A Surprise from Jurgen

I'm coming to the end of Philip Jenkins' God's Continent, and was very surprised by this passage quoted from Habermas' recent Time of Transitions (April 2006):

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Jenkins quotes further from the book Habermas' declaration that he is "enchanted by the seriousness and consistency" of Aquinas,

a spiritual figure who was able to prove his authenticity with his own resources. That contemporary religious leadership lacks an equally solid terrain seems to me an incontrovertible truth. In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community's practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete.