Provincializing Postsecularism: Critical Reflections On New Western Civil Religion

This paper aims to denounce the provincialism of the European postsecularism, considering that an insufficient pluralism was often invoked by European Union in order to justify the cultural failure of her integration’s process. The Postsecularist orientation risks, if applied without an adequate sociological and intercultural reflection, to become a new civil religion. In the first part I will bring up the consequences of this critical reflection on the actually relation between State and religion in the specific context of Italian society,  lacerated between a public secularism and a private Christianity.  In the second part, I will try to apply to the European postsecularism, as discursive regime of the European identity, two critical hypothesis emerged from the Post-colonial Studies: the suggestion to “Provincialize Europe” and the critic to her “Cultural Hegemony”.  Provincializing Postsecularism does not mean, of course, repudiate or abandon secularism, but thinking about how to renew it. In Italy the transition to post-secularism can not be seen as a simple historical transition, but also as a case of translation: translation of plural memories, religious tradition, desires of believers. In the third part, I appeal to the hermeneutic tradition of Paul Ricouer, trying to connect a new translation of postsecularism to a new phenomenology of the Italian believer, hoping that the recognition of the religious pluralism can contribute to the constitution of a lay European political community.