Strange Freedom Liberal Religion and the Play of Imaginaries

Abstract

Without an external giver, like God, the Nation, or an ideological system, the sense of the world has to be formulated and enacted by humanity itself. This is typical of the modern era, and one of the difficult challenges imposed on the modern self. In this study, the starting point is the hypothesis that liberal religion, as a non-dogmatic and non-universalist undercurrent in the plurality of modern religious traditions, can be seen as a possible response to this challenge. The author states that this undercurrent represents not only a specific spiritual community, but a condition in which every modern human partakes: he formulates this as the condition of sensus liberalis. In order to analyze this condition, a theoretical lens is developed that works with a new concept of freedom: a ‘strange’ freedom already addressed by Albert Camus in the 1950s, which engages a new insight into creation as imagination. The author makes use of the current theories of social imaginaries, like in Charles Taylor’s work, of axial theory, of Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, and of the deconstructions of the relation between secular modernity and religion by Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk. Imaginaries are the spaces or ‘worlds’ created by people, but these spaces create their creators in return. In this interplay, freedom appears beyond negative or positive liberty. Nietzsche’s hymn on the “Three metamorphoses” of humanity in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra is used to clarify this complex dynamic of playful imagination.