Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere

Postsecular Publics

R. Braidotti, B. Blaagaard, T. Graauw, E. Midden, R. Braidotti, B. Blaagaard, T. Graauw, E. Midden, Kenneth A. Loparo, R. Braidotti, B. Blaagaard, T. Graauw, E. Midden, Tobijn de Graauw

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137401144
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Religion-fuelled terrorism and attacks on freedom of expression have recently drawn headlinesacrossEurope, either in protest or in support of extreme political or religious persuasions. This books explores interdisciplinary perspectives on public discussions of liberal-secular freedoms and their implications in a postsecular world.

1

Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe?

Tariq Modood

By secularism or more specifically, political secularism, I mean institutional arrangements such that religious authority and religious reasons for action and political authority and political reasons for action are distinguished; so, political authority does not rest on religious authority and the latter does not dominate political authority. Support for such arrangements can be derived from a religion or a religious authority, and certainly are supported by many religious people.¹ On this very broad conception of political secularism, there is no necessary, absolute separation of religion and political rule, let alone that the state should be hostile to religion, though, of course, such radical views are also amongst those recognizable as political secularism. Many different institutional arrangements and many different political views and ideologies, democratic and anti-democratic, liberal and illiberal, pro-religion and anti-religion, are consistent with this minimal conception of secularism: the non-domination of political authority by religious authority. I take subscription to this idea to be central to modernity and therefore one of the dominant ideas of the twentieth century. I do not mean that everybody in modern societies agrees with this view and, of course, like all ideas, it is not perfectly or purely manifested in any actual case, and people will disagree about the specific cases. Nevertheless, like democracy, political secularism is a hegemonic idea that most people actively and passively support and few argue against in a full-throated way.

An increasing number of academics think that in recent years something highly significant, possibly epochal, has happened to this state of affairs. Established modern societies are producing critics of this taken-for-granted idea in their midst and emergent modern societies do not seem to be smoothly following in the path that led to the historical ascendancy of political secularism. My interest is specifically in Western Europe. Jürgen Habermas, who has Western Europe very much at the forefront of his mind, has famously announced we are currently witnessing a transition from a secular to a ‘postsecular society’ in which ‘secular citizens’ have to express a previously denied respect for ‘religious citizens’, who should be allowed, even encouraged, to critique aspects of contemporary society and to find solutions to its problems from within their religious views (Habermas, 2006). Instead of treating religion as subrational and a matter of private concern only, religion is once again to be recognized as a legitimate basis of public engagement and political action. Some have gone further and speak of a global crisis. Even quite sober academics speak today of ‘a contemporary crisis of secularism’ (Scherer, 2010: 4) and that ‘today, political secularisms are in crisis in almost every corner of the globe’ (Jakelić, 2010: 3). Olivier Roy, in an analysis focused on France writes of ‘the crisis of the secular state’(Roy, 2007) and Rajeev Bhargava of the ‘crisis of the secular state in Europe’ (Bhargava, 2010, 2011).²

Of course there is a larger and more specifically sociological thesis about ‘desecularization’ across the world, about the development of modern economies and institutions without a decline, and indeed by some reversal of an earlier decline in religious belief and practice (Berger, 1999). My interest is limited to the phenomenon of public religion and of how religion is fighting back from its political marginalization. Across the globe, religious groups are protesting against perceived demotion or marginalization in the public space. There is a sense of actual or potential marginality, both culturally and politically, of losing the public space that should rightfully, at least partly, belong to one (Jurgensmeyer, 1994; Marty and Appleby, 1994). This can lead to protest and even anger and an assertive politics. Yet, while in most parts of the world the protestors seek to restore a real, or more probably imagined past – a golden age before the marginalization – this is not the case in Western Europe.³ More fundamentally, while in the other regions there is a sense that a religious majority has been or is being marginalized, in Western Europe, the group most expressing its sense of marginalization is a minority. So, while the religionist agitation in the US, the Muslim world, and India is about the status and re-empowerment of the religious majority, of making the country in the image of the religious majority, the issue in Europe is about the status of a minority and its right to change the countries that it has recently become part of or is trying to be accepted as part of. In so far as the dominant religion, Christianity, exhibits a new found political assertiveness, it is in reaction to the minority presence and politics and in a context of continuing decline in Christian religiosity and church membership. The majoritarian reaction is sometimes in terms of a sympathetic multiculturalist or multifaith accommodation but all too often, and growingly, in secularist and Christianist oppositional modes. The majority are reacting to the minority, not to the felt constraints of ‘secularism’ and so the form of the challenge is not a religious resurgence but an ethno-religious multiculturalism – indeed, not postsecularism but secularism, or neo-secularism, is one of the leading majoritarian responses, especially in France.

