In the social sciences, this sort of issue has mostly been treated under the heading of relativism. As I have described it elsewhere, “our ability to be comfortable with relativism oddly depends on, or slides inexorably toward, a thin but broad universalism. But this universalism, this sense that through a less judgmental and more dispassionate gaze one has grasped the most truly general characteristics of human being, human civilization, even ‘human rights,’ as the Abbé Sieyès and others obviously thought they had [. . .] can be explained away [. . .] as a fiction embedded in certain kind of Judeo-Christian culture, that is, the kind that believes in the secularizing narrative that entails a latitudinarian tolerance based on individual rights rather than communal duties, on a putatively dispassionate separation of private and public beliefs,” and so forth. In the humanities, the dilemma of the ”frame” or structure that always somehow needs a larger one that it can never do more then gesture to “off the stage,” so to speak, was captured for many by Jacques Derrida’s very influential essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” which he delivered as a lecture at The Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and which was basically an account of the failure of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt at a universal method. (Niklas Luhmann refined the argument under the heading of “systems theory,” and I think mathematics discovered the problem rather early in the twentieth century.) The problem David Buckley is confronting, along with the skeptical gazes of those he interviews, is thus in many ways a problem that defines so much humanist reflection on method after 1945.

And yet, the fact that the problem is real—and I believe it is—should not be allowed to reduce intellectual work to an unending reiteration of the problem, as happened to “deconstruction” in the literary fields, or to the unending performance of the contradiction into which mise-en-abîme the Frankfurt School fell. It does seem to me, moreover, that the question of “religion” in a “post-secular” age raises this issue in a most intense way, since for modernity the most common way to deal with the comparison of religious systems is by methodologically stepping back (whatever one’s own beliefs may be) into a space that, in many cases, is hard to distinguish from the secular reason that dominates the Western academy (as Dipesh Chakrabarty has quite elegantly noted). In this sense, I think Buckley’s instincts are correct: to pursue the comparison on the widest possible historical grounds, though (I would add) with as much awareness of the “frame” dilemma I outlined above as possible. To do less would be to stop thinking altogether. But to ignore the dilemma would reduce thinking to the imposition of Procrustean beds, and we have enough of those already.

*  *  *

I think Jonathan Sheehan points to something quite useful in his last post: the need for a discourse that does not immediately slide into the “ideological” conflict of religious versus secular teleology.  I think many in the religious studies and sociology of religion fields have tried to find such a discourse for decades now.  It is just that their disciplinary efforts have become far more visible to the rest of us recently.  Still, Justin Reynolds raises a point that is indeed important in the entirety of the “post-secularization” discussion, as it is now being called.  However we contextualize this discussion—I tend to see it as accelerating rapidly after the end of the cold war—it is clear that much of it has circled around the question of teleology.  For a variety of reasons, two of the foundational questions of religion and philosophy, and certainly not only in the West, have reemerged to trouble the standard thesis among Western intellectuals that predicted inevitable and irreversible secularization and modernization: What is the aim, the end, the purpose of human life?  and, Can different societies reasonably embrace quite different answers to this question?

Actually, if I am right about the coincidence of post-secularization’s rise and the cold war’s end, there is perhaps a fairly superficial but still interesting answer to be had.  Socialism, or at least some fairly perfected version of social democracy, had long been regarded as the likely end or goal of human history by a fair number of Western and “Third-World” intellectuals, many of whom cut their critical teeth by working through the contradictions of capitalism and its purely instrumental version of reason—that is, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations minus Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments­.  When Francis Fukuyama turned this conviction on its head in the summer of 1989 (actually, before the Berlin Wall fell later that autumn, though this chronology is now routinely reversed) with “The End of History?” in The National Interest, the problem (as even he came later to admit) was that Western capitalism did not provide a very satisfying sense of fulfillment, even acknowledging that some bugs remained to be worked out.  In Blumenberg’s terms, Fukuyama put capitalism into the answer position formerly held by socialism (and before that by Hegel’s constitutional monarchy), but it fit far less well, especially if we accept, as I think we must during this season of terrible economic upheaval, Joseph Schumpeter’s insight that capitalism is always a process of “creative destruction.”  Now, really, what kind of telos is that?

