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 world? What makes ours a secular age? This web of questions form what we may call the broader post-secular Question. It is important to note that these questions are by no means natural or neutral. They already privilege secularity and arise in the context of mere revisions to a particular normative political philosophy, namely liberalism. They privilege the secular in assigning to it the task of determining the role of religion – a role that, by the very nature of the question, can only be a limited one and one necessitating the constant policing of those who seek to cross its allocated boundaries. It is as if the (secular) school master confiscated from his (religious) pupils, perceived by the former as disruptive, various privileges they had, restricting their movement and influence in the hope that they would eventually just leave the school. Instead, they remained, growing in number in fact, forcing the school master to find a better way to accommodate them. He remains the school master, however, and they the pupils. Stated differently, the debate generally begins on the presupposition that secular modernity is in need of mere revisions. It is not that secularism itself is subject to a fundamental critique or re-consideration. This is particularly true if we take the likes of Habermas, who explicitly upholds the Enlightenment project, as the primary instigators of this debate. However, to be sure, this is where the contemporary debate begins. There is nothing to suggest that it must remain on this platform. Thinkers like Talal Asad and others move the debate closer to a more fundamental interrogation of secularity itself, which, we would assert, needs to be at the core of the debate. Indeed, it is the argument of this thesis that the proper end of the debate is a critique of the secular itself, where secularity is understood as epistemology and ontology, as much as politics. Nevertheless, we proceed from the beginning as defined, and consider the above mentioned set of questions that outline the contours of the debate on our post-secular condition. Leading thinkers, adopting varied methodologies and focusing on different aspects of the problematic, have provided different answers in what is a lively and crucial debate. In this thesis, we focus on the contributions of arguably the leading and most influential contemporary thinkers on the questions of secularity and religion: Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad and William Connolly, with supplementary reference to others who have contributed to the academic debate. The texts of these authors that feature most prominently in this study are Habermas’ What is Meant by a ‘Post-Secular Society’? (2009), Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003) and William Connolly’s Why I am Not a Secularist (1999). This thesis aims to provide a clear exegetical outline and critical analysis of the interventions of these scholars as they elucidate, justify, critique or interrogate two particular areas: one, conceptions of the secular articulated in the social sciences; and two, justifications of secularism presented by liberal political theory. We seek to show that whilst these interventions have been insightful and the debate productive – correcting much of what was previously standard on this topic in the social sciences – they remain, despite their complexity and variance on certain particulars, committed to a liberal framework that this thesis attempts to contest.
6 To ground our discussion – about a topic with numerous branches and multiple positions on each branch – we may speak of a ‘mainstream narrative’ as our North Star. The mainstream narrative – ‘mainstream’ with respect to liberal political philosophy – may be articulated as follows:
Modernity brought us hitherto unprecedented pluralist societies in which people of different religions and denominations, and of no religion, live together. This makes it untenable that any one religion dominates as the reference point for the political organisation of society. Such a model would entail imposition and thus lead to conflict, disharmony and violence. Religion in particular, when mixed with politics, is prone to violence as people engage in disputes based on unverifiable metaphysical assertions. Religious thought and reason is also epistemically suspect relative to secular reason. Hence, religion must be made a private affair, evacuating the public sphere, which is to take the neutral and reasonable secular standpoint as its reference. As private citizens, people are free to adopt and practice whatever religious belief or unbelief they wish, but in the public sphere all these beliefs are equally irrelevant. The state, as manager of the public sphere, maintains an equal distance from all religions. Universal, secular rationality alone is to be the guiding force of social and political debate and policy. Religious citizens, if they want to engage in public debate, must present their arguments as secular reasons.
This mainstream narrative of liberal political philosophy, in this form, is upheld more closely by the likes of a John Rawls than by any of the thinkers mentioned above.1 Since it is, nevertheless, the narrative that takes centre-stage in the background of the debate they are all engaged in (and in popular discourse), it serves our purpose as a signpost in relation to which we can locate other positions. We come to see that Habermas and Taylor present revisions of this narrative based on critiques of some of its boundaries. Theirs is a smoothing of what they find to be rough edges. They want to make greater room to accommodate religion in a way that shows the need for mutual learning between the religious and secular. As such, they seek to dent the ‘conceit of the secular’ as sole carrier of reason and truth, whilst retaining its prime place as centre in politics as a matter of necessity for diverse societies. Asad and Connolly go much further in critiquing some of the more fundamental premises of the narrative, showing that it is, on the whole, untenable and proposing something of a decentring of the secular even in the political, whilst still upholding secularism in some form. This mainstream narrative rests on three pivotal premises. One, that the religious is a normative particular whereas the secular is a normatively-neutral universal. Two, since the secular is a neutral universal it can best serve the role of mediator between different religious (and non-religious) particularities in the public sphere. Three, religious discourse is epistemically weak and suspect in its truth claims relative to secular discourse. Four, religion is more predisposed to violence and conflict and is therefore unfit as the basis of politics. We take a critical look at each of these and do so by predominantly, if not exclusively, using the arguments of Asad and, to a lesser extent, Connolly to critique the mainstream narrative and its revised articulations as presented by Habermas and Taylor. We go further still by arguing that Asad and Connolly too, in still seeking some form of secular politics, do not take their own arguments to what we shall argue is their logical conclusion.
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1 Rawls’ position, it should be noted, has evolved. The earlier Rawls held that religious views had no place in the public sphere wherein everyone must deliberate in the language of ‘reason alone’ since it was not possible to deliberate between viewpoints emanating from contradictory comprehensive doctrines. The latter Rawls allows room in the public sphere for religious views and reasons, on condition that they be supplemented by secular reasons as well. It is this latter position – which is closer to that of Habermas and Taylor, albeit with significant particular differences, as we shall see – that is referred to when we refer to Rawls in this thesis.
7 In treating Habermas and Taylor as close enough to represent one broad position – whilst still pointing out some important divergences between the two – we use the former more on normative justifications of secularism and the latter more on descriptive conceptions and historical development. Likewise, in treating Asad and Connolly as representative of one broad position, we use the former more in critique and the latter in proposing an alternative. This thesis is divided into three chapters and a conclusion. Chapter one looks at how secularity is conceived: what is the secular? We outline the historical development of ‘secular’ as a term and consider critiques of the secularisation hypothesis. We also explore Taylor’s influential thesis on secularity as conditions of belief and Asad’s ‘anthropology of the secular’. Chapter two sketches liberal justifications of secularism as the preferred form of political organisation. These justifications appeal to the necessity of some neutral mode of politics, premised on a neutral mode of reason, for pluralist societies and find this necessary apparatus in different models of secularism. We end this chapter with a note on the link between religion and violence and an outline of a proposed alternative model that decentres the secular. Chapter three then zooms in on what is at the core of all justifications of secularity: its claimed political and epistemic neutrality. We critically examine this claim to show that it is not met, and that by positioning itself as neutral secular liberalism privileges itself by masking its normativity.
8 Chapter One - Conception: What is the Secular?
The persistence of religion generally and the (apparently) renewed prominence of public religion in particular – as phenomena forcing a review of traditional sociological theories of secularisation – have led to a questioning not only of what secularisation means but also to the conceptually prior question of what the secular is. Previously understood only in negative terms as the absence of religion – as the other of religion and therefore as a residual category – recent scholarship seeks to understand the secular in positive terms as a formation in its own right. Secularity emerges as neither the simple opposite of religion, as commonly understood, nor as just another form of religion masquerading as its own absence, but rather as a formation that has its own normative force – and associated political imperatives – which fashions distinct concepts, practices and sensibilities. It does not eliminate religion but rather results in a complex transformation of (European Christian) religion that reconfigures the latter, circumscribing its legitimate place in life and society, whilst also giving rise to, securing and fostering new expressions of it.
Secularity: from theological residual to modern centre
The term ‘secular’ derives etymologically from the medieval Latin word saeculum, which originally referred to a long or indefinite period of time, but later came to possess a dual temporal-spatial connotation of both secular age and secular realm.1 ‘Secular’ as in worldly, that is, of this temporal world, between the present and the eschatological Parousia, the second coming of Christ. The secular/religious dichotomy distinguished two dimensions of existence identified by a particular type of time essential to each. Secular time was profane time, contrasted with eternal or sacred time. Certain times, places, persons, institutions, and actions were seen as closely related to the sacred or higher time, and others were seen as pertaining to profane time alone (Taylor 2011, 32, 34). People who were in the saeculum were embedded in ordinary time, as against those who had turned away from this in order to live closer to eternity (Taylor 2007, 55). In the original Augustinian usage, the spatial secular realm is not profane or in any clash with the religious realm. It is rather a neutral space in which Christians and pagans live together in a way that does not demand the conquest of the secular space – Christianity need not subjugate pagan beliefs and practices. For Augustine, the ‘City of Man’ on Earth does not have to be transformed into a ‘City of God’, whose proper place is Heaven, at least for the (indefinite) period of time until the return of Christ. It is in this sense that saeculum signified both a worldly space and a worldly time. With the consolidation of Christendom and the domination of the Church, however, ‘secular’ becomes one of the mutually-constituted terms of a dyad, religious/secular, that structured the medieval Christian universe through a pair of dualisms: one bifurcation between ‘this world’ (the City of Man) and ‘the other world’ (the City of God) and another within ‘this world’ between a religious-spiritual-sacred realm and a secular-temporal- profane realm. The sacred-profane and religion-secular binaries became superimposed. The Church belonged to both worlds and was therefore able to mediate sacramentally between the two. The differentiation between the cloistered or secluded regular clergy, who withdraw from the world into the monasteries to lead a life of Christian perfection, and the
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1 The linguistic-historical evolution of the word ‘secular’ and ‘secularisation’ in this section relies heavily on Casanova (2001, 13786-90), a detailed encyclopaedia entry on secularisation, and the more recent Casanova (2013, pp. 28-30) an essay that provides arguably the most concise and incisive synoptic account of the various meanings of secularity and secularisation.
9 ‘secular’ clergy, who lived in the world along with the laity, was one of the many manifestations of this binary. The term ‘secularisation’ emerged from this theological conception with the meaning of a transfer from the religious to the secular sphere. That is, to secularise was to make worldly. It was first used in canon law to refer to the process whereby a religious monk left the cloister to return to the world and thus become a secular priest. With the onset of the Protestant Reformation, secularisation signified the lay expropriation of monasteries, landholdings, and the mortmain wealth of the Church. Thereafter, it came to designate any transfer of persons, things, meanings from religious or ecclesiastical to civil or lay use, possession or control. More broadly, secularisation took on the meaning of a broader historical process whereby the dualist bifurcation of religious and secular spheres within this world is sought to be bridged, eliminated or transcended. This occurs, however, in two different, virtually opposite, ways. One is the dynamic of internal Christian (Protestant) secularisation which aims to spiritualise the worldly, to bring the religious life of perfection out of the monasteries into the secular world – what Max Weber conceptualised as a general reorientation of religion from an other-worldly to an inner-worldly direction. This dynamic transcends the dualism by blurring the boundaries between the religious and secular through mutual infusion. Salvation and religious perfection are no longer to be found in withdrawal from the world but in the midst of worldly secular activities. The other is the dynamic of laicisation which, working in the other direction, aims to make worldly the spiritual, to emancipate the secular spheres from ecclesiastic control. Here the boundaries between religion and the secular are rigidly accentuated and the former is sought to be privatised and contained by the latter. In both cases, the medieval dualism is overcome and gives way to a modern age in which there is only one single ‘this world,’ the secular one, an immanent secular world in which religion has to find its own place. Secularity, in this broad sense, thus refers to living in the secular world and within the secular age. This is the desacralised, disenchanted, immanent world but one which is still open, for those who want, to transcendence, if only as a personal, private experience. As such, ‘the secular’ undergoes a remarkable, paradoxical, inversion. It goes from being a residual theological category to becoming a central modern category that appears as reality tout court, while the religious is increasingly perceived as the residual category. Casanova terms this ‘mere secularity’, which in his typology features along with two other distinct, narrower conceptions of the secular: ‘exclusive secularity’ and ‘secularist secularity’ (2013, 28-31). However, to the extent that Casanova builds on and refers to concepts articulated by Charles Taylor in his influential A Secular Age (2007), we would do well to first outline the position of the latter. This will also serve as a means to concretise what it means to live in a secular age, beyond the generic description we have offered thus far.
Secularity as conditions of belief and the road to the ‘Immanent Frame’
Charles Taylor (2007)2 speaks of us as living in a ‘secular age’ defined most prominently by certain ‘conditions of belief’. He provides a historical account of how the Western or ‘North Atlantic’ world in particular goes from a state in which not believing in God is virtually impossible at the head of the 16th century to one in the 21st century in which belief in God is but one option amongst many, an embattled one at that (3, 25). For Taylor, secularity operates in three distinct but related senses: the adoption of certain arrangements of institutional separation; the decline in individual religious belief and practice; and change in conditions of belief that result in different lived experiences of how the self attains ‘fullness’.
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2 All citations in this section, where only page numbers are given from hereinafter, are from this text.
10 The first sense of secularity is in terms of public spaces having been ‘emptied of God’ or any reference to ultimate reality (2). This emptying of religion from the various public spheres of human activity – economic, political, cultural, educational, recreational – means they no longer refer to God or religion in their deliberations, norms and principles. Instead they operate on a rationality internal to themselves – maximum gain in the economy, greatest benefit to greatest number of people in politics, etc. – and in this sense are autonomous. They become ‘secular spheres’. This emptying was achieved and maintained by the institutional separation of church and state, or religion and politics. Such an emptying or separation is compatible with the vast majority of people still believing in God and practicing their religion vigorously (as is the case in the United States, for instance). This latter phenomenon speaks to the second sense of secularity: the falling off of religious belief and practice – people turning away from God. There is a further sense still, for Taylor, a third sense of secularity which entails ‘the move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others,’ and is to be understood with reference to ‘conditions of belief’: conditions of experience of and the search for the spiritual (3). Taylor focuses on the secularity of the modern age in this sense. He seeks to understand belief and unbelief not as rival theories or ways that people account for existence or morality, but rather as different kinds of lived experience or what it is like to live as a believer or unbeliever, as ways of living our moral or spiritual lives. Lives in which we are all, albeit through different paths, seeking a ‘wholeness’ or ‘fullness’3 (5):
We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring.
In this sense, as noted by Brown (2007), Taylor wants us to appreciate secularism as a distinct way of being, knowing and inhabiting the world, and he gives us ‘the first erudite phenomenology of secularism through a story of the historical construction of secular subjectivity’. In certain experiences, Taylor argues, we situate a place of fullness to which we orient ourselves morally or spiritually because ‘they offer some sense of what they are of: the presence of God, or the voice of nature, or the force which flows through everything, or the alignment in us of desire and the drive to form’ (6). For believers, the account of the place of fullness requires reference to God, to something transcendent that lies without; it is received. For unbelievers, it refers only to a potentiality of human life understand naturalistically; it lies within (8). Typical of the modern condition, notes Taylor, is the recognition of a multiplicity of spiritual or moral paths: we are aware today that we can live the spiritual life differently, paths that intelligent people of good will can and do disagree on (11). In turn, we traverse our own path in a condition of doubt or uncertainty of its being the right one. This inevitable doubt explains why people speak of ‘theories’. We should not however, Taylor urges, understand spiritual paths as mere theories since they are critical to our experience of life as a whole. The difference between modern and pre-modern (or modern non-Western) life remains: where our lived experience is one possibility, one construal, amongst others, their lives carried no distinction between experience and construal. Where for us experience is
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3 We may note that Taylor’s choice of these words carries a subtle but significant implication. The human search for ‘fullness’ or ‘wholeness’ connotes an inherent partiality in the human condition, a weakness or deficiency, a void that calls out to be filled.
