We’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on how the debate highlights enduring and nascent issues involving claims to multiple rights made in the context of American public life.

Our respondents are:

Finbarr Curtis, Instructor of Religious Studies, University of Alabama

Mark Hulsether, Professor and Director of American Studies Program, University of Tennessee

Derek E. Karchner, Attorney at Law, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law

Daniel Maguire, Professor of Theology, Marquette University

Kathleen Sands, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Kevin M. Schultz, Assistant Professor of History and Catholic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

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Finbarr Curtis, Instructor of Religious Studies, University of Alabama

The Catholic Church’s rhetoric in the recent contraception controversy pits public health policy against private constitutional rights. But what is unclear is exactly whose rights are violated. No Catholics would be forced to take contraception. Rather, the Church’s claim is that its liberty is violated if it has to affirm the religious liberty of its employees, who may be Catholics as well as people with no religious affiliation or with different religious affiliations. In other words, “religious liberty” does not protect individual freedom (whatever that may be) but allows organizations to police the religious convictions of their employees. What is remarkable, at least politically, is that employees could include many conservative Evangelicals for whom contraception within marriage is fine. This means that, say, a married Southern Baptist who takes a job at a Catholic university would have her healthcare choices influenced by Papal teachings with which she does not agree. For much of American history, this kind of ecclesiastical assertiveness would have ignited anti-Catholic fury. But drawing historical parallels is tricky here because the Church now insists that it has jurisdiction over the consciences of non-Catholics, which is a long way from earlier defenses of American Catholic freedom. Yet many conservative Protestant groups have come to the defense of the Church in a way that demonstrates a shared investment in expanding the power of private institutions. This vision of religious freedom confirms Winnifred Sullivan’s post on the Hosanna-Tabor decision, in which a “church” has first amendment rights. One could note an analogy between this language of religious freedom and the Citizens United ruling that grants corporate entities the rights of persons. In both cases, the rhetoric of freedom works to expand the power of private institutions acting beyond the scope of democratic deliberation and accountability.

In this rhetoric, religious freedom is realized as long as government interference is minimized. To take the example of the Baptist working in a Catholic college, the response of the Church (and its Baptist apologists) would be that her religious freedom is not violated because she took the job knowing that it did not provide contraceptive benefits and she is free to pay for them herself or to seek other employment. In other words, the market will provide whatever freedom she needs. In practice, then, the rhetoric of private freedom that draws its persuasive force from its claims to protect individual liberty actually works to empower corporate entities that are free to do whatever they want without having to consider competing visions of public goods.

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Mark Hulsether, Professor and Director of American Studies Program, University of Tennessee

Jurisprudence on religion—and by extension public discourse about religions, social policies, and cultural norms—clearly involves rights in conflict. For example, everyone agrees that a right to “freely exercise” a religious calling to murder is trumped by the right not to be murdered. We also agree that many religious practices should be freely practiced without discrimination unless there is a compelling public counterargument. Conflicts wind up in court and on television when there are gray areas, and the resulting common sense about what counts as religious anarchy versus discrimination has varied widely over time.

Since I have little to add to current wrangles about paying for contraceptives, I will address two background issues. One gray area concerns the standing of theological convictions when deciding where to set a legal threshold for the “murder” of embryos. Everyone agrees that late-term abortions are over this line unless the mother is in grave danger. What about early miscarriages or the use of morning after pills by rape victims? Should every such event trigger a full-scale funeral for the unfortunate zygote, plus a criminal investigation to see whether the mother’s behavior rose to a level of “negligent homicide”? Even extreme pro-lifers rarely go this far. In other words, virtually everyone presupposes that “life” or “full human rights” is not a simple “on-off switch” at the moment of conception—no matter how loudly some deny this. Of course where the threshold is set has immense consequences, especially for women.

Suppose we posit that abortion is an evil but sometimes a tragic lesser evil (with pregnant women, not the state, in the best position to judge this matter). If so, one major reason for access to contraceptives is precisely to minimize abortions. We can acknowledge that Catholic bishops posit a different logic about contraception—and that they have a right to believe it—while still denying that their logic is persuasive, especially as public policy. Doesn’t their thinking seem muddled and hypocritical? Aren’t their background assumptions more about controlling women’s bodies and devaluing all forms of sexual expression except between married heterosexuals who are trying to conceive—as opposed to “defending life”?

