition of the chador in French public schools. The ban on wearing very visible uniforms and distinctive signs, which as affirmative markers of cultural identity might generate conflicts, was motivated by the aim of establishing a secular condition wherein religious freedoms, or even nonreligious ones, were guaranteed. However, the cultural identity that would be affirmed explicitly here is other—that of a relatively alien minority with respect to a more established local tradition. If we compare the prohibition of the chador with the widely accepted presence in European schools of Christian symbols (the crucifix hanging on the school wall in many countries is no longer even contested, except in a few cases), we grasp the salient traits of our situation. European society is on average lay and secularized, but in terms of a fairly explicit Christian heritage. This becomes clear when confronting persons or groups rooted in different traditions, who perceive our secularity as deeply marked by a specific religious origin. Liberalism believed that religion could be set aside by relegating it to the private sphere of feeling and faith, which does not “interfere” with political choices and the normal dialectic of power. Yet this separation succeeded only because it was realized on the solid, if unacknowledged, basis of a common religious heritage.
The lay space where religion has ceased to be a factor of conflict was carved out in Western modernity within a broader, though less acknowledged, religious space of Christian, Judeo-Christian, or biblical origin. All this can be stated in different ways: for example, through the glib saying (which I continue to find very significant), “Thank God I am an atheist”; or, in less paradoxical terms, through the recognition that the secularization characteristic of modernity (the rationalization of capitalism associated by Weber with the Protestant ethic and biblical monotheism) is a typical phenomenon of the Christian world; or through another paradox, namely the acknowledgment that the very idea of a cultural pluralism exists and developed within a specific culture, the Western one.
To be sure, Eurocentrism is the classic form taken by the idea of cultural pluralism in Western modernity, and it is no longer tenable because it placed cultures on an evolutionary trajectory whose highest point was the Christian civilization of the West. Pagan peoples were to be converted to Christianity and primitive societies were to become modern, meaning that they had to model themselves on Western ones, which were understood to be secular, liberal, and democratic. This evolutionary vision of human history, led by the ideal of emancipation as Westernization, modernization, and Christianization, was undermined not only, or primarily, by theoretical reasons. Rather, this image of the meaning of universal history became untenable because of the fall of colonialism and of the many forms of imperialism.
If today we can acknowledge that Christianity no longer presents itself as an obvious means of overcoming intercultural conflicts, this is due primarily to the erosion of the universalizing certainty of modern Western reason, which translated and secularized the Judeo-Christian faith in a divine plan of salvation—albeit unconsciously. Today, the aspect of Christian thought that always saw in this secular translation a betrayal and abandonment of the truth takes pleasure in the floundering of Western “rationalism.” However, the main consequence of this floundering is that Christianity tends to present itself more as involved in conflict than as a factor of reconciliation. The issue is all the more urgent since when we speak of Christianity we also speak of liberal society, of the West, and of modern democracy. True, the claim to universalism made by Christian civilization was clouded by and mixed up with the aims of colonialism and imperialism. But must all forms of universalism—the dream of a universal human civilization—come to an end, along with colonialism and imperialism? My argument is the following: (a) there are indications today that many Christian communities (various churches and confessions) share the widespread temptation to oppose universalism, which in modernity was complicit with the Eurocentrism of Western politics, with forms of closure ranging from various types of communitarianism (with their implication of a kind of cultural apartheid) to fundamentalism proper and its often violent outcomes; (b) in the belief that it can thus escape the perverse outcomes of modern rationalism, secularization, and so on, Christianity renounces its civilizing mission. Christianity can retrieve this mission, though no longer in its evolutionary and imperialist forms, only if it recovers its profound solidarity with the destiny of modernization.
Today, the choice facing Christianity (and I am quite aware of the generic meaning of this term: do I mean the Catholic Church? Christian churches? the thought of believers? The answer is all of the above, to some extent) is the following: either it embraces the destiny of modernity (and of its crisis, its transition to postmodernity), or, on the contrary, it claims to be outside it. If the latter option is chosen—and there are signs that this is a temptation—Christianity renounces being a world and a civilization, to become what perhaps it originally was, a sect among other sects and an objective factor of social disruption among others.
To embrace the destiny of modernity and of the West means mainly to recognize the profoundly Christian meaning of secularization. I return to the observation made earlier, namely that the lay space of modern liberalism is far more religious than liberalism and Christian thought are willing to recognize. One of the first consequences of this observation is that it does not make sense for Christianity to situate itself in the new space of intercultural conflicts by assuming a strong identity. Rather, Christianity’s vocation consists in deepening its own physiognomy as source and condition for the possibility of secularity.
