Democracy in Crisis
Democratic societies are currently facing a situation that has been described as a ‘crisis of representation’ or even as ‘post-democracy’. The self-image of Western societies characterized by the idea of democratic participation of their citizens in the political shaping of the community is being put to the test by a growing disenchantment with politics. Political disenchantment manifests itself not only in a political abstention from tried and tested procedures of co-determination, but also in a questionable interaction between a loss of willingness to engage in discursive understanding of controversial issues on the one hand, and an emotion-driven polarization of political opinions, on the other. The cohesive power of the public sphere as a place of mutual recognition in the exchange of perspectives, expectations, and convictions based on a consciousness of civic commonality seems to be diminishing. Responding to this loss of cohe-sion the project ‘Religion and the Culture of Democracy’ seeks to analyze the role of religious communities in the culture of democratic societies within and beyond the so-called West.
The project ‘Religion and the Culture of Democracy’ is based on the hypothesis that the ‘post-democratic’ developments are essentially due to a condensing atmosphere of distrust, which increasingly permeates the civic interaction of citizens in at least four dimensions: a) distrust between scientific elites or science-based economic functionaries and the population, b) distrust between ethno-cultural groupings, c) distrust between social classes, and d) distrust between information elites or networks and information users or recipients.
The vision of the Transatlantic Workshop on “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 re-spective impulses for contemporary political thought.