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Derek E. Karchner, Attorney at Law, The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law

The debate over the contraception mandate is a debate about conscience and whether one’s conscience must yield to another’s personal reproductive rights or the nation’s public health priorities. My answer to both is a profound NO. Conscience has enjoyed a robust space in the discussion of American rights. It should remain so.

This idea that conscience underlies our notion of rights is not new. John Rawls expressed the idea, in A Theory of Justice, that we all share a basic equal liberty of conscience which is central to developing a fully adequate scheme of liberty and one who holds conscientious beliefs “regards them as binding absolutely in the sense that he cannot qualify his commitment to them for sake of . . . promoting other interests” such as economic or social benefit. In this way, conscience informs all actions or, as Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Summa Theologica, conscience spurs one to action or causes one to abstain from action in response to the acquisition of knowledge, which has shaped one’s views about the proper course of action. It is not simply a belief. Rather, conscience involves an advancing of one’s beliefs through action or avoiding action that would compromise those beliefs.

American rights jurisprudence is based on the notion that an individual’s conscience should be largely free from state coercion. Indeed, an animating force behind the reproductive rights movement was the sense that government was making choices for citizens when it comes to sex, to the use of contraceptives, and the like. That is, the state was encroaching on conscience.

However, the contraception mandate is part of a broader effort to erode the right to exercise of one’s conscience. At first, having contraception grew out of an individual’s right to exercise his or her conscience with regard to reproduction. The contraception mandate and similar debates on the state suggests that certain favored liberties will be transformed into rights that can be enforced by the state against those who refuse to facilitate their exercise. This is hardly the death of conscience as we know it, but it portends a radical shift in how we view and respect conscience. While certainly conscience should yield to certain paramount social priorities, this is hardly one of those priorities.

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Daniel Maguire, Professor of Theology, Marquette University

Galileo would have welcomed the bishops’ current fixation on sexual-reproductive issues. In his day their focus was on the stars; their attention has shifted to the pelvic zone where they are once again stumbling and bumbling, claiming authority on issues where they have no privileged expertise. Increasingly, Catholic laity no longer dance to their music, especially on sexual reproductive issues where they and their theologians have long since had a change of mind. On issues like birth control the bishops are effectively in schism.

Their current zeal and bullying tenor has more than a tinge of panic. Their seminaries are emptying, clergy sexual crimes and hierarchical cover-ups are being exposed, whole dioceses are going bankrupt. Time for a little diversionary stress on birth control?

Unfortunately, Catholic disarray is not just church business. The bishops are would-be amphibians, demanding sectarian privileges, while playing big and tough in the public square. They are awash in inconsistencies, wanting and needing public finances for their institutions but violating the consciences of the diverse publics they serve in their tax-supported institutions.

They base their case on a fallacy, grasped and supported by the religious right and Republican hopefuls. “Religious freedom” is their bogus cry. They claim “religious freedom” to violate the religious freedom and conscience rights of all who are served in their establishments.

All this hierarchical ruckus may serve to raise the overdue question of whether Catholic hospitals should face the sunset rule. They began before the state saw its obligation to bring health care to the poor. They can no longer provide for the poor without massive state aid, including tax-exempt status. (Tax exempt = tax shifted, meaning someone else has to pay).

Before the state saw its duty to respond to fires, Catholic monks rose to the need. They stopped when the state took over. Otherwise we would have Catholic firehouses, such as, for example, The Immaculate Conception Fire Company. The question is: are Catholic hospitals, like Catholic firehouses, anachronistic and anomalous remains of a mission no longer theirs?

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Kathleen Sands, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa

The contraception dispute is about power. Who has to pay and who rides free? Who controls reproduction and who is controlled? Whose beliefs can determine public policy—or veto it—and whose beliefs don’t matter? “Religion” cannot adjudicate the fair distribution of power, because the word is always already a prisoner of power.