Some old Marxists faced with socialism’s recent rough patch—think Terry Eagleton—turned hard to religion as a result.  But many more recognized that the purely economic (that is, Marxian) narrative of social evolution was no longer going to hold.  Suddenly bereft of the extraordinarily bad model of Soviet socialism; increasingly confronted with the evidence that even the good (if for my taste often narrow-minded, ethnically monotone, and boring) social democracies of Scandinavia might not be as sustainable as once thought (change the ratio of workers to retirees and the math turns funky, and don’t even think about assimilating Muslim immigrant populations); terribly unimpressed with Fukuyama’s solution (end of history, indeed!); and, perhaps above all, realizing that the most potent political forces in the “Third World” were on longer socialist parties (no USSR to support them anymore) but religiously based ones (think Hamas and Hezbollah today, or, earlier in the twentieth-century, M. K. Gandhi), intellectuals have witnessed the problem of moral-social teleology raising its ungainly head all over again.

And so, we find ourselves in forums such as this wondering about “what ends we mean” and talking about teleology, as in the old (pre-Adam Smith, pre-Marx) days, because the “material” (that is, purely economic) answers satisfy us less and less.  I will conclude with two observations.  First, by insisting that I do not regard a “fully secularized world” as a telos worth pursuing, I am hardly throwing out the baby of teleology with the bathwater of secularism.  I believe, as I think Kant did, that our brains are hard-wired to think in terms of purposes, goals, ends, and (even on occasion) final ends—though, as I have observed elsewhere, Kracauer’s late notion of “the last things before the last” is for me a preferable formulation.  Asking about the nature of the “good life” is not necessarily misguided, but “modernity” itself means that a wild variety of quite reasonable answers will be given that would not accord to classical ideals with all their caste and class presumptions.  I thus find it hard to credit Alasdair MacIntyre’s attempt to resurrect Aristotelian teleology in its Catholic (Thomist) form—a resurrection that would probably require a true second coming to find enough agreement on what it now means—or Charles Taylor’s numerous meditations on “wholeness,” a term that is likely to stir up far more profound disagreement than Taylor’s ecumenical (more liberal Anglican than not) Catholicism seems to allow for.  Freud was likely right that the only form of thought that can actually claim to provide an answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is religion, but (with Freud) I get no satisfaction in my late fifties from asking the question.  Still, my claim that complete secularism should not be regarded as a teleological project is not meant to rule out teleological thinking altogether, any more than it is designed to say that secularization is not a necessary (though very partial) part of human history.

But the second point I want to make is that, pace Reynolds and his Straussian-Lillaesque line of reasoning, I wonder about the consequences of concluding that any human telos must come from outside the human being and human history, as some of his scholarly subjects once claimed.  (I also feel bad, by the way, for the poor liberal Protestant theologians, who somehow in this narrative always get blamed for Hitler—but that’s fodder for another post altogether.)  That is, while I enjoy borrowing from Heidegger in my own way, I can’t embrace the basically Heideggerian atheism that resurrects the problem of Being on non-human grounds (whether via the four-fold (Geviert) of a Black Forest farmhouse or via language itself), a topic recently opened up yet again by Stefanos Geroulanos.  No Ereignis, no arrival from without, not even some weak Benjaminian messianism that magically reverses a world run to ruin seems, contra Judith Butler, like anything worth putting our faith in.  And yet I am now quite convinced that the option to which we should pledge our allegiance is not “secularism fulfilled”—indeed, I doubt our perennial dissatisfactions with civilization (and here Freud is indeed handy) would allow such a thing.  Most of all, and perhaps on this score I do feel some kinship with the subjects of Reynolds’s research, I worry that “secularism fulfilled” would simply mean “hubris fulfilled”—the old dialectic of enlightenment still retains some force for me.  But that too is the subject for a later post.

