Habermas’s Theological Turn and European Integration

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue the early history of European integration has important implications for his conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious justifications from discourse in state institutions. I question this exclusion of the sacred by historically reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the early history of integration. Focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how the explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation.