The Böckenförde Dilemma

A case for spiritual renewal in the West

“The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself. This is the great adventure it has undertaken for freedom’s sake. As a liberal state it can endure only if the freedom it bestows on its citizens takes some regulation from the interior, both from a moral substance of the individuals and a certain homogeneity of society at large. On the other hand, it cannot by itself procure these interior forces of regulation, that is not with its own means such as legal compulsion and authoritative decree. Doing so, it would surrender its liberal character and fall back, in a secular manner, into the claim of totality it once led the way out of, back then in the confessional civil wars.”  

- Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, 1976

Böckenförde poses a profound dilemma to the West: liberal democracies rely upon the fertile soil of shared cultural values to flourish, yet they cannot replenish those very values. Without the social unity provided by these values, Böckenförde sees the procedural guarantees of liberal democracy as a corpse: an intricately designed scaffolding, but not something truly alive.

This dilemma, perhaps also a diagnosis, explains the present malaise of American political life. Americans today are divided by major rifts in cultural values, chasms that it appears dialogue and exposure cannot breach. The rights and procedures laid out by our Constitution define a battleground for negotiating cultural conflict, but the battleground itself must remain neutral and inert. Americans cannot anoint a single cultural community as victorious without surrendering the Enlightenment principles of freedom and tolerance that led the West out of centuries of religious conflict.

Our current situation is not merely a contingent state of affairs but rather a predictable outcome implied by the triumph of liberalism. America was founded by Protestant communities instilled with a millennium of spiritual education in Christian morality. A cultural fabric consisting of charity, forgiveness, and resilience permeated our founding community. Unsurprisingly, the society designed by such a people gave more rights, more freedom, and more opportunity to its citizens than any other in world history — not only under the influence of Enlightenment philosophy¹ but also from the enterprising confidence engendered by a deep commitment to religious values.

Yet as our liberal democracy expanded, the very nature of our own tolerance began to erode the thick values that once formed the nourishing soil of its infancy.

The current crisis of free speech in American universities is emblematic of Böckenförde’s diagnosis. Colonial era institutions were founded upon Enlightenment principles of truth-seeking. Many colleges, including Harvard, were explicitly built for the primary purpose of training denominational clergy. Over time, American colleges secularized, but they inherited an underlying faith in the pursuit of truth. Now, as the culture of inquiry disintegrates alongside all other previously fixed cultural values, the purpose of a university as an institution for truth is thrown into question. Yet the university, like so many other institutions of the West, contains no inherent protections against this turmoil. All it can do is retreat into its tired proceduralism, establishing the right to pursue truth but without the ability to compel anyone to value truth.

This crisis is not an isolated breakdown, but rather a microcosm of the broader challenges endemic to liberalism. It is powerless to arrest the decline in our shared substrate of values. The procedural nature of liberal democracy guarantees freedom from oppression and a set of rules for making legitimate decisions, setting up the form of political life without suggesting its substance.

Without a shared spiritual substrate, liberal democracies like ours suffer. From a simple logical perspective, constitutions are created not in the abstract realm, but as part of a historically situated context. When the values and judgements of the people drift dramatically from the original context in which the system was established, the system is no longer operating under its necessary preconditions. More substantively, democracy is essentially an algorithm or procedure for producing legitimate and just decisions. Under a unifying ethos of shared values, this set of procedural commitments helps moderate dissent and legitimize decisions by negotiating values under a shared framework. If that common culture dissolves, democracies begin to question the fairness of the algorithm itself, leading to escalating proceduralism and the weaponization of political processes as cudgels for partisan ends.

Perhaps most importantly, without a path to spiritual rejuvenation or the cultivation of a new ethos, the cultural vitality of our society deteriorates. The result is a widespread sense of alienation and nihilism which transforms itself into socialism or ethnonationalism, the two dominant secular religions of Western life since the early 20th century. Yet these secular religions are unlike the Christian faith that nourished the founding of Western democracies. Nowhere is a notion of virtue to be found, and in these belief systems God is simply missing from action. Only Satan exists in these religions in the form of a universal evil — in the case of socialism it is the threat of capitalism, in the case of ethnonationalism it is the threat of the foreign.