*  *  *

Pondering a bit the posts so far in Notes from the field—those focused on the theoretical side of the secularization question, anyhow—it is not clear to me how much daylight there actually is between, say, Justin Reynolds’s position and my own. My interest in my initial foray was not so much to liberate secularization or the secular for an appropriately contextualized present (i.e., one that has taken on board both the historical dynamics of modern religious transformation and the critiques of secular reason that abound in our contemporary moment). Rather, it was to offer some kind of hope for something else “after secularization,” something other than the repetition of the same.

That may be an eschatological hope. Or not. It doesn’t much matter to me. In fact, the point of this exercise would be precisely not to care whether or not our concepts and ideals have “religious origins” (whatever that might mean, as if religion were something homogeneous and transparent to itself, as if it even could be an origin in some absolute sense). At a place of indifference like this, the discovery that, to take Reynolds’s example, Christianity might also be able to generate the sense of a contingent future would mean something different than it does now.

But it seems to me quite difficult to get to this equipoise. And that, I think, is because the war for conceptual primacy has been running hot for the greater part of the last four centuries. It is not just that the so-called secular has historically insisted on the need for some kind of autonomous intellectual vision, insisted that it can create its own concepts, free from the inherited baggage of religious tradition. It is also that the so-called religious has, with equal vehemence, insisted that anything good in this world was generated from out of its own intellectual vision, and everything else is merely a distorted refraction of that.

This is an essentially ideological conflict, and one that has been fought at least since the Reformation (though it was likely a vigorous one already in antiquity). It has been fought on the desks of academics eager to prove their bona fides by purging themselves of a perceivedly theological past. And it has been fought by theologians eager to show that their discipline remains the (often secret) foundation for contemporary thought. I see very little likelihood that one could, with one great final surge, end this conflict by “reclaiming” the secular or secularization in some new form—not least because it has been precisely this hope of ending the battle that has been the engine of the conflict all along.

So I’d like to put my hopes in something more mundane, if perhaps romantic, for all that. Namely, that we—all of us together here in this research group, but also in that wider community of interested scholars and thinkers—might create something new, a language and practice of analysis that moves orthogonally to these older conflicts. An immanent critique, as it were, that begins in the stuff of things: historical, anthropological, political, and so on. One that does not begin with a vision of how things should be for them to ultimately come out right, whatever that means. One that does not seek to “prove” the secularization thesis, however understood, or disprove it. But rather, one that is generative of new possibilities for understanding both religion and our own modernity.

I don’t know if a concept of secularization (or the secular) will prove useful in this new analytical stance. I have my doubts. But I have no doubt that, were it to be useful at all, its uses would emerge only at the end of research. No longer, I think, does it make sense to take it up as a foundational first principle, either as that which must be proved, or, just as importantly, that which must be disproved.

*  *  *

I wondered how long it would take DPDF participants to undo what I thought I had carefully assembled in my opening post on “Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters.”  Not very long at all, it seems.  And so, I will try a response here to Justin Reynolds and Alex Hernandez, both of whom have questioned what I actually mean by saying that “secularization” is a conceptual improvement over “secularism.”  Hernandez is suspicious about my invocation of Blumenberg, who seems to him to have in the end a very thin concept of “secularization,” one that relegates the tradition that comes out of Carl Schmitt (or Carl Löwith) to a sort of category error (the religious and secular answer positions may look the same, but the answers are really very different).  But his best insight is to see the desire for the fulfillment of the standard “secularization thesis” as a kind of eschatology in its own right. (He suggests this is perhaps not a form of teleology, though I will avoid worrying the distinction for the moment.)  I agree with Hernandez completely on these points, and have argued as much elsewhere: Blumenberg’s approach does not finally allow him to respond adequately to people like Schmitt and Löwith; and the standard “secularization thesis” did indeed harbor a telos within it, as my example of Habermas’s lament over the “unfinished project of modernity” indicates.  This is why so many today are reexamining the assumptions behind the standard thesis, and why I was suggesting a notion of “secularization” at odds with that thesis.

