—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

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I have no doubt that freedom of religion or belief is attaining a prominence in international affairs unforeseen and unforeseeable even five, let alone ten years ago. The reasons are distressingly negative—based as it is on increasing levels of repression and violence against believers of many faiths.

—Malcolm Evans

The category of belief is not so easily transferred from one society to another, and…those who seek to do so are subject to the consequences of their deed.

—Donald Lopez, Jr.

Like a good movie, the story of international religious freedom offers something for everyone. It pits cowardly oppressors against heroic saviors. It is a story of the triumph of international law over those who fail to adhere to global norms and standards. It is a story of secular tolerance versus violent religion. And today especially, it is a story of the need for the U.S. government and its friends to “convince” others—particularly Muslims—that they should endorse a particular model of religious liberty as a template for organizing and democratizing their politics and societies. It is a story of human progress and emancipation, of transforming conditions of religious oppression to liberate individuals—particularly women—from their primitive, pre-modern, discriminatory ways. Working alone and in tandem, these narratives justify intervention to save, define, shape, and sanctify parts of people’s (religious and non-religious) individual and collective lives. The projects with which they are associated are diverse yet intertwined, at times supporting and at times vying with one another. It is a mixed bag.

One common feature of these accounts is the notion that belief is the defining feature of religion. Although occasionally paying respect to other aspects of religious life and belonging, belief as the core of religiosity is a powerful unifying trope to which religious freedom advocates return again and again. Rallying around religion as belief, and the assumption that there can be no religion without belief, plays a central role in international religious freedom campaigns. This post asks whether it would be possible to continue promoting religious freedom as a universalizable construct if this modern construct of belief were seen as a political discourse situated in history, rather than as the mark of the sacred. And if it isn’t possible, then what is religious freedom advocacy actually promoting?

In his contribution to the new Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Talal Asad questions the universality of the liberal democratic requirement that belief or conscience is what properly defines the individual and, for many liberals in particular, represents the essence of religiosity. His argument helps cast in a new light the position that belief is the defining moment of religion, underwriting protection of religious freedom as the right to believe by states as well as by various transnational actors and authorities.

Asad dates the requirement that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity to the religious psychology of seventeenth-century Europe. At that time belief came to be regarded as a privilege (a subject’s ability to choose her belief), a danger (belief’s likelihood of inciting violence), and something that cannot be coerced because it is located in the private space of the mind. Don Lopez has described this seventeenth-century notion as “an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths.” This discourse of belief was accompanied by a particular understanding of the secular state. “Although the insistence that beliefs cannot be changed from outside appeared to be saying something empirical about ‘personal belief’ (its singular, autonomous and inaccessible-to-others location), it was really part of a political discourse about ‘privacy,’” Asad explains, “a claim to civil immunity with regard to religious faith that reinforced the idea of a secular state and a particular conception of religion.”

Asad draws attention to the shifting and lived (rather than theorized) orientations through which belief has been experienced historically. Words translated as ‘belief’ are always embedded in concrete and distinctive social relationships and sensibilities, he suggests, as illustrated by Dorothea Weltecke’s description of a young peasant woman named Aude Fauré, who was brought before the Inquisition:

She was unable, she said, to credere in Deum. What she meant by this, Weltecke points out, emerges from the detailed context: She took the existence of a God for granted. It was because, in her desperation, she couldn’t see in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because she found herself struggling with disturbing thoughts about incarnation, that she had no hope of God’s mercy. It is not clear that the doctrine of God’s body appearing in the form of bread is being challenged here; what is certainly being expressed is her anguished relationship to him as a consequence of her own incapacity to see anything but bread. In short, it is not that our present concept of belief (that something is true) was absent in pre-modern society but that the words translated as such were usually embedded in distinctive social and political relationships, articulated distinctive sensibilities; they were first of all lived and only secondarily theorized.

If international religious freedom advocacy projects claim as their object the need to secure freedom to believe, Asad’s argument points to some of the complications attending these efforts. Inasmuch as the protection and enforcement of religious freedom hinges upon, and even sanctifies, a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them, such projects privilege particular kinds of religious subjectivity while disabling others. They contribute to the normalization of (religious) subjects for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad, is taken as the universal defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free, excluding other modes of living in the world, as bodies in communities to which they are obliged, without attention to individual “belief.”

Recent arguments by Malcolm Evans in favor of strengthening the framework of international legal protections for religious freedom illustrate the extent to which belief is taken as the essence of religiosity. Evans argues that legal protection for religious freedom should be seen no longer as “only an option, but it is fast becoming a necessity in order to prevent the further erosion of the position of religious believers in many countries.” The international community should start “developing a more precise understanding of what the freedom of religion as a human right actually entails, and … do so in a coherent and transparent fashion to which all interested parties can contribute” so that “we might then be better placed to develop the means by which it can be realised.” The idea is to settle on the norm, agree on a definition, and fix it in an international convention to move one step closer to ending violence. Such a convention would provide “a more detailed, comprehensive and rounded source of legal obligation concerning the freedom of religion or belief.” This reference to religion or belief explicitly includes non-religious belief as well. It is not only religionists but also non-religionists that are defined by belief. It is everyone. A convention would breathe new life into an anemic global consensus that to date has not offered the protection we all deserve, having “done little to combat the rising tide of restriction, hostility and violence experienced by many religious believers” by tackling “the overriding problem, which is how to hold States to account for their own failure to respect and protect the rights of all believers.”

This argument resonates powerfully in international legal and public policy circles.

Yet the historical particularities of the rise of a particular economy of belief and its close ties, and even constitutive relationship, to the modern notion of religion itself calls for a different reading of Evans’ ambitions. Perhaps contemporary international religious freedom projects should be seen as themselves engendering the formation of individual subjects and “faith communities” for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad and lionized by Evans, is seen as the universal defining characteristic of what it is to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief, belief in belief, as it were, across communities of belief (and non-belief), is what it means to have achieved religious freedom. As Evans testifies, “Faith communities must reject the superficial attractions of claiming or accepting such freedoms for themselves alone, and unhesitatingly support the freedom of religion or belief for all. Unless or until religious communities are prepared to champion for everyone the freedoms that they wish their own followers to enjoy, there is likely to be little opportunity for seriously furthering the freedom of religion or belief at all.”