Consider that “religion,” here, excludes even most Catholics. It discounts Catholic women (most of whom use contraception) and the Catholic Health Association, which accepted the Obama compromise. It discounts the vast majority of all American women, for whom the decision to use contraception is a matter of conscience. “Religious liberty” won’t help them if they work for a Catholic employer and, in fact, will deny them a benefit to which they’re legally entitled. Indeed, this “religious liberty” contradicts current jurisprudence, which clearly states that the Constitution does not provide “religious exemptions” to generally applicable laws.

And what about other religions (say, Christian Science or Jehovah’s Witnesses) that object to other elements of health care? Or the huge businesses (say, Walmart or Whole Foods) whose devoutly religious owners might like their own set of exemptions? Should they get “religious liberty”? And if so, wouldn’t universal coverage become completely impracticable?

For some, that’s the goal: their “religious liberty” metastasizes into a demand that all employers, simply by invoking “religion,” could exempt themselves from any element of health care coverage. They’re part of the alliance that now owns “religion”: conservative evangelicals, Tea Partisans, and a Catholic hierarchy trying to reassert authority after the exposure of its own catastrophic moral failures.

In public discourse, religion is what “religion” does. And this is what “religion” is doing here and now. So, while elected officials dare not question “religious freedom,” scholars must be more discerning.

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Kevin M. Schultz, Assistant Professor of History and Catholic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

First, let me say this wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t an election year. My mother works at a Catholic hospital whose insurance has covered birth control for years. The nuns who oversee the moral direction of the hospital haven’t complained once. So it seems there is some posturing going on now that has a lot to do with timing. This speaks volumes about the increasing importance of “the Catholic vote,” although that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

Regarding rights claims, there will always be a tension between individual rights (and/or minority group rights) and the fact that we all belong to a broader society that requires us to check some of our claims when we participate in it. To this point, it’s worth remembering that no church is being compelled to pay for birth control here (they get exceptions), just the auxiliary services nominally provided by a church that reach out into greater society, for example hospitals like my mother’s (which happens to employ more non-Catholics than Catholics). We all make compromises when we participate in society, and we should argue with compassion about the compromises we’re asked to make. But it seems a small compromise to make to have one’s insurance cover the cost of birth control pills for your auxiliary employees (Catholic or not) in order to maintain tax-exempt status and continue to receive millions of federal tax dollars to support your auxiliary services, like Catholic Charities.

Finally, it strikes me as particularly ironic that the Catholic Church, which, for the past 150 years has been making consistent communitarian arguments against the perceived acids of liberal individualism, is now turning the tables to say a “common good” argument has no merit when it compels their group to make compromises when they choose to branch out into broader society. More obnoxiously, their use of vitriolic cultural wars language does the Church, and the country it has thrived in for more than two hundred years, a great disservice.

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Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

President Barack Obama’s May 17 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame deftly demonstrated the president’s unique ability to elevate civil discourse and to eloquently incorporate a deep religious sensibility into the nation’s most divisive contemporary public debate. Many observers have rightly commented on Obama’s important emphasis that the abortion issue requires “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” What is equally impressive is the religious repertoire that Obama used in articulating his vision of how that so-hard-to-come-by common-ground might be achieved. I am not thinking of Obama’s references to the “imperfections of man” and to “original sin,” or to the invocation of “God’s creation”—though these religious references are important. More striking was how Obama, a non-Catholic, showed his ability to think and to talk like a Catholic. He empathically did this by vividly using in his address very particular experiences as grounds legitimating the validity of universal claims. During his speech, Obama exemplified the translation that necessarily occurs in everyday lived experience between universal principles of morality and the particularistic ways in which those principles get worked out on the ground by (imperfect) human beings. This he accomplished not by abstract talk about lofty principles but by the stories he told, two in particular.

Obama was clearly attentive to the cultural and geographical significance of the site of his speech and, fortunately for him, was able to use the words and actions of Father Ted Hesburgh, that most iconic of Notre Dame figures (and the university’s president-emeritus), to demonstrate his own thesis that common ground is achievable if and once we recognize that despite the intrusive divisions that set individuals at odds with one another, we all share a common humanity. Thus, as Obama recounted, if Ted Hesburgh could first bring together people of sharply divided opinions on race (members of the Civil Rights Commission) and then get them to talk—and fish—with one another, with the result that they formed the foundation for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, change on other divisive issues, though a steep challenge, is also possible. Obama’s story about Fr. Hesburgh and his fellow civil rights commissioners was a vivid reminder that once we find we have some particular everyday thing in common with others who otherwise seem strange and even threatening, that particular commonality opens the possibility that the divisions that characterize our lives might be bridged, however unevenly, so that a universal good is achieved.