Reynolds’s complaint is a bit trickier.  On the one hand, he wonders whether my own use of the term “secularization” remains necessarily eschatological, despite my protests to the contrary, and suggests that I have simply adopted the “delay of the day of salvation” idea from the theologians—salvation here being a fully secular world, rather than the Kingdom of God.  On the other hand, he suggests that I fall into such a form of reasoning because, in fact, there is no getting around the idea of transcendence (as Voegelin, Jaspers, Niebuhr, and Tillich might claim).  That is, even scientific thought relies on notions of “truth” that are, if not divine, at least sufficiently universal and unchanging to suggest something beyond the mere singularities of disordered perception (or poetry).  Plato argued, to great effect, that this was indeed the case; and Nietzsche, to equally great effect, argued that Plato’s argument—along with its Jewish and Christian re-statements—was the error that more or less ruined Western civilization.

I will save for a subsequent post a more elaborate account of what I am trying to say with the term “secularization.”  But I do fully agree with Reynolds that religious thought is often capable of openness and contingency—I just think religions need to be reminded every so often that certain defined ends do not always justify the means—and historically, the secularizing tendencies within religion have served that purpose.  Reynolds is also right that I do not buy Asad’s argument (derived in part from Foucault) that equates secularism at the level of the state with the pursuit of “governmentality.”  I don’t buy it because it seems obvious to me that all religions that have achieved some measure of political power—whether in classical Rome, Islamic Spain, Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Puritan states of colonial America, or Saudi Arabia, to name just a few—have been equally interested in issues of governmentality; of what use would conversion be otherwise?  Some nominally secular, capitalist regimes, as Foucault (like Max Weber before him) argued, have achieved hegemony on the basis of modes of self-regulation that, it is true, would have made earlier religious tyrants and monarchs green with envy.  But many have not, and it would seem to me that Turkey today might turn out to be an interesting test case: Turkey’s greater openness toward Islam may well mean less recourse to brute force (as under the old secular military regimes) and a more modern approach to “governmentality.”  But this would be achieved—contra Asad—with the re-assertion of religion’s public role, not its eradication or greater compartmentalization.

However, in response to Reynolds’s claims that my use of the term “secularization” must be secretly eschatological and that I cannot escape from transcendence in any case, I must disagree on both points.  On the first point, I simply don’t see how a fully secular world is necessarily better—that it is something to be aimed at, or to be treated as any sort of fulfillment.  Actually, I don’t even know what the phrase “fully secular world” means.  For example, if it means leading one’s life rigorously according to scientific principles—at least the ones we know today—then I would say that the fully secular life is actually impossible to imagine: one would be in the predicament of a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s novels (which is certainly not to say that such predicaments never occur in real life—they do).  Another way to say this is: I am not a believer in any religious faith, but I recognize full well that I live my life in a world saturated with vestiges of religious faith and ritual from the past, and routine re-assertions of such faith and ritual in the present (as Sarah Shortall’s recent post also observed).  I cannot imagine that my life, even as an unbeliever, would necessarily be emotionally richer or happier if all of this, including all the historical and cultural consequences of it, were suddenly wiped away.  (In fact, I can’t even understand what that would mean, though I do recognize that it has been tried, generally with unhappy results.)  It is not necessarily that I think we must have religion to survive—we may not need it at all.  It is simply that I see no redemptive achievement—no telos worth pursuing—in its eradication.  There are people who have thought in such terms—both Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens claimed at different times that religion is the source of all evil in the world.  But I just don’t find enough evidence for such claims.

As to Reynolds’s second point about the unavoidability of transcendence—well, this is finally a semantic issue.  If, as I said above, this means we can’t avoid thinking in terms of universals and unchanging properties that have a more or less fuzzy relationship to actual things—my words “sex” and “wife” might conjure up an act and person that are quite different from the ones conjured in Reynolds’s head (at least, I hope so)—then I agree, but really, all that “transcendence” means here is what Durkheim meant by “collective consciousness”—that is, language itself, with all its formal coherence and sloppy substance.  But if transcendence means I can’t think, even scientifically or analytically, without invoking another world, so to speak, where all the ideas expressed in my words have an existence quite distinct from the one I inhabit, then I would say we avoid such transcendence well enough every time we use the word mind.  For me, a Kantian or Blumenbergian regulatory principle need be no more transcendent than a surgeon’s check-list.  And I hope we can all agree that, whatever they may think, surgeons have no special link to the divine.