This identification of religion and religious communities primarily with belief and believers writes out of the picture alternative spaces and practices, such as those described in a recent post by Simon During, in which religion is lived as ethics, culture, and even politics, but without, necessarily, belief. Questioning the presupposition that religion implies belief, During calls for atheists to take over Church institutions from the inside, replicating what he describes as “older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination.”

The foreclosure on religion without belief also leaves little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside those ‘faith communities’ described by Evans, whose voices tend to be subsumed or submerged by the institutions and authorities that speak in their name. It endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction. Asad remarks on the instability of the notion of religious belief that underlies Charles Taylor’s vindication of the promise of religion:

The difficulty is this: What are to count as religious beliefs? Should beliefs denounced by the medieval Latin church as superstitio (wrongheadedness) therefore be regarded as secular beliefs? Or should they be pronounced religious on the criteria provided by those Enlightenment critics for whom all religion was superstition? Is the intention to carry out a particular act crucial to its religiosity? If so, how and by whom is that to be judged? Clearly how the phenomenon of belief that historians write about should be understood is a complicated question.

It may be worth inquiring into the extent to which a particular secularized Christian notion of the believing or non-believing human is being disseminated through international institutions and practices associated with the promotion of religious freedom “so that it is, to some extent, everywhere—translated, resisted, vernacularized, invoked in political struggles, and made the standard language enforced by power.” To what extent is the autonomous subject defined by his or her belief (or non-belief) normalized not only by secular states and (their) religious freedom activists, but now, also, through a rapidly proliferating series of transnational legal regimes and administrative initiatives that have eagerly adopted this template and have as their objective to protect and enforce the right to religious freedom?

Consider the crisis in Syria. Calls for the protection of persecuted Christians in Syria and neighboring countries are a cornerstone of religious freedom advocacy in the wake of the uprisings. Joe Eibner of Christian Solidarity International has lobbied President Obama to urge UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to declare a genocide warning for Christians across the Middle East. Howard Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has stated that the future of minorities is “on our agenda as we figure out how to help these countries” and their treatment of Christians and other minorities is a “‘red line’ that will affect future aid.” Habib Malik of Lebanese American University calls for Western nations to stand up for the rights of Christians, who he says may be cleansed from lands where democratic elections are used to oppress minorities rather than empower them. While this must be done “in a way that is not misperceived on the other end,” Malik concludes, “the West should not be cowed.” USA Today reports that “Christians in Syria, where Muslims have risen up against President Bashar Assad, have been subjected to murder, rape and kidnappings in Damascus and rebellious towns, according to Christian rights groups, including Open Doors, which helps Christians facing persecution.”

The momentum builds, as persecution of Christians takes on a life of its own and may, in some cases, come to define the conflict on the ground. The logic of the story is clear: when “Muslims rise up against Assad,” the result is Christian persecution. Yet the Syrian protests are not captured by the notion of “Muslims rising up against Assad.” This is the regime’s narrative. For decades the Assad family has relied upon the purported threat of sectarian anarchy lurking just below the surface of society and politics to justify autocratic rule. Defining the revolt “less as a popular uprising against a secular autocracy and more as an armed sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Alawites and their Shiite allies: Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah” hardens lines of religious difference and makes sectarian violence more likely. In this case, advocacy in the name of protecting Christians’ freedom of belief is adding fuel to the fire of the very religious and sectarian conflict that religious freedom claims to be uniquely equipped to transcend. In Evans’ words, the conflict is understood as directly resulting from a refusal to acknowledge the rights of “believers,” concealing the ways in which divisions cut across sectarian divides and the ways forward that emerge when the focus is not on beliefs but on shared needs and visions. The crisis in Syria calls for an approach to protecting human life and dignity that goes beyond these calls for ‘freedom of belief,’ and that loosens the grip of this construct on the political imaginary of the conflict.

Asad concludes his chapter by observing that “the modern idea of religious belief (protected as an individual right) is a function of the secular state but not of democratic sensibility.” In its strongest forms, the story of international religious freedom globalizes the secular state’s power over the individual. Appearing as a guarantee of the worth of the individual’s own desires, it is actually a story of telling people who they are, what to do and how to be. It privileges particular ways of doing and being as deserving special protection by the state or associations thereof, leaving others behind. Like other categories, it singles out authorized representatives of believers (and less frequently non-believers) for legal protection, reinforcing divisions and hierarchies within and between communities. And in its most insistent moments, it is a story of the costs in human dignity and diversity associated with the attempt to make “belief the measure of what religion is understood to be,” and the freedom to believe the measure of what it means to be free. Aude Fauré was brought before the Inquisition at the beginning of this modern attempt at mind control. Today it has become a global enterprise.

Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and proceed from there. Most realist, liberal, English school, feminist, and historical-materialist approaches treat religion as either private by prior assumption or a cultural relic to be handled by anthropologists. Even constructivists, known for their attention to historical contingency and social identity, have paid scant attention to the politics of secularism and religion, focusing instead on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests and identity or looking at the social construction of states and the state system with religion left out of the picture.

This disciplinary convention fixes in advance key definitions and terms of inquiry, with some of the most vital aspects of contemporary world politics systematically excluded from consideration. The presumption that religion has been privatized and is no longer operative in modern politics or that its influence can be neatly encapsulated in anthropological studies of a particular religious tradition and its external influence on politics has led scholars of international relations to miss or misconstrue some of the most significant political developments of our time. This narrow vision is in part attributable to a rigid and dehistoricized secular/religious binary that prestructures the field of academic political science and international relations. This academic practice, in turn, mirrors and reinforces particular kinds of limits on political practice, as suggested by the Egyptian example discussed earlier. Expressed and reproduced through both forms of practice, this binary polices the borders of what counts as politics and what counts as religion and how they relate to each other. It has played a critical role in the global production of knowledge. As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed of the fluid relation between theory and practice, “there ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.”