11 mediated by a construal thereof, for them, moving to fullness meant getting closer to God just as possession and evil spirits were not theories that could be wrong but immediate objects of fear. In modern western civilisation we have largely eroded these forms of immediate certainty. The closest thing we have, something analogous though weaker, is that in a given milieu one construal of belief or unbelief shows up as the default option or the overwhelmingly more plausible one (12). On the whole, however, western civilisation has undergone a radical shift. It is a change not just from a condition in which most people lived naïvely in a construal as simple certain reality to one in which almost no one is capable of this, but also from a condition in which belief was the default option, for the naïve and reflective alike, to one in which unbelieving construals seem for more and more people the only plausible ones. Stated differently, the change Taylor attempts to describe and explain in A Secular Age (2007) is the move in Western Civilisation from a condition where in Latin Christendom people lived naïvely with a theistic construal as definitive reality to one in which everyone moves between both atheistic and theistic construals as merely possible interpretations of reality (14). This change relates fundamentally to background frameworks of belief and unbelief, which, previously foreclosed by their unacknowledged shape, were subsequently opened to interrogation and inquiry by modern theorising. Routine distinctions made today between the immanent and transcendent, the natural and supernatural reveal both the acknowledgment of the background and the disruption of its earlier shape. It is this shift in background in the whole context in which we experience and search for fullness that Taylor locates the advent of a secular age. Taylor’s tripartite classification of secularity – as institutional separation (sense 1), religious decline (sense 2), and change in how belief is experience (sense 3) – allows him to speak about it in more nuanced terms, thus capturing important differences. For instance, the United States can be thoroughly secular in senses 1 and 3, whilst not secular in sense 2. Likewise, the United States in comparison to Pakistan can be the very similar in sense 1, with formal institutional separation, and 2, with the comparison for instance of mosque and church attendance, but very different in sense 3, with belief being an embattled option amongst others in the US but the natural path in Pakistan where belief in God is still axiomatic. Along with this three-mode conception of secularity, Taylor choses a reading of religion in terms of the transcendent-immanent distinction (15-16).4 This he finds sufficient to serve the purpose of his analysis since at the core of debate in the modern West has been and is the question of whether the place of fullness is beyond human life or within it, that is, whether it is transcendent to human life or immanent within it. Indeed, the ‘immanent order’ of Nature, whose workings can be understood by rational study and explained on its own terms, is an invention of the modern West. With this notion of immanence came the negation or problematisation of both the ‘supernatural’ – whether God, gods, spirits or the like – and of any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, and eventually a clean distinction and separation of the immanent world from the transcendent, a uniquely Latin Christian development (Taylor 2011a, 33).
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4 This is not meant as an abstract definition that captures all religion everywhere, but as one that gets to the core of the issue in the much narrower context of the medieval to modern West, wherein ‘religion’ for all intents and purposes means Christianity. Further, these two positions – marked by what Taylor calls ‘orthodox religiosity’ and ‘atheistic materialism’ respectively – represent two sides of a spectrum, in between which there are a myriad other positions. This is particularly significant since secularity does not equate to atheism and, for many secularists, transcendence is not a problem in and of itself. It is only a problem when made the grounds of political and public life.
12 The transcendence that marks religion, its affirmation of a beyond, has three dimensions: the sense that there is some good beyond human flourishing; belief in a higher power, a transcendent God (who makes the higher good attainable); and the extension of our lives beyond this worldly life (20). The eclipse of this transcendence – the Nietzschean ‘death of God’- is a defining feature of modernity. Human flourishing becomes the final goal, no higher power is needed, and our worldly lives come to circumscribe all that is relevant and important. We may say that, on this view, the difference between the religious and the secular outlook is the difference between experiencing the (sensible) world as partial, one part of a greater whole whose other parts are somewhere beyond, and experiencing it as a self-enclosed whole. According to Taylor’s historical account5 the advent of our secular age has been coterminous with the rise, as a widely available option for the first time in history, of what he calls a ‘self-sufficient humanism’.6 Self-sufficient or ‘exclusive’ humanism accepts no final goals beyond human flourishing (18). The path for this exclusive humanism was paved in the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of a new science, which took the universe as a manipulable object of observation and analysis, brought with it a new sense of self as disengaged from the world (113). An epochal shift occurs from our ‘finding our place in the cosmos to constructing an order within the universe’ (114) along with a new understanding of that order, one which ‘gave an essential place to the willed constructive effort in the remaking of human life’ (125). This is all facilitated by other factors: the natural law tradition, the rise of neo-Stoicism, the contract-law tradition of Locke and Grotius, the Cartesian revolution with its view of society as a malleable substance fashionable by human endeavour, and the reform movement in Christianity, which sought to close the gap between elite and popular piety (130). Exclusive humanism only begins to emerge, however, in the 18th century Enlightenment and comes of age in the 19th century, propelled by developments within orthodox Christianity that give rise to a ‘Providential Deism’. Providential Deism is the result of Deism undergoing an ‘anthropocentric shift’7 towards God as a mere designer of the world, the primacy of impersonal order, and the idea of natural religion (221). This type of Deism makes God almost dispensable and circumscribes man’s vocation in human flourishing (242-
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5 This account takes up the bulk - fourteen chapters spanning about 500 pages - of A Secular Age (2007). The account is detailed and extremely nuanced. It is not a straight casual account of historical developments but rather ‘a zig-zag account’ full of unintended consequences (95). Our outline of it here fails to capture this. It is a concise outline because our concern is not so much with the historical account itself as with what it implies about how Taylor understands secularity. 6 This is not to say that human flourishing was not important in pre-modern times. It was important but only as a means to higher ends or in a way where the reverence of higher beings is an integral part of human flourishing. Thus, we can speak of pre-modern humanisms, but not of a ‘self-sufficing humanism’, which is uniquely modern. Epicureanism, perhaps the only exception, was ‘exclusively humanist’ in this sense but only ever espoused by a small minority (19). Also, Taylor does not argue that modern secularity is coterminous with exclusive humanism since secularity, as explained, is a condition in which our experience of, and search for, fullness occurs, hence experienced by believers and unbelievers alike. Likewise, exclusive humanisms are not the only alternatives to religion since modernity includes non-religious anti-humanisms (such as deconstruction and poststructuralism) and attempts to construct non-exclusive humanism on a non-religious basis (such as deep ecology) (19). 7 The ‘anthropocentric shift’ entails four developments: the eclipse of any sense of further purpose, any sense of serving God, except (through) the achievement of our own good; the eclipse of grace by reason’s ability to comprehend everything in the world; the fading of any sense of mystery; and the eclipse of the idea that any transformation from our current human condition awaits us in an afterlife (222-4). This shift gives us a ‘Providential Deism’ in which God’s Providence is emptied: it is nothing more than his plan for us, which we understand.
13 3). In doing so, it serves as the intermediate stage to exclusive humanism, which invokes a moral order8 whose ‘ontic component’ is wholly intra-human and entirely immanent (256). The secular age, Taylor asserts, is an age defined by the ‘immanent frame’, which is marked by the above-mentioned developments and shifts crystallising in a host of modern formations: the buffered identity9, self-discipline, individuality, a constructed social space, instrumental rationality and secular time. It is frame that constitutes a ‘natural’ order, as against a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, as opposed to a ‘transcendent’ one (542). It is the frame of the eclipse of transcendence10 and within which exclusive humanism is the order of the day. In this frame we come to understand our lives as taking place within a constellation of differentiated orders, cosmic, social, moral, all of which are impersonal, self- sufficient, and can be understood on their own terms (543). They are purely immanent orders functioning, as Grotius may have said, etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if God did not exist’. The secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing falls within the range of an imaginable life of the masses of people. Quite unlike religious turnovers of the past where one naïve horizon replaces another or two fuse syncretistically, the secular age puts an end to the naïve acknowledgment of the transcendent or of goals which go beyond human flourishing (21). Further, importantly, our understanding of ourselves as secular is defined by a historical sense that we arrived here by overcoming and rising out of earlier modes of belief (268). We have advanced, come of age, to grasp our predicament through earlier, more primitive stages of society and self-understanding. Taylor labels this the ‘stadial consciousness’: an understanding of human society as developing over history through a series of primitive to more advanced (‘modern’) stages. This stadial consciousness is, Taylor says, ‘the ratchet at the end of the anthropocentric shift, which makes it (near) impossible to go back on it’ (289). Nevertheless, in returning to the typology of Casanova – which will now make better sense on the back of Taylor – and critically comparing it with that of Taylor, we find the former bearing greater conceptual and analytic clarity. As noted earlier, Casanova presents a tripartite classification of secularity as well: mere secularity, exclusive secularity and secularist secularity (2013, 28-31). ‘Mere secularity’ refers to living in the secular world, that is, experiencing the world (in the way described by Taylor’s sense 3) as an immanent frame that is open to transcendence. Religion is considered a possible and valuable option. ‘Exclusive secularity’ is to experience the world as a purely immanent frame that is closed to transcendence; religion is absent. The secular is here constituted as a self-enclosed reality and religion is considered superfluous to human life. Importantly, for Casanova, exclusive secularity only becomes the normal taken-for-granted position if it is experienced not simply as a fact of historical contingency, but as the meaningful result of a quasi-natural process of development. In this sense, exclusive secularity is tied to ‘secularist secularity’, which – on the back of what Taylor calls a ‘stadial consciousness’ – is to experience the world as now ‘liberated’ from religion, as humanity having come of age, matured and progressed from lower stages of existence. Casanova’s typology borrows from Taylor the perspective of understanding secularity phenomenologically, as a lived experience of the world. It differs – and in our view improves
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8 By ‘moral order’, Taylor wants to signify not just norms or ideals, but also, and in fact more significantly, a picture of what makes these norms appropriate and possible of realisation (256). 9 Taylor contrasts the ‘buffered self’ of our disenchanted secular age – a conception of self with a much firmer boundary between self and world – with the ‘porous self’ of the bygone enchanted age – a conception in which the self is not separated or bounded from the world but where forces could cross a porous boundary between self and world and shape our lives (38). 10 Whilst the frame eclipses transcendence as the dominant mode of experiencing the world, it invites or permits closure without demanding it. The immanent frame can be lived as an open frame or a closed one (544).
14 – on Taylor in construing secularity only in terms of how the world is experienced, whilst categorising the decline of religion and institutional arrangements under ‘secularisation’. This allows for greater conceptual and analytic clarity since we can speak about ‘secularity’ as the underlying category that relates to epistemology and ontology (expressed in phenomenological terms), while ‘secularisation’ relates to social-historical processes and ‘secularism’ relates to normative political positions.11 With the above sketch, we can see that far from having universal, fixed meanings, the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ remain mutually-constituted but with radically different meanings over time. Taylor summarises these changes by noting that ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ start as terms of a dyad distinguishing two dimensions of existence – an immanent one and a transcendent one – identified by a particular type of time (2011a, 34). Both sides are real and indispensable dimensions of life. The dyad is ‘internal’: each term is impossible without the other, like right and left or up and down. They then develop, as a dyad, such that ‘secular’ refers to what pertains to a self-sufficient, immanent sphere, contrasted with a transcendent realm marked by the ‘religious’. A further transformation, where the transcendent is now denied, has the ‘secular’ referring to what is real or to institutions necessary to live in this world and ‘religious’ to what is merely invented or to optional accessories, which often disturb the course of worldly life. These latter two dyads are ‘external’: the two sides stand in opposition to each other.
Secularisation
We noted above that linguistically secularisation means to ‘make worldly’ and that as a broader historical process in Europe it referred to the elimination of the originally theological bifurcation of religious and secular spheres. Given the result of this process in the rise of the immanent frame, secularisation came to be identified, popularly and in the social sciences, with the hypothesis that there is a negative correlation between social modernisation and religious belief and practice. In other words, this ‘secularisation thesis’ held that decline in the relevance of religion was a natural product of such phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation, the functional differentiation of the secular spheres, bureaucratic rationalisation, instrumental rationality, the rise of science and technology, and greater social and geographic mobility, all of which constituted ‘modernisation’. For Jürgen Habermas, this thesis rests on three considerations (2009, 60). First, progress in science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the ‘disenchanted’ world since a scientifically enlightened mind cannot be easily reconciled with metaphysical worldviews. Second, the functional differentiation of social subsystems means that religious institutions lose control over law, politics, culture, education and science. They confine themselves to their ‘proper function of administering the means of salvation’, thus making religion a predominantly private affair and it losing public influence and relevance. Third, the higher levels of welfare and social security resulting from the development of agrarian to industrial to post-industrial societies leave individuals with less need of a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a higher power. Habermas finds these considerations plausible ‘at first sight’, but suffering, on further inspection, from certain rash inferences, ‘which betray an imprecise use of the concepts of “secularisation” and “modernisation”’ (2009, 63). For instance, the loss of function for religious institutions and the trend towards individualisation do not necessarily lead to a loss in the influence and relevance of religion, either in the public arena or personal conduct,
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11 It should be noted that the different morphological derivations of the ‘secular’, viz. secularity, secularisation, and secularism, are used in a myriad of ways. In this thesis, we opt for the meanings expressed here in our reading of Casanova’s classificatory system.
15 since faith and its practices can take on more personal or subjective forms. We may add to this that there is a lot being assumed about the grounds and role of faith in the notion that it is effectively a coping mechanism. For Taylor, the classical secularisation theories are unconvincing and premised on a simple global notion of ‘religion’, a definition of secularity as the absence of religion, and the assumption that modernisation would inevitably undermine religion (2007a). They are also predicated on what he calls ‘subtraction stories’: narratives about modernity in general and secularity in particular ‘which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge’ (2007, 22). According to such stories modern civilisation cannot but bring about a ‘death of God’ as underlying perennial features of human nature come to the fore, having previously been impeded by what is set aside. Taylor’s own ‘story’ of the coming of a secular age, as outlined above, shows that a simple opposition between religion and secularity, where the latter is merely the absence of the former, is not tenable. The relationship is far more complex. The secular age is actually a result of transformation from within Christianity itself.12 It is the fruit of innovation, newly constructed understandings, and related practices, of self and its place in society, in space and time (2007, 22, 573). Further, it does not necessitate or result in the decline or elimination of religion. The salient feature of Western societies, argues Taylor, is not a decline of religious faith and practice, though this has occurred, but a mutual fragilisation – caused by cross pressures between narratives of closed immanence on the one side and their inadequacy on the other – of different religious positions as well as of outlooks of both of belief and unbelief (595). Paradoxically, religion can be secured from and even by secularism. Older forms of religion are destabilised but they are also transformed and ‘recomposed’ into new forms (2007, 437):
[T]he interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life. This new placement is now the occasion for recompositions of spiritual life in new forms, and for new ways of existing both in and out of relation to God.
The secularisation thesis was for long viewed as a single theory. More recently, it has been suggested that it actually comprises disparate, albeit related, propositions. It has thus been deemed judicious to distinguish the different connotations of ‘secularisation’ in order to speak more meaningfully about it. José Casanova first suggested – in his influential Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) – the need to distinguish between three related but distinct connotations: secularisation as i) the decline of religious belief and practice; ii) the privatisation of religion; and iii) the differentiation of the secular spheres (Casanova 2006, 7). The secularisation of society as the functional differentiation (third sense) of what came to be understood as the secular spheres – the state, economy, science – from religious institutions is the conception most closely related to the initial linguistic meaning of the term (Casanova 2001, 13788). Secularisation in this sense refers to the transformation of medieval (European) society from one which views itself entirely through the lens of the religious and in which the saeculum is an undifferentiated whole viewed from outside (from the religious perspective) to one in which the saeculum is both distinguished from the
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12 In terms of secularism’s relation to Christianity, there are two broad readings, as noted by Scherer (2011, 624): a Kantian reading that sees secularism as the detachment of secular reason from religious discourse and thus a break from Christianity, and a Hegelian reading of continuity in which Christianity itself paves the way for secular reason. Taylor’s is closer to the latter. An example of the former is Connolly (1999).
