Taylor and Habermas respectively follow communitarian versus cosmopolitan lines that constitute substantive differences in their political theories.¹ Nonetheless, trends in each of their writings on religion in a global context have taken surprising turns toward communicative convergence. They find in the great Axial traditions rich resources for what could enhance species solidarity. This may not seem as surprising for Taylor given his earlier works on the ethical dimensions of authenticity . In A Secular Age, he extends this work as his concluding chapters propose a moral variant of cosmopolitanism , universal solidarity as a species ethic , and a Romantic dialogical view of revelatory language (Taylor 2007, pp. 694–695, 758–765; Kleingeld 1999, pp. 521–524). For Habermas, although a classical defender of neo-Kantian forms of political cosmopolitanism , his most recent writings bear the marks of a moral cosmopolitanism likewise of a romantic and expressive flare. Rather than following his more common politically revisionist recommendations for democratization of a robust set of regional and cosmopolitan institutional arrangements, his neo-Kierkegaardian species ethic draws upon an internal reconstruction of second-person discourse (Habermas 2003, pp. 37–44, 113–115, 2006, pp. 44–47, 2009, pp. 76–77).

On my reading, what both views lack would be a further analytical and normative classification that better captures the pluralistic dimensions of this shared expressive turn. Tracing the Axial roots to modernity moves the attendant communicative reconstructions from the political to the ethical characteristic of cosmoipolitan justice. In Karl Jaspers , Taylor and Habermas find a descriptive hermeneutic for the affective claims to moral universality deriving from the species ethic unique to each major world religion—including the expressive autonomy of secularists’ background justifications. A discourse-theoretic rendition of the onset of the Axial Age also offers prescriptive norms for how public debate ought to proceed in a global context. Innovative justifications open new transnational public spheres as they proceed from expert discourse to real volitional commitments held by those believing and non-believing individuals uniquely affected. Highlighting ethical appeals to the variety of expressions of species universality inherent to the Axial traditions, need not presuppose that the sociological facts of interdependence necessarily lead to a secular political cosmopolitanism. Under conditions of multiple modernities, secular universality presents merely one among many options to be taken as morally and rationally justifiable for individuals (Taylor 2006b, pp. 143–158; Eisenstadt 2003; Bohman 2007b; Habermas 2008, pp. 312–352; Habermas 2009, pp. 60).²

We must hypothetically extend Taylor’s descriptions of the nova effect of expert discourses becoming generalized to entire societies that Taylor traces out in his admittedly parochial narrative of secularization out of Latin Christendom . I will amend his brief reference to the ‘supernova’ of radical plurality by supplanting it with Jaspers’ initiation of the Axial Age as more germane to the global perspective (Jaspers 1953; Taylor 2007, p. 300). In addition, we must further embellish Taylor’s pragmatic endorsement of William James’ concept of the openness of a volitional will to affective and relational comportments not reducible to the objectivigating discourses of scientific claims. We thus enter into the Jamesian open space that does not preclude an untested confidence in our secular stance as already obviously compelling for both self and others. Moving beyond a mere modus vivendi, we need to expand our scope beyond what Taylor labels as the subtraction narrative(s) of contemporary secularization. With a widened framing of our communicative ethic, we broaden what might constitute the domain of the rational. For example, Taylor’s insightfully recasts the seemingly value-neutral proclaimed triumph of science itself as one among many types of ethical claims for how one might attain the fullness characteristic of contemporary searches for self-authenticating expression (Taylor 2007, p. 551; Habermas 2009, p. 67, 72). However, given the ensuing sorts of plural background justifications in a global public that constitute the moral and ethical substance of both basic rights and pragmatic solutions to shared problems, we ought then to adjust our normative semantics. We follow Jose Casanova in detailing one of the characteristics of the postsecular as the open prospect of a re-enchanted cosmos that might include pre-Axial, Axial, and post-Axial amendments. Simultaneously, by conceding what Casanova calls the emergence of global denominationalism , we will grant the sociological fact of the polyphonic complexity of Jamesian live options that drive the supernova of hybrid positions feeding into the richer epistemic reservoir best articulated by the semantic qualifier cosmoi (Habermas 2009, p. 76; Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, p. 79; Bowman 2009a).

Instead of the default stance of an overt focus on the traditions of Latin Christendom , by using Islam , we have an instance of an attempt on both sides of the Atlantic to widen the scope of moral and political solidarity from what Jaspers has termed Biblical religion as stemming from common Abrahamic roots that include Islam (Jaspers 1948, p. 61). Assessing the inherent potentials for the integration of immigrants and minorities offers a practical test of the more encompassing inter-Axial communicative ethic characteristic of cosmoipolitan justice as a viable alternative to political cosmopolitanism (Habermas 2009, p. 71) .