To be clear, I do not want to suggest that the categories of the secular and the religious fluctuate so wildly that they lack any analytical, political, or metaphysical salience, depending on one’s perspective, but, rather, that from the perspective of deep pluralism that underlies my argument, these categories cannot be taken for granted in their fixity. Failing to account for the power and limitations of the category of the secular and its shifting and contested relation not only to religion but to other political phenomena cast in opposition to it risks imposing a simplistic and distorted template on world politics. A rigid secular/religious divide stabilizes particular, historically contingent, and often hegemonic definitions of both politics and religion. This makes life easier for social scientists looking for answers in the short run but is costly in a world in which the way these categories come to be defined, what they come to represent and not represent, is critical to understanding how they operate politically.

At the same time, the category of religion is no more obvious than the category of the secular. Reconsidering the fixity of the secular/religious binary opens new epistemological spaces for the identification of forms and locations of politics that fall off the radar screen of conventional secular rationalist approaches to politics and conventional religious approaches to politics. It makes room for alternative instantiations of the secular/religious divide to work their way into political theory and practice, as is occurring today in Turkey and is discussed below.

A second qualification is that not all social scientists are cut from a single mold, and the degree to which any individual, institution, party, state, or international organization unthinkingly reproduces any particular secular/religious binary varies. It would be inaccurate to suggest that everyone approaches these questions in the same way. Yet particular varieties of secularism, like varieties of religion, have had an organizing influence on the ways in which most Europeans and Americans define and relate to basic categorizations involving religion and politics. These categorizations also change over time, as Charles Taylor argues in chapter 1 of this book, with the secular coming to refer in our time to that pertaining to a self-sufficient immanent sphere. The practices, institutions, and ways of being designated as secular sustain and shape the contours of public life and the modern organization of social-scientific knowledge. These traditions do not merely reflect social reality; they help to construct it. They embody attitudes, sensibilities, and habits that facilitate closure and agreement around cultural, political, and legal settlements of the separation of church and state, the definition of religion, and what constitutes normal politics. There is in many contexts an identifiable secular “pattern of political rule,” helping to generate and sustain the category of religion and setting preconditions for particular kinds of academic and political practice.

The unthinking adoption of a rigid secular/religious binary in the social sciences has had at least three consequences for the study of world politics. First, social scientists are encouraged to define research questions, select methods, and present results that fall squarely into the “secular” half of the binary, understood as the domain of rational humanism. They are taught to avoid religion, the domain of the supernatural, superstitious, otherworldly, metaphysical, and so forth. This encourages social scientists to approach religion either not at all or as a particular, emotive (as opposed to secular, rational, and universal) dimension of politics alongside others such as gender, caste, and (at times) nation. The secular/religious binary operates such that not to be secular is to be emotional, irrational, unpredictable, and behind the march of progress. Quietly at work here is the notion that only the West, with its narrative of secularization, has found its way out of the woods, while other civilizations continue to cast about in a desperate search to answer the questions that the West resolved centuries ago. Lodged within this narrative is the assumption that the secular is the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. The secular thus comes to stand not only in an oppositional relation to religion but also as the natural counterpart to other dimensions of politics that do not fit comfortably within the categories of either rational self-interest or universalist ethics.

This suggests that the secular is a more powerful and capacious category than one might assume when it is taken to stand only in contradistinction to the religious. Loosening the hold of a fixed secular/religious binary opens up a broader field of inquiry into modern formations of authority than may be apparent at the outset. The secular grounds and secures a place for the good, rational, and universal in Western moral order, which is then opposed to series of nonrational or irrational particularisms, aberrations, or variations. Religion often, though not always, appears as one of these particularisms. It is not the only candidate: institutions and identities associated with (ethnic as opposed to civic) nationalism, race, caste, and gender all have been cast in an oppositional relation to secular rational self-interest and/or universalist ethics. This is the sense in which it is possible to glimpse the capacious power of the category of the secular above and beyond its extraordinary capacity to define and delimit the religious. I return to this below.

A second consequence of the naturalization of the secular/religious binary is that the study of religion and politics tends to focus not on secularism in relation to religion or the other categories discussed above (the binary has effectively segregated these categories) but on predefined religious traditions taken as independent objects of inquiry and the degree to which they infiltrate or influence politics. This division of labor divides inquiry into mainstream (secular) studies on the one hand and studies of religion or religion and politics on the other. A fixed understanding of religion in relation to the secular supports an understanding of the secular as that which is associated with normal, rational politics. Religion becomes a repository for a range of nonrational and nonuniversal dimensions of politics that fall outside the range of “normal” politics, including belief, culture, tradition, mood, and emotion.

A third consequence of the stabilization of the binary is that a particular (often monotheistic) definition of religion is often taken as the norm. This definition constructs an object of study and defines religious actors and institutions according to a particular set of parameters. These limitations press those trained in the traditions of European and American international-relations scholarship to read the world in a particular way, with an emphasis on European religious history and experience, and to misconstrue or miss entirely a whole spectrum of political actors, histories, and processes. Perhaps most significant among these are the intense political struggles, historical contingencies, religious ambivalences, and philosophical uncertainties surrounding the practices associated with and legitimized by claims to the secular itself.