16 religious sphere and internally divided into distinct spheres: politics, economics, law, science, art, etc.13 Each of these spheres, now ‘emancipated’ from religion, follows its own internal logic, whilst the religious sphere loses its centrality and universality and, in turn, suffers a significant loss in power and influence.14 Secularisation is also conceived in terms of the privatisation of religion (second sense). Privatisation here is broadly used to mean two different things. One, that as a means to secure freedom of conscience religion becomes a private affair of the individual without interference or imposition by political (state) or religious (church) institutions. Two, that religion shrivels into the private sphere slowly but surely losing all influence and relevance in the public sphere. The first sense of privatisation is a corollary of the thesis of differentiation: religious disestablishment entails its privatisation (Casanova 2001, 13790). Freedom of conscience entails the right to privacy which serves as the very foundation of modern liberalism. As such, privatisation in this sense is essential to modern liberal democracies and a normative precondition thereof. The second sense of privatisation is related to the decline thesis and assumes that modern religion would become so subjective and private that it turns invisible with respect to public life. It also has a normative corollary: that the proper place of religion is the private sphere where it should be restricted without transgressing beyond and influencing the public sphere. Secularisation as the decline of religious belief and practice (first sense) is the most recent yet most widespread connotation. Often postulated as a universal, human developmental process, the theory of secularisation in these terms incorporated Enlightenment beliefs of progress and critiques of religion and became embedded in a philosophy of history that saw history as the progressive evolution of humanity from superstition to reason, belief to unbelief and religion to science (Casanova 2001, 13787). It is this part of the theory – which Taylor ties to the ‘stadial consciousness’ and Casanova links to ‘secularist secularity’ – that has been proven manifestly mistaken.15 As for why it was so remarkably wrong, Casanova notes that the secularisation paradigm stood more on ideology than empirical study (2001, 13787). Shared by all the founders – with the exception of Tocqueville, Pareto and William James – secularisation was perhaps the only theory within the social sciences that attainted the status of a paradigm. The consensus was such that for over a century the theory was not only uncontested but also untested. Durkheim and Weber’s work, serving as the foundation of later theories of secularisation, offer scant empirical analysis. Even after freeing themselves from some of the positivist prejudices about religion, they still share the main intellectual assumptions of the age about the future of religion. For Durkheim, the old gods and dysfunctional historical religions would not be able to compete with the new functional gods and secular moralities modern societies would generate. For Weber, intellectual rationalisation had ended in the complete disenchantment of the world and the old integrative monotheism, displaced by the functional differentiation of the secular spheres, had been replaced by the modern polytheism of values. The old churches now remained only as a refuge for those – to recall Weber’s memorable phrase – ‘who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man’.
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13 This process is pushed by four related and parallel developments according to Casanova: the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state, modern capitalism and modern science (Casanova, 2001, 13788). 14 This may sound similar to Taylor’s first sense of secularity that has preceded. Indeed, Casanova’s first and third senses here are, for all intents and purposes, the same as Taylor’s second and first senses mentioned above. The difference, significantly, is that Taylor’s is a classification of ‘secularity’, whereas Casanova’s, here, is a classification of ‘secularisation’. 15 Renowned sociologist Peter Berger on this: ‘In the course of my career as a sociologist of religion I made one big mistake … which I shared with almost everyone who worked in this area in the 1950s and ‘60s, [which] was to believe that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion’ (1998, 782).
17 Only as late as the 1960s, Casanova notes, did we see the first attempts to develop more systematic and empirically grounded formulations of the theory which brought to light the first discernible flaws in it and gave rise to the first systematic critiques by Martin (1969) and Greeley (1972) (2001, 13788). This allowed the separation of the theory from its ideological origins in the Enlightenment critique of religion and the recognition that the theory had multiple sub-theses which were best considered on their own terms, as they now are. Finally, on secularisation, it is important to note that the dynamic has been far from uniform. It has been markedly different in different areas as shown by Casanova (2006, 11). The Latin-Catholic cultural area saw a protracted clash between religion and the differentiated – at the time differentiating – secular spheres, that is, between Catholic Christianity and modern science, capitalism and the nation-state. In turn, the Enlightenment critique of religion found resonance here and secularisation was conceived of in terms of emancipation from religion, with the latter being pushed into the private sphere. The Anglo- Protestant cultural area on the other hand saw no such clash. On the contrary, it saw collusion between religion and the differentiated secular spheres. There is little evidence of any tension between American Protestantism and capitalism or science (prior to the Darwinian crisis of the late nineteenth century). In turn, the American Enlightenment did not have any significant anti-religious component. Even the institutional separation codified in the First Amendment sought as much to ensure the free exercise of religion as it did to ensure the state did not adopt or impose a state religion. Likewise, most ‘progressive’ social movements in Europe since the French revolution have been informed by secularism whereas American movements (until very recently) and the discourse of US presidents have appealed much more to the Gospel and Christian values. The point worth noting from this comparison is that whilst both America and Europe are undeniably secular, in the former the triumph of the secular came aided by and fused with religion, where in the latter it came at the expense of religion and its marginalisation. This is a significant recognition in terms of understanding how secularity and religion relate to each other. It also highlights the very contingent nature of these developments. As Casanova (2006, 12) concludes on this point:
As an analytical conceptualization of a historical process, secularization is a category that makes sense within the context of the particular internal and external dynamics of the transformation of Western European Christianity from the Middle Ages to the present. But the category becomes problematic once it is generalized as a universal process of societal development and once it is transferred to other world religions and other civilizational areas with very different dynamics of structuration of the relations and tensions between religion and world, or between cosmological transcendence and worldly immanence.
An Anthropology of the Secular
Talal Asad makes something of an epistemological break in the debate on the secular. In Formations of the Secular (2003)16 he attempts an ‘anthropology of the secular’ which seeks to challenge normative essentialist notions of the ‘religious’ and ‘sacred’ and assumptions about the ‘secular’. Where Taylor and Habermas are engaged in revising or providing alternative accounts of secularisation, Asad wants to critically interrogate secularity on the premise that ‘neither the supporters nor the critics of the secularization thesis pay enough attention to the concept of “the secular”’ (183). 17 Anthropologists, argues Asad, have taken
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16 All citations in this section, where only page numbers are given from hereinafter, are from this text. 17 It is pertinent to note the methodological difference between the analyses of Taylor and Habermas, which are philosophical and intellectual - albeit expressed in phenomenological terms in the case of Taylor - and that of Asad, which is anthropological. Notably, for Asad, anthropology is not, as
18 the study of religion as a central concern but have paid little attention to the idea of the secular, which is odd since the two categories are closely linked both in thought and historical emergence (21-22). Anthropological study of religion, according to Asad, shows a heavy reliance on such themes as myth, magic, witchcraft and taboo, suggesting that the religious and sacred stand in the domain of the non-rational. Modern politics and science are sited in the domain of the secular, which, however, is not the subject of any thorough study. Such a study is what Asad seeks to initiate, with particular focus on examining the category of the secular itself and the ‘shifting web of concepts making up the secular’ (23). These include the familiar binaries, inter alia, of belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, natural and supernatural, and sacred and profane. The unsettling effect of Asad’s work along these lines, we may assert with Seidel (2005, 113), is to make almost savage the concept of ‘the secular’ that is so precious to natives of Western liberalism. The ‘secular’, for Asad, is an epistemic category whereas ‘secularism’ is a political doctrine18 and the question of the connection between the two is an important departure point for any understanding of a secular age (1). The secular is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism and over time a variety of concepts, practices and sensibilities have come together to form ‘the secular’ (16). Modern secularism is not the mere separation of religion from the public sphere but rather a process of establishing a new form of normative power over the modern subject: ‘What is distinctive about “secularism” is that it presupposes new concepts of “religion,” “ethics,” and “policies,” and new imperatives associated with them’ (2). Asad’s main point, on the question of how we conceive of ‘the secular’, is that it should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually but naturally frees itself from the controlling power of mythical ‘religion’, thereby achieving the latter’s relocation. Secularism does not simply insist that religious belief and practice be confined to a space where they cannot threaten political stability or the liberty of citizens. Rather, it builds on a particular conception of the world (‘natural’ and ‘social’) and the problems that arise therefrom. Importantly, the historical process of secularism produces a remarkable ideological inversion: from ‘the secular’ being constructed by and part of a theological discourse to, in the discourse of modernity, presenting itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in the march to human civilisation and freedom (191-2). This transfer comprises tectonic ontological and epistemological shifts, not mere political reconfiguration. Humans become the self-conscious makers of History and the foundation of universally valid knowledge about nature and society. The domain in which acts of God (accidents) occur without human responsibility is restricted. The world is disenchanted and tameable. Modernity, according to Asad (14), is a way of living-in-the-world to which the constructed categories of the secular and the religious are critical. It is with reference to these categories that ‘modern living is required to take place, and non-modern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy’. Representations of the secular and religious mediate
------popularly thought, simply a method of ‘thick description’ or ‘fieldwork’ (17). He prefers and practises an anthropology of systematic inquiry into cultural concepts. And although conceptual analysis is as old as philosophy, what is distinctive about modern anthropology is ‘the comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently located in time or space’ (17). Further, in examining the secular Asad favours a genealogical approach over that of historical narrative, where genealogy is ‘a way of working back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties’ (16). 18 This is very much in line with our reading of Casanova’s typology. See p. 14-15.
19 people’s identities, shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences. Since the secular is so much part of modern life, Asad sees it best pursued – as the object of an anthropological inquiry – not directly but through its shadows. This is done by seeking the traces of the secular in such disparate conceptions as those of myth, agency, pain, cruelty, human rights, religious minorities and nationalism. Asad notes that although the secular narrative posits religion as alien or inimical to the secular, the latter is also seen, paradoxically, as generating religion (193). It is asserted that premodern secular life created superstitious and oppressive religion and that modern secular life has produced enlightened and tolerant religion. Thus, the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and secular goes hand in hand with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former. It is here that Asad locates the grounds of the secularisation thesis’ increasingly evident implausibility (200). It is not that religion has now started playing a more vibrant part in the modern world of nations. Religion was always involved in the world of power. Rather, if the thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought: the concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion. For Asad, the constructed binary of ‘religion’, which stands in the domain of the non- rational and takes the sacred as its object, and the ‘secular’, which stands in the domain of the rational and takes the profane as its object – and where modern science and politics are sited – breaks down on interrogation. Likewise, Asad shows, through a ‘grammatical investigation’ of the conceptually parallel binary of sacred and profane that it too breaks down on examination (30-33). In the Latin of the Roman republic, the word sacer referred generally to anything owned by a deity taken out of the profanum and placed in the sacrum by action of the state. In early modern English, the word ‘sacred’ referred to individual things, persons and occasions set apart and venerated, although in no uniformly identifiable sense. It was late nineteenth century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages into a single immutable essence and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called ‘religious’.19 The classic statement is found in Durkheim (cited in Asad 2003, 31):
All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic. They presuppose a classification of all things, real or ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred. The division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought.
The sacred became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane action. It was both a transcendent force that imposed itself and a space that must never be violated, that is, profaned. This supposedly universal opposition between the supernatural ‘sacred’ and natural ‘profane’ finds no place in premodern writing, where the prevailing antimony was between the ‘divine’ and ‘satanic’ – both transcendent powers – and ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ – both worldly institutions. In France, the word sacred (sacre)
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19 O’Leary (2010, 2) notes that historian of religion Jonathan Smith was perhaps the first influential thinker to declare that ‘religion’ was an entirely constructed category. Smith asserted that religion is the creation of the scholar’s study, created for analytic purposes by imaginative acts of comparison and generalisation. Religion, he noted, is not a native category, that is, it is not a first-person term of self-characterisation. It is a category imposed from outside. What he means to say is that people, in origin – prior to the category ‘religion’ gaining widespread currency and naïve adoption – would refer to themselves as ‘Christian’, ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, etc., not as ‘religious’.
20 becomes salient at the time of the Revolution acquiring strong resonances of secular power. The Preamble of the Declaration of Human Rights speaks of ‘natural rights, inalienable and sacred’, and the right to property is qualified as ‘sacred’ in article seventeen. Thus modernity sees the re-siting of the sacred as the concept is used in a way that would be unrecognisable to the sensibilities of the Middle Ages, let alone of antiquity. It is now a naturalised power part of a discourse expressing the functions and aspirations of the modern, secular nation- state. Importantly, for Asad, the essentialisation of the ‘sacred’ as a transcendent power is connected with European colonisation (34).20 The things, words, and practices set apart by ‘Nature Folk’ were constituted by Europeans as ‘fetish’ and ‘taboo’. What had been previously regarded in theological terms as idolatry and devil-worship (devotion to false gods) became the secular concept of ‘superstition’. They remained, as such, objects and relations falsely given truth status and wrongly endowed with virtuous power. They had to be constituted as categories of illusion and oppression before people could be liberated therefrom. ‘Profanation’, Asad thus suggests, is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism (35). Reason requires that false things be proscribed, or transcribed as objects for the properly educated senses. Profanation is universal reason unmasking pretended power but also, simultaneously, affirming its own status as legitimate power. The false sacred is replaced by a new sacred: the sacred right to property, the sanctity of conscience, and, later on, sacred ‘human rights’. The irony is that at the very moment of becoming secular, these claims were made transcendent. Hence, Asad concludes that although profanation appears to make the transcendent mundane, it actually simply rearranges barriers between the illusory and the actual (36). We may say that where the explicit aim is to unmask and eliminate the transcendent as illusory and false, the result is only to relocate it. This analysis of Asad may seem, on the face of it, to seriously challenge Taylor’s reading of religion in terms of transcendence. However, to the extent that the transcendent of the secular is located within the immanent (temporal-spatial) world – a sort of paradoxical immanent transcendence: a transcendence within the immanent frame – the re-location is significant. An immanent transcendence is a beyond that is still within this world. It is beyond in the sense of not being directly accessible through sensible intuition, through experience, but it remains within this world in that it makes no appeal to higher powers such as God.21 In turn, we still find merit in Taylor’s conception of the religious-secular in terms of immanence-transcendence, where transcendence is defined as not simply metaphysical but also beyond the immanent frame. This is a subtle but important distinction that reflects the fact that while the religious-secular binary is not a neat zero-sum opposition, it is still one that is meaningful. Indeed, all our thinkers, including Asad, continue to use it in meaningful ways. Thus we may note that this contemporary debate has found wanting previous scholarly and persisting popular conceptions of secularity as simply the opposite of religion; of the secularisation thesis as natural, universal progress away from religion; and secularism as
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20 Through such consideration of Europe’s encounter with its imagined others, Asad’s account improves on that of Taylor. The latter has rightly been criticised for presenting a story of secularism that is, as Brown (2007) asserts, ‘more provincially European, monolithic, colonial, than it needs to be’, and makes ‘the emergence of EuroAtlantic secularism a product of tensions within Christendom rather than, in part, a feature of Christendom’s encounter with others and especially with its constitutive outside’. For Asad, as Polat (2012, 225) observes, ‘it is important from the very beginning to grasp the salience of non-European and non-Western peoples’ histories for the construction of the project of modernity’. 21 Asad’s concept of secularism as ‘transcendent mediation’, discussed in chapter three, is a good example, perhaps, of what we are referring to as ‘immanent transcendence’.