President Obama also drew on the late Cardinal Bernardin, another iconic figure in the Catholic Church. Cardinal Bernardin is most well know for articulating what he called a consistent ethic of life, meaning that life needs to be protected and supported from the moment of conception through to the moment of death and at all moments along the way. Bernardin’s intent in articulating a consistent ethic was driven by his attempt to forge a meaningful common ground among Catholics in the face of their polarization over abortion. Subsequently, this ethic has been frequently invoked by politicians and activists who argue that abortion is just one among several moral issues for Catholics; consistency on the sanctity of life requires opposition not just to abortion but also to the death penalty, and strong support for social and economic policies that help alleviate poverty, homelessness, discrimination, etc.  One might well have expected President Obama to mention Bernardin in his address, in part to justify his own strong social justice leanings (policies which University of Notre Dame administrators have approvingly highlighted while expressing disagreement with his abortion views).

But what was especially intriguing about Obama’s speech was that he did not mention the phrase “consistent ethic.” Instead, in a masterful gesture, he told a moving story about his own personal encounter with Bernardin and of Bernardin’s exemplification of both the ethic and the common ground that he sought to foster. That story, from Obama’s time as a community organizer working closely with Catholic and other churches in Chicago, allowed Obama, once again, to demonstrate that universal moral principles get translated in particularistic local actions. It also allowed Obama to pay sincere tribute to Bernardin (and the Catholic Church at-large) while also finding support for his own call for a civil approach to abortion and other divisive issues. Obama noted that Bernardin was “unafraid to speak his mind on moral issues ranging from poverty, AIDS, and abortion to the death penalty and nuclear war. And yet he was congenial and gentle in his persuasion, always trying to bring people together, always trying to find common ground.”

Thus at Notre Dame, Obama demonstrated the practical sense that he has long been credited with and also unveiled a new religious sensibility, one that has heretofore been silenced by the moral complexity of issues (as on stem cell research, for example). Obama has put religion back in civil religion, and has achieved this not by simply invoking religious words in public setting (“God bless America”), but by deploying a narrative style that both fits with, and gives lived experience, to the theological argument that universal moral principles are a society’s foundation and anchor. Obama’s speech is unlikely to change the passions and fundamental moral divisions that exist around abortion. Nonetheless, his demonstrated appreciation of how universal moral claims get worked out in particular contexts can serve to remind us that interpretive diversity does not undermine but is part and parcel of the universality of human community. People can accept but disagree with each other’s differences while working together to achieve their discoverable, shared goals.

Certainly, personal interaction with the president raises the stock of an evangelical leader.  The late Jerry Falwell often let it be known that President Reagan personally called him when the president nominated Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court.  That one presidential gesture in 1981 validated Falwell’s claim to authority, even though he was just one of many figures vying to lead the evangelical movement in the early 1980s.

So who will President-Elect Obama turn to when he wants to hear what the evangelical community is thinking?  As has been the case with President Bush, he will first turn to members of his own administration who are evangelical.  I expect Burns Strider, who once led religious outreach in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, will serve somewhere, most likely in the office of public liaison.  This is the office that was institutionalized by Presidents Nixon and Ford as a way of maintaining regular contact with core constituencies.  There has been a person in this office tasked with religious outreach for over three decades.  No one in the Democratic Party has done a better job reaching out to evangelicals in recent years than Strider, and although they were not on the same team in the primary season, I expect President-Elect Obama will count on him.  I interviewed Strider three years ago while researching Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.  Even then, it was apparent that Strider was laying the groundwork for a religiously-inspired movement that would engage political liberals and moderates, thereby forcing pundits to specify more clearly what is meant by “values voters.”

There are also high-profile evangelical pastors who will have the president’s ear.  Both Joel Hunter and Kirbyjon Caldwell publicly supported George W. Bush in 2004 and then backed Barack Obama in 2008.  Hunter leads a church in Orlando and delivered the benediction on the closing night of this year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver.  Caldwell pastors Windsor Village United Methodist Church, the largest United Methodist congregation in North America, and frequently participated in conference calls with the Obama campaign.

