Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age

Michael Rectenwald, Rochelle Almeida, George Levine

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781614519317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

Global Secularisms addresses the state of and prospects for secularism globally. Drawing from multiple fields, it brings together theoretical discussion and empirical case studies that illustrate "on-the-ground, " extant secularisms as they interact with various religious, political, social, and economic contexts. Its point of departure is the fact that secularism is plural and that various secularisms have developed in various contexts and from various traditions around the world. Secularism takes on different social meanings and political valences wherever it is expressed. The essays collected here provide numerous points of contact between empirical case studies and theoretical reflection. This multiplicity informs and challenges the conceptual theorization of secularism as a universal doctrine. Analyses of different regions enrich our understanding of the meanings of secularism, providing comparative range to our notions of secularity. Theoretical treatments help to inform our understanding of secularism in context, enabling readers to discern what is at stake in the various regional expressions of secularity globally. While the bulk of the essays are case-based research, the current thinking of leading theorists and scholars is also included.

Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida

Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age

By now, it is nearly a commonplace observation to note that secularism – until quite recently simply assumed to be the basis of modern nation states and the public sphere – is a contested and even “beleaguered” cultural, social, and political formation.1 Once regarded as the sine qua non of public democratic life and the requisite integument of international relations, the secular was taken to be unmarked ideologically, as the mere absence or negation of obsolescing “religion.” Linked to this regard for secularism as an unmarked, neutral category was the standard secularization thesis, according to which modernity itself was characterized by, if not understood as predicated upon, the progressive decline of religion – its relegation to the private sphere, its diminishing hold on individual belief, and its loss of authority in separate and increasingly differentiated spheres of discourse and activity.

However, within the past two or three decades, both the status of secularism as a relatively unproblematic feature of modernity and the secularization thesis as a standing explanation for its regnant status have been deeply shaken. A crisis of secularism is widely recognized. Secularism is currently a vexed topic fraught with complex and difficult global implications and consequences. While scholarship on secularism has seen a dramatic upsurge, questions related to secularism have become increasingly urgent and involve enormous real-world implications. These include the battles over “SharĪʿah law” in Europe and the Middle East, and the renewed importance of religion in the politics of India and Turkey. They also include the challenges posed for and by laicism in France. One might also point to the emergence of the “new atheism” and its political meanings in the West, and the battles over the authority of science in the United States. At stake also is secularism’s supposed role for arbitrating armed religious conflict, and its place in political and legal struggles over the shape of the public sphere in multiple contexts. The questions involving secularism prove essential and significant.

In recent years, secularism has been taken to task not only for its differential treatment of various religions within the state but also, and more fundamentally, for its putative imposition of cultural norms and values, political prerogatives, and hegemonic impulses within and across political landscapes and the public sphere. As the chapters in this volume make clear, secularism has been far from a neutral arbiter of religious practices and expression in its various contexts. Including other charges, secularism has been seen as deeply implicated in colonial and imperialist projects. Meanwhile, the standard secularization thesis, once a staple of social science theory, has been called into question, if not outright reversed, even by some of its more prominent, erstwhile proponents. Some scholars question the assumption that the modern social order is undergoing, or indeed has ever undergone, the process of secularization.2 In the late 1990s, pointing to the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States, the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the growth of fundamentalist movements and religious political parties in the Muslim world (even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the upsurge of ethno-religious conflict in international affairs, sociologist Peter Berger recanted his earlier faith in secularization and descried a new “religious resurgence” or desecularization.3 Similarly, Jürgen Habermas, a major social theorist and signal advocate of secularism in the public sphere, has attended to the persistence of religion and called for a new role for it in politics and public life, as well as adoption of the term “post-secularism” to describe the relations between the secular and the religious in the current era.4 Indeed, while important thinkers have reasserted versions of the secularization thesis, and others have attempted to retain it with significant revisions,5 there is little doubt that it has been significantly weakened. Secularism and secularization, that is, are no longer regarded unquestionably as the vaunted pillars of modern democratic society, or modernity itself.

On the other hand, some thinkers insist that secularism, despite post-secular claims to the contrary, represents the only means of negotiating sectarian strife and establishing and maintaining a democratic state. Secular humanists continue to insist that secularism is the best way to achieve real human flourishing. Yet the very meanings of the words “secularism” and “religion” have been questioned, and the secular/religious binary has been significantly troubled.6 For some, the crisis of secularism represents a significant potential loss. The questions at stake include whether secularism, promoted by the West as a universal doctrine and since debunked from its perch and understood as provincial and particularistic, can be recuperated and its incomplete universalism universalized, its secularism (re)secularized. 7