*  *  *

In the spirit of a blog, I don’t want to provide anything like a definitive statement about our workshop or its results, but rather offer an opening for questions that, it seems to me, are outstanding.

In his earlier post, Vincent Pecora suggests an “unfinished project” approach to secularization. He also hints that the difference between secularization and secularism may well lie in a certain openness to a contingent future. Precisely as an ideal—whether a good one or a bad one does not matter—secularism seems to foreclose on this contingency. In fact, its normative claims demand just this closure. Things should be like this (and not like that) in some future moment, which allows us to decide in the present between right and wrong. A courthouse lawn in Georgia should not have a statue of the Ten Commandments on it, even if every person who now goes to court is a believing Christian, presumably because (in part) some future litigant could well find their liberties infringed.

Secularization, as a theory, need not make these normative claims, although often, in practice, it does make them or at least it has. That is, it is a rare version of secularization that actually opens itself to future contingency. If secularization were simply a descriptive project whose sole charge were neutrally to determine the various functions that religion plays in modern social, cultural, and political life, that would be one thing. But secularization, again as theory, has historically been tied to specific beliefs about trend lines in the reorganization of religious functions in the shadow of modernity. It has stipulated a direction of development that is, shall we say, less than contingent.

Three things stand out for me, as a historian. First, classical secularization theory seems to carry a set of claims, implicit and explicit, about what religion was like before modernity. In fact, it is exactly these claims that make secularization into a problem at all. If, for example, we believe that the first generation of colonists came to America out of religious idealism—John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” for example—then it becomes a problem to explain why, in subsequent generations, religious goals appear to drastically lose their potency. Whole generations of scholars cut their teeth on this now classic dilemma. But, the question should be asked, were those Puritans so pure after all? The city on the hill may well have been as much about commerce as anything else, and if that’s true, then the issue of “decline” is as much a figment of the model, as of real social, political, religious factors.

Second, models tend to generate the need for more models.  The question of a possible religious “resurgence” has leapt into prominence in the past 15-20 years, and apparently demands new heroic efforts in model building to figure out why society in the age of globalization suddenly seems more religious than ever before. New theories are developed—(“desecularization”?)—to address phenomena that look problematic in light of previous orthodoxies.  But what if “resurgence” appears only as a kind of spandrel in a sociological and historical picture of how things ought to have been? What exactly needs to be explained, in other words? The return of religion? Its decline? Its persistence? Its metamorphosis?

Third, the efforts of the past twenty years to address these issues of secularism and secularization in terms theoretical have mostly run out of steam. The study of religion and modernity has traced the same arc as so many other humanistic disciplines, ending in a kind of genealogical or deconstructive cul-de-sac, where we can see the problems (secularism as governance, say) without being able to imagine any alternative. Are scholars really willing to give up on secular norms of truth seeking? At this moment, I doubt it—not least because the alternatives seem so impossible to inhabit intellectually or ethically. Struggles to force ourselves beyond either tie the knots tighter or become so frantic as to seem altogether irresponsible. What results is a version of Dipesh Chakarabarty’s “politics of despair,” where our conceptual armature seems too crude and yet impossible to abandon.

It seems to me that it is precisely at this moment that empirical study—of past and present—might play a creative role in generating possibilities “after secularization.”

All of our fellows are, I think, working toward just these ends. On the one hand, all of them know the critiques, whether of secularization as sociological norm or of secularism as political one. They are alert, in other words, to the ways that these normative projects have shaped, not just scholarly work, but also the world that we inhabit. On the other, all of them are just as alert to the empirical contingencies of things. People are creative makers of their environments, religious and secular, and their makings cycle between local needs and ideal commitments.

