Post-secular Conflicts

Conflicts over religious-moral issues such as LGBT-rights, gender equality, abortion, euthanasia, and the role of religion in society have shown a disruptive potential across many societies, even in secular Western Europe. They have also become the subject of political and legal debates between liberal and moral conservative political and religious actors in international institutions such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, and forums of inter-religious dialogue like the World Council of Churches. This project looks from a normative theoretical and from an empirical perspective at conflicts over religious-moral issues in these institutional arenas while focusing on the actors from the conservative spectrum. Adopting a contextualized political theory approach, the project makes use of empirical research for theory- building and undertakes an in-depth study of the global moral conservative network, shedding light on its actors, their alliances, arguments, and political agenda. It zooms in on a key actor within this network that has not yet received sufficient attention, the Russian Orthodox Church, and investigates its role as a transnational conservative norm-entrepreneur. By linking the empirical findings to normative theory, the project asks how liberal political theory can adequately reply to moral conservatism and still do justice to value pluralism. The project will propose a post-secular theory of moral conflicts that overcomes existing biases by focusing on non-liberal and non-Western actors and develops further the insights both on the role of learning and translation from theories of post- secular inclusion, and on conflict and contested democratic accommodation drawing on theories of political pluralism and modus vivendi. POST-SECULAR CONFLICTS Abstract in Englishpage 1

Is society breaking up over moral questions? There are questions that polarize a society because their answers require value judgments. Should abortion be legal? Should there be a right to euthanasia? Should marriage apply also to same-sex partnerships? The answers to these questions vary from person to person. Nevertheless, the state must find a generally applicable rule and policy. In the best case, a compromise is reached between disagreeing parties, in the worst case, one side feels inferior and walks away dissatisfied with democratic rules. At the University of Innsbruck, the Postsecular Conflicts project, headed by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Kristina Stoeckl from 2015 to 2021, investigated how such conflicts change when the conflicting parties forge alliances with like-minded people across national borders in order to exchange arguments and strategies. Christian conservative groups from the US are working closely with Orthodox actors from Russia and conservative religious groups in Europe, united in their opposition to women's rights, same-sex love and abortion. It is important to understand this dynamic and to show ways out of the polarization. The project carried the term "post-secular" in its title because it reflected on political-theoretical debates about the role of religious arguments in public sphere and about the relationship between religion, human rights and democracy. All results of the project are documented on the homepage: https://www.uibk.ac.at/projects/postsecular-conflicts/