What Happens to the Religious Right?

Is the Obama presidency the final nail in the coffin for the Religious Right?  Don’t count on it.  For one thing, political movements like the Religious Right don’t need a “god” to succeed, but they do need a devil.  Nothing builds allegiances among a coalition like a common enemy.  Within the first few days of the new administration, the White House will reverse the so-called “Mexico City Policy” that bans all non-governmental organizations receiving federal funding from performing abortions in other countries.  President Clinton repealed this policy, first enacted by President Reagan and continued with President George H.W. Bush, on his first day in office in 1993.  In 2001, President George W. Bush reenacted the policy upon entering the White House.  The policy has become a political hot potato.  Shortly after the inauguration, President-Elect Obama will, no doubt, repeal the policy and thereby reinvigorate the Religious Right, for whom abortion remains the defining policy issue.

All the while, speculation continues on who will be the new standard bearer for the Religious Right.  Although Sarah Palin charmed this core constituency of the Republican Party, don’t expect her to become their public face.  Evangelicals have too much political savvy for that.  Just as they distanced themselves from Dan Quayle in the 1990s, so also will evangelicals move away from Governor Palin, despite her charisma.  Certainly, she will remain in the public eye, maybe complete with her own television show.  But she has never been able to articulate a religiously-inspired vision for public policy in the way that Phyllis Schlafly or Tony Perkins—both stalwarts of the Religious Right—have.

It is possible that Mike Huckabee may lead the Religious Right.  Like Charles Colson, Huckabee has actual government experience and shares with Colson a unique blend of theological insight and political acumen.  But the former governor of Arkansas will have to decide if he wants to be a contender for the Republican nomination in 2012.  If so, he will spend much more energy building relationships with fiscal conservatives (who did not support him in 2008) than deepening friendships with fellow social conservatives.

A more likely choice is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.  His conservative credentials are unassailable with a 100% pro-life voting record according to the National Right to Life Committee and consistent opposition to embryonic stem cell research.  He converted to Catholicism after being raised in a Hindu family, and he served as an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services in the first term of George W. Bush’s administration.  A former Rhodes Scholar, Jindal was rumored to be the front-runner to join John McCain’s presidential ticket earlier this summer.  As the first Indian-American governor in U.S. history, Jindal would represent, quite literally, a new face for the Religious Right.

Whatever happens in the months ahead, three things are certain.  A new cohort of public figures will emerge, each claiming to represent American evangelicals.  President-elect Obama will appoint a few of them to his administration, but none to high office.  Second, the public disdain for the evangelical “brand” will subside a good bit as Bush-era religious conservatives fade from attention.  Finally, by next fall, the Religious Right will solidify its support behind two or three newer figures as they seek to remake the movement’s public image.

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty. This concern with sexual life is refracted through the Counter Reformation, which emphasizes sexual purity such that, as Taylor puts it, “[t]here were mortal sins in…other dimensions as well (for instance, murder), and there were many in the domain of church rules (such as skipping Mass); but you could go quite far in being unjust and hard-hearted in your dealings with subordinates and others without incurring the automatic exclusion you incur by sexual license.”

Thus, for all their differences in what constitutes the ideal of sexual life—marital sexuality or monastic celibacy—both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produce sex as an overburdened site of moral worry and regulation. And we are not done with this burden; it is carried forward in the secular political life even of the United States, which is supposed to value individual and religious freedom.

As a way to ameliorate this burden, we propose a broad re-envisioning of sexual ethics. This new vision imagines a world in which sexual ethics has meaning for sexual practice, but is not burdened by having to account for the health of the nation, the status of a civilization, or the state of the world (all things which American politicians are happy to connect to sex). We also imagine a sexual ethic in which the question of sex is not one of whether we go “way beyond” or stay within certain “limits,” as Taylor suggests. Rather, we would suggest that we could think more capaciously (even more catholically?) about sex as a site for the production of values. Such a view of things—the possibility that sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made—is in sharp contrast to the current commonsense: to wit, sex is a moral problem, and conservative religion is the solution, for the sake of the individual and the community. We beg to differ.