In some sense, our secular religions, these outgrowths of a lack of spiritual center, are themselves emblematic of the core challenge of liberal democracy: its commitment to negativity. In these religions, what is emphasized are the enemies, yet what remains unclear are the true values of the system after these enemies are defeated. They embark on a Crusade that worships only the death of Satan but fails to glorify God.

Likewise, liberal democracies ensure negative liberties: freedom from censorship, freedom from religious persecution, freedom from coercion. They do not explicitly offer a guiding vision of the good life, and this is by design. Weary of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, the dangerous question of religion was removed from the remit of universal judgement and delegated first to the state in the Treaty of Westphalia, and later by the state to the people in the American Revolution.

Böckenförde’s dilemma is further strained by the explosion of networked media. As Martin Gurri notes, social media lowers the cost and increases the distribution of negative critique as institutions can no longer hide their flaws. The result is that the public is in perpetual revolt against the current establishment, regardless of who they are or what they stand for. There is no revolt towards anything, merely the rolling boil of a constant revolting against. In a triad of deficiency, the same negativity that characterizes liberal democracies also defines our dominant secular religions and our information ecosystem.

Yet the resolution to the dilemma is not to abandon liberalism outright. No other philosophy has so powerfully articulated the dignity of the individual and freed so many from the clutches of ignorance and oppression. In a meaningful sense, liberalism is a necessary evolution in the history of the human race, a sort of growing into its own. However, as with all maturation, there are periods of uncertainty in which our greatly expanded consciousness, in severing itself from the inheritance of the past, must stumble in finding its own way.

But in affirming liberalism, we cannot continue down this path without dire intervention. Liberalism alone is not and has never been enough. Without meaningful efforts to engage in a transformation of previous religious values or the wholesale creation of new binding social ideas, we enter a period in which either socialism or ethnonationalism will reign. After a brutal 20th century in which both ascended to political power in the West, sometimes in succession and oftentimes simultaneously, we can no longer be excused in feigning surprise at the popularity of totalizing ideologies on our own shores.

The only solid path before us lies in generating new forms of spiritual authority that replenish rather than consume our moral fabric. We need to suffocate the growing embers of brittle pseudo-religions, and move beyond the sanitized value-neutrality of a proceduralism that can only shrug its shoulders at escalating cultural conflict. What we need is not necessarily a religion in the traditional sense. Be it a vision of virtue or a new morality, we must admit that certain substantive commitments must take place over mere proceduralism. Böckenförde teaches us that there is no free lunch. Guaranteeing liberty is no sufficient condition for its existence.

Where could we find the ground for a new spirituality? We could find it in geopolitical competition. We could find it in rehabilitating Classical virtue. We could find it in religious revival. We could find it in charismatic individuals, exemplars of excellence. In tandem with a rejuvenated liberalism that acknowledges its reliance on thick cultural values, our answer to this question offers an opportunity for a rebirth of the West. Though can such a powerful idea ever originate from a position of needful self-consciousness? The very articulation of this question in the open is a sign of our predicament, and perhaps also the precondition for its resolution.

Transcending the cultural morass of the times, we must look for spiritual deliverance in the West. The hard-won fruits of liberalism depend on it.

1. America is in many ways the country of Locke, the foremost philosopher of property as fundamental right. Only in a Lockean, capitalist context does our founding story make sense. What other great nation was founded upon such a strong revulsion to taxation? The Boston Tea Party was a tax protest, and our founding slogan is “No taxation without representation.” To those who believe the Revolution was only about political rights, consider that the Constitution was created after much deliberation from our greatest political minds in Philadelphia. It emerged without any protections for civil liberties. The Bill of Rights was only inserted in response to political backlash from Anti-Federalists worried about a monarchical federal power. Our founding fathers could only have been so confident in the centrality of property — and thus acquisitiveness — in their new nation if they had taken for granted the moral character of its Christian nation as an eternal constant.