THE SECULAR LIBERAL STATE AND RELIGION5
Religious consciousness has been forced to engage in processes of adaptation. Every reli-
gion is originally a ‘‘conception of the world’’ or a ‘‘comprehensive doctrine’’ in the sense
that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Under the circum-
stances of the secularization of knowledge, of the neutralization of state authority, and of
the generalized freedom of religion, religion has had to give up this claim to interpretive
monopoly and to a comprehensive organization of life. As functional differentiation
brings about societal subsystems, the life of the religious community also separates itself
from its social context. The role of a member of a community differentiates itself from
that of a citizen of society. And because the liberal state is dependent upon a political
integration of its citizens that goes beyond a mere modus vivendi, this differentiation of
memberships has to amount to more than a cognitively undemanding aligning of reli-
gious ethos with the imposed laws of secular society. Rather, the universalistic system of
law and the egalitarian morals of society must be connected to the ethos of the community
from within, in such a way that one follows consistently from the other. To represent this
‘‘embedding,’’ John Rawls chose the metaphor of a module: the module of secular justice
should, despite the fact that it was constructed with the help of ideologically [weltanschau-
lich] neutral reasons, fit in with each of the orthodox foundational systems.^9
This normative expectation with which the liberal state confronts religious communi-
ties accords with the latter’s own interests insofar as it gives them the possibility of exert-
ing, via the political public, their own influence on society as a whole. It is true that the
resulting costs of tolerance, as the more or less liberal abortion regulations show, are not
distributed symmetrically between believers and nonbelievers. But neither does secular
consciousness enjoy negative religious freedom without cost. It is expected to acquire,
through practice, a self-reflexive handling of the limits of Enlightenment. The conception
of tolerance in liberally constituted, pluralistic societies demands that believers recognize
that they must sensibly reckon with the continued existence of dissent in their dealings
with nonbelievers, as well as with those of other faiths. And the same recognition is
demanded, within the framework of a liberal political culture, of nonbelievers in their
dealings with believers.
For the religiously unattuned citizen, this constitutes the by no means trivial request
that he or she self-critically determine the relationship between faith and knowledge from
the perspective of a general knowledge of the world. The expectation of a continuing
disagreement between faith and knowledge only deserves the predicate ‘‘reasonable’’ if,
from the perspective of secular knowledge, religious convictions are also accorded an
epistemic status that is not irrational per se. By no means, therefore, do naturalistic con-
ceptions of the world, conceptions that owe their existence to the speculative processing
of scientific information and that are relevant for the ethical self-understanding of citi-
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