What I am trying to argue (though with difficulty, since the problem is not a linear one) is that the postmodern dissolution of metanarratives (to use Lyotard’s expression)—the idea that the universality of reason characteristic of modernity has been discredited—leads Christianity to see itself as merely an internal element in the conflict among cultures, religions, and world views. It seems to me that a religiously inspired communitarianism, and fundamentalisms in their different forms (including that which sometimes appears in the official teachings of the Catholic Church), correspond to this new attitude, which is legitimized by the fact that it no longer needs to reckon with the imperialist and colonial legacies of Enlightenment universalism and rationalism. As contemporary hermeneutics, along with the existentialism that inspired it (from Heidegger to Gadamer and Pareyson), teaches, the condition for any authentic dialogue is that every interlocutor assume explicitly his own involvement by acknowledging to himself and to the other interlocutor his own prejudices, or more generally his own identity, without assuming at the outset that he knows more about the subject matter or that he might lead the dialogue toward predictable outcomes that he knows in advance to be “true” (this is why, for example, many hermeneutic philosophers are suspicious of a certain concept of the psychoanalytic dialogue that does not presuppose a perfect symmetry between the two interlocutors). In placing itself as an interlocutor with equal rights with respect to other cultures, Christianity should not forget that among the features of its heritage there is also universalism, namely the awareness of a plurality of cultures and of a lay space where these can confront one another. To become an authentic interlocutor in a cultural dialogue, Christianity cannot put aside this essential feature of its heritage and identity; it must present itself as a bearer of the idea of secularity for the sake of its own specific authenticity. This is the very idea of the universalism of reason, emptied of its contingent—though weighty and deeply rooted—complicity with modern colonialism and imperialism. However, this means that instead of “identifying itself” as a religion among others, thereby strengthening its distinctive character in dogma, moral preaching, and disciplinary cohesion, Christianity should develop its lay vocation, which is already visible in that in European modernity it made possible, and promoted, the birth of the lay orientation. Here it is less a matter of acknowledging an accidental, secularized character of Christianity than of acknowledging one of its essential traits that distinguishes Christianity from other religions: that from the outset it was deeply marked by a missionary element, explicit in Jesus’ summon to the apostles to preach the Gospel to all creatures. In modernity, the form of this missionary ideal was an alliance with European imperialism, often not experienced as a tragic necessity. At the same time, Christian universalism, in the wake of the terrifying experience of the European religious wars, led to the discovery of the idea of tolerance and to the invention of a “lay” space, where different religious and nonreligious positions that came to the surface in modern society could freely confront one another. The point was, and still is, to grasp the Christian proclamation—based on Jesus’ sayings, “give unto Caesar” and “my kingdom is not of this world”—less, or not exclusively, as the end of all (other) false and lying gods than as a legitimate space for different religious experiences. Indeed, it is not rare to find among thinkers who profess to be Christian without reservations an interpretation of Christ’s incarnation that legitimates all the purely natural symbols of divinity. If God is incarnate in Jesus, it means that he is not so radically far apart from the natural, human world, and that truth may thus be found in the idolatry of many pagan religions as well.
Christianity frees itself from complicity with the imperialist ideals of European modernity in the wake of a series of historical experiences in which the former colonized nations turned against their “Christian” dominators in the name, too, of a more authentic interpretation of the biblical message. Christianity was forced to recover its lay inclination—to present itself as the promoter of a free dialogical space for religions, world views, ideal dispositions, and other cultures—because in its missionary vocation it had to confront new, unheard of historical experiences. Christianity cannot realize its missionary vocation within the new order of relations among nations and different peoples and cultures by stressing its own doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary specificity. Instead, it can take part in a conflictual or comparative dialogue with other cultures and religions by appealing to its specific lay orientation (since the same stress is not found in those other cultures and religions). This proposal could be summed up with the slogan “from universality to hospitality.” Indeed, the diffusion of fundamentalist positions or of forms of communitarian apartheid shows clearly that in the Babel-like world of pluralism, cultural and religious identities are destined to move toward fanaticism unless they explicitly develop in a spirit of weakness. Hospitality (I am thinking here of a beautiful recent lecture by Jacques Derrida) is not realized if not as a placement of oneself in the hands of one’s guest, that is, an entrustment of oneself to him. In intercultural or interreligious dialogue, this signifies acknowledging that the other might be right. If Christian identity, applying the principle of charity, takes the shape of hospitality in the dialogue between religions and cultures, it must limit itself almost entirely to listening, and thus giving voice to the guests.
I am aware that the thesis I am putting forth here is controversial and has many implications. Nevertheless, the task facing the Christian world (the West) today is the recovery of its universalizing function without any colonial, imperialist, or Eurocentric implications. It is difficult to imagine that this task might be accomplished by stressing its dogmatic, ethical, and disciplinary specificity. One might reasonably argue that this stress does not correspond to the content of Christian doctrine, but depends rather on a certain historical inertia of the churches insofar as they are worldly institutions. The other path open to Christianity is to recover its universalizing function by stressing its missionary inclination as hospitality, and as the religious foundation (paradoxical as this might be) of the laity (i.e., institutions, civil society, and religious individuals). To return to the example mentioned a moment ago, Christians cannot claim the right to expose the crucifix in public schools and at the same time adopt it as a sign of a particular, highly dogmatic religion. Or, Christmas can continue to be celebrated in Western societies as a holiday for all, but then it makes no sense to complain that it has become too lay, too mundane, that is, that it has been deprived of its original, authentic meaning. In the end, also, the prohibition of the chador in French public schools can be justified precisely because in that context it is an affirmation of a strong identity, a kind of profession of fundamentalism. By contrast, in our society the crucifix has become an almost obvious—and hence unobtrusive—sign, which allows for the continued existence of a lay orientation of which it only underscores the religious origin within the context of a development toward secularization. It is precisely by appealing to this generic meaning—one that offers openings and possibilities—that the crucifix can claim its right to be accepted as a universal symbol in a lay society. If world religions, primarily Christianity, are determined to present themselves as strong identities, the only option for liberal society will be to manifest its secularity by further reducing the visibility of all religious symbols in civic life, so as to not arouse reactions from this or that minority or from “other” religions and cultures. Among other things, this would ultimately force us to close most Western museums and to renounce the very cultural traditions of the West, which are so thick with—and inseparable from—religious symbols. By contrast, we should promote a free and intense coexistence of multiple symbolic universes in a spirit of hospitality that well expresses the lay orientation of Western culture, and its deeply religious origin—perhaps taking the museum, with its juxtaposition of different styles, tastes, and cultures, as a symbolic model of democracy. Yet to reach this goal, it is necessary that the world religions, and Christianity in the first place, no longer take the dogmatic and fundamentalist forms that have characterized them to date. In this sense, too, one might say, against all narrowly lay expectations, that the renewal of civic life in the Western world in the epoch of multiculturalism is mainly a problem of the renewal of the religious life.