The dichotomy between piety and zealotry: Reflections on the relation between religiosity and democratic secularism

İçinde yaşadığımız dönemin en belirgin özelliklerinden birisi, liberal -demokratik ilkeler ekseninde belirlenmiş ve uzunca bir süredir kabul görmüş olan siyaset ve din ilişkisine dair seküler modellerin sorgulanmaya başlanmış olmasıdır. Dolayısıyla, günümüz siyasal ve hu kuk felsefesi için en önemli sorunlardan birisi, dinselliğin siyasal ve toplumsal alan içerisinde nasıl konumlandırılacağıdır. Köktenciliğin, liberal-demokratik rejimler içerisinde dinsel talep ve hareketlerin hoş görülebilmesinin sınırını belirlediğine yönelik klişe pek de yol gösterici olmamaktadır. Sorun, kabul edilebilir ve kabul edilemez dinsellik biçimleri arasındaki ayrımın nasıl çizileceğidir; ve bu ayrım genellikle sorunlu bir biçimde kişilerin yaşamlarını şekillendirirken dinsel inanç ve kanaatler inin ne oranda belirleyici olduğu üzerinden kurulmaktadır. Bu çalışma, sözkonusu ayrımı, dinsel inanç ve kanaatlerin kişilerin yaşamındaki oransal ağırlığına göndermede bulunmadan kategorik bir biçimde tanımlama çabasını içermektedir. Bu doğrultuda, dindarlık ve bağnazlık ikiliği işlenecek ve bu ikiliğin demokratik siyaset içerisinde dinsel talep ve hareketlerin kabul edilebilirliğine dair genel standartları belirmekte yardımcı olacağı iddia edilecektir.

Dindarlık ve bağnazlık ikilemi: Dinsellik ve demokratik sekülerizm ilişkisi üzerine düşünceler

It is a mark of the decades we live in that the long-standing relations between politics and religion founded along the axis of liberal-democratic principles have turned out to appear problematical. It seems now an important issue to find out how religiosity should be located within political and social terrain. The cliché that fundamentalism constitutes the limit for tolerating religious demands and movements within liberal-democratic regimes, does not help much. The real problem is how to draw the distinction between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of religiosity, and this distinction is usually drawn wrongly as a matter of weightiness of one's religious convictions in shaping one's way of life. This paper investigates the possibility of making a categorical, rather than a proportional, distinction between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of religiosity through working up a dichotomy between zealotry and piety, which can then serve as the criterion for the acceptability of religious demands and movements within democratic political spheres.

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