I’ll begin with some preliminary points which I will exploit in my responses, and then speak to each comment in turn, posting the responses one at a time over the next many days.

1.

My essay began by distinguishing three cognate terms and their meanings as an effort to impose some clarity and distinctness to a somewhat confusing field of concepts. I did not deny that some of this sorting out was stipulative and proposed that the substantive discussion through the first four sections of the paper was intended partly to try and make this stipulative element non-arbitrary.

The three terms were “secular,” “secularization” and “secularism.” This family of terms, as is well known, grew out of a certain history and a certain intellectual history and my hope in these initial semantic explorations was to keep faith with that history as far as is possible.

I proposed that the term SECULAR simply be treated as a very generic marker of “mundiality” i.e., of all and any phenomena lying outside the concerns of “the cloister.” True, religions are sometimes supposed to be comprehensive doctrines in the lives of religious people, so it may seem that it would be contestable to those for whom it is such, that there is anything outside the concerns of the cloister. But I took it for granted that this extreme understanding of religion’s reach was implausible. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the very word “cloister,” metaphor though it is, would lose its meaning if that were not so. More substantially, it is hard for anyone who understands elementary human social psychology and knows anything about the sociology of modern life to take seriously the idea that the players in social life are comprehensive doctrines. Subjects who enter the social arena are not doctrines but human beings and they have diversified psychologies—however important religious matters are in their lives and minds, they do not consume every moment and aspect of their lives. Finally, as Charles Taylor’s points out in his fine and much misunderstood book, if the reviews of it are any indication, A Secular Age, at some point in the history of Europe, however “comprehensive” religion may be, some of its doctrinal and its practical elements began to be seen as, “optional.” If nothing else, this surely opened things up for a domain properly describable as “the mundial” and it is elements in this domain that are properly describable with the term “secular.”

Of the trio of terms in this family, then, “secular” because of the generality of its coverage (anything outside the concerns of the cloister), is the most innocuous.

Following a familiar trend in common usage of the term by intellectual historians, I had said that the term SECULARIZATION described the process of decline in various forms of belief and practice that are loosely describable as “religious.” This process, as we all know, has had a very uneven development in different parts of the world. It is hardly disputable that secularization has been much more pervasive in Europe, where it first arose, and in Australia and in Canada, than it has, say, in many parts of the Middle East or South Asia or in the heartland of the United States, though this last may be a more distinctly modern form of religiosity, one that comes out from underneath of a process of secularization that has already taken place. This may also recently be true of certain modern, nationalist forms of religiosity to be found in other parts of the world, including South Asia and the Middle East, and even in some parts of Europe.

Taylor’s thematic focus in the book I have mentioned was on these two things that I have demarcated as the “secular” and “secularization,” and its gaze in particular was on Latin Christendom.  But Taylor, in other essays, for some years now, has been addressing what is a slightly different (though obviously not unrelated) and much more specific subject, which is the relation that religious doctrine and practice bear to a very specific domain, that of the polity and the state. The term “SECULARISM” is a good term to mark a particular position on this subject and Taylor himself uses the term in this way in these essays. I had said that the fact that the term summons for so many such slogans as “the separation of church and state” is something of a proof that the term has this restricted focus. It is not referring to a general mundiality that lies outside the cloister as the term “secular” does, it is not referring to a general process by which the domain of the mundial spreads and the domain of the cloister (i.e., the belief in and practice of religion) shrinks, as the term “secularization” does. It is referring to a position taken on the relation between religion and the specific domain of the polity (the “state” being a term that merely narrows somewhat the focus on the slightly wider domain of the polity).

As I say, in my essay, it is highly necessary to introduce this third term because the general phenomenon and process marked by the other two terms by themselves leave no space for the following possibility, which is in fact frequently realized. Many people are religiously devout in both belief and practice (which is to say that they are not yet fully given over to the process of secularization) but are nevertheless willing to leave aside some of their belief and practice that affects the polity in recognizable ways. I used policies and laws regarding free speech and gender-equality as examples of what is central to polities. I contrasted them with matters of dress and diet in the matter of religious practice, and in belief in God or in creationism in the matter of doctrine. These aspects of practice and doctrine have less directly to do with the polity than laws and policies regarding free speech or gender-equality.  Someone may protest: questions of dress and diet can be made part of the political domain by introducing policies and laws regarding them (as has been done in France for example by laws regarding what can and cannot be worn by females in schools). Well, there are all sorts of conversation-stopping ploys that could bring intellectual discussion to an end and it is certainly possible to do so by insisting that everything is or potentially is part of the polity and therefore secularism does not have such a restricted domain, as I am suggesting. But I would think that the very fact that it seems intuitively much more controversial to many that the hijab should be banned in schools than it does to disallow the banning of a book considered blasphemous by some religion, is some evidence that we intuitively do make a distinction between some things as being more central to defining the polity than others. Matters of dress and diet are only with some strain made to be matters that are directly related to the polity in a way that the matter of free speech is not. So there are good, substantial, and intellectually fruitful reasons to speak of secularism as distinct in meaning (because more restricted in scope) from “secular” and “secularization.”