The accommodation of Muslims in Western Europe

There is no endogenous slowing down in secularization in relation to organized religion, attendance at church services, and traditional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. For example, to illustrate with the British case, church attendance of at least once a month amongst white people has steadily declined from about 20 per cent in 1983 to about 15 per cent in 2008 and with each younger age cohort (Voas and Crockett, 2005; BRIN, 2011; Kaufmann, Goujon, and Skirbekk, 2013). Which is not to say that religion has disappeared or is about to but for many it has become more in the form of ‘belief without belonging’ (Davie, 1994) or spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005) or ‘implicit religion’ (Bailey, 1997). For example, while belief in a personal God has gone down from over 40 per cent in the middle of the twentieth century to less than 30 per cent by its end, belief in a spirit or life source has remained steady at around 35–40 per cent and belief in the soul has actually increased from less than 60 per cent in the early 1980s to an additional 5–10 per cent today (BRIN, 2011). All these changes, however, are highly compatible with political secularism if not with scientism or other rationalistic philosophies. Whether the decline of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or new ways of being religious or spiritual, neither is creating a challenge for political secularism. Non-traditional forms of Christian or post-Christian religion in Western Europe are, in the main, not attempting to connect with or reform political institutions and government policies; they are not seeking recognition or political accommodation or political power.⁴

In recent decades, Western Europe has come to share the post-immigration racial and ethnic urban diversity, which has long been a characteristic of the United States.⁵ Currently, most of the largest, especially the capital, cities of north-west Europe are about 20–35 per cent non-white (i.e., people of non-European descent, including Turks). Even without further large-scale immigration, being a young, fertile population, these proportions will grow for at least one or two generations more before they stabilize, reaching or exceeding 50 per cent in some cities in the next few decades or sooner. The trend will include some of the larger urban centres of southern Europe. A significant difference between Western Europe and the US, however, is that the majority of non-whites in the countries of Europe are Muslims.⁶ With estimates of 12 million to over 17 million Muslims in Western Europe today, the Muslim population in the former EU-15 is only about three to five per cent and is relatively evenly distributed across the larger states (Peach, 2007; Pew Forum, 2010). In the larger cities, the proportion which is Muslim, however, is several times larger and growing at a faster rate than most of the population (Lutz, Skirbekk, and Testa, 2007). In this context, with the riots in the suburbs (banlieues) of Paris and elsewhere, the Danish cartoon affair and other issues about offence and freedom of speech, and the proliferating bans on various forms of female Muslim dress just being a few in a series of conflicts focused on minority-majority relations, questions about integration, equality, racism, and Islam, and their relation to terrorism, security, and foreign policy, have become central to European politics.

The issue, then, driving the sense of a crisis of secularism that some sense in Western Europe is the place of religious identities, or identities that are or are perceived to be an ethno-religious identity (like British Asian Muslim or Arab Muslim in France), in the public life of the countries of the region. This multicultural challenge to secularism, is amongst the most profound political and long-term issues to arise from the post-war Western European hunger for labour migrants and the reversal of the population flows of European colonialism. The challenge is far from confined to secularism. It is a broad one: from socio-economic disadvantage and discrimination in the labour markets at one end to a constitutional status or corporate relationship with the state at the other. Moreover, the awareness of this challenge is not due to terrorism, as it began to manifest itself and was perceived before events such as 9/11; nor is it due to the fact that some Muslims, unlike other post-immigration groups, may have been involved in rowdy demonstrations and riots, because some African-Caribbeans were associated with these without raising such profound normative questions. Nor is it due to (Muslim) conservative values, especially in relation to gender and sexuality, though it is related to it.

The core element of the challenge is the primacy given by some muslims to religion as the basis of identity, organization, political representation, normative justification, etc. These matters were thought to be more or less settled (except in a few exceptional cases like Northern Ireland) till some Muslims started to assert themselves as Muslims in the public sphere of various West European countries. Some have thought that primacy could be given to, say, gender, ethnicity, or class; others have thought that primacy should not be given to any one or even a few of these social categories as identity self-concepts, but very few thought that religion should be in the select set (Modood, 2005; Modood, Triandafyllidou, and Zapata-Barrero, 2006).