Given the dynamic and shifting roles and meanings of secularism in contemporary societies, a brief review of its history may be in order. Etymologically, the notion of the “secular” was originally contrasted not to religion, but to eternity. Derived from the Latin, saeculum, the word secular is related to time, and the French word for century, siècle. The secular thus stood for occurrences in worldly time as opposed to otherworldly eternity, to temporal as opposed to spiritual power. From late thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, the secular came to refer to clergy who lived outside of monastic seclusion, serving parishioners as they sought to live Christian lives under secular conditions. The cloistered monks on the other hand were referred to as “religious.” Thus, the word secular signified the worldly or mundane, and also became closely associated with the profane in contrast to the sacred. From the designation of a lesser state of religiosity within the western Christian imaginary, the secular eventually came to refer to that which stood outside of the Church altogether, as an antipode to the religious. Secularization, meanwhile, first referred to the expropriation of church property during the Protestant Reformation, and later was extended to designate any transference of religious authority to persons or institutions with non-religious functions. In contemporary parlance, secularism has connoted the separation of church and state, a supposedly neutral space for arbitrating religious and other claims, or a successor to disappearing religion(s). Secularization has signified the (progressive) decline in importance and influence of religion in the political sphere, public life and private commitment, and has become nearly synonymous with modernity itself.

Secularism received renewed scholarly attention with the publication of Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age in 2007.8 In this arguably paradigm- shifting study of secularism and secularization, Taylor undertook a complete revision of the accounts of secularization, taking the secularization thesis to task for its reliance on what he called “subtraction stories,” or narratives of the progressive loss and compartmentalization of religious belief attendant upon the rise of science, industrialization, urbanization, and so forth. Drawing on Max Weber’s notion of pre-modern enchantment and modern disenchantment, Taylor argues that, as a consequence of disenchantment resulting from religious reformism that began before the Protestant Reformation, faith was ultimately undermined as a default position, requiring that “belief” become a matter of positive declaration. Against the subtraction stories of the standard secularization thesis, Taylor advances his notion of “secularity 3,” which describes a condition comprising both belief and unbelief, and everything in between. Unbelief ultimately became a distinct possibility for a growing number, including non-elites, for the first time. According to Taylor, the secular age is marked not by the progressive rise of unbelief or decline of religion or religiosity, but rather by a condition under which choices are opened up for belief, unbelief, a suspension between the two, as well as other creedal commitments. Secularity in Taylor’s third sense is a new “naïve framework” for all those living within modernity, indeed representing a space opened up for unbelief but also amounting to an overarching optative state that comprehends unbelief and belief and the irresolution and continuing challenge that they pose to one another. But secularity also embodies a “fully exclusive humanism,” which greatly pressures religious belief and conditions its fragility.

This conception of secularity significantly challenges the standard secularization thesis and redefines secular modernity in terms of a new “social imaginary” or background condition of lived experience. Quite apart from sociological accounts of church attendance and other indices of secular ascendance or putative religious decline, Taylor’s study obviates or skirts such quantitative evidence in favor of a historical narrative that arrives at an existential-phenomenological predicament characterizing modernity. Against the positing of a new desecularization or post-secular dispensation, Taylor’s conception of secularity theoretically accounts for the fragility and vacillations of religious belief and unbelief, perhaps even making sense of the putative “religious resurgence” observed by Peter Berger and others.9 Certainly, causal factors would need to be located for such resurgences, but secularity comprehends such fluctuations as possibilities in advance. Furthermore, the notion of secularity as developed by Taylor may help us to comprehend the nature or quality of religious commitment under modernity. For Taylor, not only is belief “fragilized” by unbelief but also its very structure is changed, since believers, along with unbelievers, all operate under the “immanent frame” of secularity. The question becomes whether or not belief – in transcendence in particular – is any longer what it once was. The answer to this question may prove important for how we regard the various forms of religiosity across the globe today.

Taylor’s work prompted several significant responses, including Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Rethinking Secularism, and The Joys of Secularism, among others.10 Given its exclusive focus on the West, A Secular Age has been faulted not only for its apparent provinciality or ethnocentrism, but also, and more importantly, for its intra-Christian understanding of the development of western secularism. Although Taylor provided an explanation for this exclusivity – the task at hand already threatened to exceed the compass of a single work; other studies might address the historical development of secularism in various regions – Taylor’s internalist perspective, it has been argued, misses the role played by non-Christian societies. Like Taylor, Talal Asad also figures the secular as a social formation that developed initially within Latin Christendom in particular.11 However, unlike Taylor, Asad sees western secularism’s development as contingent upon the West’s interactions and exploits in the Middle East and elsewhere. According to Asad, in its management of colonies, the West encountered diverse belief systems and cultural practices that it came to understand in terms of “religion.” Its understanding of these beliefs and practices was conditioned upon Protestant Christianity as the context for the development of western secularism. For Asad, secularism is far from a neutral or innocent formation; rather, it is fully implicated in colonial and imperialist projects. Yet Asad does not figure secularism as simply a colonialist imposition. Rather, secularism developed differently as it interacted with different religious and regional contexts. Secularism is not the mere unfolding of an Enlightenment universal within particular local situations. The secular and the religious are co-constituting formations and secularism is always contingent upon its relationship with the particularity of its religious other. Thus, while Asad, and Saba Mahmood, whose work follows in his paradigmatic footsteps, treat secularism as a western construct that is not easily transported and transposed onto other contexts, those contexts nevertheless condition the development of secularism. Likewise, secularism should always be understood as plural and variable.