Contemporary activists and critical theorists of many stripes—queer, feminist, womanist, gay and lesbian, for example have understood that sex, precisely because it is embedded in interpersonal relations, can help constitute new forms of social life. Paradoxically, then, the extraordinary moral pressure placed on sex—up to and including the fact that these pressures bear down especially hard on those whose sexual practices fall outside what anthropologist Gayle Rubin calls the “charmed circle” of a monogamous and reproductive heterosexuality—may also offer opportunities for reimagining the good life. This paradox helps to explain why some of the same people who are leery of moralizing (because they have so often been on the receiving end of conservative sexual moralism) also want to articulate sex’s values. Crucially, we cannot decide in advance what new forms of social life and ethical relation alternative sexual praxes might give rise to. (These “alternative sexual praxes” include homosexuality; in a culture that values marriage above all, they also include celibacy). What we can decide is that we are committed to freedom and that this commitment includes the realm of the sexual.

Such a project well may appeal to Charles Taylor, not because it is in any way Catholic (the capital “C” kind) or because he would particularly agree with most of the goods and values that such a project might produce. Nonetheless, this project could provide for an opening in secular imaginaries so as to admit into view the value of Catholic sexual ethics, a recognition Taylor currently sees as missing. However, such recognition does not require agreement. If the recognition Taylor seeks is currently “so hard to grasp” (at least for secular public life—we cannot speak for “the Vatican rulemakers”), this may be because we do not have a public life that values either religious or sexual freedom. Ironically, there might be more religious freedom if there were more sexual freedom. One of the ways in which Protestant dominance is maintained in American political life is through the constant invocation of rhetorics based on Protestant sexual ethics.

To accomplish this vision of a broader sexual ethic grounded in a broader notion of freedom, the secular state would need to step back from the business of policing sex (both in public bathrooms and in the courthouses of marriage certifications). And all of us—religionists and secularists—would need to break the stranglehold on our imagination currently exercised by a sexual ethic in which one is either committed to marriage or has no sexual ethic at all (or, at least no recognizable or worthwhile sexual ethic).

The sexual ethic we call for values not just freedom, but multiple forms of freedom— including religious and sexual freedoms. In so doing, it opens the door not just to different ideas about sexual practice, but also to a different vision of the practice of democracy.

First, I would like to make a simple observation about institutional position. The research university has long been at the heart of European, and thence global, secularism—if we think of secularism as the progressive social/intellectual distantiation from supernaturalisms. The implications of this alignment press on us not least because it means that academic anti‐secularist arguments risk bad faith. And it means that such arguments, even if inspired by non‐European situations, canʹt avoid questions about their relation to European political theory and, in particular, to the tradition of counter‐revolutionary critique of secular progressive modernity whose most recent manifestation has been that transnational new right which, as Jan‐Werner Mueller has shown, draws inspiration from Carl Schmitt. The structural link between European conservative political theology and post‐colonial anti‐secularism makes for strange encounters. For example, it would not be hard to deploy Carl Schmittʹs postwar affirmation of the anti‐liberal, anti‐democratic partisan for a sympathetic account of contemporary jihadism.

At the same time, as we know, the division between the secular and non‐secular is less hard‐ edged than it seems. To offer a well‐trodden example from the U.S. abortion debate: Is ”the right to life” a secular or religious principle? Even ”the right to choose” can be regarded as religiously sanctioned, were we to pursue Harold Laskiʹs supposition that “the affirmation of the right of each human being to fulfill his individuality” constitutes Christianityʹs best contribution to world civilization. Indeed the political cogency of abortion debate sound‐bites depends on their grounds being indeterminable in regard to secularism.

Such strategic ambiguity poses difficulties for Habermas, whose argument, I think, depends on a hard distinction between propositions that are amenable to “secular justifications” in “public political debate” and those that are not. But the abortion debate exposes the appropriateness of secular justification as such to question since secular justification for life, say, can threaten rather than supplement lifeʹs religious sanction. In instances like this, as Charles Taylor has implied, opposing parties meet not on the basis of a Rawlsian overlapping consensus but on joint submission to an established social order, happily or not.