21 mere institutional separation of church and state. Such conceptions are too heavily invested in neat binaries of the religious and secular that assume these to be fixed and fully-opposed categories; in unexamined Enlightenment critiques of religion; and in subtraction stories where religion simply falls away as humanity comes of age. Rather, as both the passage of time and critical study have shown, the religious and secular are much more mutually implicated and constituted than is allowed by their conception as fixed and fully-opposed categories. They are not, in a diachronic assessment, fixed at all. As we have seen, the secular develops from being a residual theological category in Medieval Christendom to a central modern category. In this remarkable inversion, ‘religion’ too is completely re- constituted in modernity as a personal, institutionalised, epistemically suspect and politically dangerous supernatural belief. At the same time, in any synchronic assessment, the two categories do have certain defining features that are sufficiently stable and mutually opposed for the binary to be meaningful. From this standpoint, we may make a number of observations. First, our secular age is marked by the dominance of the immanent frame that is still, however, open to transcendence but only as a personal, and therefore limited, experience. Second, religion conceives or experiences the world as having its grounds in a transcendence beyond the immanent frame while secularity allows only for transcendence within it. Third, the two are opposed insofar as these two positions are not fully mutually compatible. This implies that while secularity does not seek to eliminate religion, it does, nevertheless, stipulate how it is to be expressed, in particular, the ways it can go public. The secular must manage and contain the religious. Different conceptions of secularism, as we shall see in chapter two, assert different limits of this containment – from delimiting it to the private sphere alone to conditionally allowing its expression in the public sphere as well – but no conception is free of it. Therefore, what modernity brings us is not mere political rearrangements of roles between fixed categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ but rather the transformation of these very categories. It is the overhaul and transformation of characters in what becomes effectively a new cast on the European stage – even if some names remain the same – not the mere swapping of roles by the same characters. It is a transformation that comprises tectonic ontological and epistemological shifts, not mere political reconfiguration. The secular emerges as a normative force in its own right, tied to the project of modernity. This transformation brings the secular to the King’s seat at the table. Is this move well-deserved? Should it be affirmed, revised or rejected? And on what grounds? Having examined the secular descriptively, we move in the next chapter to explore its normative justification.
22 Chapter Two - Justification: Why the Secular?
What we have termed the ‘post-secular question’ is, as noted above: If religion is here to stay in what is nevertheless a thoroughly secular world what is its legitimate place and what is the proper relationship between the religious and the secular? Having examined the descriptive conception of secularity as the basic category that speaks to epistemological and ontological positions and of secularisation as a historical social process, we now turn, with this normative question, to the conception and justification of secularism as a political doctrine. As we shall see, this question turns on two main considerations: the character of public discourse and the role of religion in public life. We find that most thinkers, although critical of liberal secularism1 as currently applied, uphold the need for some form of secularism. In this chapter, we outline and assess the justifications provided for this position.
Secularism as a Necessity of Pluralistic Society
For Habermas, secularism is that form of political organisation where the state is neutral with respect to all worldviews, religious ones in particular, if not exclusively, and where public discourse is conducted in the neutral language of public reason.2 It is justified, and here to stay, as simply a necessity of pluralistic society: ‘[I]n view of the fact of persisting pluralism, it is hard to see on which normative grounds the historical step toward the secularization of state power could ever be reversed’ (Habermas, 2011, 24). Secularism, on this view, is an essential requirement to manage societies that are diverse with respect to the worldviews adopted by its citizens.3 Since clashes on political and social questions over
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1 Illiberal or authoritarian states can also be secularist, by excluding religion from public and political life for instance or by institutional separation. Liberal states, however, are necessarily secular in so far as state neutrality is seen as essential. In this thesis we sometimes speak of ‘liberal secularism’, to refer to the mode of secularism currently applied in liberal states, and sometimes of ‘secular liberalism’, to stress the secularity of liberalism. 2 We shall expand, qualify and critically problematise this conception and its component premises in the ensuing discussion of this chapter and the next. 3 It is this precise meaning that is intended whenever ‘diverse democracies’, ‘diverse societies’, or ‘pluralistic societies’ is mentioned, that is, diverse with respect to the worldviews people within them adopt. As for ‘worldviews’, the literature is awash with different terms, based on the preferences of different authors, signifying a web of related concepts. By ‘worldview’ we mean the holistic conception through which one views and interprets the world or, in phenomenological terms, through which one experiences the world. Worldviews can be classified along multiple lines. Perhaps the one we encounter most in this topic is religious (Christian, Islamic, Hindu) and non-religious or secular worldviews (Marxist, Liberal, Kantian). Further, a worldview comprises i) a fundamental conception about what is asserted as the reality of the world and ii) a normative framework about how individuals and societies ought to live in the world. The former has been referred to as a ‘comprehensive doctrine of truth’ (Rawls), ‘comprehensive worldview’ and ‘strong tradition’ (Habermas), ‘metaphysical perspective/orientation’ (Connolly) and ‘Weltanschauung’ (from which the English ‘worldview’ originally derives) and ‘basic belief’ (Taylor). The latter, variously marked as a ‘comprehensive doctrine/view of the good/right’ (Rawls) and ‘deep commitments’ (Taylor), is more specifically relevant to political philosophy and has been further divided into ‘background’ or ‘deeper’ reasons and ‘foreground principles’, where the former are the fundamental normative premises (man being created in the image of God or the maximisation of human joy being sought) and the latter are the specific moral positions (human rights, such as the right to life). In this thesis, we shall encounter most of these terms. Unless quoting or paraphrasing others, our preference is for the simpler ‘worldview’ or ‘normative worldview’. This is more on count of the word understood in the meaning noted above sufficing our purpose. Otherwise, ‘worldview’ has a complex philological and
23 beliefs impregnated by different worldviews are inevitable, the secular grounds for the separation of religion from politics provides a way to deal with the fact of pluralism in a non- violent way, that is, without disrupting the social cohesion of a political community. Managing a diverse population, argues Habermas, ‘requires a justification of constitutional essentials and the outcomes of the democratic process in ways that are neutral toward the cognitive claims of competing worldviews’, and democratic legitimacy is the only available option today (2011, 24). Thus, not only is secularism needed to manage diversity, it is claimed as the only feasible way to do so. Historically, according to Habermas, secularisation of state power was the appropriate response to the confessional wars of the early modern period in Europe (2009, 66-68). Religious minorities progressively acquired more rights: first, the right to private practice, then expression, and finally equal rights to exercise religion in public. This was a ‘valuable achievement of extending inclusive religious freedom to all citizens alike’. The result, on the whole, was a ‘modus vivendi’: a situation in which the state authority had to take a neutral stance – even if still intertwined with the dominant religion – and ensure amicable social relations between hostile confessions. This precarious coexistence of antagonistic subcultures, estranged from one another, proved inadequate for the new political order born of the late eighteenth century’s convulsions in Europe. Constitutional revolutions subjected secularised states to the rule of law and the democratic will of the people. The new setup necessitated that all subcultures loosen their hold on members so that the latter can recognise each other reciprocally as citizens, as members of the one and same political community, and not as members of opposing religious communities. The contemporary situation, however, Habermas asserts, requires something different. The normative question for him is (2009, 63):
How should we understand ourselves as members of a post-secular society, and what must we expect from one another if we want to ensure that social relations in firmly entrenched nation- states remain civil in spite of the growth of cultural and religious pluralism?
Here Habermas finds both the progressivist and decline narratives of secularisation as making the same mistake of construing it as a zero-sum game between the secular and religious; between ‘the capitalistically unbridled productivity of science and technology on the one hand, and the conservative forces of religion and the church on the other hand’ (2003, 104). His short answer to the above question is that both sides, the religious and the secular, have to learn from each other and adapt themselves to the new context through a ‘democratically shaped and enlightened common sense’ (2003, 104). A functioning (post) secular society requires its secular citizens to cease treating religious viewpoints as outdated and illegitimate and its religious citizens to translate their viewpoints into a language accessible to all. Thus, according to Habermas, the way in which secularism managed diversity at the point of its advent was by delimiting religion to the private sphere and thereby ‘secularising’ the (nascent) public sphere. Thereafter, Europe moves from a precarious modus vivendi to a more stable political configuration on the basis of the concept of citizenship. However, the bias against religion and its marginalisation to the private sphere persisted. In the post-secular world, this ‘laicism’ is no longer appropriate: the delimiting is to be eased and religion admitted into the public sphere.
------philosophical history from the 17th century to the present day. For a detailed outline, see Naugle DK 2002, Worldview: The History of a Concept, Eerdmans: Michigan.
24 The (Conditional) Admittance of Religion in the Public Sphere
Like Habermas, Casanova finds no compelling reason, on democratic or liberal grounds, to banish religion from the public sphere (2006, 20):
The attempt to establish a wall of separation between “religion” and “politics” is both unjustified and probably counterproductive for democracy itself. Curtailing the “free exercise of religion” per se must lead to curtailing the free exercise of the civil and political rights of religious citizens and will ultimately infringe on the vitality of a democratic civil society. Particular religious discourses or particular religious practices may be objectionable and susceptible to legal prohibition on some democratic or liberal ground, but not because they are “religious” per se.
Further, revising a previous position that public religion should be restricted to the public sphere of civil society on what he thought were justifiable normative grounds, Casanova admits that its separation from even political society is not a necessary or sufficient condition for democracy. Noting that many modern secular authoritarian states – such as the Soviet Union or Turkey – had or have strict no establishment, where other states with nominal establishment – such as England or Lutheran Scandinavia – have relatively commendable democratic records, he concludes that ‘secularist principles per se may be defensible on some other ground, but not as intrinsically liberal democratic ones’ (Casanova 2006, 21).4 This admittance of religion into the public sphere, it must be noted, is not unconditional. Religion is welcome in the public sphere only with certain provisos that seek to keep it in check. The now classic proviso is that of Rawls (1997, 783):
Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons ... are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.
Habermas, seeking to overcome the valid critique against the Rawlsian proviso that it places an asymmetrical burden on religious citizens, tries to better it with his ‘translation proviso’ (2011, 25-27):
[A]ll citizens should be free to decide whether they want to use religious language in the public sphere. Were they to do so, they would, however, have to accept that the potential truth contents of religious utterances must be translated into a generally accessible language before they can find their way onto the agendas of parliaments, courts, or administrative bodies and influence their decisions.
This ‘institutional filter’, Habermas asserts, between informal communication in the public arena and formal deliberation of political institutions achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that all legally enforceable decisions are formulated and justified in a universally accessible language whilst also not distributing burdens asymmetrically (2011, 26). Religious citizens accept – not necessarily assume, as they would on the Rawlsian model – the burden of translation, while secular citizens are obliged not to dismiss religious contributions as mere noise or nonsense from the start. In this way, both are involved in the interaction that is constitutive for a democratic process ‘springing from the soil of civil society and developing
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4 We may ask here whether there is any substantive difference between no establishment and nominal establishment such that this line of reasoning holds up.
25 through the informal communication networks of the public sphere’. Such a model, Habermas explains, requires citizens, believers and unbelievers alike, to be aware of the fallibility of their worldviews (2003, 105). And it requires the neutral state to abstain from prejudging political decisions in favour of one side or the other when confronted with competing claims of knowledge and faith. ‘Democratic public reason’ remains osmotically open to both sides, science and religion, without relinquishing its independence, whilst keeping equal distance, in the outcome, from any strong traditions and comprehensive worldviews. In this sense, Habermas’ secularism singles out religion for exclusion from certain domains of public discourse whilst still making room for it in the public sphere more generally. It is welcome in civil society, but it is to be filtered out of the formal deliberation of political bodies. Even in civil society, however, it is, ideally, to be translated to the ‘common’ vernacular, which is the ‘secular’ language of public reason5. Habermas’ claim that his proviso shares the burden more equally between religious and secular citizens may well be admitted. However, there is little doubt that the treatment of the religious and secular is still explicitly asymmetrical. The latter reigns, the former is to be managed. Indeed, Habermas is elsewhere explicit that religion must undergo a change or reform, restraining its otherwise ‘destructive potential’, to be accepted as reasonable by the liberal state (2003, 104). It must show a restraint based on a ‘triple reflection’ on part of believers living in a pluralist society: first, religious consciousness must come to terms with the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of encountering other denominations and religions; second, it must adapt to the authority of the sciences which hold societal monopoly of secular knowledge; third, it must accept the premises of a constitutional state grounded in a profane morality. This is quite plainly a very narrow and pejorative view of religion as unable to naturally encounter plurality, as epistemically inferior to secular knowledge, and as needing to set aside its morality in favour of a profane morality. These demands of restraining an inherent destructive potential may well be argued as necessary for a secular liberal democracy but it is untenable to simultaneously claim to be treating religion and secularity symmetrically.6 On the contrary, not only is the treatment radically asymmetrical but religion is made a special case of in a way that is difficult to justify, as noted by Charles Taylor. For Taylor, secularism is justified on much the same grounds as those invoked by Habermas7, with two important differences: one, that secularism should not single out religion as a special case, and two, that there is no need for any translation proviso.
A Negotiated, Free-standing (Secular) Political Ethic?
Taylor asserts that secularism is in need of a radical redefinition to free it from an unhealthy and unjustified fixation on religion, from treating religion as a ‘special case’. Secularism, for Taylor, seeks three goods that can be classed in the three categories of the French Revolutionary trinity: liberty, equality, fraternity (2011, 34-35). Specifically, no religion or
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5 We shall outline and critique the concept of public reason in chapter three. See pp. 36-39. 6 Another insightful critique of Habermas’ translation proviso comes from Stoeckl (2017, 38, 42), who notes that the proviso i) assumes that all religious content is translatable into secular language; ii) assumes that mere translation can resolve conflict; and iii) shares the burden of translation unequally amongst religious citizens, let alone between religious and secular citizens: liberal religious actors will find it much easier to translate than more conservative actors. Stoeckl presents this critique within a broader one about the debate on secularism – and the discourse of the social sciences related to religion more broadly – suffering from a theology blind spot in which the nuance and difference within religion is not given sufficient consideration. 7 Primarily the need to manage diverse societies: ‘The pluralism of society requires that there be some kind of neutrality’ (Taylor, 2011, 34).
26 basic belief is to be forced on anyone, or to enjoy a privileged status in society, and all are to be included in deliberation on the political identity of the society and how it will achieve these goals. If this is the case, then secularism is not about the relation of the state with religion but rather has to do with the correct response of the democratic state to diversity (Taylor 2011, 36). The aim is to protect people in the belief and practice of whatever outlook they choose, treating them equally regardless of this choice, and giving them all a fair hearing. The ‘political principles’ of human rights, equality, rule of law, and democracy are what is sought. There is no reason here to single out religion as against non-religious viewpoints: ‘the point of state neutrality is precisely to avoid favoring or disfavoring not just religious positions but any basic position, religious or nonreligious’ (Taylor 2011, 37). The fixation on religion, for Taylor, is bound up with a tendency to define secularism in terms of some institutional arrangement (2011, 40-41). This ‘fetishisation’ of some institutional formula becomes the goal in and of itself and the entire matter is reduced to how best to meet this formula. Instead, argues Taylor, we should start from the goals – such as those outlined above – and derive the requisite arrangements therefrom. Some separation of church and state – some mutual autonomy of governing and religious institutions and the neutrality of the former – will still be indispensable but what form they are to take and what they mean in practice should be determined by how we can maximise the three basic goals. According to Taylor, modern societies are direct-access and temporally homogenous and hence radically different from premodern societies (1998, 43). He argues that traditional despotisms required people to remain passive and merely obey the law where free democratic societies substitute despotic enforcement with a degree of self-enforcement and require of citizens some degree of participation in the process of governance. The direct- access nature of modern society is reflected in multiple developments: the rise of the public sphere in which all have equal right to participate in discussion; the extension of the market place whereby all contracts are between legal equals; and the concept of citizenship. Temporal homogeneity is reflected in all time being equally profane (‘secular time’). Together, these two features of the modern ‘imagined community’, mean, according to Taylor, that there are no privileged persons or events, and hence no mediations (1998, 43). Taylor also holds that secularism has universal applicability despite having emerged in response to the specific political problems of Europe. This is so at least in so far as it allows modern societies to define a political ethic independent of religious convictions, something they simply cannot do without given their heterogeneous nature. Such a politic ethic is arrived at through a (Rawlsian) overlapping consensus, which allows people to have different, even mutually exclusive, reasons for affirming the politically significant ethic8, and disputes are to be addressed through persuasion and negotiation. On this view, the markedly liberal moral-political positions of human rights, democracy and equality become mere ‘political principles’, ‘basic principles’ or ‘basic norms’ that everyone can agree with, as if they are neutral values, not themselves emanating from the ‘deeper reasons’ of liberalism. We would assert that Taylor’s move here, as with Rawls and Habermas, is to take the fundamental normative contents of one worldview, namely liberalism, and elevate them to the (non-negotiable) political ethic of the state, which it is to
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8 For instance, the ‘political principles’ of ‘human rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy’ as a political ethic is said to be shared by people of very different basic outlooks: ‘A Kantian will justify the rights to life and freedom by pointing to the dignity of rational agency; a utilitarian will speak of the necessity to treat beings who can experience joy and suffering in such a way as to maximize the first and minimize the second. A Christian will speak of humans as made in the image of God. They concur on the principles but differ on the deeper reasons for holding to this ethic. The state must uphold the ethic, but must refrain from favouring any of the deeper reasons’ (Taylor, 2011, 37).
