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Introduction: Secularity Or the Post-Secular Condition

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Introduction: Secularity Or the Post-Secular Condition Notes Introduction: Secularity or the Post-Secular Condition 1. For a discussion of the ‘death of God’ discourse, see, for example, J. W. Robbins ‘Introduction: After the Death of God’, in J. D. Caputo, G. Vattimo, and J. W. Robbins (2009) After the Death of God (New York, NY: Columbia University Press), esp. at pp. 1–10. 2. Anon. (25 February 1968) ‘A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion’, New York Times, 3. 3. Once an important secularization theorist, Berger reversed his long-standing position on secularization in P. L. Berger (1999) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center). 4. For a summary of the secularization debates, see R. Warner (2010) Secularization and Its Discontents (London; New York: Continuum); D. V. A. Olson and W. H. Swatos (2000) The Secularization Debate (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers); S. Bruce (ed.) (1992) Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press); I. Katznelson and G. Stedman Jones (eds) (2010) Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). For a call to abandon the notion of secularization, at least where historians are concerned, see D. Nash (2004) ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization’s Failure as a Master Narrative’, Cultural and Social History 1, 302–25. 5. T. Asad (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 46. 6. J. Habermas (2008) ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly 25.4, 17–29. In March of 2007, Habermas delivered his now famous lecture on ‘post-secularism’ at the Nexus Institute of the University of Tilberg, Netherlands. Habermas pointed to three factors that characterize modern social orders as post-secular: 1) the broad perception that many global conflicts hinge on religious strife and the changes in public conscious- ness and weakening of confidence in the dominance of a secular outlook that such acknowledgement accedes; 2) the increased importance of religion in various public spheres; and 3) the growing presence in Europe and else- where of immigrant or ‘guest workers’ and refugees with traditional cultural backgrounds. 7. For the persistence of the secularization thesis, see S. Bruce (2002) God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub). For a signifi- cant revision, see P. Norris and R. Inglehart (2011) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Norris and Inglehart advance the ‘existential security hypothesis’ as the explanation for secularization or the lack thereof. According to this thesis, as populations 202 Notes 203 become relatively secure economically and otherwise, religiosity tends to decline. The denizens of post-industrial societies are demonstrably less reli- gious than those living in agricultural or industrial economies. Meanwhile, although secularization is increasing as regions become post-industrial, reli- gious populations are growing relative to secular ones, owing to the fact that in traditional societies the birthrate is much higher than in secular societies. 8. Asad questions the very existence of ‘modernity’ as such. 9. C. LaPorte (2013) ‘Victorian Literature, Religion, and Secularization’, Literature Compass 10.3, 277–87, at 277. 10. See, for example, O. Chadwick (1975) The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); H. Cox (1965) The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (London: Macmillan); A. D. Gilbert (1980) The Making of Post- Christian Britain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society (London: Longman); D. Martin (1978) A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Blackwell); M. H. Abrams (1971) Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, NY and London: WW Norton); and B. Willey (1956) More Nineteenth-Century Studies: A Group of Honest Doubters (New York: Harper & Row). 11. For criticism and revision of Romanticism and/as secularization, see C. Jager (2014) Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); C. Jager (2008) ‘Romanticism/ Secularization/ Secularism’, Literature Compass 5.4, 791–806; and C. Jager (2007) The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). 12. B. Holsinger (2006) ‘Literary History and the Religious Turn’, ELN 44.1, 1. 13. T. Larsen (2006) Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press). See also D. Nash (2011) ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith” in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry’, Journal of Victorian Culture 16.1, 65–82; and F. M. Turner (2011) ‘Christian Sources of the Secular’, Britain and the World 4.1, 5–39. 14. See C. Brown (2009) The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), p. 10. Note that Nineteenth-Century British Secularism does not suggest that the timing or gradient of seculariza- tion should be revised, but rather that the end of secularization should be reconsidered and reconstructed through a new notion of ‘secularity’. 15. C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 11. 16. For the argument that secularization never happened, see A. Morozov (2008) ‘Has the Postsecular Age Begun?’, Religion, State & Society 36.1, 39–44. 17. D. Nash, ‘Reassessing the “Crisis of Faith”’, p. 70. 18. C. Taylor (2007) A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). 19. D. Nash (2013) Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 15. 20. The major social historian of Secularism is E. Royle (1974) Victorian Infi dels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield); and E. Royle (1980) Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 204 Notes (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield). See also D. Nash (1992) Secularism, Art, and Freedom (Leicester: Leicester University Press); L. Schwartz (2013) Infi del Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press). For general studies of unbelief, see S. Budd (1977) Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society, 1850–1960 (London: Heinemann Educational Books); D. Berman (1988) A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Croom Helm); and S. A. Mullen (1987) Organized Freethought: The Religion of Unbelief in Victorian England (New York: Garland). 21. J. Marsh (1998) Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth- Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); and M. Rectenwald (2013) ‘Secularism’, in M. Harris (ed.) George Eliot in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 271–78. 22. L. Schwartz (2013) Infi del Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press). 23. M. Rectenwald (2013) ‘Secularism and the Cultures of Nineteenth-Century Scientific Naturalism’, British Journal for the History of Science 46.2, 231–54. 24. Anon. (17 March 1800) ‘The Life of John Bunyan’, The Missionary Magazine, No. 46, 97. 25. T. Asad, Formations of the Secular. 26. T. Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 25. 27. B. Nongbri (2013) Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press). This assertion is analogous to argument made by Butler regarding belief and unbelief. ‘Neither belief nor unbelief is an origin’, Butler states, suggesting that belief and unbelief constitute a discursive pair, and that each element in the pair becomes the source of its opposite. Unbelief or ‘loss of faith’ in the mid-nineteenth century is generative of a subsequent belief or faith, and so on. See L. S. Butler (1990) Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf), pp. 1–8, at 3. 28. D. Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture, p. 17. 29. [W. H. Ashurst] (25 June 1851) ‘On the Word “Atheist”’, Reasoner 11.6, 88. 30. When referring to Secularism proper as originated and developed by Holyoake and company, I will use an uppercase ‘S’. For the more general sense of the term, secularism in the lower case will be used. 31. N. Vance (2013) Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 7. 32. V. Geoghegan (2000) ‘Religious Narrative, Post-secularism and Utopia’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3.2–3, 205–24, at 206. 33. A. Morozov, ‘Has the Postsecular Age Begun?’, p. 41. 34. C. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3. 35. M. Warner, J. VanAntwerpen, and C. J. Calhoun (eds) (2010) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 22: ‘[B]ecause [Taylor’s] third sense of the secular comprehends precisely those forms of religiosity that are now most widely mobilized, resurgence of reli- gion is not evidence of a new post-secular dispensation’. 36. N. Vance, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God, p. 17. Notes 205 37. R. Bhargava (2015) ‘We (In India) Have Always Been
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