The Rise of the State as a Process of Secularization [1967

Abstract

Böckenförde shows how and why the modern state is a product of the historical process of secularization. Three key conflicts between papacy and European kings led to the establishment of administrative, political, and later legal structures independent from the Catholic Church: the Investiture Controversy (1087–1122), the confessional wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the declarations of rights as universal rather than based on religion in the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 and the French constitution of 1789. The modern state emerged from this process independent from the Church, without claims on the religious lives of its citizens or questions of sin and salvation. Böckenförde regards the constitutional recognition of freedom of religion as the bedrock of modernity. In the article, Böckenförde identifies what he regards as the core challenge facing the liberal democratic state, formulated in his most prominently cited sentence: ‘The liberal secularized state is sustained by conditions it cannot itself secure.’ Böckenförde argues that the modern state relies on a moral substance, thriving only under conditions of solidarity and cohesion that need to emanate from within society. Religiosity is one potential source of this moral substance. At the same time, one of the goals of the liberal state is the promotion and safeguarding of pluralism: If the modern state were to promote a given worldview or a sense of morality, it would violate the very liberalism on which it is founded. This dilemma has become known in the literature as the ‘Böckenförde dictum’.