Mobilizing Religious Heritage in Politics: Inclusivity in a Pluralistic Society

Abstract

While concepts like citizenship, justice, participation, and sovereignty are core terms of political philosophy, the same cannot be said for cultural and religious heritage. The political significance of cultural and religious heritage, however, has become increasingly important both in politics and in scholarly debates about the public presence of religion in liberal democracies. This contribution focuses on political work that is done by religious heritage, and on ethical dimensions of controversies about religious heritage in the context of democracies that are characterized by religious diversity and committed to political equality. Following a discussion of the concept of religious heritage, the article sketches two controversies in which Christian holidays and the symbol of the cross were mobilized as religious heritage for political purposes. I use these controversies to analyze possible implications and effects of politics of religious heritage for members of both majority and minority religious communities. In the concluding section, I propose a direction for scholarship on inclusive politics of religious heritage that takes seriously the transformation and pluralization of the religious landscape in countries like Germany, on which I focus in this contribution, since the 1950s.