My focus in the essay was entirely on “secularism” and I had characterized or defined it in my formula (S), which I won’t repeat here since it should be read and understood within the frameworking remarks that led up to its formulation in my essay.

2.

Terminological distinctions apart, I had also made another crucial distinction between descriptive and normative aspects of the subject—that is, between, on the one hand, describing what secularism might sensibly be taken to be and, on the other, when and where it might be something that we should advocate or normatively advance.

The expression “when and where” in my last sentence conveys something that was central to my essay’s argument.

It was important for me to avoid confusion by insisting that what secularism means or is (the descriptive part of the subject) should be relatively fixed through different contexts but whether secularism, given this relatively stable meaning, is relevant or a good thing (the normative aspect of the subject) may vary from context to context. The essay tried to give both an historical and an analytical argument for why secularism only has normative relevance and should only be advocated in very specific contexts. In other words, different contexts should not make us want to redefine the term since that only gives rise to unnecessary and badly motivated theoretical confusion but, once defined and described in relatively clear and non-arbitrary ways, the ideal should be seen as having relevance and worthwhile application only in some historical and sociopolitical contexts, and not others.

3.

Finally, I had made another distinction that I think is important in bringing clarity to the subject.  And that is to distinguish between matters of definition and matters of legitimation and implementation—that is, a distinction between what secularism means and how secularism should be justified and adopted by a polity. There has been much disagreement about how secularism should be justified: are there strictly rational (or what I had, following Bernard Williams, called “external) arguments for it that establish it as an objectively true doctrine or position in politics for all rational people? Or can it only be justified by appealing to more local (what I had, following Williams, called internal”) reasons that appeal to particular substantive values that may not be shared by all people? There has been a closely related disagreement as well about how secularism should be implemented: should the state be granted the right to impose it from on high or should it involve different religious groups in matters of crucial decision in its adoption, allowing them to come to secularism only if and when they found reasons within their own outlook and their own vernacular categories to adopt it? My own view, argued for at length in the opening and closing sections of the essay, was that on the matter of justification, we only had recourse to internal arguments, and in the matter of implementation, we ought to be inclusive of all religious groups in the process of the adoption of secularism. But none of these stances on how to justify and implement secularism, I had said, should affect the question of how we should define secularism.

The essay’s arguments and conclusions would be entirely unpersuasive unless these two distinctions (2 and 3) were kept well in mind.

The first was relevant in the following sense: Once we non-arbitrarily characterize secularism, we should realize that, so characterized, it was only relevant and necessary in a few contexts—contexts that I had said were first historically to be found in the history of European nation-building, and which were simply missing in many other parts of the world. There was no reason to advocate secularism in all parts of the world, therefore, as if the European context was the standard for all others. (Only if some other parts of the world had replicated relatively specific conditions that had loomed large in the history of European nation-construction does secularism, properly characterized, have relevance and application.) Thus it was not necessary to redefine secularism so that it had to fit all parts of the world or even to fit Europe in its changing contexts. It is theoretically sounder to stay with its stable meaning and simply deny its relevance to many of these contexts.

The second distinction’s relevance was this: Simply because one had different ideas about how to justify and implement secularism does not imply that we have different concepts or meanings of “secularism.” Once again, the meaning of the term should be considered to be relatively stable and fixed. And we could then either proceed to justify and implement it (in the contexts in which it was good to implement it) along lines that were internal and inclusive or external and state-imposed. Decisions as to how to justify it and implement it were relatively independent, therefore, from how to define it.

