Transatlantic Workshop Series “Religion and the Cultures of Democracy

Themes:
1. Sources of Community
The contemporary concept of community has religious and romantic origins. The biblical idea of community (edah) is connected to a common experience of “witnessing” from which boundaries of belonging are commonly drawn. Nineteenth-century collectivism revived the concept of an Apostolic community investing it with social utopian imagination (Saint Simon). The late nineteenth-century dichotomization of community and association (Tönnies) often articulated itself as a critique of modernity. The identification of community and totalitarianism (Plessner) exposed the inherent dangers of communitarian thinking in the modern political sphere. On the other hand, there also exists a communitarian critique of liberalism’s radical individualism (Walzer) that has sought to rehabilitate the concept of community as a source of mutual care and responsibility. If communities are to guarantee social cohesion, however, it must be borne in mind that the social inclusion of some in certain ­communities can be correlated with the ­exclusion of others; this entails the danger of the formation of friend-foe schemata and the breakdown of communication between the ‘enemy’ camps. This is why political liberalism has in principle pleaded for public abstention from values, but on the other hand has thereby exacerbated the problem addressed by the ‘Böckenförde-dictum’. A central question, therefore, is whether there are forms of value-based communitization which themselves contain the potential of conflict resolution between conflicting social groupings. 

2. Contestation & Negotiation
The resurgence of geopolitical conflicts amplifies the frictions within democratic cultures. Therefore, questions regarding the sources of community need to be complemented by questions regarding the transformation and evolution of community. What are the prerequisites of social cohesion and the public sphere in a culture of democracy? If forms of protest and dissent are its distinctive and creative core, how do we deal with theo-political contestations, particularly with topoi that stand beyond negotiation for the participants in a given conflict? What are the principles that sustain a pluralist culture and what role do religions play in these contexts? What potential do they release? And do we need a notion of common good, rituals and shared narratives as grounds to uphold the possibility for negotiation?

3. Exclusion & Violence 
Violence and coercion have typically been an integral part of community formation, maintenance, evolution, negotiation, and fragmentation: whether the obvious violence of conquest and nation-state building, outbursts of violence between social groups, protests, riots, and military operations or the more routinized violence and coercion of policing and maintaining a social order, the structural violence of systemic inequalities that often define communities and their borders.  Both inclusion and exclusion from communities can be coercive and violent. This theme seeks to examine the role of violence and coercion in all of the other themes, paying particular attention to the role which religions and political theologies play in defining what constitutes violence and coercive force, and who can wield it against whom. Are violence and coercion, thus defined, an inevitable part of communal life?

4. Forces of Fragmentation 
While religion has always served as a powerful factor in creating social inclusion and cohesion, history is also filled with numerous examples for how beliefs and faith-based identities and practices fostered exclusion and fragmentation, both within specific religious groups and within society more generally. Looking at, for example, the long history of anti-Judaism in European Christendom or the culture wars in the US today, one can easily see how religion often factored into marginalization, and division. This panel aims to explore these interdynamics of religion and fragmentation from various historical and cultural perspectives. How have specific religions conditioned or shaped social and political fragmentation in different social settings and historical periods? And, inversely, how have changing historical, social, cultural, and political circumstances eroded the inner cohesion of religious groups or denominations? Specifically, in what ways did gender, race, and ethnicity figure into these dynamics of fragmentation? At the same time, we are also interested in the ways in which religion (through things such as religious reform movements, revivals etc.) worked to reduce or prevent fragmentation across different cultures and epochs of history.

5. Equality & Solidarity
The past few decades have witnessed the growth of global inequalities both economic and political, and this has prompted renewed calls for equity, equality, and solidarity both intra- and internationally. In civil society, civil religion, public theology and the traditions of democracy equality and solidarity are often imagined to be keys to a healthy community. Equal rights, equal opportunities, equal dignity are basic values of secular as well as religious concepts of modern societies. However, the rhetoric and political implementation of solidarity and equality has often been premised upon exclusion and suppression. The recent resurgence of right-wing movements in many democracies has frequently demonstrated how these practices of social and political “othering” have built a sense of solidarity and even equality through deepening divisions and reactionary hierarchies. This equality is thus premised on furthering inequalities. At the same time, we have seen a new awareness of the importance and urgency of both local and global solidarities across social, political, and ethnic divisions. These solidarities are often articulated in religious terms and sensibilities. Given these tensions how can these modes of inclusive solidarity regain credibility?

The vision of the Transatlantic Workshop Series “Religion and the Cultures of Democracy” is to build bridges in two directions: The project views itself as an exchange of experiences and ideas from European and American perspectives on the current role of community and its challenges for religion and politics. Another focus is on establishing an intellectual exchange between Jewish and Christian traditions and positions, triangulated also to include Islamic and non-Western approaches, in order to explore their respective impulses for contemporary political thought.