The study of religion, secularism, and international affairs requires a suspension of (dis)belief to address these limitations and move toward new paradigms for the study of global politics. It requires suspending disbelief in the particularity of the secular (or suspending one’s belief in the universalizing potential of the secularization narrative, depending on how you look at it) and approaching the secular/religious binary not as fixed but as shifting, evolving, and elusive. This suspension of (dis)belief can be uncomfortable for those socialized in Euro-American secularisms, which are kept afloat by a high degree of certainty surrounding the stability of these categories. But I hope to show that it is worth the effort. Suspending the assumption that any secular/religious binary is fixed and universal and approaching it as an unstable, historically contingent construct that is capable of sustaining a broad discursive field that goes beyond the maintenance of a distinction between the secular and the religious allows the ground that supports this distinction to shift in intellectually fruitful directions.

And the ground is shifting. Developments in late-modern international relations, such as increasing pluralization within societies, rising global interdependence, the retreat of Christendom, the questioning of the universality of the Enlightenment, and a rise in religiously inspired forms of collective political identification, demand a destabilization of the fundamental terms and binaries (secular rational versus religious irrational, philosophical versus theological, reason versus faith) that have structured inquiry on this subject for decades. Understanding the politics of secularism requires this suspension of (dis)belief. Like their counterparts in philosophy and political theory, international relations theorists need to hone their capacity to pose research questions that do not presuppose fixed definitions of these terms or relations between them. What claims to the secular and the religious signify in different circumstances and what political effects these claims have in various settings are precisely what needs to be explored.

The indiscriminate association of the secular with good governance stabilizes an understanding of Islam as that which is not secular. It also, and perhaps even more dangerously, perpetuates the idea of the secular as the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. Secular politics comes to stand as the opposite of Muslim politics and as the natural counterpart to all other dimensions of politics that don’t fit comfortably within the categories of rational self-interest or universalist ethics. This is a powerful and capacious category. Beyond securing itself in distinction to Islam, the secular thereby comes to ground and secure a place for the good, rational, and universal, which is opposed to any number of irrational particularisms, aberrations, and variations.

This oppositional rhetoric closes down all kinds of political spaces and possibilities. And today this closure is occurring in real time, as Americans and Europeans rely upon unreflective blanket usages of the secular to organize their responses to the Egyptian crisis. It is striking the extent to which this term—and related constructs, such as secular democracy and secular leaders—serve as placeholders for all that is good, right, and universal in many Western accounts of developments in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), founded in 1928 and still officially outlawed in Egypt, is anxiously depicted in these accounts as ‘Islamist’ and represented as a potential danger that might result from the emergence of democracy in Egypt. Political positions expressed through reference to Islamic tradition, history, or politics are assimilated into the category of ‘bad’ politics and assumed to threaten normal, rational, and democratic politics. Political Islam is seen as a divergence from and/or infringement upon neutral secular public space, as a throwback to pre-modern forms of Muslim political order, or a toxic combination of the two.

Earlier work of mine on the politics of secularism described two widely held evaluative frameworks that fuel these representations of Islam, laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism. These same frameworks are now being mobilized by the media and other political actors to make sense of the crisis in Egypt, forming the backdrop out of which many Europeans and Americans understand developments on the ground. In the first, laicist reading, political Islam is portrayed as a superficial expression of deep-seated economic and political interests and/or an infringement by irrational forms of religion upon would-be secular public life in Muslim-majority societies. In the second, ‘Judeo-Christian’ secularist reading, political Islam is depicted as an undemocratic commingling of Islam and politics that stands against the modern Christian or secularized Christian separation of church and state. This second narrative posits that distinctions between religious and political authority are not only historically absent from Muslim-majority societies but are unthinkable due to fixed characteristics of the Islamic religion. In both narratives political Islam is equated with a refusal to acknowledge the privileged status of the private sphere and a transgression of modern categories of public and private. The effect of these narratives is to equate any appearance of Islamic discourse in political practice with fundamentalism and intolerance. These views of political Islam are alive and well in today’s representations of the MB and help structure Western political responses to the crisis. Fear of the rise to power of the MB in Egypt appears to be among the reasons that the Obama administration is hesitating to call for Mubarak to step down and has expressed ambivalence with regard to American support for the protesters’ legitimate objectives.

Yet we could tell a different story about religion and politics in Egypt. Today Egypt is being challenged over the fundamental structure of the field in which the secular and the religious have been defined. The structure of this field under Mubarak served to legitimize and de-legitimize certain parties, institutions, and forms of collective identification. It allowed certain kinds of political practice, such as vigorous anti-terror laws and violent repression of opponents of Mubarak’s regime, while disallowing others, such as full political participation by parties designated by that regime as ‘religious.’ These distinctions were enacted legally: revisions to Article 5 of the Egyptian constitution enacted in 2006 prohibit political activity based in any way upon religion, effectively banning the Muslim Brotherhood from formally participating in politics.

The United States has stood forcefully and famously behind this state-instituted and highly securitized secular-religious oppositional binary as a means of defending its interests in the region, defined primarily as ensuring Israeli security, pursuing the war on terror, and guaranteeing access to oil. In a 2005 speech at the American University in Cairo, Condoleeza Rice remarked: “our goal here is to encourage the Egyptian Government, within its own laws and hopefully within a process and a context that is ever more reforming, to engage with civil society, with the people of Egypt for elections that can be free and fair. But we have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood and we don’t—we won’t.” According to Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher, the Bush administration further hardened this position after Rice’s visit. After Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, in which the MB gained one-fifth of the seats in parliament, U.S. pressure on the Mubarak regime decreased and then ceased entirely after Hamas’ victory. Washington remained silent as the Mubarak regime arrested hundreds of Brothers and transferred dozens to military courts.

Today the Egyptian people and a powerful anti-Mubarak coalition are overturning this entire structure of domination, upheld by Mubarak and aided and abetted by the Americans and the Europeans for decades. The future is up for grabs. Rami Khouri, the eminent Lebanese journalist, has described this momentous change as “the unraveling of the post-colonial order that the British and French created in the Arab world in the 1920s and 30s and then sustained—with American and Soviet assistance—for most of the last half century.” It is unclear whether decision-makers in the United States and Europe will recognize the potential of this moment for Egyptians and others in the region to open up and remake the political playing field along participatory and democratic lines, or whether they will cling to the familiar securitization of secular/religious politics in the name of regional security and order.

