Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Inner-Catholic Critic and Advocate of Open Neutrality

Abstract

In this introductory essay to a special section on ‘Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde: Inner-Catholic Critic and Advocate of Open Neutrality’, we outline the main features of Böckenförde’s thought with regard to law, religion, and democracy while also introducing the six articles that are part of the section. Böckenförde emerged early as an inner-Catholic critic that -prior to Vatican II- called on the church to accept the secular democratic state and on Catholics to participate in democratic politics not in order to represent the Church's interests, but to work towards the larger common good. Böckenförde was also a pioneer in confronting German Catholicism with its role during the rise and consolidation of Nazism. Later in his life a chief contribution of his was the outlining of a model of democratic religion-state relations beyond laicité. What Böckenförde calls “open encompassing neutrality” allows for the presence of religion in public life and the deliberate state support for positive (and not only negative) religious freedom. While believers need the democratic state to be able to make a free choice in favour of their religion (freedom of conscience can only truly exist in a democratic state), democracy, too, needs religion in so far as it is a central resource, among other sources, for citizens to develop and hold on to a democracy-sustaining ethos.