In his seminal work, A Secular Age, Taylor poses what he terms the most daunting problem for secularization theory: If European societies and the United States are so close in their comparative histories of liberal democratization, why are they so far apart in how they deal with religion in the public (Taylor 2007, p. 522, 530)? While Taylor proposes the conventional understanding to this query as something akin to the presumed triumph of the scientific worldview on the more rational European sense of modernity, he has a more complex narrative intended to disclose that the scientific worldview ultimately cannot be distinguished from its own tie to a particular view of ethical authenticity and moral fullness (Taylor 1989, 2007, p. 21).³ To illustrate the notion that secularity cannot merely presuppose a rational and moral supremacy to religion, he proposed a tripartite genealogical reconstruction of three ways to characterize the concept, with a decided preference for the descriptive and prescriptive richness of the third classification.

For Taylor, secularity 1 refers most succinctly to God’s displacement at the center of social life within a contemporary liberal democratic constitutional framework. While this is indeed an accurate description of the social world as we experience it—and state neutrality to religion seems an almost indisputable command of justice—only secularity 3 gives the genealogical account for how we got to this point. In addition, he also notes that much of secularization theory regards sociological evidence for his secularism 2, on the comparative data on declining indices of belief and practice, as leading to the hasty generalization that in a modern democratic (and cosmopolitan) republic, trends must thereby continue this way for the society to remain moral, just, and rational. Lastly, and perhaps most germane to my comparative analysis of how the EU vs. US comparison bodes for the global situation, Habermas and Taylor find much common ground in their mutual endorsement of secularity 3 as a sufficiently normative account. That is, they agree on the self-authenticating autonomy characteristic of modern societies (which Taylor deems the secularization of human flourishing and Habermas developed earlier via a communicative recasting of Kierkegaard on authenticity). In my comparison of the European and American respective claims to exceptionalism, I would like to address the hitherto unexplored implications of contemporary differences in secularism 1—that is, post-Age of Mobilization—as perhaps the real origin of the wide differences in both secularisms 2 and 3. This should thereby bring us to a cosmoipolitan norm of increasing differentiation as a better descriptive and prescriptive remedy than cosmopolitanism , particularly in noting the increased prevalence of religious organizations as national and international epistemic communities of interpretation for filtering out how best to address shared transnational social problems such as armed conflict and terrorism, and species ethic problems such as those made possible by contemporary innovations in technologies associated with biomedical engineering (Habermas 2009, p. 64, 2003, pp. 101–115).

Shifting the outlines of the debate over religion in the global public to moral and ethical differences constitutes a multi-perspectival task, since the modern notion of the self must fit within a socialization context that extends in potentially three directions, including communion with God (or lack thereof), membership in nation, and participation in global society. With respect to the first two of the three axes—God and nation—Robert Bellah points out that this offers one preliminary site of political differentiation between US and EU that starts the discussion immediately in the more familiar context of secularism 1 (the displacement of God from the center of public and social space):

While America—perhaps uniquely in the Western world—seems able to keep God and nation together as predominant ideas together with Self, in Europe today neither God nor Nation musters deep loyalty among a significant majority. Instead we see the emergence of the individual Self as the primary moral focus. (Bellah 2008, pp. 15–21)

While Taylor’s most intriguing remarks on this topic proposed by Bellah are buried in the footnotes of A Secular Age (2007, p. 831, n. 46), in his essay ‘Religion and European Integration’ (2006), Taylor finds that substantive differences between secularization in the US and EU boil down largely to questions of moral and political identity, which I will evaluate in terms of his discussion and critique of the array of available political forms for displacing God’s role in the public domain (Taylor 2006a, pp. 1–22). Given what Taylor has termed the nova effect of the radical pluralization of believing and unbelieving positions (primarily placed in the domain of secularization 3), these differentiations are ultimately informed by the degree to which the cultural innovations of social elites spill over, disseminate socially, and then become challenged and/or adapted into the broader political public (secularization 1) at mutually reinforcing national and global levels.

One alternative response to the growing pluralization of religious forms that Taylor considers at length and attributes to the political theory of Habermas, has been to steer social integration via public law and its democratic institutionalization by means of moral constitutional patriotism (Bowman 2007). While I will generally agree with Taylor’s critique of Habermas’s position, Taylor does not fully articulate the implications of his critique of Habermas for answering the original question he raised, specifically as the analysis bears on the role of religion in a globalized domain. As an amendment to his proposals, I will provide an epistemic scorecard for what seems to work best in the competing accounts as we consider where secularization theory must go beyond the EU and US comparisons and into the more diverse global context offered by cosmoipolitanism. In this respect, I agree with Jose Casanova’s observation that

An impasse has been reached in the debate. The traditional theory of secularization works relatively well for Europe, but not for the United States. The American paradigm works relatively well for the U.S., but not for Europe. Neither can offer a plausible account of the internal variations within Europe. Most importantly, neither works well for other world religions and other parts of the world. (Casanova 2006a, p. 9)

