On Wednesday, I had the great privilege of getting a few moments of time to speak with the great man himself. I want to leave what we talked about for later though. On Monday, I saw Saba Mahmood give her Milliband lecture on Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation. Her thesis is that the social sciences in general have avoided treating secularism as an object of study in itself. She asserts that are assumption up to now is that secularisation always follows the pattern experienced in Europe, but that this doesn’t necessarily hold true in all circumstances. In the Q&A that followed, she gave two examples. Egypt – authoritarian, secular, state replacing civil society services that were provided by religious institutions, but yet a deeply religious society. Lebanon – a state system founded upon religion, but one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of work expected in Beck’s call for methodological cosmopolitanism. However, as a side effect, this opens a critique in Beck’s work itself. Mahmood also claims that attempts by Western institutions to modernise Islam necessarily involves a certain amount of theological and hermeneutic (re)invention. So when Beck asserts the need for negative freedoms that everyone can agree upon (something that is problematic in other ways), does this not imply that Beck’s cosmopolitanism also involves a certain theological project?

The confrontation between individuals and world society seems like it ought to present an opportunity to the church. It looks like individuals will always need intermediate institutions and contexts in which meaning can be moulded, experienced, interpreted, and made socially binding. Theoretically at least, a Catholic faith that reconstructed itself, that distilled out its cosmopolitan essence and made it into a new basis of practice, could provide exactly that. It could provide individuals with a context of action and meaning that made more sense and was more effective than this Robinson Crusoe idea of being self-entrepreneurs trying to survive the war of all against all.
However, when I talk about a cosmopolitan reconstruction, I’m talking about deep structural changes. The church would have to embrace the internal openness that defines cosmopolitan world society. In church terms, that would mean opening its churches to the citizens of all other religions. Even the Lutherans!

The chapter on Prospects for a Second Enlightenment is well recommended for interested readers, but I digress. Beck’s call for Rome to open its churches to all other religions (including those of no religion), also applies to the Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu (etc…) religions. If we are talking about the Muslim world in particular, how is this cosmopolitanisation going to proceed? Will it be violent or not? And how much of it will be instigated by Western actors like the US State Department?