Events may impose a new worldview. As Philip Weiss observes: “the danger to America and Israel is that the Egyptian revolution will destroy this false choice of secular dictator-or-crazy Islamists by showing that Arabs are smart articulate people who can handle real democracy if they get to make it themselves.” Mohamed ElBaradei likewise describes the idea that Islamic fundamentalists are set to take over Egypt as “a myth that was sold by the Mubarak regime—that it’s either us, the ruthless dictators, or . . . the al Qaeda types.”

At the time of the Iranian revolution, Michel Foucault observed that “the problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.” The ascription of threat to the MB empowers those who argue that the West aspires to global hegemony through a crusade against Islam. It emboldens Mubarak and fellow autocrats throughout the region. And it fails to address the realities of contemporary politics in states in which these movements have gained a strong and legitimate political foothold that cannot be washed away by wishful thinking in Washington, London, or Jerusalem.

Such a hostile attitude toward the MB is also unfounded. As Nathan Brown describes them, “a lot of their program is just standard reform stuff—independence of the judiciary, the end of corruption, protecting the environment. Especially when they got more political over the last 10 years or so, what they really began to push was a very general reform language that takes Islamic coloration in some areas. But an awful lot of it is consistent with other reform programs coming from reformists all over the political spectrum.” It remains to be seen whether Western decision-makers and pundits will display the political courage and intellectual creativity needed to transcend the false choice between secular dictators and “crazy Islamists” and support real democracy in the Middle East, for a change.

My first thought upon reading the Chicago Council’s report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy” is that the title is misleading. This report is not about engaging religious communities abroad—one hears little if at all from such communities—nor does it say anything particularly new. There is, however, an imperative. This report is an attempt to create a particular kind of world, one defined by the projection of American power—a certain kind of religious power.  The report, as Winni Sullivan observes in her companion piece, endorses an establishmentarian position in American foreign policy, meaning that American policy could discriminate among religions, and fund and promote religious activities that meet with U.S. government approval. This is a different kind of religious power than what Sullivan describes as the “periodic and not altogether successful efforts” at disestablishment that we have undertaken at home. Assuming that we agree with Sullivan, as I do, that “established religion is by definition not accepting of ‘pluralism, freedom, and democracy,’” it becomes clear that this report is not about engaging religious communities to promote either religious freedom or democracy. It is about the projection of American power through the securitization of religion. Perhaps a more apt title, borrowing in part from the language of the report itself, would have been “‘Savvy, selective, strategic, and targeted’: the projection of American religious power and the global securitization of religion.”

I want to point to a few moments at which the report works especially hard to achieve these objectives. The first is in its definition of “religious freedom,” understood as the right to, “advance values publicly in civil society and political life.”  Religious freedom is to be articulated “in a way not viewed as imperialism, but as a means to support religious agency to undermine religion-based terrorism and promote stable democracy.” Yet one of the great challenges of our time is to engage with and listen to those who enact religious agency and live religious freedom in ways that may not conform to these protestant-secular understandings of religion and religious freedom. In focusing exclusively on “values and beliefs,” the report not only fails to engage with, or allow spaces for, religious practice, habits, and ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to values and beliefs, but actively closes down such “religious agencies,” save those that are deemed to be “undermining religion-based terrorism” in the eyes of the National Security Council (NSC). In tacitly sanctioning a protestant understanding of religion as the (only) legitimate way to be religious and modern, it forecloses upon a range of understandings of religion and arrogates to the NSC the authority to decide who is “civil” enough to be allowed into the public sphere, and who isn’t. As Saba Mahmood has observed of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) itself, the report illustrates, “how the exercise of sovereign power tends to subsume the secular principle of religious freedom.”

This rather astonishing exercise of sovereign theopolitical authority brings me to a second point involving the government regulation of religion. The report states: “We know that government regulation of religion can lead to increased persecution and religious violence, forces that increasingly escape confinement within national borders.” This is a striking statement. What is the Task Force calling for, if not increased government regulation through the securitization of religion? In recommending that the NSC direct, not only governmental, but also nongovernmental engagement with religious actors and communities overseas, it vests in the government the authority and institutional capacity to regulate religion both directly and through nongovernmental proxies, calling explicitly for “practical religious literacy” on the part of governmental and nongovernmental offices and institutions. Will this lead to increased persecution and religious violence?

It won’t, according to the logic of the report, because the secular state in general, and the United States in particular, is ontologically incapable of particular kinds of violence, “religious” violence, in particular. Violence undertaken by the American state is by definition not religious. So, religious violence is something undertaken by others, while secular violence disappears from the picture altogether, or is quietly subsumed and legitimized under the rubric of “marginalizing extremists.” Yet, is it not the case that, like the errant “religious actors” described in the report, the United States also, at some times and in some places, “inspire(s) or legitimate(s) violent conflict by framing it as an act of justice”?  How is it that the United States manages to exempt itself from the critical scrutiny that it so avidly prescribes for its (religious) others? Could it be the case that American exceptionalism and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report, lending “a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions”? As religion is increasingly nationalized through this heady cocktail of religious freedom and American exceptionalism, should we now brace ourselves for “calls to defend that which is held sacred […] increasingly employed as a conflict escalator”? Should we not at least consider the possibility that the United States, in its new role as self-appointed theologian, might “invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion”?  It is in closing down the possibility of this kind of self-scrutiny that the report moves in dangerous directions.

In another example of the inherent goodness of American power, failed states, in the eyes of the Task Force, are responsible for terrorism, and never the international actions of the United States (such as in the invasion of Iraq) or other actors.  The United States floats above and outside the world, guided expertly by the NSC through the rocky shoals of political theology and toward safer shores, in a carefully navigated approach, “tailored so as not to overstep the bounds by intervening unwisely in theological disputes or, worse still, seeking to manipulate religion.”