It is on the last couple of these issues that my comments will focus. This is a small window through which to enter into Bilgrami’s broad-ranging and powerful arguments. The precise extent to which this point of entry connects with other aspects of his edifice is not entirely obvious to me, though given the tightly connected analytical tissue he presents, it is likely to have some implications on other parts of his argument. The question I want to raise is whether, given Bilgrami’s endorsement of internal reasons as the basis of “one’s truth” as it is relevant to secularism, his version of humanism can deliver the fraternal caring that he thinks it can without some additional warrant and supplementation. This question relates to the issue of the significance of the neutrality of the state and to why Bilgrami thinks the impasse of relativism does not follow from his view of secularism and why it does not disable it—both issues on which he disagrees with Charles Taylor.

Bilgrami sees the special value of humanism in its inclusiveness in the face of “bitter and vexed” disputes, where each party claims internal reasons as the ground for its own truths. When faced with such disputes, and with no external reasons to which to appeal to settle them, humanism as an evaluative position, Bilgrami claims, permits one to embrace one’s bitter foe as a brother. The significance of this fraternal idea is that it allows one to insist on one’s own truth, thus not being hobbled by relativism and its political cognate neutrality, while offering that very insistence on one’s own truth as a mark of one’s care for one’s fraternal foe. Bilgrami is quite clear that in the first instance the caring is for one’s own conception of what is true. There are no fraternal feelings being insisted on towards others beyond the firm conviction that I have in my truth, which I wish him to accept.

The question I want to raise is: Does this form of caring for my own truth imply any other form of caring for my bitter foe, now designated as my brother, or does the conception of caring need to be thickened with something beyond a love of truth that wishes the other to see things my way? Put differently, does caring for my own version of the truth necessarily produce a form of fraternity that deserves the name? Bilgrami admits that his form of humanism and inclusiveness stems from a rather abstract source, namely a commitment to truth based on one’s own internal reasons. But he does not think this invalidates the point he makes and by which he seeks to go beyond relativism and neutrality. I am not entirely convinced. It is not the abstractness of the position that troubles me. Rather, it is the thinness of the resources by which fraternity could in fact be engendered. I think humanism and fraternity require something beyond a conviction in one’s own truth, though I admit such a conviction adds something profound, and perhaps even essential, to both ideas.

My main reasons for not being convinced is that it seems to me there are all sorts of ways in which one could be utterly convinced of one’s own truth, and wish to have it accepted by others, without entailing any care for those who do not share those truths; indeed, in a good many such cases the very basis of one’s subjective certitude makes an uncaringness and moral indifference towards others highly likely. One could, for example, be utterly dogmatic in one’s insistence on one’s truth or one might have a narrowly narcissistic self-certainty, or just be unable to imagine another point of view, but none of these ways of holding to one’s truths is likely to engender a form of caring that deserves the name of fraternity, even though they might all be moved to be wholly inclusive toward others. The epistemological confidence that marks dogmatism or narcissism is not typically leavened by patience, humility, forgiveness, or openness—the sort of values that must make up the content of care and fraternity. Indeed, such confidence often thinks of itself as having reasons for being aggressive and dominating. Those reasons, barring perverse situations where the person is aware of their own dogmatism or narcissism, are likely to be justified by their insistence on or care for the truth. But the fraternity of such ways of holding to the truth gives nothing of itself to others in the putative gesture of inclusion, i.e. its insistence on the truth one wishes the other to hold to. Even when dogmatically or narcissistically held views change on account of incoming information or the broad effects of Hegelian dialectics, that change need not produce an attitudinal change that brings them closer to a genuine care and respect for others. After all, dogmatism and narcissism are both characterized by self-serving forms of forgetting that allow one to overlook the fact that one’s views have in fact changed. It seems to me that this point has a broader application, beyond the instances where the truth is held dogmatically or narcissistically. Self-certainty by itself needs to be leavened by at least humility for it to be able to produce respect for the other, especially if the other is a bitter foe. When Bilgrami, in the concluding pages of his paper, refers to non-dominating and non-coercive forms of state behavior as following from his quasi-Hegelian humanism, this strikes me as an add-on, for which his thin form of humanism gives little internal warrant.

The point I am making can be illustrated by way of considering Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude towards truth and fraternity. Gandhi insisted on the truth—his truth. This was the singular yardstick by which his actions and those whom he led were to be governed and judged. Such an attitude often produced deep conflicts with those who disagreed with him—conflicts with the imperial authorities, Indian nationalists, and various individuals, including members of his own family, such as his wife and sons. In these conflicts Gandhi hardly ever relaxed his commitment to the truth as he took it; nor did he typically invoke an external or neutral vantage point from which to settle these disputes. Moreover, he did not as a general matter advocate resorting to a framework of toleration such as that offered by a neutral state, which he knew could lead to mutual indifference.