Once I set up Taylor’s critical remarks of moral constitutional patriotism as applied to both the US and EU, I will defend cosmoipolitanism as a better normative and epistemic model for fostering solidarity in an increasingly postsecular political environment via the Rawlsian notion of forming an overlapping consensus instead of Habermas’s more typically international federative proposals (Taylor 2007, p. 532).⁴

Taylor initially defines the notion of constitutional-moral patriotism, as ‘the reigning synthesis between nation, morality, and religion,’ characterized most fully in the early secularization histories of the US—and to some extent Britain (Taylor 2007, p. 526). On such a view, which one could situate quite well in the domain of secularism 1, the constitution via its norms, principles, and schedule of inscribed rights offers citizens a focal point of political identity among many sources of moral solidarity and identity (Taylor 2007, p. 526, 2006a, p. 2, 9, 16). However, Taylor challenges the very basis of what he terms the Habermasian approach to political identity, since by circumscribing political inclusion and exclusion in terms of national citizenship, constitutions always contain the inherent philosophical tension of having universalist moral norms as inscribed within a particular political culture and a unique historical realization of these norms (Taylor 2006a, p. 9). Therefore, for Taylor, adhering strictly to the constitutional re-appropriation of moral norms and ethical principles as the primary locus of social identity runs the risk of masking religious forms of identity that might equally well be the true motivating moral (and perhaps non-political) source for commitment to universalistic norms we hold (Eisenstadt 2003a, pp. 399–433).⁵

In reply, as historical support for his Verfassungspatriotismus thesis, Habermas characteristically points to the translation of religious principles into constitutional norms. Classical examples include the person as created in the image of God recast as the inalienable dignity of the person enshrined in universal declarations of human rights (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, p. 45). Or, he also considers the Pauline notion of universal solidarity translated into a common concern and compassion for all humankind. Most recently, he has even amended some of his early views that place the epistemic burden on non-believers to aid in the translation of religious insight into public language (Habermas 2008, pp. 130–140). However, even with this amended view that places the burden on the secularist to aid in the translation process by not presuming non-secular justifications as irrational and immoral from the outset, Taylor would not remain fully convinced given the tendency of what he terms ancestralism to lead to the problematic elision of one’s national constitutional divide as ‘the’ proper threshold for secularization one (Taylor 2006a, p. 16).

While Taylor certainly would concede the aforementioned forms of translation as possible with notions like inalienable rights, his concluding remarks on Christian agape, incarnation, and resurrection in A Secular Age seem to agree with Martin (Taylor 2007, pp. 739–742), that the neo-Kantian fetish with moral rules and norms as viable candidates for politicization can only see particularistic expressions of moral fullness an enemy and as a threat to political solidarity that must be reduced to a minimum:

But the priority of faith, hope, and love—above all love—cannot be translated into civic and constitutional terms. Such priorities are laid on human beings by religious commitment in a manner that cannot be articulated as constitutive of the state or as a matter of policy in the public realm….How you treat that specificity and acknowledge it as a presence in the public realm is partly a matter of whether you view religion as archaic survival condemned to continuous erosion by social evolution, or as a constitutive language that is primordial in its way as reason, and with its own coherence and continuing relevance. (Martin 2006, p. 84)

In this manner, Taylor would seem to agree that the limits of the public encroachment into religious forms of self-authenticating expression cannot be breached without proclaiming the neo-Nietzschean death of God under the veiled language of ‘our’ constitutional tradition (Habermas 2010).

However, in reply, compare Taylor and Martin’s pronouncements of the potential ideologies behind assuming secular autonomy as the golden road to self-authenticating fulfillment to similar remarks made by Habermas. His own revisions of prior positions seem to move his more recently pragmatic appeals to social solidarity out of the constitutional realm alone with his revised anthropological notion of a species ethic . In this respect, the politicized universalism of constitutional patriotism now seems to have been given a depoliticized and potentially more universal ethical counterpart via his introduction of species ethic inspired Kierkegaard’s notion of the authentic life (Habermas 2003, pp. 5–15; Habermas 2009, pp. 22–30). In Habermas’s words, he even regards religion as a check on the potential dogmas of Enlightenment rationalism:

[S]omething can remain intact in the communal life of the religious fellowships—provided of course they avoid dogmatism and the coercion of people’s consciences—something that has been lost elsewhere and cannot be restored by the professional knowledge of experts alone. I am referring to adequately differentiated possibilities of expression and to sensitivities with regard to lives that have gone astray, with regard to societal pathologies, with regard to the failure of individuals’ plans for their lives, and with regard to the deformation and disfigurement of lives that people share with one another. (Habermas and Ratzinger 2006, pp. 43–44)

Both Taylor and Habermas pose the intriguing insight that increasing the range of possible epistemic influence of religious communities of interpretation over one’s ethical self realization could at least negatively uncover truths about the nature of man that lead persons away from damaged forms of social solidarity that in turn threaten a more universally encompassing species ethic .