27 support and implement, all the while claiming to uphold the notion that the state is not to privilege any particular worldview. This move, we assert, makes the liberal worldview invisible, masking its normativity in the mantle of alleged neutrality. Taylor (Rawls and Habermas, too) would here argue that ‘human rights’ – to take one of his ‘three basic norms’ – is a foreground principle supported by many different worldviews, albeit based on different background or deeper reasons. We would contest that the notion of human rights is much more closely tied to liberalism9 than to be so easily quarantined and abstracted as a general, free-standing principle. Even if we accept this premise, however, it can only be true to the extent that ‘human rights’ is conceived of as an empty shell, meaning little more than the assertion that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Such a notion is so lacking of concrete content as to be useless for any political ethic; for a value that is to be fostered by the state, the very purpose ascribed to it by the proponents of this view. As soon as the shell is filled with any content, we face serious moral questions that simply cannot be answered in abstraction from the deeper reasons of any particular worldview.10 In practice, it is not any free and fair deliberation by the ‘people’ as a collective agency that resolves such questions. Rather, the regnant worldview of liberalism has greatest influence and the disparate distribution of power is determinative. It is from this perspective that Asad critiques Taylor, challenging the latter’s conception of modern society on almost all counts (2003, 3-6). Political participation, Asad argues, has more to do with state enforcement than self-enforcement. He notes the influence of pressure groups on government decisions, opinions polls as a means for government anticipation and influencing of public opinion, and the role of mass media which directly mediates individuals’ imagination of their national community, as evidence that there is in fact a lesser direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives. The latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a culturally differentiated and economically polarised electorate. Modern society, argues Asad, in important ways is not at all a direct-access society. There is no space in which citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another. Negotiation in public life is confined to such elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary legislators, and business leaders. As for the idea that disputes about background justifications and foreground political principles can simply be addressed through persuasion and negotiation, Asad finds this a generous but naïve impulse (2003, 6). The nation-state, he notes, is not a generous agent and its law does not deal in persuasion. Given obvious imbalances of power, negotiation amounts to the exchange of unequal concessions forced on weaker parties.
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9 This is discussed in Chapter three. See p. 34-36. 10 We may take the ‘right to life’ as an example. All normative worldviews may agree to humans having a right to life but none affirm it unconditionally. That is, they all allow life to be taken under certain circumstances. What are those circumstances? We may also take the very recent debate in Australia about same-sex marriage as an example. Is choice of sexuality a human right? Both these questions – one about the details of a right, the other about the validity of the right itself – simply cannot be answered without reference to the deeper reasons and specific moral content of a particular normative worldview.
28 Religion, Secularity and Violence
Another justification for secularism rests on the attribution to religion of intolerance, cruelty and violence. This position finds in religion an inherent propensity for violence.11 Theocracy is said to be exceptionally violent because the sovereign’s support of the ‘true path’ to eternal life is said to hang in the balance. Given that it perceives itself to have arisen as a solution to the devastating and persistent religious wars of medieval Europe, perhaps secularism must conceive of violence as intrinsic to religion, its supposed opposite. Only a secular legal constitution, it is argued, can restrain religious violence and intolerance towards minorities. This perspective, however, turns a blind eye to a gaping hole. It overlooks the brutal conquests of Africa and Asia by European powers in the nineteenth century that were congenial with the rise of secularism in Europe and had little to do with religion (Asad 2003, 100). Likewise, it ignores the devastatingly cruel secular powers of the twentieth century: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Imperial Japan, Maoist China. These historical realities problematise the simple equation of institutional religion with violence and cruelty. Asad puts it poignantly (2003, 10):
Experts on “lslam,” “the modern world,” and “political philosophy” have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur’an or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafiz al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an nor did the secularist Saddam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not - so far as is publicly known - invoke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho. Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture.
Thus secularism does not solve the problem of violence as much as it shifts it. The state forcibly establishes and defends core political principles, which its courts enforce through violence, leading to cumulative disaffection in those with different views. This is comparable, thinks Asad, to early Euro-American historical experience with secularism, which claimed to ensure peace between rival groups but in fact merely shifted the violence of religious wars into the violence of national and colonial wars (2003, 10). Asad submits two examples of how secularism is in practice very much compatible with violence, disharmony and intolerance: the United States and India (2003, 7-8). In the US, which has a model secular constitution, ‘the repeated explosions of intolerance in American history … are entirely compatible (indeed intertwined) with secularism in a highly modern society’. In India, again with a secular constitution and functioning liberal democracy, communal riots between Hindus and various minorities (Muslim, Christian, ‘Untouchable’) occur with disturbing frequency. ‘A secular state’, Asad concludes, ‘does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play
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11 For instance, Habermas: ‘Three overlapping phenomena, more than anything else, converge to create the impression of a worldwide “resurgence of religion”: (a) the missionary expansion of the major world religions; (b) their fundamentalist radicalization; and (c) the political instrumentalization of their inherent potential for violence’ of which ‘worldwide Islamic terrorism [is] only the most spectacular examples of a political unleashing of the potential for violence inherent in religion’ (2009, 61-62, emphasis added).
29 different structures of ambition and fear’. Indeed, violence is built in to the very logic of political liberalism.12
Refashioning Secularism as Decentred Pluralism
To complete our discussion on justifications of secularism, we now turn to William Connolly whose work presents both a penetrating critique of prevailing forms of liberal secularism – complementing the critique of Asad – but also the justification of another type of secularism. In Why I am not a Secularist (1999)13 Connolly seeks to ‘rework the secular problematic by exploring layered conceptions of thinking, ethos, and public life appropriate to a timely vision of multidimensional pluralism’ (4-5). He argues that while the secular formation was admirable at its inception, when some compromise formation was needed with the breakup of the Catholic monopoly in Christendom, there is a need for re-examination now under new conditions of being. For Connolly, secularism is the endeavour to ‘strain metaphysics out of politics’ and to dredge out of public life as much cultural density and depth as possible in order to uphold public reason, procedure and justice (23). It is the attempt at a ‘postmetaphysical’ politics: ‘a world of politics in which controversial religious and existential orientations are bracketed from public discourse and political life’ (Connolly 2011, 648). Connolly finds both secularism and theocracy untenable positions and seeks other spaces of possibility between these. Whilst he opposes ‘a religiously centered politics in which the state represents the dictates of a specific church or of a religious faith as general as Christianity’, he also finds secular conceptions of language, ethics, discourse, and politics ‘insufficiently alert to the layered density of political thinking and judgment’ (4). Where secular models are ‘too constipated’ to sustain the diversity they seek to admire, theocratic models that do engage density of culture are too highly centred. Notably, Connolly is still an advocate for secularism (notwithstanding the title of his book). He seeks the refashioning of secularism, not its elimination (19). For Connolly, at the heart of secularism is the wish to provide an authoritative and self-sufficient public space equipped to regulate and limit ‘religious’ disputes in public life (5). This, for him, is the secular conceit that tries to ‘provide a single, authoritative basis for public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or “private” faith’, and in doing so tries to seal off public life not only from religious doctrines but also nontheistic orientations of reverence, ethics and public life. Not only are asecular, nontheistic perspectives – Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Deleuze et al - marginalised by secularism, they are difficult even to account for in the binary framework of secular and sacred orientations to public life. Upholding a separation between church and state does not necessarily accord with those conceptions of public life most widely bound up with secularism. For Connolly, then (5):
[T]he secular wish to contain religious and irreligious passions within private life helps to engender the immodest conceptions of a public life peddled by so many secularists. The need today is to cultivate a public ethos of engagement in which a wider variety of perspectives than heretofore acknowledged inform and restrain one another.
Thus, secularism, in its current form, is untenable. It must be converted, refashioned into one perspective amongst several in a pluralistic culture. Connolly’s preferred refashioning
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12 See note 5 on p. 35 for a self-articulated liberal view that reveals this inherent logic. 13 All citations in this section, where only page numbers are given from hereinafter, are from this text.
30 would refuse all metaphysical perspectives including the secular (the nonreligious and nontheistic) the privilege of elevating themselves to a position of primacy (39):
The need today, rather, is to rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of engagement in public life among a plurality of controversial metaphysical perspectives, including, for starters, Christian and other monotheistic perspectives, secular thought, and asecular, nontheistic perspectives.
This ‘multidimensional pluralism’ is a ‘more vibrant public pluralism’ in which each constituency (religious or nonreligious) projects its perspective into the public fray without any being the single authoritative source from which all others must draw. Each is an honoured participant in a pluralistic culture rather than the authoritative embodiment of it (6). Each appreciates the ‘profound contestability of the fundamentals’ it honours (8). This pluralism is not to be grounded in one ‘austere source’ adopted by everyone, but rather (39):
It would be grounded in an ethos of engagement between multiple constituencies honoring a variety of moral sources and metaphysical orientations. Such an ethos between interdependent partisans provides an existential basis for democratic politics if and when many partisans affirm without deep resentment the contestable character of the fundamental faith they honor most.
Importantly, for Connolly, the fundamentals of all constituencies are contestable, whether that be a theological creed, public reason, or communicative rationality. All are unable to secure their faith so tightly as to convince all reasonable people. Further, this multidimensional or ‘decentred’ pluralism goes hand in hand with Connolly’s ‘politics of becoming’: the conflictual process by which new identities are propelled into being by moving the pre-existing shape of diversity, justice and legitimacy (10). This is one proposed solution to the problem of representing minorities on the mainstream model. Connolly’s decentred pluralism - in which Asad too finds merit (2003, 177) - urges a shift in the prevalent concept of pluralism from a majority presiding over numerous minorities to a situation of multiple minorities contending and collaborating with a general ethos of forbearance. This approach requires, in the stead of liberal doctrines of multiculturalism, a continuous readiness to deconstruct historical narratives constituting identities and their boundaries. How this plays out in practice is to be established. Another type of decentring outlined by Asad, different to that of Connolly, is that of John Milbank who distinguishes between an ‘enlightened simple space’ and a ‘gothic complex space’ (Asad 2003, 178). This conception, which is linked to a specifically medieval historical experience, recognises that there is no such thing as absolute non-interference: ‘no action can be perfectly self-contained, but always impinges upon other people, so that spaces will always in some degree ‘complexly’ overlap, jurisdictions always in some measure be competing, loyalties remain (perhaps benignly) divided’. On this recognition, this view preferences ‘complex space’, which has a natural, ontological priority, over ‘simple space’, which is merely an abstracting, idealising project. For Asad (2003, 178-9), this idea of complex space, complemented by a parallel concept of complex time, is a fruitful way of thinking about the intersecting boundaries and heterogeneous activities of individuals and groups related to traditions. Whilst this sort of approach would, he appreciates, reduce the scope for ‘national politics’ with its exclusive boundaries and homogenous temporality, it is more likely to facilitate the conditions that nurture collective ways of life, not simply the acceptance or recognition of different identities. What is important, Asad posits, is not how different identities are negotiated and recognised (through exploratory and constructive dialogue as advocated by Taylor and
31 Habermas, for instance). Rather, our focus should be on what it takes to live particular ways of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously. We may note, then, that when it comes to justifications of secularism both Habermas and Taylor uphold revised models of secularism as a necessary means of managing diverse societies. Their models advocate for a new epistemic attitude that moves beyond the modern assumed superiority of positivist rationality over religion. In turn, both propose significant revisions of the authority of the secular and emphasise the importance of learning from religion. Nevertheless, they still privilege the secular, Habermas more than Taylor. Asad and Connolly rightly critique this position as not only privileging secularity whilst claiming neutrality but also giving mere lip service to genuine pluralism. They are in favour of a more radical shift that would see the secular decentred. All four, it should be noted, still find secularism, albeit in substantively different forms, to be the best political arrangement for contemporary societies. We find more merit in the arguments of Asad and Connolly. However, a proper exploration of their critiques and suggested alternatives, which we attempt in the next chapter, requires further consideration of what is at the core of all justifications for secularism: claims of secularity standing on a neutral ground and providing for an enlightened freedom.
32 Chapter Three - The Secular as (Elusive) Salvific Neutrality
Self-representations of the secular aim at the characterisation of neutrality and pragmatic common sense. It is interesting to note that the terms ‘secularism’ and ‘secularist’ were introduced into English by ‘freethinkers’ in the mid-nineteenth century – such as George Jacob Holyoake – in order to carry an anti-theist agenda but without also subscribing to, or being seen as subscribing to, atheism. Holyoake introduced the word to differentiate his anti-theistic position from the atheistic pronouncements of Charles Bradlaugh and others also associated with the secular movement (Waterhouse 1921, 348). For Holyoake (1871, 11):
Secularism relates to the present existence of man … having for its objects the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest perceivable point, as the immediate duty of society: inculcating the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism or Christianity.
This appeal to neutrality has persisted since. According to the more traditional liberal model of Rawls, and the revised models of Taylor and Habermas, the secular as epistemic category and secularism as political doctrine are linked and emerge with the modern nation-state. They are related by their common neutrality: the epistemic secular is a neutral mode of knowing independent of any religious or moral commitments and the political secular establishes a neutral political ethic independent of any such commitments. These are cornerstone premises of what we have termed the mainstream narrative since it is this claimed neutrality on whose basis liberalism asserts a unique ability to organise diverse societies. Asad challenges this claim of neutrality. Secularism, for him, is ‘transcendent mediation’: it is an enactment by which a political medium – the representation of citizenship – redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self articulated through class, gender and religion, in contrast to the mediation enacted in pre-modern societies which sought to mediate local identities without aiming at transcendence (2003, 5).1 Relatedly, modernity is a project – a series, to be sure, of interlinked projects – that aims at institutionalising a number of principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, free markets and, of course, secularism. As such, it accounts for distinctive sensibilities, aesthetics and moralities, even if not constituting an integrated totality. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, experiences constituting ‘disenchantment’, implying an immediate access to reality stripped off myth, magic and the sacred (Asad 2003, 13-14). Thus, it is hardly neutral in any sense of the word. It represents a very particular mediated experience of the world. Liberal secularism claims neutrality and, on this basis, claims prime candidacy to organise pluralistic society. These claims are made concrete through a number of the political, epistemic and moral characters that make up its cast: the nation-state, public reason, and freedom and equality between individuals and religions. In the following sections of this chapter we show that none of these come through on the claim to neutrality, focusing in
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1 Habermas and Taylor, of course, would argue that this ‘transcendent mediation’ is necessary to form a ‘people’ with a strong collective identity and the ability to act as a deliberative unit. See, for instance, Taylor (2011, 43-44), where he argues that the very notion of ‘people’ is a new kind of collective agency without precedent in pre-modern times. Further, acting as a collective deliberative unit requires coming together on some (real or imagined) commonality and, as such, transcending particular differences.
33 particular on the various ideologies that comprise the secular worldview, on ‘public reason’, and on the notions of freedom and equality. We end with a consideration of how the one suggested alternative of ‘decentred pluralism’ fares on the same count.
The Ideological Secular Web
Charles Taylor presents an interesting example from early 19th century America of a political system in which religion is given a place that no one would accept today (2011, 38):
For Judge Joseph Story, the goal of the first amendment was “to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects,” but nevertheless “Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state.” Christianity was essential to the state because the belief in “a future state of rewards and punishments” is “indispensable to the administration of justice.” What is more, “it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is a special duty of government to foster, and encourage it among the citizens.”