Laws enforcing secularism, for example, reveal only part of the actual working mechanisms of state-religion relations. This was true in early modern Europe, where local communities routinely violated apparently strict cuius regio, eius religio principles in order to reach workable, if often unstable, accommodations to religious pluralism (here see the excellent new book by Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith). And it is true now, in places as various as the US, Turkey, and Egypt. When Winnifred Sullivan writes about Salazar v. Buono, the most recent Supreme Court religious-establishment case, in this blog, she asks:

Why do crosses continue to present themselves publicly and to present such a difficulty for the modern, secular nation-state?… Haven’t the myths and symbols of religions been supplanted by the myths and symbols of nationalism? Has secularization failed? Or, has the cross been secularized?

It is too easy, her article implies, to simply insist that the cross is, in fact, an essentially Christian symbol (Justice Steven’s position). It is equally too easy to insist that it is universal—that is, that it can be a symbol for all faiths—even when what one means by that seems to be a version of a Christian universal (Justice Alito’s position).

It is too easy, not because these positions are unsophisticated, but because they are effectively ideological. Neither Stevens, the secular apologist, nor Alito, the religious apologist, has, in fact, the least idea of how this symbol functions, how it is read, how it has changed and is changing. Has the cross become more Christian in the past 50 years? Or less? Hard to say without actual research. How facts have changed would seem crucial to understanding how norms should be understood and applied, now and in the future.

Scholars like Sullivan and our SSRC fellows are doing just this research. They are working in the past and present. They are working with various media and various methods. Their actors are diverse, from religious organizations to local healers, from television programmers to television audiences, and more. Most importantly, all are open to the exigencies of explanation. It seems to me that we may not know, yet, precisely what comes “after secularization” for a very good reason: we are still figuring out what things we need to explain. Discovering what these things are, even in tentative terms, is the first order of business for a group like this. At the very least, it will set directions for future research open to Pecora’s ideals of contingency.

*  *  *

Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the standard model of the “secularization thesis,” Jürgen Habermas famously pronounced modernity an “unfinished project,” and then proceeded to outline both the conditions needed to complete the project and the barriers that the twentieth century had thrown up in its way. This is obviously not the place to rehearse Habermas’s ideas, especially since so many others have done it well. (I am especially fond, still, of Anthony Giddens’s quick and reductive, yet incisive, overview of Habermas in Social Theory and Modern Sociology.) But, for the present purposes, I think we can usefully boil the conditions down to two. First, there is the completion of the process of the differentiation—or rationalization—of social spheres that had been emphasized (though not entirely happily) by Max Weber: the distinction of “state” from “society,” or the public from the private, that has become the hallmark of the liberal capitalist nation-state, and with it, the concomitant distinctions between the economic, the legal, and the political, along with the separation of science, morality, and aesthetics that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Second, in order to prevent the undeniable effectiveness of “steering mechanisms”—essentially, the purposive, means-ends rationality that has proven so successful in the areas of science and economics, and even, to a large extent, in utilitarian reformations of the law—from becoming “reified,” and thus overpowering all other potential social aims, the “life-world,” that is, the everyday world of lived traditions and customs, including the “semantic potentials” of religious beliefs and their ethical systems, would need to be preserved through a process of “communicative action” that based such beliefs on rational argumentation alone.

Nevertheless, Habermas posited that the major barrier to this happy (and still devoutly Weberian) synthesis, or balancing, of disenchanted managerial technocracy and charismatic life-world was the same one that had bedeviled the Enlightenment: myth. Again, this is not the place for detail, but it would be fair to say that Habermas is very much in the mainstream of Western thought in making a sharp distinction between religion (which is, in this view, rational in its own way) and myth (which is not), and then in assuming that the sorts of “semantic potentials” that could usefully be provided by religious tradition in the life-world of modernity were those that were already largely “rationalized” (that is, reformed), Protestant (or Judaic, in Hermann Cohen’s sense), private, individual, and directed toward ethical action in this world, rather than salvation in another—essentially, Judaic “justice” and Pauline “love.” In this sense, myth, from the dogmas and totalitarianism of the Right and the Left to what Habermas has called “idle postmodern talk,” is the primary enemy of the unfinished project of modernity.