Instead, he insisted on the truth and on fraternity. He yoked the two ideas by giving something of himself, which was not simply an extension of his firmness regarding his view of the truth. Gandhi’s response to deep differences went well beyond the avowal of epistemic and moral certainty. He fasted, he gave up cherished foods, he served in wars where the primary threat was to his opponents and not to himself, he welcomed and courted imprisonment, he abjured the use of physical and other forms of violence and domination, and he was prepared to be endlessly patient and take on suffering. In brief, he vouched for his truth in a way that gave a thicker content to the idea of fraternity, which therefore went beyond just vouching for his truth and the inclusiveness that resulted from that alone. It was such acts that allowed him to think that public concerns could still be navigated though a familial ideal such as fraternity. And similarly it was such forms of behavior—some of which were self-referential, such as fasting, others in which he threw in his lot with his opponents, and yet others where he stood his ground and accepted the consequences—that made Gandhi’s humanism genuinely inclusive and more plausibly caring and fraternal. He made himself, as Bilgrami has compellingly argued in another essay, exemplary and through that generated a convivial, one might say fraternal, radiance, which often moved his opponents. Why did it so often move his opponents? I suspect in large measure because they saw in these acts a firmness of conviction that could not plausibly stem from dogmatism, narcissism, or cognitive myopia and because such acts exemplified some additional quality on account of which his opponents were prepared to reconsider their own firmly held truths. By wagering something of himself, he created the ground on which truth and fraternity could both be sustained. This was also Gandhi’s way of going beyond the impasse of relativism and neutrality without having to rely on Hegel’s reason in history to sustain, as in the case of Bilgrami’s humanism, his confidence in secular liberal outcomes.

Here’s a plausible solution to this paradox. We could say, roughly, that freedom of religion is in fact a sub-set of a broader class of freedoms. So instead of seeing religion itself as a special good, we say that religion is one of the ways in which individuals seek the good for themselves. Exercising one’s freedom of religion is one of the ways in which we exercise a more generic freedom—moral freedom. Let us call this an egalitarian solution to the paradox I started with. An egalitarian theory of religious freedom does not deny that religious belief is special and should be respected and protected. What it denies is that religious belief is uniquely special: it can and should be analogized with other beliefs and commitments. Many contemporary liberal philosophers are egalitarians in this sense. John Rawls argues that what the liberal state protects is our ability to form and pursue comprehensive conceptions of the good. Ronald Dworkin sees “ethical independence” as the core value protected by freedom of religion. Martha Nussbaum connects freedom of religion to a conscientious search for “ultimate meaning.”

It is in this context that Charles Taylor and Jocelyn MacLure’s little book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience is of considerable interest. In it, Taylor and MacLure put forward their own egalitarian theory of religious freedom, and a radically inclusive one at that: they argue that all “meaning-giving commitments” should be protected on the same basis as religious commitment. The volume is also fascinating when read as a statement of Taylor’s political theory—a normative companion to the more historical, epistemological, and philosophical diagnoses of our contemporary condition found in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age.

To put my cards on the table: I agree with Taylor and MacLure that normative egalitarianism is the right response, ethically speaking, to the deep moral pluralism of the secular age. What I shall suggest, however, is that they—like other egalitarian philosophers—have underestimated the profound tensions that beset egalitarian theories of religious freedom. And these tensions can be traced back to the difficulties of identifying a liberal theory of the good in the secular age—in a world where conceptions of the good are irreducibly pluralized, individualized, and subjectivized. In brief, the story I want to tell is also a very Taylorian story, for it is one that raises questions about liberal neutrality about the good.