It is true that such a political approach is disagreeable to modern liberal sensibilities. We may note here something else, however, from the perspective of the pretence of neutrality: that this is an example of a state honestly stating its fundamental principles as the articulations of a normative worldview. We may well think of analogous political or judicial commentary of our age in which the ‘truth’ of liberal fundamentals (human rights, democracy, equality) are announced and the state justified in supporting and fostering these. This would be something much more acceptable to the sensibilities of our secular age, no doubt. However, the difference is in the pretence of neutrality, the assertion that somehow liberalism is not ideological. A number of concepts comprise the web that represents the dominant liberal secular worldview: humanism, nationalism, and liberalism, amongst others. All of these are ideological. Nationalism, for instance, is not some natural, empirically deduced understanding of how the human family is, or should be, organised. As Asad notes, nationalism imagines the world as a universe of national societies in which individual humans live their worldly existence and align their loyalty directly and exclusively to the nation (2003, 193-4). Even when the nation is said to be ‘under God’, it exists only in ‘this world’ – a special kind of world. The people of each nation make and own their history. ‘Nation’ and ‘culture’ – categories that do not precede but rise with nationalism in early modern Europe – together form the conditions in which the nation uses and enjoys the world: man dominates nature and each person fashions his or her individuality in the freedom regulated by the nation-state. Asad cites the popular thesis of Benedict Anderson about ‘imagined communities’2 to note that the ‘worldliness’ of secular nationalism, far from being some common sense truth, is a construct no less ideological than the one it replaced. It includes in the present an imagined realm of the nation as a community with a worldly past and it employs highly abstract concepts of time and space to tell a particular story about the nation as a natural and self-evident unity whose members share a common experience. Liberalism too is thoroughly ideological. Its central principles of human equality and human rights rest on controversial assumptions about the nature of the human being and of society. Some liberal political theorists recognise this. Margaret Canovan argues that a secular, liberal state depends for its public virtues (equality, tolerance, and liberty) on
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2 See Anderson B 2006, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Revised Edition, London: Verso.
34 political myth3 (Asad 2003, 56-58). She notes that in the eighteenth century the ideas that eventually formed the core of liberal thinking were based on a conception of nature as deep reality. Later, liberal thinkers found grounds to be optimistic about political change in invoking nature as a realm more real than the social world. Natural rights came to refer to not only what men (and later women) should be afforded but what they do in fact possess as a function of their inner human nature that lies beneath the distorted world as it appears. The moral value of ‘natural rights’ was grounded in their claimed ontological reality. Only by invoking an alternative ‘natural’ world in which freedom and equality prevailed could the manifest regnant social inequalities and constraints be condemned as ‘unnatural’.4 For Canovan, this is liberalism’s own redemptive myth. Liberalism is a project to be realised not an account of the world. The ‘nature’ of early liberalism and the ‘humanity’ of today are talked about as if they exist but the point is that they are still to be created. An ‘imaginary construction’ of human rights is asserted precisely because they are not built into the structure of the universe (Asad 2003, 59):
The frightening truth concealed by the liberal myth is, therefore, that liberal principles go against the grain of human and social nature. Liberalism is not a matter of clearing away a few accidental obstacles and allowing humanity to unfold its natural essence. It is more like making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching … But it is precisely the element of truth in the gloomy pictures of society and politics drawn by critics of liberalism that makes the project of realizing liberal principles all the more urgent. The world is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light of a myth.5
The weakness of these assumptions about the natural world, Asad argues, emerged most fully at the turn of the nineteenth century with the rise of sociological realism and the emergence of a new vision of nature as essentially violent and conflict ridden. The eventual
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3 Asad provides a concise outline of how the meaning of ‘myth’ changes and develops in the western tradition (2003, 26-29). What we know of today as the binary opposition of myth and reality has its origins with the classical Greek binary of mythos and logos. Mythos was the powerful speech of heroes associated with truth (alethea) where logos was speech associated with lies and dissimulation usually designed to placate in acts such as dissuading warriors from combat. Poets tended to authorise their speech by calling it mythos – an inspiration from the gods. Later, the Sophists taught that all speech originated with humans. As such, the mythoi of poets are lies in so far as they speak of the gods, although they have a morally improving effect. Plato takes this line – in his attack on poets – and asserts that philosophers, not poets, were responsible for moral improvement, changing the sense of myth to signify a socially useful lie. For thinkers of the Enlightenment, the study of myth (Greek ‘mythology’ in particular) became the site of reflection on human error (within the framework of a newer binary of imagination and reason) through which the psychology of human passions could be explored. It also became the object of cultural cultivation. Myths allowed writers and artists to represent contemporary events and feelings in the new mode of ‘fiction’. 4 Canovan M 1990, ‘On Being Economical with the Truth: Some Liberal Reflections’, Political Studies, vol. 38, p. 16, cited in Asad, 2003, 59). 5 Asad perceptively notes the striking nature of these metaphors and their implications in terms of violence (2003, 59). They explain and justify the violence at the heart of a political doctrine that has disavowed violence on principle. It is a translucent violence, the violence of a universalising reason. For to make an enlightened space, which is constantly under threat of encroachment by the darkness of the outside world, this outside must be continually attacked, restrained, and, eventually, annexed by conquest. The garden itself too needs constant weeding. We thus have not one but two legitimated violences: a violence required by the cultivation of the liberal enlightenment that is an expression of law and a violence of the dark jungle that is an expression of transgression. Political and legal disciplines that forcefully protect sacred things (individual conscience, property, liberty) against whatever violates them are thus underwritten by the secular liberal myth.
35 resurrection and triumph of liberal natural rights came off the back not of more effective theorisation but of Europe’s experience of its own horrors in the form of Nazism and Stalinism in the first half of the twentieth century. This gave rise to the entire project of human rights that brings with it a moralism wrongly said to be uncongenial to secularism as a system of political governance. It is also not difficult to see that in practice secularism is not some neutral background frame that allows all other worldviews to express themselves. As ideological as any other worldview, it insists on the positions required by its fundamental commitments and disallows expression of whatever contradicts these. A recent example of this noted by Asad (2003, 139) was the insistence of the Greek government that religious affiliation be removed from Greek identity cards – as required by the European charter of human rights – despite popular opposition which saw this move as a threat to a collective religious identity. Even the suggestion, made by the church, of a referendum to decide on the proposed change was rejected by the government on grounds that such methods cannot apply to issues of human rights. A further compromise by the church that old forms be retained on an optional basis was also dismissed. This is a powerful example which demonstrates not only secular power as imposing and exclusionary but also of it as resting on certain ‘sacred’, metaphysical fundamentals, such as human rights, that are prior to other fundamental secular principles such as democracy. These human rights achieve such a level of inviolability that they are beyond even being put to those who are otherwise asserted as sovereign in deciding how they live their lives. A second example we can add of the imposing nature of secular liberalism is that of the Muslim hijab, which, in spite of claims to religious freedom and expression, has been banned or policed in several states. In France, it is banned for students of public schools. In certain German states, pupils can wear it but not teachers. In the UK and elsewhere individual schools have the right to decide to impose restrictions. Such examples, of which there are many, render untenable the juxtaposition of religious politics as imposing and exclusionary with a secular politics as liberating and inclusionary.
Public Reason
‘Public reason’ – today often considered a Rawlsian idea, but one with (deeper) roots in Hobbes, Kant and Rousseau – is a critical component of Habermas’ conception of how moral-political positions are decided in liberal democracies. In Rawls (1997), the diversity of incommensurable and irresolvable comprehensive doctrines held by people in a pluralistic society means the best we can aim for, in public deliberation on moral-political rules, is to leave aside background reasons and seek an ‘overlapping consensus’ of foreground principles. The political order is based, to use Ferrara’s (2009, 81) characterisation of the Rawlsian principle, not on ultimate but on penultimate truths. Since every citizen is free and equal, rules can only be imposed when justified by reasons that everyone can accept. This requires a common and neutral language of reasoning, a role served by public reason. ‘I propose’, writes Rawls (1997, 766), ‘that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens’. This presupposes a basic principle asserted by all forms of secular politics, viz., that the exercise of legitimate state power must take place in secular terms. Habermas agrees with this basic principle. He calls it ‘democratic public reason’ or ‘democratic common sense’ (as well as ‘secular reason’6) and holds that it allows for
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6 Cf. Rawls (1997, 775) who wants to distinguish public reason from secular reason, defining the latter as reasoning in terms of comprehensive non-religious doctrines such as a Kantian or utilitarian morality.
36 democratic deliberation ‘in ways that are neutral toward the cognitive claims of competing worldviews’ (2011, 24, emphasis added). Without the presumption of a background consensus on constitutional essentials, citizens of a pluralist society could not seek judicial redress, appeal to specific rights or make arguments with reference to constitutional clauses in the expectation of getting a fair decision (Habermas and Taylor, 2011, 65). Such an indispensable background consensus, however, can only be settled within a space of neutral reasons; reasons that, for Habermas, are ‘secular’ in both the active sense that they are neutral with respect to comprehensive worldviews and in the negative sense that they do not appeal to religious discourse in particular. For Habermas (Habermas and Taylor, 2011, 66):
Secular reasons do not expand the perspective of one’s own community, but push for mutual perspective taking so that different communities can develop a more inclusive perspective by transcending their own universe of discourse.
Habermas maintains an epistemic distinction between secular and religious thought, privileging the former as uniquely sufficient to arrive at the normative conclusions we need to establish a political ethic and the legitimacy of the democratic state. While he now affirms the possibility that religious discourse carries ‘truth contents’ (which can be extracted via translation), this is only in its capacity as a vehicle. The basic epistemic distinction still holds for him (Habermas and Taylor 2011, 50). He asserts that whereas ‘at a general cognitive level, there is only one and the same human reason’, there are differences in kind between religious and secular reasons (Habermas and Taylor, 2011, 61-62). The latter can be expressed in a public or generally shared language; the former appeal to an inclusive membership in a corresponding religious community and are therefore exclusionary:
Only if one is a member and can speak in the first person from within a particular religious tradition does one share a specific kind of experience on which religious convictions and reasons depend … [T]he evidence for religious reasons does not only depend on cognitive beliefs and their semantic nexus with other beliefs, but on existential beliefs that are rooted in the social dimension of membership, socialization, and prescribed practices.
Yet surely this is true of all traditions and worldviews. Is liberal language any more accessible to a communist or Hindu than Christian language is to a liberal or Muslim? All worldviews, religious or secular, give rise to an internal language, a particular idiom. No contingent worldview can give rise to a neutral language that is somehow more universally accessible than others. We would do well here to separate considerations of understanding and conviction. I do not need to share someone’s experience or practice to understand their argument, although I would perhaps appreciate their argument more if I did. The commonality of a discourse in terms of its intelligibility is a function of how widespread and established it is, that is, on its power and dominance, not of any inherent epistemic distinctions. Secular human rights discourse is now commonly understood in modern Europe, whereas the same arguments would have been unintelligible in Medieval Europe. The opposite is true, to some extent, of theological discourse. As for conviction, naturally I would need to hold the deeper reasons on which the argument ultimately rests to find it convincing. However, this is no truer of a religious worldview than it is of a secular one. If I need to affirm the existence of God to find convincing a moral position that rests on revealed scriptural text, so too do I need to affirm the self-sufficient nature of Reason or the existence of human rights to find convincing a moral position that rests on an article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter is no more inherently intelligible than the former, except only as a function of the hegemony one discourse enjoys relative to the other at any given time.
37 Charles Taylor agrees with Rawls and Habermas on the premise that diverse democracies cannot revert to a shared conception of social and political life. We are condemned to seeking an overlapping consensus.7 However, he disagrees on the claimed necessity of public or secular reason as a common language (Taylor 2011, 49). Hence, whilst he affirms the need for neutral reasons, he is strongly against referring to them as ‘secular reasons’ to the extent that this makes a special case of religious discourse. Indeed, the very idea of secular reason, Taylor argues, is underpinned by an unjustified epistemic distinction (of the sort Habermas posits). This distinction juxtaposes ordinary secular reason as a common language which everyone can use and deliberate in with extraordinary special languages, which introduce extra assumptions and are much more epistemically fragile: you won’t be convinced by them unless you already hold them. In turn, religious reason either comes to the same conclusions as secular reason, but then it is superfluous, or to contrary conclusions, in which case it is dangerous and disruptive and hence to be sidelined. At the core of this epistemic distinction is the notion that religious thought is less rational than secular (non-religious) thought. Religion is a faulty mode of reason. For Taylor, this position has its source in a myth of the Enlightenment (2011, 52). A fairly common view sees the Enlightenment as a passage from darkness to light: a move from a realm of thought full of error and illusion to one where the truth is revealed. Importantly, truth is revealed precisely because the shackles of religious thought are thrown off in favour of ‘secular’ science and philosophy. Marquis de Condorcet (1988, 225)8, in his account of the progress of the human mind, is paradigmatic of Enlightenment thought:
It was finally permitted to resolutely proclaim this right, so long unrecognized, to submit all opinions to our own reason, that is to say, to employ, for seizing on the truth, the sole instrument that we have been given for recognition. Each man learned, with a certain pride, that his nature was not absolutely destined to believe in the words of others; the superstition of antiquity and the abasement of reason before the delirium of a supernatural faith disappeared from society as from philosophy.
Of course, the classic statement, not long after de Condorcet wrote, is that of Kant (1968, 13:33):
Enlightenment is the emergence of human beings from a state of tutelage for which they were themselves responsible, a self-incurred nonage. The slogan of the age was sapere aude! Dare to know.
Kant’s definitional statement on the Enlightenment announces a sounder epistemic mode as the means to progress. The move from religion, or revelation, to reason alone (Kant’s Blosse Vernunft) is posited as a self-evident epistemic gain of our setting aside considerations of dubious truth and relevance and concentrating on matters of obvious relevance that we can
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7 To the extent that all three of Rawls, Habermas, and Taylor seem to acknowledge no other way for diverse societies to operate except through locating some (allegedly) free-standing and neutral conception of justice via an overlapping consensus, they seem not to have sought alternative models. Stout (2004, 68-69), who seeks to consider the possibility that ‘a person can be a reasonable (socially- cooperative) citizen without believing in or appealing to a free-standing conception of justice’, provides one such model. Viewpoints grounded in contradictory background justification can come into conversation through ‘immanent criticism’: an internal critique that, rather than arguing from a purportedly common basis of reasons either tries to show that their opponents’ religious views are incoherent or to argue positively from their opponents’ religious premises to the conclusion that the proposal is acceptable. Only such an approach to political discourse, for Stout, shows the requisite respect for the particular beliefs and practices of its components. Anything less, is to only pay lip service to genuine pluralism. 8 This citation and the following one from Kant are cited in Taylor (2011, 55-56).