It is obvious, from the vantage point of the present, that Habermas’s quite influential theory is in many ways a theory of secularization, and in the classical sense of that term. Those social spheres already emancipated by purposive rationality—by self-interest, that is—were the leading edge of a secular modern world. But they needed to be countered by residues of ethical tradition—in particular, it turns out, the belief set that came to be defined in the twentieth century as the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—until such time as such vestiges could be translated into the language of secular philosophy. In Habermas’s words, “As long as religious language bears within itself inspiring, indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation into a discourse that gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion.” Bracketing off the circularity of this statement—for example, are the contents of religion “inspiring” because they are “unrelinquishable” (that is, perhaps, innate), or “unrelinquishable” merely because they are “inspiring,” if obviously contingent?—Habermas’s Hegelian faith in the power of philosophical reason eventually to “translate” religious ethical contents into language with a firm (materialist and scientific?) basis is clear. That would, presumably, finish the project of modernity once and for all. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of all processes of “secularization,” and the full instauration of “secularism” as a lived, quotidian experience.

There is no way, I think, that Habermas, in his earlier work, could have predicted the return of religion in its more public forms in recent decades, any more than he could have foreseen the re-opening of the question of secularization within social theory since 1990. But these are empirical questions, and there has been a fair amount of debate about the factual reality of the oft-cited resurgence of religion, or “desecularization,” and about how to measure it. I am more interested here in the theoretical questions that Habermas’s work raises: What would a fully secularized world mean? What would the “project of modernity” look like if it were, finally, finished? What philosophy could achieve the thorough extirpation of all religious, or mythical, or irrational elements, and how would we respond to it?

Such questions remind me of a smart comment made by Barbara Johnson years ago—I now forget where—in reference to the voluminous amount of criticism leveled at the way the realist novel encoded and sustained gender inequities. Could the novel as a genre even exist, she asked, without the inequities? Johnson’s question is a properly deconstructive one, and I have no desire to re-open here the question of the utility of Derrida’s work. But even on historical grounds, she is right: the ongoing conversation that we call the novel in fact depends on certain kinds of irrationality, and gender is one of them (there are many others). But the same could be said about “philosophy”—indeed, I think that is, finally, what Habermas is getting at once you subtract the Hegelian teleology (itself attenuated by a question mark) from his work—or about “ethics” or “justice” or any of the other big ideas that are inevitably raised by social theory. Considerations of this sort have traditionally led people back to a kind of neo-Kantianism, that is, a sense that what matters most is the method by which we approach such questions, not whether we are able to posit a fixed endpoint to the discussion. Hans Blumenberg, for my money, has it about right when he insists, in a neo-Kantian vein, that the idea of progress—ethical, legal, and political, and not just scientific or technological—can be treated as an infinite project without positing any sort of “finish”: “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it and cannot promote it as mere means. Infinite progress does make each present relative to its future, but at the same time it renders every absolute claim untenable. This idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable, which is that all dealings must be so constituted that through them people do not become mere means.”

I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth already: Blumenberg leaves us with a Kantian “regulative principle” and nothing more. Worse, he hardly sets the bar very high. A history that is merely “humanly bearable” is a long way, in my book, from the one that would hold out the promesse du bonheur that Stendhal attributed to art, and that legions of Marxist thinkers in later decades demanded from society. (Indeed, even the reference to the “pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence would be, for most people, a substantial improvement over Blumenberg, I think.) Still, regulative principles can be extraordinarily useful—think of them as procedural “checklists” of the sort that Atul Gawande has recently promoted in medicine. In effect, Blumenberg’s regulative principle has two consequences. It not only demands that we eschew the willingness to tailor all means to predetermined ends promoted by dogmatism, from the religious to the scientific to the professional—a refusal of dogma that is the essence of what Edward Said once meant by “secular criticism,” and that is in many ways an echo of what Matthew Arnold meant by “Hellenism.” It also insists that the pathway to the ideal of “secular criticism” (or “Hellenism”)—that is, the pathway to secularism, in the terms I have set out in this post—is itself without end. No one, as far as I can tell, has yet been able to describe what a fully achieved secularism would mean. Were lives today to be lived only according to the latest scientific evidence, devoid of allegiances to that hodgepodge of ideas we call custom, tradition, religion, and (even) myth, we would need a new Jonathan Swift to capture the likely result; the eighteenth century was already fertile ground for his satire. And those “projectors” who subsequently tried to implement such a world—from Fourier with his phalanstery to J. B. Watson with his scientific child rearing—hardly inspire any more confidence. (Swift’s religion was, at its core, a stinging rebuke of mortal hubris.) My point here is not to resurrect Habermas’s “semantic potentials” under another guise, for these emotive elements of the life-world are “potentials” precisely in the sense that they would eventually be “translated” by rational actors who could then provide good reasons, based on sound evidence, for what they believe and do. Rather, I want to insist that “secularization,” in all its polymorphous perversity, is all that we have ever had, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and that this is, strictly speaking, an unending process, even if it is one that, for many reasons (such as the “regulative principle” against dogma), is worth pursuing. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, contra Habermas, the only modernity that any rational person should want is one that will remain both historically unnecessary and never complete. Finishing the project of modernity is precisely the oxymoron we want to avoid.

