A genuine understanding of religious traditions has become a theopolitical necessity in the West. While many secularists expected an inevitable decline of religious belief as Enlightenment modernity took hold around the globe, it seems that the exact opposite has occurred. As the authors of God?s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politic wrote in 2009, ?Over the past four decades, religion?s influence on politics has reversed its decline and become more powerful on every continent and across every major world religion.? These authors argue that despite the prediction of the ?secularization theory,? the twenty-first century can ironically be coined ?God?s Century.? In other words, religion has become and will likely continue to be a vital player in the global political realm. With regard to Islam in particular, Europe is now facing an influx of Muslim immigrants that does not fit this myth of the emergence and death of religion, does not subscribe to the seventeenth-century theists? understanding of religion, and rejects the religious/secular divide imposed by European colonialists. For many new residents of Western Europe,religion forms the central fabric of their lives. How will a post-Christian Europe absorb these new residents into their local communities? And how will it develop an understanding of Islam that does not reduce it to modern universal principles applicable to anyone or equate it with extreme acts of violence? Instead of shoehorning Islam into modern fabrications of ?religion,? fruitful dialogue could emerge if we read Muslim religious claims through Christian theological traditions rather than in spite of them.

Pierre Manent persuasively argues in Beyond Radical Secularism (2016) that Europeans (in his case, his fellow French citizens) are ill prepared both to incorporate Muslims into their political community and to understand Islam. This is due not only to prejudices and widespread ignorance about Islam, even though plenty of both abound. This limitation also results from Europeans? having lost touch with their own Christian roots, whose laicité vocabulary is ill equipped to engage Muslims in serious terms. Manent suggests toward the end of his book that the Catholic Church is poised to work as a mediator between the secular West and Islam: ?Given the spiritual fragmentation that affects the Western world, [the Catholic Church] is the fixed point that is concerned to relate itself intelligently to all the other points and to which the other points can try to relate.? An interpretation of Islam from within the Catholic tradition in particular offers an appreciation of one tradition from within the heart of another. Catholic interpretations of Islam have been riddled, of course, with dangerous medieval caricatures and violent polemic that continue into the present. This theological tradition offers rich resources we can use to obtain a fresh understanding of Islam. The Catholic tradition offers intellectual resources and institutional networks to serve as mediator between Islam and the secular West since it has achieved a differentiation of the sacred from the secular that acknowledges the distinctiveness of the political realm without yielding to the thinness of the secular myth.

It shares a guarded openness to the political liberalism of the West while remaining grounded in a religious worldview that is aligned in many ways with the Islamic tradition. Many Catholics still inhabit Charles Taylor?s ?enchanted world,? despite living and working in modern cities and exhibiting many aspects of the ?buffered self.? The Church has been understood to be late in embracing the modern world. But, as Ulrich Lehner persuasively argues in his The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (2016), ?It was Catholicism that, at least during the first few decades of the eighteenth century, was able to interact productively with Enlightenment thought. Only the anti-clerical and anti-Christian attacks of Enlighteners?and especially the terror of the French Revolution?put a stop to this conversation.? To be sure, that engagement did not translate into an uncritical embrace of Enlightenment liberalism, but it did bear fruit in an openness to religious freedom and democratic forms of government during Vatican II. It is the argument of this book that the Catholic Church is particularly equipped to engage with Muslims in theological terms and that this will lead to salutary political consequences. (Excerpted from Chapter 1).