Panel: CROSSING THE GAP BETWEEN FAITH AND FAITHLESSNESS: MODELS OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND THEIR ANTHROPOLOGICAL PLAUSIBILITY



581.5 - SECULAR MAYBE: ON NONCOMMITTALITY IN RELIGION

AUTHORS:
Costa P. (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Center for Religious Studies ~ Trento ~ Italy)
Text:
Some conclusions can be drawn with reasonable certainty from the new secularization debate. Secularity does not imply a self-interpreting demise or decline of religion, but something more ambivalent. What is left in a post-secularist age is the sense of a "diaspora of the sacred" (G. Filoramo) resulting from the spiritual "nova effect" (C. Taylor) triggered by the rise of the secular option. "Faith as an option" (H. Joas) spurs individual spiritual quests, which, in turn, multiply intermediate positions between belief and unbelief. What you have, then, is religious pluralism; spiritual eclecticism; enhanced reflexivity. Thus, modern secularity admits if not encourages the cultivation of a religious negative capability. "Negative capability" (Keats) is the ability to live creatively in a condition of uncertainty. A distinctive feature of religious negative capability is a stance, where suspension of belief is taken to be a condition for conducting one's spiritual quest with maximum receptivity and open-mindedness. Here, religious indifference coexists with a spiritually engaged noncommittality. But what exactly is a spiritually engaged noncommittality? From an epistemic point of view, the modern secular condition urges inquiries into what lies amidst religious belief and disbelief. Between unwavering faith and what is known as militant atheism, you may have mild religiousness, pondered agnosticism, bland or vindicated indifference to religion, alienated religious belonging (to Catholicism or Evangelicalism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.). These subtle differences deserve to be scrutinized and articulated in their distinctiveness as much as possible. Against this topography of belief and unbelief, my paper aims to establish whether religious noncommittality constitutes a stance in its own right, which is different from agnosticism, and can be regarded as epistemically stable or, instead, as bound, eventually, to lead to belief or unbelief as default options in this area.