I agree with the Task Force that the United States should not shy away from engaging the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, although the project of “discerning which elements of the Muslim Brotherhood are interested in moving away from extremism” is not an approach I would advocate. Is this process of “discernment” constitutional? Or is it an attempt on the part of the American government to assume the mantle of the global theologian of reform, separating the wheat from the chaff—turning water to wine?—as it acts “ in a way that is both decisive and prudent, developing the means to assist those whose ideas it supports without tainting them by association”? Is this an appropriate role for the United States government? Is it the role of the government to determine “which elements” of which religious groups or parties abroad “are interested in moving away from extremism”?  Or might we see this as part of what Mahmood has described as an “ambitious theological campaign” undertaken by the U.S. government in which, “secularism reveals itself in its civilizing and disciplinary aspects, rather than as a circumscription of religion or a prophylaxis that immunizes politics from religion within the context of the nation-state”?

I also agree with the report’s recommendation, in the section on international organizations, that “the United States also stands to learn from the experience of international organizations and their interactions with faith-based institutions in numerous fields.” The United States stands to learn from the experience of these, and many, many other actors—both “faith-based” and not.  We stand to learn from doing more listening and less promoting of “the message,”  not to mention “spearheading a new reformation,” in Sullivan’s words. The real challenge, understanding and engaging multiple modalities of being “religious” and being “free” in a globalizing world, still lies ahead.

The central puzzle of my book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations is that of how we might begin to think about secularism, and eventually, secularisms in the plural, as forms of political authority in IR. What does this mean for IR theory and for our understanding of political Islam and the broad resurgence of religion? What kinds of politics follow from different forms of secular commitments, traditions, habits and beliefs? I argue that the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but socially and historically constructed. The failure to recognize the validity of this contestation helps to explain why IR—both in theory and in terms of actual practices of international politics—has been unable to come to terms with secularism and religion as forms of authority in world politics. Overcoming this problem—opening up the black box of secularism and digging into the complex negotiations that take place inside of it—allows for a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations involving the politics of religion. Examples include the long-standing conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and the global resurgence of religion.

I approach secularism as a series of social and historical traditions—various sets of historical practices that have developed over time. These particular traditions of secularism both rely upon and help produce unique understandings of religion, political Islam, religious resurgence, “normal” politics and so forth. None of the divisions between religion and politics embodied in these secularist traditions are stable or universal. In fact, they are unstable; and even fundamentally contested, constantly being refined and redefined. To think about secularism in this way, I find it helpful to use Craig Calhoun’s suggestion that we approach nationalism as a discourse within which political struggles are conducted. When we adopt this insight, secularism becomes “not the solution to the puzzle [of politics and religion] but the discourse within which struggles to settle the question are most commonly waged.” Secularism is to an authoritative discourse, a language in which moral and political questions are settled, legitimated and contested. It is a form of political authority.

One implication of thinking about secularism in these terms is that it becomes clear that there are many traditions or varieties of secularism—Turkish Kemalism, French laïcité, American “Judeo-Christian” secularism. Each of these varieties of secularism represents a contingent yet enduring political settlement of the relation between religion and politics. Various forms of secularism both produce and are composed of authoritative settlements of religion and politics, while simultaneously claiming to be exempt from this process of production. This is a powerful move. Secularization then may be understood to be the combined social and historical processes through which a particular settlement becomes authoritative, legitimated and embedded in and through individuals, the law, the state, and other social relations, including international relations.

The central premise of my argument is that two specific trajectories, varieties or traditions of secularism, two strategies for managing the relationship between religion and politics, have been influential in international politics: laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism. Laicism refers to a separationist narrative in which religion is expelled from politics, and Judeo-Christian secularism refers to an accommodationist narrative in which Judeo-Christian tradition is perceived to be the foundation of secular democracy. These varieties of secularism don’t map cleanly onto one country or individual or another—both are present in different variations in different times and places. Both these forms of secularism are discursive traditions, following Talal Asad, collections of practices with a history. Each defends some form of the separation of church and state, but in a different way from the other, with a different justification and with different political consequences.

In developing the figure of Judeo-Christian secularism, I ask—to what extent have our forms of secularism inherited particular religious traditions? Or, rather, to what extent does Christianity, or post-World War II, Judeo-Christian tradition, animate contemporary, lived practices of secularism? It took Charles Taylor nearly 900 pages to answer this question in A Secular Age, so let me state briefly that I regard secularism as a series of lived traditions which are indebted to religious tradition and practice in significant ways, but the nature of their debts varies significantly with the form of secularism and the historical context in which it operates. This means that secularisms must be studied within their historical, cultural, and political contexts and not in the abstract. The secularisms that I write about are indebted to Christianity in interesting and complex ways, but laicism is also indebted to French Enlightenment thought, which is deeply anti-clerical.

These trajectories of secularism cannot be fully understood without reference to European and global history. They were created though human actions and beliefs and cannot be abstracted from the historical contexts and circumstances from which they emerged. While the secular traditions that interest me emerged out of and remain indebted to both the Enlightenment critique of religion and Judeo-Christian tradition, they also have been constituted and reproduced through global relationships, including negative representations of Islam.

But this argument has several implications for IR theory. My objective has been to bring debates from sociology of religion, philosophy, and political theory into international relations to refigure a field that has virtually ignored questions of how the categories of religion and politics shape international affairs. One implication of opening up this question of the politics of secularism is that it presents an alternative to realist, liberal and constructivist accounts of international relations that work on the assumption that religion has been privatized.

I challenge the assumption that after the Westphalian settlement, religion became privatized and thereby was rendered largely irrelevant to power politics. Instead, modern forms of secular authority emerged out of a specifically Christian-dominated Westphalian moral order. The influence of this specific tradition upon the Westphalian secular settlement makes it difficult to subsume the current international order into realist and liberal frameworks that assume that religion was simply privatized.

