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What Comes After the Critique of Secularism?

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What Comes After the Critique of Secularism? WHAT COMES AFTER THE CRITIQUE OF SECULARISM? SPONSORED BY THE UC BERKELEY CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION APRIL 13, 2017 PANEL TWO 10:45-12:15: Rival Versions of Secularism in European Political Thought Moderator: David Bates Udi Greenberg, “Freedom of Religion, Protestantism, and Catholic Polemics” Over the last few years, several prominent critics of secularism have focused their attention on freedom of religion. Europeans and Americans, these scholars claim, have sought to disseminate their conceptions of religious liberty on the non-Western world, unnecessarily intervening in complex conflicts (especially in the Middle East) under the guise of promoting religious and political freedom. Yet according to such critics, such interventions come to tragic end because the concept of religious liberty is not neutral. Rather, it stems from Protestant conceptions of religion. Like their Protestant forefathers, so the argument goes, current-day Western leaders privilege the right of individual belief and worship over all other forms of religious practice. They are therefore unable to grasp that promoting these ideas in non-Western societies, where communities and individuals think differently about religion, is bound to be counter-productive. This paper will claim that despite this critique’s powerful insight, it mischaracterizes the history of religious freedom. First, Protestants in the modern era rarely focused on individual rights as the core of religion. Deep into the twentieth century, many assumed that religious freedom required legal and political mechanisms that would allow collective communities and even the state to regulate individuals’ religious behavior. This indicates that contemporary focus on individual rights as the source of religious freedom is a recent shift, a product of contemporary debates and ideas rather than the core of secularism itself. Second, it claims that the strong association of Protestantism with individualism was the product of Catholic polemics in the century before Vatican II. As part of the era’s intense Catholic- Protestant struggles, Catholics often portrayed militant secularism and individualism as the product of Protestant deviation. They described religious liberty, which was formally considered heresy before the 1960s, as the reincarnation of the Reformation’s assault on Christian unity and as a key cause for the disintegration of “natural” communities and hierarchies. It is my hope that in our discussions, we can reflect on the meaning of the overlap between such Catholic apologetics and contemporary critiques of secularism (which have very different goals), and perhaps distinguish more clearly between the alternatives they offer for contemporary dilemmas. James Chappel, “Varieties of Secularism in the Catholic Church: 1930-1960” The study of the secular is at an impasse. Scholars in “secularism studies” have done a great deal of important work, to be sure. Like capitalism, and like the nation, secularism has been placed on the map as one of the coordinates around which modern societies orient themselves. And like them, secularism has been subjected to the hermeneutics of suspicion. We are now aware of its repressive, gendered, and exclusionary effects. But has critique, as Latour put it, “run out of steam”? We can no longer naïvely defend secularism as liberatory, but what are we to put in its place? This paper will suggest that the “varieties of secularism” literature provides untapped potential in this regard. Instead of seeking to peer beyond the minotaur of the secular towards a mystical post-secular future, scholars might begin to think harder about different kinds of secularism. Previous typologies of the “varieties of secularism,” provided primarily by political scientists, have focused on constitutional arrangements, resulting in a rather arid picture of the monumental process through which religious communities grappled with the secular. Building on my research on twentieth-century European Catholicism, this paper will argue for a different approach, and one more in dialogue with the insights of secularism studies. The question is not only how states recognize religious authorities and law, but how religious communities themselves articulate the distinction between public rationality and private religiosity that is at the heart of secularism—an articulation that is centered, due to the nature of secularism itself, on the explosive questions of gender and the family. Within the Catholic Church of the twentieth century, two different forms of secularism emerged. The way to understand the explosive conflicts within the Church between the 1930s and the 1960s is not to claim, as previous scholars have, that some supported secular modernity and others did not. The conflict, instead, was between two opposing forms of secularism, built around two opposing ways to imagine the private/public split and two opposing visions of the family. This sounds highly abstract, but it turns out that one of these forms of secularism legitimated collaboration with fascists, and the other became a tool for resistance. This analysis suggests one way to move beyond the critique of secularism. In place of de- fetishizing critiques of secularism, I suggest reframing our analysis around the highly diverse ways in which religious communities themselves navigate the secular—sometimes in emancipatory ways, and sometimes in repressive ones. Carlo Invernezzi Accetti, “Beyond Secularism and Establishment: The Idea of Religious ‘Inspiration’ in Politics in the Intellectual Tradition of Christian Democracy” The question of the relation between politics and religion is at the center of many debates in contemporary political theory and science. Yet, these debates mostly take place within the terms of a rather narrow set of categories, pitting “secularism” on one hand and religious “establishment” on the other (and, more recently, “post-secularism” somewhere in between). This paper proposes to expand the set of categories for discussing the issue by returning to an intellectual tradition that has received little attention in contemporary debates on politics and religion, despite its manifest historical importance in informing the constitutional frameworks of many European and Latin American countries: the ideology of Christian Democracy. The argument advanced is that in the work of several highly influential thinkers writing from within this tradition in the middle part of the 20th century – such as Luigi Sturzo, Jacques Maritain and Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde – is developed a distinctive model of Church-State relations, based on the idea of religious “inspiration” of politics, which cuts across the more familiar distinction between “secularism” and religious “establishment”. As well as reconstructing the characteristic features of this model, and showing its key role in informing the legal and institutional frameworks of several European and Latin American countries, the paper also assesses it from a normative point of view by relating it to some of the central questions in the contemporary political theory debates on the relationship between politics and religion. SECOND PANEL BIOGRAPHIES Udi Greenberg is an associate professor of European history at Dartmouth College. His first book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, 2014), was awarded the Council for European Studies’ prize for best book in the field 2014-2015. He is currently working on a book-length project that explores the transformation of Catholic-Protestant relations in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, from animosity to cooperation. James Chappel is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2012, and spent a year at the University of Chicago Society of Fellows before moving to Duke. His first book, forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2018, is entitled Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Secularism and the Remaking of Europe, 1918-1968. It is a transnational, trans-war history of the European Catholic Church, asking how Catholics came to accept the secular condition of human rights and religious freedom. His work on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe has been published in Modern Intellectual History, New German Critique, Rethinking History, and Contemporary European History. He is at work on a second project that investigates the imagination and governance of aging in postwar Europe. Carlo Invernizzi Accetti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College of the City University of New York and Research Associate at the Center for European Studies of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). His book entitled Relativism and Religion. Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes was published by Columbia University Press in 2015. He is currently working on a second book entitled What is Christian Democracy? The Forgotten Ideology, under review at Cambridge University Press. .
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