Finally, I believe that the proposals submitted for this year’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the “After Secularization” field suggest approaches to secular modernity that are quite congruent with what I have outlined so far.

First, there is a very clear interest, shared by about half the group, in empirical questions—that is, questions that have to do less with theoretical issues of, say, the meaning of secularization, or religion, or what (if anything) one might imagine “after secularization,” than with how a specifiable collectivity of persons responds to such questions in practice, in everyday life, and in the kinds of moral or political decisions they make. In one sense, this is not surprising: much of the work in the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the secularization thesis, from 1990 to the present, was theoretical in nature. When empirical considerations were taken into account, this was done largely through superficial surveys of population samples in given societies that could then be used for comparative purposes. What was evident in many proposals was a desire to dig deeper, to work especially via interviews and ethnographic investigation toward a more thorough and complex understanding of how and why secularization in particular societies occurred, and to elaborate more fully the kinds of resistance, or the types of return to religion, that might accompany this process. In particular, it seems that many younger scholars are concerned to view the boundaries of the secular and the religious as being far more porous than surveys might suggest, even in those instances when there are measurable claims to either strong belief or strong skepticism.

Second, it is clear that the wide range of problems that have been discovered in the “secularization thesis” over the past two decades equally unsettle the term secularism. The difficulty of defining “religion” in any comprehensive way, or with any pretension to universality, is a long-standing one. Indeed, one might say that the entire history and sociology of religion in the modern period, since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, have been built in large part around this difficulty. But it is now impossible to avoid the conclusion that secularism itself is not simply a word that defines a negative condition—the absence of religious belief, whatever that might be taken to mean—but rather a term that occasions almost as much ambiguity and difficulty as “religion.” Whether we consider the work of figures like Ashis Nandy, for whom secularism represents a particular imposition of Western values in non-Western religious communities, or that of Talal Asad, for whom secularism is the agenda of a specific regime of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality,” we no longer have the luxury of seeing the secular in some neutral, non-historical, non-political, and purely rational light. Many proposals demonstrated a fairly sophisticated awareness that, whatever “secularism” might mean, it was not going to be easily reduced to the sheer invisibility of religion, and that this was true, not only for some putative era “after secularization,” but also for the entire history of secularization itself.

Third, there was a manifest interest in the ongoing, yet also quite newly inflected, interrogation of the underlying theories of religion and secularization. This is particularly salient in the degree to which the broader set of questions once posed on the peripheries of mainstream secularization scholarship by “political theology” has now become far more central, whether in the work of early figures such as Carl Schmitt or in that of contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. But even here, there is a real desire to push the boundaries of, say, what “political theology”—a term with an essentially Christian frame of reference—might mean. Most significant is the widespread desire to re-situate theorizing about religion and the secular in global terms. No matter how limited by geography or confession individual projects may be, there appeared to be a fairly consistent sense that, even on theoretical grounds, new revisionist work on secularization and its history could not be done on Christian terms alone, no matter how one regards fairly entrenched claims—claims made with equal force from Max Weber to Peter Berger to Bernard Lewis to Talal Asad—about the overwhelmingly Christian origins of secularization in history.