A Post-Secular Ethics of Citizenship and Its Implications for Immigrant Integration in Europe

In this paper I discuss Jürgen Habermas’ recent writings on a “post-secular society” and examine the implications of this concept for how European societies should think of the integration of immigrants with a religious background. Habermas has recently called for the abandonment of a “rigid and exclusive secularist self-understanding of modernity” and advocated for a more expansive role of religious discourse in the democratic public sphere of Western societies. At the centre of the “post-secular society” Habermas places a new “ethics of citizenship” which requires secular and religious citizens to practice mutually taking perspective, see each other at eye level and learn about one another’s deep commitments and values. Habermas’s turn to a “post-secular society” has received significant attention, the implications of this turn for a broad range of topics, from how democratic dialogue and deliberation must be construed, to the secular structure of the state, and the role of state representatives (judges, state officials, MPs), being widely discussed. However less attention has been given in the literature to the normative ramifications and institutional implications of this concept for the integration of immigrant population. I argue in this paper that a “post-secular” ethics of citizenship offers promising normative resources to think about this issue in a way that avoids the main pitfalls of many assimilationist perspectives, on the one side, and those of multiculturalist perspectives, on the other side.