The Immanent Frame

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr confesses that she is not an expert with regard to “the value of normative theory for legal and constitutional concerns, and for political theory.” She rightly thinks that “for empirically grounded comprehension and explanation of societal and political processes, institutions, and practices” the use of normative theory “is limited,” but wrongly attacks normative theorizing as such and also misunderstands my proposal to “replace secularism.” In this brief response, I focus on three issues: first, her criticism of “normative theory” and “value judgments”; second, her krypto-normative remarks on learning from empirical comparisons; and third, her construction of “four types of secularity.”

Is there a crisis of secularism in Western Europe? Is Tariq Modood’s “moderate secularism” the solution, or should we go “beyond moderate secularism” and embrace the “alternative conception of secularism,” that of “principled distance,” proposed by Rajeev Bhargava? In this piece I hope to show that, for the purposes of normative thinking—in the realms of political and legal theory, constitutional law, and jurisprudence in particular—we had better drop the language of secularism altogether and reframe the contested issues in terms of the language of liberal-democratic constitutionalism and its respective principles, rights, and institutional arrangements.