Multiculturalism

It is not the mere presence of Muslims or Islam that creates a challenge all by itself. It is the presence of Muslims mediated by or in interaction with contemporary values of European states and politics. In particular, we should attend to two key complexes of political ideas, norms and practices which predate and are independent of Muslim immigrant politics but which make available a certain political opportunity structure for Muslims to make claims which create majoritarian and secularist anxieties. Muslims have been able to adapt and utilize these evolving political complexes and this gives a distinctive character to the phenomenon of interest.

The first one of these is not to do with secularism or desecularization or public assertive religious, per se, but with claims for accommodation from within Western polities and normative viewpoints in relation to minorities generally. Let us call these debates and activities ‘multiculturalism’. These discourses and practices of non-discrimination, rights, equal accommodation, and respect are largely discourses from within Western European normative debates, norms, and laws (though influenced by a larger climate of opinion led particularly by Anglophone, colonial settler, and immigration-based countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia). They are picked up post-immigration and when Muslims or other groups utilize them, the reference is to the status and resources available to other groups in the West, not ‘homelands’.⁷ The second complex I have in mind is the religion-state linkages and support structures that exist in Western European countries, which I will call ‘moderate secularism’.

Multicultural citizenship refers to the presence of ideas, ethos, and politics of ‘difference’, which allows for the articulation and legitimacy (and illegitimacy) of dealing with certain kinds of claims, in ways that are deemed acceptable and satisfactory. Briefly, I mean three things here (for further details, see Modood, 2007). Firstly, there is the critique of those portrayals of political systems, including contemporary liberal democratic states like those of Western Europe, as consisting of universal norms and rights. The critique is that such norms and rights are inflected by particular historical traditions and national cultures which give distinctive interpretations to ideas such as individual and group, public and private, rights and obligations, and so create a de facto second-class citizenship for those who do not identify with that culture or are not privileged within it. Secondly, that despite legal definitions and idealized norms of equality between all individuals, many people see either themselves and/or other citizens not just as individuals or citizens but in terms of membership of groups, such as women, black people, or Muslims. These identities are often imposed upon individuals as markers of social inferiority but equally (and simultaneously) can be forms of self-identity and pride and indeed resistance to inferiorization. Given this, thirdly, the challenge of creating equality between historically privileged and disadvantaged groups within a citizenry is unlikely to be achieved by acting as if group identities no longer exist. In relation to colour racism such pretence is called the pursuit of colour-blind policies and, by analogy, one can speak of gender blindness and Muslim blindness in relation to citizenship equality. It is contended that full civic equality will require not just policies treating all citizens as individuals but, additionally, policies, institutions, and discourses which ‘recognize’ (Taylor, 1994) that certain group identities are victims of negative treatment, are not going to disappear, and should not be required to disappear. So the best approach is a politics of respect which turns these negative identities into positively valued ones and to remake our sense of common citizenship and nationality to include them. This is my understanding of political multiculturalism based on the ideas of political theorists such as Charles Taylor, Bhikhu Parekh, Iris Young, and Will Kymlicka, though I understand that it is not what many Western European politicians, journalists, and social commentators who are critical of multiculturalism may mean by multiculturalism (Modood, 2007, 2011a). My point is that it is the presence, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introductory Notes
• 1  Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe?
• 2  Reawakening Enlightenment? Contesting Religion and Politics in European Public Discourse
• 3  (Pro)claiming Tradition: The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Roots of Dutch Society and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism
• 4  Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies
• 5  The Eradication of Transcendence
• 6  The Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul in Contemporary Philosophy
• 7  More Proof, If Proof Were Needed: Spectacles of Secular Insistence, Multicultural Failure, and the Contemporary Laundering of Racism
• 8  Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice: Postsecularism, Postcolonialism, and Digital Culture
• 9  Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular; or How Real Is Real Estate?
• 10  Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, and the Secularity of Pluralism
• 11  Towards a More Inclusive Feminism: Defining Feminism through Faith
• 12  Blasphemous Feminist Art: Incarnate Politics of Identity in Postsecular Perspective
• 13  Conclusion: The Residual Spirituality in Critical Theory: A Case for Affirmative Postsecular Politics
• Index