In other words, modern forms of secularism contribute to the constitution of a particular idea and practice of state sovereignty that claims to be universal in part by defining the limits of state-centered politics with “religion” on the outside. However, this attempt to delimit the terms and boundaries of the political and to define religion as a private counterpart to politics is a historically and culturally variable claim. It is also a highly politicized one. Different varieties of secularism create and perpetuate this claim about the limits of modern politics in different ways. From this perspective, they appear not as unchanging or obvious as we may have been inclined to see them before, but as contingent, yet firmly established, political settlements. These settlements operate below the threshold of public discourse and practice of state sovereignty. They may not be on the radar, but they should be, because they represent important constitutive elements of the theory and practice of modern sovereign authority.

A second contribution of this argument to IR theory involves the domestic/international question in relation to religion and politics. There has been a lot of great work done at this intersection. My contribution is to show how shared interests, identities and understandings of religion and politics that form at the domestic and regional levels become influential at the systemic level. This is constructivist theorizing that makes domestic politics a central part of the story, counteracting the tendency in IR, identified by Ole Wæver, Rodney Hall and others to “relegate domestic-societal interaction, sources of conflict, or societal cohesiveness to the status of epiphenomena.” This is a constructivist approach to the social, cultural and religious foundations of international relations.

If you accept my argument about the nature and significance of the politics of secularism, it becomes clear that the question often thrown about among students of religion and IR—“What is religion and how does it relate to international relations theory/practice?”—misses the point. For there can be no universal definition of religion. This is (as Asad argues) “not only because its constituent elements are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” If the categories of “religion” and “politics” are themselves the products of complex cultural, historical and political negotiations, then the question that I would put front and center in this discussion is how do these categories take shape, become authoritative, and what are their political consequences in specific sets of historical circumstances?

Defining the secular and the religious is a political task. Religious beliefs and practices are interwoven with political authority in complex and changing ways that don’t necessarily align with state boundaries or conventional secularist assumptions. IR theorists need to examine the secularist assumptions about religion that are embedded in the hypotheses and the empirical tests of IR scholarship.

This positive, at times triumphalist, narrative gathers some momentum in Lilla’s book, at least at first. It is a compelling and confidence-inspiring story. Yet at other moments The Stillborn God approaches historical and contemporary European negotiations of religion and politics with hesitance and even trepidation, with Lilla concluding near the end of the book that “the river separating political philosophy and political theology is narrow and deep; those who try to ride the waters will be swept away by spiritual forces beyond their control.” In this second, more defensive mode of argumentation, which competes throughout the book with the first, Lilla presses the reader to acknowledge the danger of negotiating a third way between political theology, defined as appealing at some point to divine revelation, and, political philosophy that attempts to attain political good absent such appeals on the other. This tension between the West’s alleged accomplishments in the domain of religion and politics and the prospect that these salutary advances are under siege from a variety of quarters runs throughout the book, pushing the narrative forward and lending coherence to what otherwise might read more like an introduction to the religious politics of several Western canonical political thinkers than an intervention into contemporary debates on religion and politics.

Lilla’s claim that the Great Separation is unique to the West has important implications for global politics, and I want to point toward some of the difficulties surrounding his assumption that (Western) postmetaphysical political philosophy is located on a fundamentally different and distinct plane than political theology. I question the assumption that Western theopolitical identities, practices, and institutions are fundamentally different and distinct from other civilizations that allegedly have yet to discover the resources to make such a transition possible.

For Lilla, Westerners are the exception because we live on what he calls “the other shore.” Civilizations on the “opposite bank” puzzle us because we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. They are, moreover, unlikely to follow our path because to successfully navigate the hazardous shoals of political theology as we have done would require a difficult excavation of theological resources. Lilla seems skeptical that this will occur, in part because he seems to lack confidence in the capacity of other traditions to negotiate these difficult matters, and in part because our own crossing to the “other shore” has been complicated “by the fact that the religious anthropology that supplanted theology as the foundation of Western political thought contained paradoxes and problems of its own.” This crossing has been placed in jeopardy by, among others, intellectual traditions that seek to revive political theology within the West, such as those that draw on the writings of Ernst Bloch and Friedrich Gogarten, and Lilla is as critical of these as he is candid about the alleged shortcomings of other civilizations. Thanks to these internal dissenting traditions, he laments, political theology has once again entered through the back door of Western civilization, threatening the hard-won gains of the Great Separation and overwhelming liberal theologians such as Cohen and Troeltsch with messianism by exploiting the “gnostic potential embedded in the Bible’s promise of redemption.” Lilla’s remedy for this backsliding into political theology is to rely upon “our own lucidity” to reign in the impulse to theologize politics, to hold ourselves in check when tempted by questions of theology, cosmology, and metaphysics. It is a question of discipline. The liberal deity is a stillborn God; political theology has been reborn.

I agree with Lilla’s contention that we need to revisit the tension between political theology and modern political philosophy. I disagree, however, with his easy assumption that political theology and political philosophy are and must be mutually exclusive. Rather than settling this contentious relation in advance by fiat, as his argument aspires to do in its more confident moments, the relation between political philosophy and political theology, and how various instantiations of this relationship shape institutions, practices, and identities of world politics, is precisely what needs to be explored.

