Laicità, bilateralità, serendipità. Dalla transizione ecologica all’innovazione dei paradigmi nei rapporti tra Stato e confessioni

The essay offers a reappraisal of State-religion relations through the lenses of innovation and serendipity. After defining innovation as the intentional and systemic transformation of the possible into the real, the Author draws on Christian Busch’s theory of serendipity – articulated through agency, surprise and value, and unfolding in the phases of enabling potentiality and materialization – as a technique for governing institutional uncertainty. This category is then connected with the constitutional principle of good administration (Art. 97 of the Italian Constitution), with the supreme principle of secularism (laicità), and with the principle of bilaterality (Art. 8), in order to outline a model of “serendipitous bilaterality” capable of turning religious pluralism into an opportunity for institutional learning. The argument is tested through the analysis of the ecological transition of places of worship, where the exemption from energy-certification duties has gradually evolved, through dialogue between public administrations and religious communities, into a laboratory of sustainable co-administration. Secularism thus emerges as a generative principle of normative cooperation, and sustainability as a shared semantics among law, technique and faith.