38 definitely settle. Reason emerges as autonomous and self-sufficient. It is freed from the ‘delirium’ and ‘tutelage’ of religious thought. As reason is emancipated, and secular reason emerges, humanity comes of age. This is the ‘stadial consciousness’ we encountered earlier in Taylor and Casanova. This type of thinking is implicit in Rawls’ and Habermas’ privileging of secular reason as a universal language. The assumption is that secular reason is better, in some way, at resolving moral-political issues. We would assert, with Taylor (2011, 53-54), that such a distinction in the rational credibility of religious and secular discourse is without foundation. There is no a priori reason for a greater suspicion of the former. There are, of course, this-worldly or immanent arguments that suffice to establish certain conclusions such as mathematical or scientific conclusions. However, the foundational principles we need to establish our basic political morality are not amongst these. The two most widespread immanent moral philosophies, utilitarianism and Kantianism, are as questionable and debatable on their foundational premises as any transcendent philosophy or religious tradition. Basic liberal moral-political positions, such as human rights, for instance, are not by any stretch self-evident or definitively established. Indeed, the ontological grounds of ‘inalienable’ human rights is extremely shaky, particularly in the context of an immanent ontology. How, we may ask, in the larger frame of a world fashioned purely by the evolution of material substances, a world without grounds in any sentience or intelligence, do any ‘rights’ arise? The proposition is hardly intuitive, let alone evident. Rights, in such a frame, can only be postulated. Therefore, we agree with Taylor’s critique of the epistemic distinction between secular and religious reason. However, while Taylor would rather do away with any such distinction, he is still given to locate some neutral ground and hence falls in the same problem as Habermas. Taylor affirms the need for a neutral language in some ‘zones’ of a democratic state (2011, 50). It is only that the zones in which he would have religious reason excluded is smaller comparatively with Habermas.9 In contrast with the latter, Taylor allows religious reason in parliamentary debates (and does not place the condition of translation in citizen deliberation either). He would have the exclusion limited to the ‘official language of the state’: the language of legislation, administrative decrees and court judgments.10 However, this is not on grounds of it being religious reason, but rather on grounds of the neutrality of the state. Thus, where religious justifications for a position are excluded so too are those of non-religious worldviews. The state is not to privilege Marxist, Kantian or utilitarian frameworks just as it is not to privilege Christian, Muslim or Jewish ones. Yet what of liberalism? The problem with this narrative – both that of Habermas and Taylor insofar as they both seek and claim neutral ground upon which an allegedly free- standing political ethic is erected – should, given the preceding discussion, be apparent. It privileges liberalism and secular reason whilst claiming neutrality.11 As to the former, we
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9 ‘I am not sure whether I am disagreeing with Habermas or whether the difference in formulation really amounts to a difference in practice. We both recognize contexts in which the language of the state has to respect a reserve of neutrality and others in which freedom of speech is unlimited. We differ perhaps more in our rationales than in the practice we recommend’ (Taylor, 2011, 58). 10 Habermas is closer to Rawls, in this respect, who also applies public reason only to certain public discourses. It applies to the tripartite ‘public political forum’, which comprises the discourse of judges, government officials and legislators, and candidates for public office, not to the ‘background culture’, which is the discourse of civil society (Rawls, 1997, 768). 11 This is true of the original Rawlsian conception as well. ‘Central to the idea of public reason’, argues Rawls, ‘is that it neither criticizes nor attacks any comprehensive doctrine, religious or nonreligious, except insofar as that doctrine is incompatible with the essentials of public reason and a democratic polity. The basic requirement is that a reasonable doctrine accepts a constitutional democratic regime and its companion idea of legitimate law’ (Rawls, 1997, 766). We may note here both the attempt to
39 have shown that the ‘basic goals’ of the state that even Taylor affirms – human rights, democracy, equality – are markedly normative liberal positions. They are not normatively neutral. Likewise, secular reason, reason alone, secular language – none of these are neutral. ‘Secular reason’ appeals to its own normative grounds just as religious reason does. It appeals to human rights and democracy. If ‘Whereas the Bible tells us…’ or ‘It is our obligation to God that we…’ are religious reasons used to justify moral-political positions, then the secular equivalents are ‘Whereas the Constitution states…’ or ‘It is obligation of upholding human rights that we…’ – neither are normatively neutral.12 Taylor comes closest to what we would assert is an inevitable realisation that it is impossible to abstract from differences in the deeper reasons of normative worldviews, religious and secular alike, when establishing the political ethic of a society. No normative assertion can be made from mere empirical or descriptive observations. The ‘is’ does not lead us to the ‘ought’ as Hume would remind us. As such, any political ethic is necessarily grounded in one or other worldview, in some normative claims, in some assertion about how the world should be. The particular political ethic defended by Habermas and Taylor is markedly liberal, yet they are unable to admit this whilst still maintaining the coherence of a chosen political framework that is built on the premise that the best way to organise diverse societies is on some common, neutral ground – neutral, that is, with respect to all the normative worldviews held by the citizens as individuals. Public reason, then, is a prototypical example of the move by the secular to claim superiority through its supposed exclusive ability to locate a neutral ground. Public reason, it is claimed, is reason acceptable to all citizens because it is free, unlike private reason, from any religious, moral or ideological commitments. To the extent that this claim is not true, as we have argued above, what we are left with is the secular privileging itself by creating an artificial distinction between public and private reason, deeming the former as superior and giving itself a monopoly therein. The above-mentioned criticisms of public reason, it should be noted, take for granted its presumption of a clean distinction between the private and public sphere and that the latter is a neutral space for debates that equally welcome all voices. In the next section, we interrogate these premises further.
The Secular as Enlightened Freedom and Equality
We have seen that thinkers like Habermas, Taylor and Casanova posit that while the secularisation thesis has been problematic, it can be salvaged by certain revisions, the upshot of which is that room is made in the public sphere for religion (‘deprivatised religion’). This apparently generous impulse to allow religion room in the public sphere of liberal democracies is not as simple or worthy a solution as it may seem. Asad’s critique here has been instructive (2003, 183-5):
------find a neutral ground and the failure thereof. Public reason criticises only unreasonable doctrines, where ‘reasonableness’ is defined by fundamental liberal secular positions of democracy, constitutionality and rule of (secular) law. Indeed, it would be remarkable to suggest that the reasonableness of anything could be determined without recourse to normative judgments that inevitably emanate from one particular worldview or another. 12 It is also worth noting that public reason, in all its conceptions, operates on the Machiavellian view of politics as separated from morality (except, on the Berlinian reading of Machiavelli, in its final ends), as opposed to the Aristotelian view of politics as intertwined with morality. Rawls puts it most explicitly: ‘Political liberalism views this insistence on the whole truth in politics as incompatible with democratic citizenship and the idea of legitimate law’ (1997, 771). From this perspective too, public reason is not normatively neutral.
40 [W]hen it is proposed that religion can play a positive political role in modern society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever … [o]nly religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal discourse are being commended, in which tolerance is sought on the basis of a distinctive relation between law and morality.
Asad notes that the liberal public sphere systematically excludes various kinds of voices or claims from serious consideration. This is now a popular critique first articulated long ago.13 From the onset the liberal public sphere excluded women, those without property, and members of religious minorities. This public sphere is not simply a forum for rational debate but an exclusionary space. Or, we might say, that it is a forum for rational debate where ‘rational’ is defined in way that to be rational means to adopt certain fundamental assumptions of liberalism and as such is exclusionary. And it is so not merely contingently but necessarily as an articulation of power. Anyone who enters this public sphere must address power’s disposition of people and things and must speak the language of power and accept its ideological boundaries or else be excluded from serious consideration by being characterised as extremists or threats to the public order.14 The public sphere, far from being an empty space for carrying out debates, is constituted by the sensibilities – memories and aspirations, fears and hopes – of speakers and listeners. Thus the introduction of new discourses may disrupt established assumptions structuring debates. Indeed they may have to do so to be heard. However, ‘positive contribution’ by religion is that contribution which does not disrupt these structuring assumptions or threaten dominant values. In turn, the dilemma facing the religion that wants to enter the liberal public sphere – utilising its sacred privilege of ‘free speech’ – is that it can only enter in a manner that does not allow it to be heard on its own terms. It must re-mould (‘reform’) itself in the liberal image to be heard. This requirement to reform – effectively to change – is explicit in the models we outlined in chapter one. Rawls admits only ‘reasonable’ religions amongst those who are welcome in the public sphere. Habermas demands reform by religious citizens on the ‘triple reflection’ we encountered earlier. Casanova illustrates how Catholicism in fact reformed to become more acceptable. Taylor cites this example with optimism that a similar ‘evolution’ is possible with Muslim communities (2011, 36). We may add here that even on granting the premise that the public sphere is an empty space for debates that equally entertain all views, there is something quite artificial and problematic about siphoning it from the private sphere, as if human life is compartmentalisable into neat self-contained divisions. As if what is held most dear to people of their very conception of the world and the normative lens through which they view it – or how they most deeply experience the world – can be contained within the four walls of the home and taken off and hung on the coat rack – or, to recall the memorable phrase of Taylor, left in the ‘vestibule of the public sphere’ – whenever they venture out.
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13 For example: ‘There is a very sharp distinction in the public domain between legitimate interests and those which are absolutely beyond the pale. If a group or interest is within the framework of acceptability, then it can be sure of winning some measure of what it seeks, for the process of national politics is distributive and compromising. On the other hand, if an interest falls outside the circle of the acceptable, it receives no attention whatsoever and its proponents are treated as crackpots, extremists, or foreign agents’ (Wolff RP 1969, ‘Beyond Tolerance’ in Wolff RP, Moore J, and Marcuse H, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Cape: London quoted in Asad (2003, 183)). More recently, Wendy Brown (2008) has powerfully argued that toleration, although presumed as a method of affirming and celebrating diversity, is in practice often a tool of masking fear and aversion and of regulating its objects. 14 On this very logic Jews, Communists, Asians and others have been excluded in western liberal democracies by being characterised as extremists, foreign agents, or a fifth column. The quintessential extremist of our day is the Muslim.
41 There is, still, yet another way in which religious minorities are fundamentally excluded from modern secular liberal political communities. Using the example of Muslims in Europe, Asad shows how European self-conception means that Muslims are not, and indeed cannot, be represented as Muslims (2003, 159-166). This is because Europe has conceived itself in a very particular way: positively, as a distinct civilisation, in terms of specific historical moments such as the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Enlightenment and industrialisation, and negatively, in contradistinction to certain non-European others – Muslims featuring prominently in these latter.15 The fear of Islam and Muslims persists as seen in the drawn- out saga over two decades of failed Turkish attempts to enter the European Union. Although this fear is explained, sometimes justified, with reference to historical encounters between Muslims (the Ottoman Caliphate in particular) and Europe, it is more a matter of self- conception than historical fact. The far greater violence exhibited by Nazi Germany, for instance, in its attempts to conquer Europe does not figure in the same way. The historical violence of Turkey – which, notably in this context, was against Christendom, not secular Europe – brings into question their inherent ability to ever be truly European. The historical violence of Germany does not at all cast doubt on whether it belongs in Europe. On the contrary, as Tony Judt argues, the idea of Europe stands as a convenient suppressor of collective memories of widespread collaboration with Nazi crimes in East and West [Europe] alike (Asad 2003, 162). Thus the threatening historical violence of some affirms their place outside of Europe whereas the equally, if not more, threatening historical violence of others re-affirms their place on the inside. Once constituted as outsiders, the Europeanness of all Muslims is questionable, both those who migrate and have lived in Europe for decades and, perhaps more remarkably, those Muslims who are native to geographical Europe.16 It follows from this view of Europe, Asad asserts (2003, 168), that:
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15 Asad gives as an example the following anecdote reported in the 1992 Time magazine cover story on Turkey’s attempt to become a member of the European community: ‘However it may be expressed, there is a feeling in Western Europe, rarely stated explicitly, that Muslims whose roots lie in Asia do not belong in the Western family, some of whose members spent centuries trying to drive the Turks out of a Europe they threatened to overwhelm. Turkish membership “would dilute the E.C.’s Europeanness,” says one German diplomat’ (cited in Asad 2003, 160). 16 ‘Consider another example: the 1995 interview with Tadeusz Mazowiecki on the subject of his principled resignation as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Commission on Human Rights in the Balkans. At one point the interviewers, Bernard Osser and Patrick Saint-Exupery, pose the following question: “You are Polish and Christian. Is it strange to hear yourself defending Bosnians, many of whom are Muslims?” Some readers might wonder how it is that two French intellectuals, heirs to the secular Enlightenment, can formulate such a question in Europe today. But of course the aim of this leading question is to elicit the plea for tolerance that the interviewers know will be forthcoming. So I find it more significant that Mazowiecki expresses no surprise at the question itself. Instead, he responds as expected by urging tolerance. He assures his interviewers that the war in Bosnia is not a religious one, and that Bosnian Muslims are not a danger to Europe. “It bodes ill for us,” he warns, “if, at the end of the twentieth century, Europe is still incapable of coexistence with a Muslim community.” Mazowiecki’s assumption (accepted without comment by his French interlocutors) is that Bosnian Muslims may be in Europe but are not of it – and it is precisely for this reason that they should be accorded toleration. Even though they may not have migrated to Europe from Asia (indeed they are not racially distinguishable from other whites in Europe), and even though they may have adjusted to secular political institutions (insofar as this can be said of Balkan societies) they cannot claim a Europeanness as the inhabitants of Christian Europe can. It is precisely because Muslims are external to the essence of Europe that “coexistence” can he envisaged between “us” and “them”.’ (Asad 2003, 164-5)
42 [R]eal Europeans acquire their individual identities from the character of their civilization. Without that civilizational essence, individuals living within Europe are unstable and ambiguous. That is why not all inhabitants of the European continent are “really” or “fully” European. Russians are clearly marginal. Until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too, but since that break the emerging discourse of a “Judea-Christian tradition” has signaled a new integration of their status into Europe. Completely external to “European history” is medieval Spain. Although Spain is now defined geographically as part of Europe, Arab Spain from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries is seen as being outside “Europe,” in spite of the numerous intimate connections and exchanges in the Iberian peninsula during that period between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
One must conclude that the self-conception here is primordial and thus determinative. This has serious implications which we might raise as a question: With culturally and historically- thick identity self-conception is it even possible for a society to form a neutral political space that can represent citizens constituted by different cultures and histories? Alternatively, is transcendent mediation even possible? We are inclined to answer in the negative. Where in theory secular liberalism is dealing with individuals abstracted from any history, culture or worldview, in practice it deals with real people and communities constituted of different histories, cultures and worldviews in ways that raise concrete problems. In the case of Europe, as Asad notes, the idea of European identity is not merely a matter of how legal rights and obligations can be reformulated. Rather, the discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about non-Europeans tied to a deep history of particular moments and its site is suppressed fear. The abstract Rawlsian or Habermasian political theory does not even account for this, yet it is so powerful that large groups are effectively not only unrepresented but also unrepresentable. The only way they can be made representable is by de-essentialising them. Indeed, the de-essentialisation of the ‘non-European’ is at the core of attempts to assimilate non- European peoples to European civilisation (Asad 2003, 169). The idea that people’s historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, facilitates the Enlightenment claim to universality. Beliefs too should either have no direct connection to the way one lives, or be held so lightly that they can be easily changed. Otherwise secularism as a political arrangement cannot work well (Asad 2003, 115). In the case of Islam, for instance, Muslims as members of the abstract category ‘humans’ can be integrated or ‘translated’ (a la Habermas) into the universal European civilisation once they have left behind what many of them mistakenly regard as essential to themselves.17 Asad goes further still to make a more fundamental critique of liberal political theory, arguing that the ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it virtually impossible to represent minority groups as themselves (using the example of representing ‘Muslims as Muslims’) (2003, 173-177). This is because of an irreconcilable tension between the concept of the abstract citizen and the concept of the ‘minority’. In theory, citizens who constitute a democratic state are defined by what is common between them, namely, their abstract (numerical) equality with respect to each other. Since they are equivalent units,
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17 The same sort of logic has dominated the Australian political discourse of the last two decades of the post 9/11 era. Peter Costello, then Federal Treasurer, perhaps put it most poignantly in February 2006 when, after listing a number of ‘Australian values’ that Muslim leaders should adopt and preach, he said: ‘[I]f you go to a mosque you will be asked to take your shoes off as a sign of respect. Now if you don’t want to take your shoes off then don’t go to the mosque. And when you come to Australia you will be asked to subscribe to certain values – Australian values. If you don’t want to subscribe to those values, don’t come to Australia. This is what we ask of people. We have to preserve a way of life which makes us the greatest country in the world’ (Costello P 2006, Australian citizenship - Interview with John Laws, 2UE, 24 Feb, viewed 17 Sep 2017, http://www.petercostello.com.au/transcripts/2006/3158).