Along similar although not identical lines, the political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has argued for the existence of a distinctive (although not “unique” or conceptually novel) Indian secularism that developed outside of the reach of European colonialism and which he argues currently provides much needed lessons for western democracies.12 Bhargava serves to underscore the multiplicity and substantive content of secularism, but also its contingent and variable character. Secularism is not an empty container or timeless wall between the state and the public sphere on the one hand, and religious belief and practice on the other. Rather, it is purposive and content-full, with “positive” values of its own, which change depending on the context. If anything, Bhargava sees secularism as a flexible and necessary concept of modernity, and one that we should work to refurbish and support.

Following the work of Bhargava, as well as Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini,13 in this volume, the editors take as a point of departure the fact that secularism is plural, that various secularisms have developed in various contexts and from various traditions around the world, and that secularism takes on different social and cultural meanings and political valences wherever it is expressed. Further, in accord with the first volume in this series, we hold that “[u]niversalist theories of secularization are singularly ill-suited for exploring secularities beyond the West."14 At the same time, however, we acknowledge the hegemonic desiderata of secularism’s universalizing claims. That is, we see the importance of recognizing secularism as an Enlightenment legacy that exhibits universalizing ambitions. Thus, it is necessary to keep in mind both the doctrinal claims of secularism – its supposed difference from religion(s), its association with “progress” and modernity, its assertions of rationality and neutrality, its claims of exclusivity in connection with public life – as well as how this doctrinal logic unfolds in various contexts. Given this conception of secularism as both universalizing doctrine and particular instantiation, the chapters in this volume provide numerous points of contact between theoretical/historical reflection and empirical case studies on secularisms in context. With this anthology, we aim to fill a chasm between sweeping theoretical analyses of secularism on the one hand and accounts relating to the lived experiences of the formations as they have evolved in different parts of the world on the other. We believe it is unlike any another work in the field for its delivery of both theoretical scope and empirical granularity on a global scale.

Recognizing that secular traditions have developed differently around the world and that this multiplicity must necessarily inform and complicate the conceptual theorization of secularism as a universal doctrine delivered wholesale from the Enlightenment, we have sought to gain clearer and more nuanced appreciations of the complexities of the concept of secularism from empirical case studies. Analyses of different regions, we believe, enrich our understanding of the meanings of secularism, providing comparative range to our notions of secularity, while adding dimension to our understanding of regional conditions and conflicts themselves. We maintain that theoretical and historical reflections over the meanings of secularism benefit from such empirical studies, serving to illustrate theories while also challenging traditional understandings that otherwise may remain unchallenged from within the more or less purely theoretical debates. At the same time, theoretical/historical treatments of secularism, we believe, help to inform our understanding of secularisms in context, enabling us to discern the principles at stake in the various regional expressions of secularity and/or reli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 1
• Part I: Histories & Theories of the (Post)Secular
• Stijn Latré The Fall of the Sparrow: On Axial Religion and Secularization as the Goal of History
• Michael Rectenwald Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Secularism and its Contemporary Post-Secular Implications
• Philip Kitcher Secularism as a Positive Position
• Religion and Post-Secularity: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere The Advantages of Quantitative Studies for Dialectology
• Patrick Loobuyck Religious Education in Habermasian Post-Secular Societies
• Rajeev Bhargava We (In India) Have Always Been Post-Secular
• George Levine The Troubles of An Unrepentant Secularist
• Bruce Robbins Atheists in Foxholes
• Part II: Case Studies: Global Secularisms
• Rochelle Almeida Secularism and 'Gazetted' Holidays in India
• Arolda Elbasani and Murat Somer Muslim Secularisms in the European Context
• Ayşe Seda Müftügil Education and Religious Minorities in Turkey: the Story behind the Introduction of Compulsory Religion Courses
• Jonathan R. Beloff The Historical Relationship between Religion and Government in Rwanda
• Jonathan Scott Secularism from Below: On the Bolivarian Revolution
• Gregorio Bettiza Post-secular Expertise and American Foreign Policy
• Part II: Case Studies: Global Secularisms
• Roberta J. Newman When the Secular is Sacred: The Memorial Hall to the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre and the Gettysburg National Military Park as Pilgrimage Sites
• Chika Watanabe Porous Persons: The Politics of a Nonreligious Japanese NGO
• Elayne Oliphant Circulations of the Sacred: Contemporary Art as “Cultural” Catholicism in 21 Century Paris
• Charles Louis Richter “A Deeply Held Religious Faith, and I Don't Care What It Is:” American Anti-Atheism as Nativism
• James McBride The Myth of Secularism in America
• Contributors
• Index
• Endnotes