Pope Ratzinger has turned on its head the historical basis of secularism formulated by Grotius, according to which, within the political sphere, one should behave “etsi Deus non daretur”: Benedetto XVI believes that for a democracy to protect itself against nihilism, each citizen, however agnostic, sceptical, or atheist, must behave “sicuti Deus daretur”, and must thus ensure that the law should adhere to the precepts of “natural morality”, precepts that coincide with those given by the Roman Catholic Church.

In the United States, moreover, many reformed congregations - often recently established, but nonetheless growing rapidly and aggressively - advance the same principle as that put forward by the Pope: that what they consider to be a sin should be a legally punishable crime. The President of the United States himself declares that guidance for his political decisions comes to him through religious enlightenment, directly from Jesus.

One may wonder whether this subversion of the secular tradition, this repudiation of the “etsi Deus non daretur”, is not due to the very ambiguity and confusion with which the principle of secularism has been asserted, both in political and in cultural terms. In fact, France and Holland are the only two countries that have followed this principle coherently and rigorously. And even in those countries, its foundations are now being questioned.

In the United States - that is, in the world’s most powerful democracy - to hold on to secularism has never meant to keep God out of the public sphere or of political discourse. On the contrary. Politicians of all stripes have always claimed a relation to God. But there prevailed the illusory belief that the very multiplicity of competing and individualistic churches was a bulwark against confessional dogmatism, even as it fed a diffuse and pervasive religiosity that was also present in political argument. And yet, secularism consists in the strict neutrality of the State with regard to each citizen (regardless of creed - or of the absence of it), in all aspects of public life. How is it possible to maintain such a neutrality if political decisions include references to God? Such an inclusion, in fact, not only leads to the usual problems (and consequent antinomies): which God? who is the authorized interpreter? how can one resolve the conflict between various and incompatible notions of “God’s will”? Even if these problems were resolvable, there would remain the issue of discrimination against those who do not believe in God and who become second-class citizens.

And so it is perhaps not surprising that, once one accepts the presence of the God-argument within the public sphere, the encroachment of religious confessions upon worldly matters is no longer self-limited; instead there is a new wave of confessional moralisms and dogmatisms that profess to be the unbreakable rule erga omnes (with citizens as believers or non-believers), that is, State law. If one gives up the «etsi Deus non daretur», if the intrusion of “God’s will” in public argument becomes legitimate, then the notion that a God is against abortion can become an argument too, just as does the notion that a God is for polygamy, that a God demands genital mutilation of girls, or that a God forbids blood transfusions… Or indeed that a God imposes the stoning of female adulterers. By giving up the «etsi Deus non daretur» in the public sphere, the only alternative is a “sharia”, whether Christian or Islamist or Jewish or of any other religion. More or less soft, but, in principle, legitimate.

And so, the “French” coherence in forbidding the veil and religious symbols in schools and public spaces, rather than a form of secular extremism (or secular fundamentalism, as some have called it), may well be a justifiable call not to set one’s religious identity against citizens’ collective identity.

But objections against the strict, uncompromising notion of secularism do not only come from the clerical milieu and from the religious right. They are also coming from those who uphold a self-declaredly progressist multiculturalism. Yet how “progressist” is a multiculturalism invoked, in the name of one’s “belonging” to a tradition, to justify practices and beliefs detrimental to the shared dignity of individuals? Paraphrasing Marx, one might reiterate that “a culture can be free even where those who belong to it are not”. In the name of a culture’s freedom, one can negate the rights and freedom of the invididuals who “belong” to that culture. How can one call free a child educated in a madrassa, or in a fundamentalist “ghetto” in Jerusalem, or in self-referential Christian homeschooling?

Multiculturalism, in short, privileges the group’s hierarchy and conformity to its rules, rather than individual dissent. The notion of belonging it advances is the opposite of autonomy and critical outlook.

Moreover, condemnations by the Prophet’s faithful of cultural or journalistic endeavours con-sidered “offensive”, such as the film of Theo van Gogh or the cartoons in Denmark (and in the past, the christian Church, catholic and otherwise, behaved in a similar way when it branded works as “blasphemous”), gave rise to an understanding response on the part of many, including on the “left”, rather than to the assertion that all attempts to censorship should be radically condemned.

In the purely cultural sphere too the secular outlook is increasingly weak, defensive and even submissive. The assertion of the cognitive superiority of atheism is now viewed as redolent of nineteenth-century positivism. It almost seems as if it is now the atheist who has to prove his or her innocence before the accusation of dogmatism! Of course rationality cannot be reduced to the claims advanced by the experimental sciences. But whatever contradicts these claims or the propositions that one can logically extrapolate from them, cannot be taken to partake of rationality. Nor can be considered rational any hypothesis that fails before “Ockham’s razor”, in other words one that is a superfluous account of phenomena that have already been explained. Everyone is free to believe anything beyond and even against that which can be asserted rationally (science + logic), but not to claim that this faith is also reason. But the constantly renewed attempt, by people who partake of the most diverse philosophical trends, to “demonstrate” that values are inscribed in scientific facts or in “nature” (this in the face of modern philosophy’s greatest achievement, “Hume’s Law”, for which an “ought” can never be derived from an “is”), opens the road to an infinite number of substitutes to traditional religions. It does not encourage anti-metaphysical, secular thought, or lead to the recognition that, as the lords of norms (that do not exist in nature), we are absolutely responsible for the values we choose.

Is it not then necessary (even if not sufficient: the material problems of citizens remain) for a coherent and uncompromising secularism to effect a political and cultural counter-attack in response to the current crisis of our democracies?