In modern societies, one of the goods offered by this established social order (letʹs call it nation‐state capitalism) is what Iʹll call the secular adiaphora—the world of consumption and entertainment which is equally indifferent to (if not independent from) religion, politics and enlightened knowledge. Mediatized entertainment is of special interest because, for all its indifference to religion and politics, it provides both with so many of their resources and can thus transform them, and not just in the West. Originally, before the Christian era, “secular” meant “of the ages”—profane human lifeʹs sheer duration and rhythms. The contemporary secular adiaphora—a ceaseless stream of celebrities, fictions, fashion and sport—has, for all its non‐secular utilities, structural affinities to that primordial concept. For the secular adiaphora marks the persistence of the simple human capacity to live on, to inhabit continuous mundane repetition. In this case, the Pascalian realm of “distraction” is transubstantiated into a fundamental condition of temporal being. And this sphere binds societies today. Itʹs also where secular distantiations from liberal state secularity can emerge in echoes of the ethos of a secular anti‐secularism given philosophic force by Nietzsche. Or as one could also say: the secular adiaphora is not just where the secular loses its ties to enlightened reason and progress, but where it is absorbed by the mundane.

These remarks rub against Gil Anidjarʹs fascinating paper and in particular his claim, following Ashish Nandy and T.N. Madan, that we should regard Christianity as the agent of European colonialism by recognizing that Christianity has “disenchanted its own world by dividing itself into private and public, politics and economics, indeed, religious and secular.” In making this move, Anidjar asks us to dethrone concepts like modernity and capitalism as master signifiers of European domination. Anidjar comes to his argument in rescuing Edward Said from himself by showing that Said was not the secularist he claimed to be. Itʹs worth recalling that Said himself often thought of his secularism as a commitment to “affiliation” (against ”filiation”) two aspects of which are pertinent here. Said was committed to associational identities and collectivities against nativist ones like race, nationality and inherited religious confession. And he was committed to an analytic method which, in the post‐structuralist mode, seeks to find exchanges, flows, mutations rather than autonomies and antinomies. It may be that Said could not logically commit himself simultaneously to programmatic secularism and to affiliation to the degree that the latter breaks down the hard distinction between the secular and the Christian along the lines that Anidjar proposes. From this perspective, Anidjar seems right to recognize a tension between Saidʹs anti‐Orientalism and his secularism. But affiliation also breaks down the hard distinction between Christianity and other religions so as to prevent us conceiving of the history of imperial modernity as religious warfare in Anidjarʹs spirit, or indeed, in Samuel Huntingtonʹs.

My own inclination would not be to pursue Anidjar along this theoretical track but to invite him to spell out the historical evidence on which his case must ultimately rest, as well as to explore counter‐instances. His argument, after all, is finally more historical than theoretical. So Iʹd invite him to tell us more about both non‐Christian secularities and the reception of Christianity outside the boundaries of the West. (China might be an instructive case: The impact of the Jesuit mission created a stronger and codified Confucianism, a religion of empire to use Chris Bayleyʹs phrase, directed against Western trade and exchange while later Protestant missions sparked the millenarial offshoot of Christian soteriology that led to the bloody Taiping rebellion against both the Qing regime and the British. In both cases, Christianization hardened anti‐imperialist resistance in terms that complicate Anidjarʹs argument).

But let me end these brief remarks by citing an old case of non‐European secularity from the Europe‐Asia trade route. As recorded in Halycut, sometime around 1550 CE in todayʹs Iran, an English trader met a traveler from Gujurat. The man from Gujurat was ʺasked concerning his opinion in religion, what he thought of Godʺ and replied ʺthe three chief religions in the world be of the Christians, Jewes, and Turks, and yet but one of them true: but being in doubt which is the truest of the three, [I] will be of none.ʺ In an ambiguously non‐religious gesture, he chose instead to worship the sun, that natural symbol of a lifeʹs secular duration. Can we parse that worship of eternal return as a moment in a Nietzschean secular anti‐secularism which today may take the form of non‐participation in liberal progressivism, a form of non‐ participation most popularly available through immersion in industrialized, mediatized culture itself? An immersion in that culture which (to draw upon the rich array of Christian attitudes to the world albeit in a profoundly unchristian (and un‐Nietzschean spirit)) at the very least does not preclude charitable contemplation of that culture by intellectuals like me.