Writing in the context of the Canadian debate about reasonable accommodations, Taylor and MacLure begin by defending the idea that members of religious minorities have a right, on non-discrimination grounds, to enjoy similar opportunities to practice their religion as members of the majority. I have no quarrel with this idea, and have argued along similar lines in relation to the affaire du foulard in France. But I’d like to focus on their second main point, namely that the question of reasonable accommodations raises a more fundamental problem: in virtue of what are religious believers entitled to special consideration in the first place? They answer that religious belief, for purposes of legal exemptions, should only be seen as a subset of a broader category of beliefs that deserve protection: “moral beliefs which structure moral identity”—what they call “meaning-giving beliefs and commitments.” And this also covers a broad spectrum of non-religious beliefs and practices—from secular pacifism to eco-centric vegetarianism, through duties of care to terminally-ill loved ones. The notion of meaning-giving commitments is broader than that used by other egalitarian philosophers: in contrast to Rawls, they do not insist that individual beliefs be ‘comprehensive’ in scope; and they reject Nussbaum’s emphasis on “ultimate existential questions.” It is a feature of the secular age, they point out, that people’s ethical commitments take the form of “fluid, eclectic set(s) of values,” which are not integrated into a comprehensive, integrated whole, and which are not perceived as ‘unconditional rules for action.” At certain times, however—such as the illness of a loved one—the pursuit of certain core values become paramount and gives meaning and shape to one’s life. In sum, we can say that Taylor and MacLure take the ethical pluralism of the secular age far more seriously than other egalitarian philosophers. Rawls and Nussbaum, it seems, still hold a traditionally religious understanding of the scope (comprehensive) and content (“ultimate questions”) of what counts as a morally weighty secular belief.

Drawing on Taylor’s rehabilitation of “ordinary life” in Sources of the Self, Taylor and MacLure detect pockets of moral depth in ordinary life—in the sudden encounter with finitude in the event of the death of a loved one; or in eco-centric vegetarians’ profound convictions about the wrongness of meat consumption—to take their two favourite examples. What makes those commitments particularly weighty is that they allow individuals to act with integrity—where integrity is defined as congruence between one’s perceptions of one’s duties and one’s actual actions. What the end-of-life carer and the eco-centric vegetarian have in common is that they both seek to act in accordance with their conscience. “Here I stand, I can do no other,” as Martin Luther is said to have said. Taylor and MacLure note that forcing someone to act against her deep conscientious convictions constitutes a “moral harm” equivalent to the kind of “physical harm” that justifies the special accommodation of citizens with disabilities. So, they conclude, citizens with intense categorical meaning-giving secular beliefs have a pro tanto claim to be considered for exemptions from burdensome laws.

So have Taylor and MacLure developed a plausibly egalitarian definition of morally weighty beliefs, which is not biased in favor of religious beliefs, yet adequately protects the underlying values expressed by the ideal of freedom of religion? My assessment is in two parts. In the first, I draw attention to one significant virtue of their account, which is that it implicitly relies on a very Taylorian idea of “strong evaluation,” In the second, I cast some doubts about the viability of the individualistic, Protestantized, subjectivist conception of strong evaluation that underpins their account.

First: Taylor and MacLure get to the heart of a key feature of freedom of religion—one that is strangely neglected by contemporary liberals. It is this: what Taylor said about negative freedoms in general—that they are empty without “strong evaluations” of what they allow the pursuit of—applies with particular acuity to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion, by contrast to more generic freedoms of thought, belief, and association, relies on a moralized distinction between valuable and non-valuable activities, and serves to protect a sub-set of the former. It is a freedom to pursue a specific end and activity: it refers to the pursuit of a conception of the good with a specific shape, content, and form, rather than the means through which any conception of the good can be pursued. Furthermore, in the case of exemptions and accommodations, which is our focus here, freedom of religion generates demands of positive assistance in pursuing those activities. This means that, when adjudicating such claims, it must be decided which claim correctly expresses the values underpinning the general principle. Even though they do not explicitly draw on Taylor’s earlier writings, Taylor and MacLure are open about the need to make “strong evaluations” about the values that freedom of religion is supposed to protect. This confirms the long-standing Taylorian view that rights protect substantive values: we care about rights because of the good that they protect, which cannot be reduced to individual freedom of choice. So our authors do not shy away from openly perfectionist evaluations, setting “trivial” against “central” commitments, and “mere preferences” against “core convictions.” Such perfectionist discriminations, it seems to me, are inherent to any serious reflection about the value of freedom of religion. Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it is one that contemporary liberals—punctiliously attached to an ideal of neutrality towards the good—have not fully come to terms with.

