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Secularity, Religion and Liberal Political Philosophy: a Critical Assessment of the Conception and Justification of the Secular in Contemporary Academic Debate

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Secularity, Religion and Liberal Political Philosophy: a Critical Assessment of the Conception and Justification of the Secular in Contemporary Academic Debate Secularity, religion and liberal political philosophy: A critical assessment of the conception and justification of the secular in contemporary academic debate. A thesis presented by USMAN BADAR Submitted to the Graduate Research School of the Western Sydney University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters Research / Masters Arts (Continental Philosophy) September 2017 Principal Supervisor: Charles Barbour Associate Supervisor: Jessica Whyte Abstract Following decades in which certain standard positions in the social sciences framed the discourse on secularity and religion, recent times have seen the emergence of crucial and critical interventions in this area. The academic debate on the ‘post-secular’ – carefully distinguishing among and between the related but distinct notions of secularity, secularisation and secularism – challenges much of what was previously taken for granted. This thesis focuses on the contributions of Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad and William Connolly, which it outlines, explains and critically engages on the question of the conception and justification of the secular. On the back on these contributions, it argues that having moved beyond classic negative conceptions of the secular as the simple other of religion – where both are considered fixed, universal categories – it should be positively understood as a normative force, tied to modernity, in its own right – one that is not opposed to religion per se but to that religion which challenges its fundamentals. Further, the secular and religious relate in much more complex ways than the former simply coming to the fore as modernisation leads humanity to mature and shed the latter. As for liberal justifications of secularism, these rest on untenable claims of the secular occupying neutral epistemic and political grounds, which make it uniquely suitable for modern, pluralistic societies, and of religion distinctively being prone to violence and intolerance. This thesis challenges the supposed neutrality of the secular in particular, showing that it is as ideological and normative as any other worldview. Word count: 29350. 3 Contents Introduction - The Post-Secular Question ........................................................................... 5 Chapter One - Conception: What is the Secular? ................................................................ 9 Secularity: from theological residual to modern centre ....................................................... 9 Secularity as conditions of belief and the road to the ‘Immanent Frame’ ......................... 10 Secularisation ...................................................................................................................... 15 An Anthropology of the Secular .......................................................................................... 18 Chapter Two - Justification: Why the Secular? .................................................................. 23 Secularism as a Necessity of Pluralistic Society ................................................................... 23 The (Conditional) Admittance of Religion in the Public Sphere .......................................... 25 A Negotiated, Free-standing (Secular) Political Ethic? ........................................................ 26 Religion, Secularity and Violence ........................................................................................ 29 Refashioning Secularism as Decentred Pluralism ................................................................ 30 Chapter Three - The Secular as (Elusive) Salvific Neutrality ............................................... 33 The Ideological Secular Web ............................................................................................... 34 Public Reason....................................................................................................................... 36 The Secular as Enlightened Freedom and Equality ............................................................. 40 Decentred Pluralism and Neutrality .................................................................................... 45 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 47 References ....................................................................................................................... 50 4 Introduction - The Post-Secular Question Secularism continues to be a highly controversial and divisive topic in both popular and academic discourse. Its advocates, upholding the Enlightenment legacy, claim it is a universal necessity for peace and progress, a demand of rationality required in order to restrain religious passion that breeds intolerance, delusion and violence. This is the ‘progressivist view’ of a disenchanted modernity throwing off primitive forms of thought and practice based on religion for new and superior forms grounded in reason and science. On the other hand, its detractors see it as nothing less than the degeneration into a particular modern worldview that privileges the material over the spiritual, the profane over the sacred, breeding, as a result, widespread alienation and a hedonistic culture. This is the ‘decline view’ of an unsheltered modernity as the cause of widespread social and moral corruption. These extremes sandwich various positions closer to one side or the other. What is increasingly obvious is that the debate is not simply about politics – secularism as a political doctrine – but equally, perhaps more importantly, about ‘the secular’ or secularity as epistemology and ontology. Indeed the secular forms the epistemological and political spine of the regnant Western liberal worldview. A critique thereof, in turn, puts much at stake for how the world is conceived and lived under the hegemony of a secular liberal discourse and politics. Western discourse on the question of the place and role of religion entered the 21st century shaken by two disturbing realisations. First, the secularisation thesis of the 19th century, insofar as it predicted the decline and end of religion in modernity, was seriously challenged, if not outright refuted. The simple narrative of humanity progressing from the religious to the secular was no longer tenable. Religion, as manifest in individual belief and practice, persisted amongst millions of people around the world. In turn, as a guiding force for so many people, its influence extended, increasingly since the 1970s, into matters of social and political debate and policy. The last half-century or so also saw the explosion onto the world scene of what has been characterised as religious ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘fanaticism’. Second, the very Enlightenment principles on which the critique of religion and the doctrine of secularism rested – autonomous, universal rationality at their fore - had also been strongly critiqued. Yet secularism continued to dominate social and political thought. These realisations, as disturbances to what was taken for granted, paved the way for a serious – indeed long overdue – review and critique of secularism comprising not only a reopening of the question about the space for religion in the public sphere but also, and more fundamentally, a critical review of the very categories of ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ and their mutual relation. Mendieta and Vanantwerpen (2011, 1) summarise well the significance of recent scholarly interventions in this area: Many of our dominant stories about religion and public life are myths that bear little relation to either our political life or our everyday experience ... yet these understandings of both religion and public life have long been pervasive, perhaps especially within academic circles. In recent years, however, and in the midst of a widespread resurgence of interest in the public importance of religion, there has been an increasingly sophisticated series of intellectual interventions challenging us to reconsider our most basic categories of research, analysis, and critique.... [T]he very categories of the religious and the secular — and of secularism and religion — are being revisited, reworked, and rethought. Jürgen Habermas introduced the concept of the ‘post-secular’ society, by which he sought to describe ‘the new public consciousness in Europe which requires a self-adjustment to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment’ (2009, 63). In such societies, ‘religion retains a certain public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear everywhere in the world as 5 modernization accelerates is losing ground’ (65). Hence, the question originally animating this debate may be stated thus: if religion is here to stay in what is nevertheless a thoroughly secular world what is its legitimate place, particularly in the public sphere? In this sense, the ‘post-secular’ problematic directs a sort of correction, adjustment or revision of the secularisation thesis. It is a recognition that the expectation that secular progress would cause religion to wither away is not correct and it is the question that if that expectation is not correct, then what now? What sort of societies are we to seek? What does the persistence of religion mean for secular modernity? These questions presuppose and anticipate yet others: what is ‘religion’ and what is the ‘secular’? How do the two relate to each other? What does it mean to live in a secular
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