Despite the fact that there is no evidence of the decline of religion in Asia the problematic of “the secular” in Asia is very important, especially in its communist variant but also elsewhere. This introduction discusses a wide variety of interactions between “the religious” and “the secular” in Asia that are highlighted in the contributions to the volume.
Studies of secularism have primarily concentrated on Northern Europe and North America. The philosopher Charles Taylor (2007) has written a detailed account of the centuries-long historical development of a secular age in the Western Christianity of Euro-America. The anthropologist Talal Asad (1993) had earlier provided a genealogical account of the concept of religion and ritual, noting the legacy of Christian theological understandings. In a subsequent work, he called for an ethnography of multiple forms and consequences of secularism beyond Euro-America (Asad 2003). In a study of Europe and the Americas the sociologist Jose Casanova has outlined three elements in the so-called “secularization thesis” and shown that these are not in any necessary relation to one another.
For South Asian societies and some Southeast Asian societies, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Burma, two of the three elements of the “secularization thesis” of Jose Casanova (Casanova 1994) cannot be found at all. Firstly, a “progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices as a concomitant of levels of modernization” is absent. There is no doubt that these societies modernize their economies, go through fast urbanization, and have developed eminent institutions for scientific and technological research, but there is no decline of religion to be witnessed. A second element, namely “privatization of religion as a precondition of modern and democratic politics” is also totally absent. However, importantly, the third element can be found in these societies, namely “the institutional differentiation of the so-called secular spheres, such as state, economy, and science, from religious institutions and norms.” But even here one finds in the public sphere in Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka constant references to “the rule of Shari’a” or “the Hindu Rashtra,” or the “Rule of the Buddhist Dharma.” These can be taken as merely polemical references that do not really destroy religion’s differentiation from religion, but they are still important to the extent that they mobilize people around religious issues.
In Communist Vietnam and China it is hard to say whether there is a decline of religion, since the Communist Party controls public manifestations of religion heavily. These societies do not have democratic politics, so one cannot address that part of the secularization thesis. If there is a possible privatization of religion (for example in Christian house-churches) it may only be a result of repression. In these societies one can speak about atheist secularism as a “project” to remove religion from society rather than a historical “process” that gradually leads to privatization of religion.
The picture in the large urban centers of Asia is varied (van der Veer 2015). In South Asia, mega-cities have religious processions every day, while in Chinese mega-cities such processions are forbidden, despite their importance in Chinese religion. Urban centers like Seoul and Singapore seem at first sight totally secular with their extremely modernist city planning and shopping malls, but when one looks more closely one finds Christian mega-churches and an even closer look will enable one to find all kinds of religious practices happening in street-corner society.
For all these reasons secularization is often regarded in Asia as a Euro-American phenomenon. The debate about the secularization thesis has not yet really excited scholarship on Asian societies. However, in Asia one cannot ignore the importance of the separation of modern state institutions from religion. Here, the discussion has mostly focused on legal arrangements regarding religious institutions and communal rights. Modernization theory in the 1960s addressed the challenges of creating modern nation-states after decolonization by focusing on the difficulties in creating citizenship to replace religious (communal) allegiance. In response to such political secularism in South Asia a critique of (Western) modernity has been developed that argues that demands to replace tradition by modernity are a legacy of the colonial period. The political philosopher Ashis Nandy and the anthropologist T.N. Madan formulated in the 1990s a defense of the tolerant and syncretic nature of Indian religions that in their view has been threatened by both a fanatical secularism, carried by Nehru’s Congress Party, and a fanatical religious nationalism. Even the Communists in China and Vietnam have now gingerly started to explore the possibilities of salvaging “intangible heritage” which is often constituted by the very religious practices that they had tried to destroy for over a century. Whether one can call this a “revitalization” of religion depends very much on one’s interpretation of what happened in the long period of outright repression. Certainly the discourses of nationalism have changed in Asia from a desire to transform societies from traditional to modern to an emphasis on the national character of civilizational traditions. Official state discourses run the full gamut from an emphasis on the superior nature of Hindu civilization (India) or the notion of a superior Pan-Asian alternative to the West (Singapore) to the notion of a “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
One can conclude that the problematic of “the secular” is in fact of great importance in Asia. Some initial attempts have been made to provide alternative Asian intellectual histories for Taylor’s masterful presentation of Euro-American history (Bilgrami 2017), but one should not try to find in Asian histories the presence or absence of some historical essence that is the hallmark of modernity. Asian histories have their own problematics that should be explored on their own terms, but also through comparison. In the modern period the interaction with Western societies is crucial in those histories. Recently, van der Veer (2013) outlined the nineteenth-century formation of a “syntagmatic chain” of interconnected concepts—religion–magic–spiritualism–secularism—that was introduced to the rest of the world by colonial and imperial Western powers over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book concentrates on comparisons and contrasts in the reception and local adaptation of this interlinked conceptual chain in India and China . The ways in which these concepts were interpreted, legislated and internally absorbed has led to strikingly different results: religious nationalism is on the rise in India, while China still insists that it is an atheistic state regulating limited religious freedoms.
In this volume we seek to explore a wide set of instances of the interaction between the secular and the religious. The chapters do not give an exhaustive account of the wide variety of such interactions but rather seek to respond to the question of why most of the world remains a realm of spirits and religious expression, making the Western story of secularism recounted by Taylor into the exception, rather than the rule. To understand the apparent “exceptionality” of the West better one needs to start with a closer look at Charles Taylor’s argument. By examining interactions with the West Jose Casanova challenges in this volume Charles Taylor’s account in several provocative ways. First, he argues that we should begin the account of the secular age not in 1500 with Luther but in 1492 with Columbus. By examining the role of colonialism and imperialism in Latin America, Africa and Asia, alongside the rise of secularism in the West, one can begin to see Western secularism as intimately tied to the increasing centralized power and rise of national(ist) states in Europe. Casanova views secularization as a process of confessionalization leading to national(ist) identity. He discusses the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation not as a narrative of the buffering of the self, but as creating the conditions for nationalism through state-controlled religious confessionalization processes involving ethnic or religious communal “cleansing,” where adherence to a national (or a territorially divided and nationally supervised) church was a prerequisite to full belonging.
Western hegemonic power to impose confessionalization on colonial subjects was rarely uncontested, but it did expand quickly in certain cases of rapid capture and control (Mexico, parts of Latin America, the Philippines). In his paper, Casanova outlines an earlier form of Western Christian universalism which preceded colonialism. The Jesuits explored the possibilities and limits of conversion through acculturation in India, China and Japan. As the first transnational corporation and the first mission society, they based their efforts on a belief in the universal salvation of the souls of all men through conversion. In order to achieve inroads in a highly unified and hierarchical political and cultural space (China), Jesuits like Matteo Ricci found ways to accommodate Catholic doctrine to local practices such as ancestor worship. By redefining religious practices as cultural practices, they opened the way to a relativistic understanding of cultures which could operate without a monotheistic god as the fulcrum o...