Reading Lilla’s argument next to The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa’s study of the vicissitudes of European discourse on world religions and its relation to the formation of modern European identity, gave me a different take on these questions. Masuzawa offers an alternative historical and philosophical framework for contextualizing Lilla’s argument as part of a broader tradition of secular European discourse on world religions. As she suggests, “the new discourse of pluralism and diversity of religions, when it finally broke out into the open and became an established practice in the first half of the twentieth century, neither displaced nor disabled the logic of European hegemony—formerly couched in the language of the universality of Christianity—but, in a way, gave it a new lease” (xiv). Lilla’s self-congratulatory contention that we in the West have made it (though fitfully and not without setbacks) to the other shore appears as part of a long historical trajectory of Western discourse about religion that has served to reinforce a particular understanding and practice of European identity, global power, and hegemony. Modern discourse on religion and religions, as Masuzawa argues, was from the beginning a discourse of secularization at the same time that it was a discourse of othering. A symmetry and affinity appear between these two “wings” of the religion discourse, enabling it to “do the vital work of churning the stuff of Europe’s ever-expanding epistemic domain, and of forging from that ferment…the essential identity of the West” (20).

Lilla’s argument serves to buttress a particular understanding and practice of a “secular” West that claims to be developmentally more advanced than its non-Western rivals, while reinforcing Western identity in opposition to a series of others (both inside and outside the geographical West) defined by their location on the “other shore” of an allegedly clean political philosophy-political theology divide. Whether and how other civilizations and internal dissenting traditions will be quarantined to this “other shore” is not entirely clear. In any case, the presumption that we have left the rest of the world on the opposite bank does a great deal of work in international politics. In an earlier post on this blog, Nicolas Guilhot suggested that part of the problem in international relations scholarship is the assumption that “the very idea that the ‘science’ of politics that has shaped our understanding of international affairs is substantially different from religious worldviews or political repertoires claiming a relation to some form of transcendence.” In other words, and contra Lilla, could it be that we are all on the same shore, struggling with questions of transcendence and immanence in different languages and traditions? If so, Guilhot is right that we have to let go of the notion that “we” in the West “enjoy some kind of epistemological privilege because our understanding of world politics has somehow worked itself out of its own cultural embeddedness and acquired universal relevance by becoming secular.”

Lilla’s confident defense of the West’s hard-won, allegedly “postmetaphysical” accomplishments and accompanying call to arms against threats to these accomplishments emanating from both inside and outside the West propel his argument forward. This alternation between a confident narrative of theopolitical success and the frightening potential that it will be (already has been?) derailed helps to explain why the author finds the prospect of navigating the waters separating political philosophy and political theology so threatening. Lilla’s conclusion that those who spend time exploring these waters risk the possibility of being swept away by “spiritual forces beyond our control” attests to the unresolved tension between his aspiration for a clean divide between political theology and political philosophy and the messy realities of the politics of religion in the real world.

Taylor convincingly argues that historical processes associated with secularization were deeply intertwined with Reform within Christianity, concluding that the movements drawing the largest masses of people into the “slipstream of disenchantment” were religious ones. As a result, the new humanism bears the mark of its origins, not only in being committed to an active, instrumental ordering of self and world, but also in the central role of universalism and benevolence within it.

It is because Taylor draws on such an impressive historical and literary repertoire and writes with such philosophical dexterity and generosity that his dismissal of the immanent counter-Enlightenment strikes me as problematic. He approaches the transcendent/immanent distinction such that the “place of fullness” is either: 1) outside or beyond human life (the position of “religious” transcenders); or 2) within human life with no reference to transcendent reality (the position of “faithless” immanentists). The “religious,” then, approach fullness as transcendence in a particular way. Religious faith in Taylor’s strong sense entails belief in transcendent reality and the aspiration to a transformation beyond ordinary human flourishing. So “religion,” at least in the historical European experience, is, essentially, Christianity.

Fair enough, until you get to the implications for those who fall outside the bounds of both “religion” and exclusive humanism. These radical theorists of immanence trouble Taylor throughout the book. They cannot be accommodated in the “face-off” between traditional faith and secular humanism because—neither endorsing “religion” nor eschewing metaphysics altogether—they are simply not playing the same game. Though Taylor wrestles with the need to adjust his categories and amend the rules such that a three-way face-off between these rivals becomes a genuine possibility, he struggles with the implications of doing so, and never commits to that path. Instead, he consigns unbelievers to living in a universe cloaked in absolute darkness. “A race of humans has arisen which has managed to experience its world entirely as immanent,” he writes. “We may judge this achievement as a victory for darkness, but it is a remarkable achievement nonetheless.”

Though I sympathize with Taylor’s antipathy toward the unreflectively anti-Christian strains of modern unbelief, I do not believe it needs to extend to all modes of believing or unbelieving (the categories themselves becomes problematic here) that fall beyond the reach of both “religion” and exclusive humanism. Though he acknowledges the proliferation of such alternatives with his figure of the “supernova,” he dismisses modes of belief/unbelief that come from within Western experience yet operate outside of and often in tension with the Christian categories that animate his extraordinarily rich analysis. We are led to conclude that he is pulled so strongly toward his version of the transcendent that what becomes most threatening are not exclusive humanists who “close the transcendent window” but their “nonreligious” rivals who represent an alternative to both a philosophy of transcendence and a philosophy of radical atheism.

Though it makes no appearance in this book, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism comes to mind. For non-Christian metaphysicians like Deleuze, the transcendental field is transcendental in that it resides above or below appearance, but not in that it is unquestionable or authorizes a morality of command.

Can the field of immanence be “experience-far”? Can it also hold mystery, and, if so, would this open interesting possibilities?

I would have appreciated a more nuanced engagement with these questions. Instead, Taylor portrays exclusive humanism as the rightful heir of (Reformed) Christianity, while the immanent revolt is shunned as the illegitimate offspring of Reform, “a resistance against the primacy of life, but which has abandoned these traditional sources” (372). Taylor shuns it not only because it rejects his mode of transcendence (though this matters too), but because in equating a diverse tradition with a particular reading of Nietzsche, the revolt becomes nearly synonymous with proclivities toward fascism and a fascination with death and violence (637-38). With this position condemned both politically and metaphysically, Taylor bypasses an opportunity for what might have been a fascinating engagement between rival metaphysical traditions.

Perhaps this three-way face-off still lies ahead. And A Secular Age is magnificent nonetheless.