43 formally distinct but without qualitative differences, representation means issues are decided by their summation. The side with greater weight on any issue is authoritative over all lesser parts, since the former is considered statistically representative of the whole body. Thus, in theory, nothing distinguishes the members of a minority group as citizens except their fewer numbers. However, a ‘minority’ is not a purely quantitative concept. The concept of ‘minority’ arises from a specific European Christian history following the dissolution of the bond that formed after the Reformation between the Church and early modern state. The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s role to secure religious uniformity within the polity was abandoned in favour of ‘minority rights’ as a central theme of notional politics. The point to note is that the political inclusion of minorities meant that recognition and acceptance of groups formed by specific historical narratives. Minority rights – at their core the right to maintain and perpetuate themselves as collectives – are not derivable from general theories of citizenship since their status is connected to membership in a specific historical group, not in the abstract class of citizens. This is also true of the ‘majority’. It is also a historically constituted group. And what we have today across the secular liberal West is, unmistakably, a politics of a majority that claims to represent the ‘national identity’ and several competing minorities who are summoned to integrate into that national identity. As such, it is not a political ethic decided by the collective through negotiation and persuasion but the cultural identity of a historically constituted group, inclusive of general and specific normative positions, that becomes the reference point by which politics is conducted and discourse in the public sphere takes place. Further, the narratives that define the national identity – ‘being French’, ‘Australian values’, ‘America’ – and the practices they authorise cannot, in this political dynamic, be regarded as inessential. That is, the majority cannot be de-essentialised. The minorities must make the requisite changes to secure the sanctity of the national heritage. This view, shared by much of the left as well as the right, does not accord with the notion that the citizen is nothing more than an abstract quantity, separate from his or her social identity, added up and then divided into groups that have only numerical value. The upshot of this analysis is that the only way minorities can be represented is after they make the relevant adjustments to accord with the national identity. They cannot be represented as themselves but only as ‘translated’ to fit a mould fashioned by the national identity, which is the identity of the majority. The radical upshot of this analysis should not be mistaken: far from being the solution to discrimination against religious minorities, the secular state is part of the problem. We may assert, then, that the deprivatised religion of a revised secular narrative falls quite short of its claim of providing freedom and a fair hearing to all citizens as equals. The liberal public sphere is not simply a forum for rational debate amongst voices of all persuasions. It is an exclusionary space that has little genuine room for those voices that do not subscribe to fundamental liberal positions. Further, in it minorities cannot be represented as themselves. It is not that individuals or groups are not welcome in the public sphere in theory but that, in practice, you either enter reformed in the liberal image – leaving your deepest convictions about the world at home, speaking the liberal language of public reason, preserving the national identity, and being careful not to disrupt or interrogate the prevailing narrative – or at best be satisfied with pariah status.
44 Decentred Pluralism and Neutrality
The recognition that the secular is not neutral has led some thinkers – represented here paradigmatically by William Connolly – to propose an approach where, supposedly, no worldview occupies the centre. As outlined in Chapter 2 Connolly calls for a ‘decentred pluralism’ in which secularism is refashioned, stripped of its conceit that has itself providing a single basis for politics, and converted into one perspective amongst several in a genuinely pluralistic culture.18 To the extent that this approach entails a logic and appeal to neutrality – indeed, a more genuine neutrality is claimed - we assess it here on this very claim. At first sight, the solution is appealing. Since no worldview is neutral all are treated the same without any occupying the centre from which all others are judged. By this acknowledgment alone, this approach to politics is more honest and genuine than that of Rawls, Habermas or Taylor. The pretence of secular neutrality is dropped. However, on further inspection, there are serious issues and the approach leaves much to be desired. First, we would assert, with Brian Goldstone (2006), that the secular is still privileged in Connolly’s decentred pluralism. Secularism is both, albeit not explicated as such, a unique political arrangement (now refashioned to exemplify the ‘ethos of engagement’) and also a metaphysical perspective. As a political arrangement it makes cultural pluralism operate as a supposedly neutral framework, masking the fact that it is, as a political doctrine, already a product of secular reason. Thus, the presupposition that pluralism is not the product of a metaphysical perspective is problematic, and already the distinction between secularism as arrangement and perspective break downs. Second, as Goldstone also highlights, the stipulation that everyone affirm the contestable character of their worldview (and do so without resentment) is also a markedly secular stipulation that appeals to the unmistakably modern, secular virtue of scepticism. Indeed, it is in the very tradition of liberal secularism, which, as Asad notes, requires that beliefs should either have no direct connection to the way one lives or be held so lightly that they can easily be changed (2003, 115). Connolly’s defence against this charge is that appreciating the profound contestability of the fundamentals you honour does not mean forfeiting faith in those fundamentals. It only means that we come to terms with our respective inabilities to secure our respective faiths so tightly that all reasonable humans must place one or another at the centre of public life (1999, 8). This is, arguably, a weak defence. The charge is not that one is required to forfeit their faith but that one is required to hold their faith in a particular way. In a rather flimsy way, to be sure. We may well ask whether this sort of stipulation is of the same kind that requires people to leave their deepest convictions in the vestibule of the public sphere. Further, the requirement that one come to terms with their inability to ‘secure’ their faith is, again, a very modern epistemological approach that speaks to more a Cartesian or Kantian framework than say a Heideggerian one. Why should one have to experience the world from this perspective as opposed to any other? The greater issue, we should emphasise, is not these stipulations themselves, but the grounds on which they are asserted. Are these grounds some particular metaphysical perspective? Or some alleged neutral ground? We would assert it is the former; Connolly’s own ‘nontheistic faith in the plurovocity of being’ seems the best candidate on this count. Connolly seems to be claiming the latter. Indeed, he must, otherwise he would have centred one metaphysical perspective over others. However, in doing so – in claiming some neutral ground on which his arrangement of the political space is based – he is guilty of the very charge he levelled against presently dominant forms of liberal secularism.
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18 The outline provided in chapter 2 should be read alongside this section. See pp. 30-32.
45 Connolly does not appear to recognise that all the normative judgments his refashioned secularism stands upon – charges of ‘immodest demands of transcendental narcissism’, demands that everyone affirm the contestability of their fundamentals, the ‘reasonable human’ test on which we measure the securing of those fundamentals – are not and cannot arise from any neutral basis. They are inevitably arising from some normative worldview or metaphysical perspective, which, in turn, is being privileged. Further, liberal concerns about religious language (as articulated by Rawls and Habermas), although ideological and privileging the secular, are not without due cause. They speak to an important problem, namely, how can there be a public discussion if mutually exclusive references are cited to ground opposing arguments? How can I discourse with someone on a moral-political issue of mutual concern if I reject the deeper reasons of their normative worldview and they mine? We would assert, then, that along with facing the inevitable fact of there being no neutral normative grounds, we must also face the inevitable fact – to which history bears indubitable, if sobering, testimony – that some non-neutral normative perspective must occupy the centre. Secularism’s Holy Grail of neutrality remains elusive and its pretence otherwise is illusive. At the same time, the political cannot but be grounded in some normative worldview. We are fated to live in a world where different normativities simply cannot be treated equally. If we take this position, however, have we simply come full circle by starting with a critique of liberalism as normative worldview occupying the centre to posit that some normative worldview must do so? Not quite. The important recognition here is that liberalism occupies the centre whilst claiming neutrality, indeed on the grounds on this very claim. Whereas our assertion would be that, descriptively, the centre must be occupied by some normative worldview but that, as a (self-consciously) normative claim, this should be done without pretensions to neutrality.
46 Conclusion
When we speak of religion and secularity there are some naïvely-held yet pervasive beliefs. Religion is said, at best, to be a personal matter of belief that must not mix with politics and, at worst, a disruptive remnant of bygone primitive times we would do much better without. It is prone to result in violence and disharmony if it intrudes into public and political life and is located in the domain of the superstitious and non-rational. Secularity, in contrast, understood as its simple opposite, is what liberated us from the worst aspects of religion. It is sited in the domain of the rational, the scientific and the political. Many of these sensibilities are the ripened fruit of Enlightenment critiques of religion, on the basis of which the social sciences for over a century asserted – and used as a paradigm for thinking about related issues – a secularisation thesis that had religion withering away into oblivion as modernisation took hold. The persistence of religion, empirical study (since around the 1960s), and more recent critical interventions have shown this thesis to be untenable. In turn, many of the premises that fed into it have been challenged in a debate on what we have called the post-secular question. This debate begins on a mere revisory impulse seeking to make minor corrections to the mainstream narrative of liberal political philosophy which is content to begrudgingly accept religion but only as a privatised affair that steers clear of the public sphere. It proceeds, however, to reveal more profound problems with this narrative and will end, perhaps, with the recognition that the narrative is untenable on the whole. All the thinkers chosen for this thesis - Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad and William Connolly - find problems with how religion and secularity are conceived as fixed and opposite categories and with the notion that the secular age is simply one that sheds off religion as it comes of age in a march to progress. They seek to move away from a negative conception of secularity as the absence of religion to an active one of it as a modern formation in its own right. Taylor shows that our secular age is the result of a series of transformations that begin with changes within Medieval European Christianity itself and which result not in the decline of religion per se as much as its alteration and recomposition. He would have us understand our secular age in terms of conditions of belief within which we experience the world and search for a fullness of life. He finds merit in thinking of religion and the secular in terms of the immanence-transcendence distinction where immanence of secularity is to experience the world as a free-standing self-sufficient order whose working we can understand and organise on its own terms and wherein human flourishing is the final goal. The transcendence of religion is its affirmation of a beyond in terms of higher powers, an extension of life beyond this world, and goods beyond human flourishing. The advent of a secular age represents the transformation from a state where everyone naïvely experiences the world in such a way that value, meaning and fullness lie in something beyond it to a state where this experience, no longer able to be held naïvely, is one amongst many other options. In fact, it is an embattled option since now the dominant mode of experiencing the world is one where value, meaning and fullness lie within it. Asad goes further, in this respect, in showing how religion and secularity are mutually- implicated and in problematising the binaries of sacred and profane, natural and supernatural, even transcendence and immanence as breaking down on interrogation. None of these are stable, universal categories with fixed essential meanings. Indeed, secularity undergoes a remarkable inversion from being a residual category of medieval theology to a central category of modernity which makes religion and theology residual. We find merit in both these positions and see them as reconcilable insofar as Taylor’s conceptualisation of religion and secularity in terms of immanence and transcendence is not asserted as universal or fixed. It rather marks a very particular western European experience and allows us to
47 speak meaningfully about our age. Further, to the extent that his transcendence is a particular type of beyond, his assertion that modernity brings an eclipse of transcendence does not contradict Asad’s insight that modernity simply relocates transcendence. The latter should be understood, paradoxically if still meaningfully, as an immanent transcendence: a beyond that is still within this world. On the more animating normative question of the place of religion in a secular age, Habermas and Taylor represent the revisionist camp, which wants to smooth some of the rougher edges of the mainstream narrative that accepts only a privatised religion. They uphold the core of this narrative by affirming the legitimacy and preferability of secularism on the claim that given its epistemic and political neutrality it is the only way to equitably manage diverse societies. Its only revision they seek is to have religion deprivatised, admitted legitimately into the secular public sphere – or, more accurately, since it is and was already there, to have its presence legitimated – but only on a conditional basis, the details of which they differ on. Not content with secularism as facilitating a modus vivendi, they seek a secularism that allows for an overlapping consensus. Habermas corrects previous biases against religion by asserting a need for mutual learning between the religious and secular. This he does on the practical grounds of having to deal with religion given its persistence, and on the epistemic grounds of what he now accepts as its potential of carrying truth content. He still, nevertheless, holds on to an epistemic distinction between religious and secular discourse in which the latter is privileged. Religious content is allowed but should be translated into the (supposedly) neutral language of public reason. Taylor, who finds any such epistemic distinctions untenable, would have us go a little further by understanding secularism not in terms of how we deal politically with religion in particular but with diversity in general. This would seem a sensible approach in theory – since there is nothing peculiar about religious worldviews as opposed to non-religious ones that warrants the former being made a special case – except that in practice it would make little difference. This is because Taylor, like Habermas, understands the liberal state and the public sphere in ways that Asad has rightly shown to be inaccurate representations of how they operate. The public sphere is not an empty space in which all voices can discourse on equal terms. It is an exclusionary space that only gives serious consideration to voices that subscribe to its liberal fundamentals. The liberal state does not decide matters through persuasion and negotiation. Its modus operandi is the force of law. As such, Asad’s position that the secular is a normative power over the modern subject that establishes new concepts of religion, ethics, politics, and new imperatives associated with them is, we find, much closer to the mark. In bringing these various strands together, we may offer some concluding remarks. Secularity, as a modern category, is, we would assert, tied to immanence, in the sense outline above. Secularisation, in turn, is the immanentisation of ontology and epistemology and, in turn, ethics and politics. It is the domination of the immanent frame. It is the construction or experience of the world in terms of what exists, how we should act, what we can know and how we should organise society in terms of human determination alone and for the end of human flourishing alone. It is the transformation of the pre-modern story of God in which man is a footnote into a story of man in which God is a footnote. This conception of secularisation works well with both the etymology of the word and the reality of modernity. The secular (from saeculum) is the worldly; to secularise is to make worldly, to transfer to the worldly. This begins in Western Christendom with the transfer of clerics, then property, then political authority, and then eventually the complete transfer of life, as it were, to the worldly. That is, the immanentisation of human life: its circumscription within the ‘natural’ bounds of worldly (secular) space and time. This does not mean that religion is banished or even necessarily completely privatised. Secularisation as a process,
48 particularly in service of liberalism, cannot and need not proscribe religion. It need only be in the master’s seat defining (and re-defining as needed) the place of religion in society, indeed the very meaning of ‘religion’ itself. The place of religion is always to be marginal and secondary and its meaning is always to be in accordance with, and service of, the secular perspective and project. It is not to challenge or interrogate the boundaries set by this perspective and project. Thus, while the secularism of Continental Europe exacts a harsher whip to keep religion in a more restricted sphere in comparison to American secularism where religion finds ample expression even in the public sphere, the commonality is that the secular is thoroughly dominant. It has taken the King’s seat at the table. Even where religion finds public expression of some form, however loud, it is a form that has been co-opted and reconstructed by the secular in an image it approves. What is necessitated by secularism, therefore, is not the elimination or privatisation of religion in absolute terms but rather its reconstruction and delimiting on the normative terms of secular liberalism. Secularism stipulates the way religion can and cannot be manifest and seeks to reform any religious sensibilities considered incompatible with the norms of liberalism. The place of religion, in a secular age, is always peripheral. The way in which the secular is able to occupy the position of master is by projecting itself as neutral and the modern condition as uniquely pluralist. In turn, it lays claim to possess the distinctive and unique salvific ability to manage our modern predicament, to lead the way to the Promised Land of human flourishing. However, its claim to neutrality, as we have shown, rests of precarious grounds. It stands on a special pleading whereby secular reason and discourse is held out as different to all others, as universal and common. And whereby secular politics is held out as different in its ability to establish a foundational political ethic that does not emanate from any normative worldview. These claims, nonetheless, remain claims. Secular reason, discourse and politics are as particular and normative as any other. The secular master is a naked emperor. It should rightly be herded back into the paddock of normative worldviews, each of which must make its case on its own terms without a special pleading to some unique feature it does not in fact possess. As to alternative political models that may better deal with our modern predicament, we have not said much in this thesis, if only because its focus was to outline and critically assess the contemporary academic debate and the interventions of its leading participants – a formidable task in itself. The question is, nevertheless, of immense importance. What good is a critique if it does not, at the least, give direction towards some better alternative? As such, we might close this thesis by indicating some important lines of inquiry that were beyond our scope but would assist in thinking about alternative models. First, is the modern political condition truly unique in its plurality? There were many polities in the past where people of different worldviews lived and, in some cases, in relative harmony. What makes that ‘pluralism’ (excuse the anachronism) different to ours? Second, are there ways in which people of different normative worldviews can discourse without having to leave or artificially question their perspectives, without being ‘postmetaphysical’? We alluded to some broad suggestions by Jeffrey Stout and John Milbank. These, and others, need to be critically assessed. Third, is the liberal public-private divide tenable in the first place? Can and should human life be constructed in this way and what are alternative constructions? Fourth, if the political centre must be occupied by one normative worldview, this privileges that worldview leaving those who subscribe to others in that society with a deficit of privilege and power. Given, however, that liberalism already does this, how do the two models compare in this respect? That is, how do the two models, both of which privilege one normative worldview over others, one acknowledging this and the other pretending otherwise, compare? These, among others no doubt, are all interesting and relevant lines of inquiry for further research on this topic.
49 References
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