Who, then, is to make the strong evaluations required to distinguish between meaning-giving and trivial commitments? Taylor and MacLure’s empathic response to this is: the individual claimant herself. Here they anticipate the charge—often levelled at Taylor’s conception of positive liberty—that the idea of “strong evaluation” could give the state the authority arbitrarily to discriminate between better and worse ways to exercise one’s freedoms. Instead, Taylor and MacLure assert that “the special status of religious beliefs is derived from the role they play in people’s moral lives, rather than from an assessment of their intrinsic validity.” They defend what they call a subjective conception of freedom of religion, according to which only individuals—not the state, nor religious authorities—are in a position to explain which particular beliefs and commitments are key to their sense of moral integrity. Judges only have to assess whether such claims are made with sincerity (so as to rule out, when possible, fraudulent or pretextual claims). Yet ultimately, the subjective conception of freedom points to the sovereignty of private strong evaluations.

There is much to recommend in this account, to which I am very sympathetic. But I’d like to draw attention to two difficulties.

First, Taylor and MacLure effectively collapse religion into conscience, and implicitly assume that the latter category is more inclusive than the former. But we may wonder whether this is the case, or whether anything is lost in the re-description of freedom of religion as freedom of conscience. Assume I am a devout Muslim. I observe Ramadan, say my prayers every day, wear the hijab, give zakat, and send my children to Quranic school. Or assume I am a practicing Catholic. I observe Lent, try not to eat meat on Fridays, celebrate Easter, go to church every Sunday, have my children baptized and confirmed. For many Catholics and Muslims (but also other Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists) the religious experience is fundamentally about exhibiting the virtues of the good believer, living in community with others, and shaping one’s daily life in accordance with the rituals of the faith. Those rituals are meaning-giving and connected to believers’ sense of their moral integrity. Yet they are not duties of conscience—though they are often re-described as such. The good religious life is a life of constant, difficult, ritual affirmation of the faith against the corrupting influences of the secular world. It is not often one in which one single obligation (say, wearing a particular dress, going to mass) is so stringent as to promise eternal damnation if it is not fulfilled. Taylor and MacLure tend to re-interpret acts of habitual, collective, “embodied practices” of religious devotion as Protestantized duties of conscience. While such a description tallies with the individualization and subjectification of religious experience in contemporary societies, it also has two unanticipated consequences. First, it perversely encourages the most fundamentalist and rigid interpretations of religious dogma. It rewards those Christians who present their objection to homosexuality as a matter of conscience (“here I stand and I can do no other”) over and above those habitual believers who seek to accommodate their religious life to a secularizing world, often with considerable unease and forbearance. So here’s another paradox: in insisting that only beliefs that are intensely held, and experienced as categorical duties, should be candidates for “reasonable” accommodation, Taylor and MacLure accommodate those with the least “reasonable” beliefs.

The second unexpected consequence of the reduction of religion to conscience is that it seems to deny protection to the cultural, habitual, embodied, and collective dimensions of religion. Consider the following practices, which currently generate rights to exemption from general laws on religious freedom grounds in various countries: accommodations of religious dress in the workplace, the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote in Native American ceremonies, church autonomy in the appointment of its leaders, tax exemptions for religious charities.

None of these activities are properly described as conscientious activities, and therefore it is unclear whether they would be entitled to accommodations under Taylor and MacLure’s theory. Furthermore, in a Canadian context, where cultural identities often feature as the archetypical meaning-giving, integrity-constituting commitments, Taylor and MacLure’s lack of reference to culture is perhaps surprising. They seem to underestimate the communal, cultural dimensions of religion itself and betray an (unexpected) Protestant bias in the interpretation of where the good of religion is located. Whether such a bias is compatible with the egalitarian impulse of the theory is open to question. Here is a heretical thought. Perhaps the ideal of conscience is not a thin, uncontroversial, neutral, liberal conception of the good. In line with the “social thesis” Taylor himself puts forward as a critique of Rawlsian liberalism, and of which a complex version appears in A Secular Age, perhaps our ideals of individualism and conscience are not what remains (but was always there) once the obscure, mystifying debris of traditional community and religion have crumbled away. Instead, we have become individuals—of a particular kind—through a contingent Christian and post-Christian trajectory. If that is the case, how suitable is this particular conception of individual conscience in the pluralistic secular age?

There is a second, connected difficulty with Taylor and MacLure’s subjective notion of freedom of religion. While they only consider examples of morally admirable commitments (pacifism, caring for the sick, protecting animal rights) it is not difficult to think of a range of conscientious actions that may be morally trivial, morally wrong, or morally bad. In those cases, should individual strong evaluations be supreme, or are different standards called for? One issue is how to distinguish trivial from morally significant beliefs. Taylor and MacLure assume there is a shared understanding of the difference between a morally trivial and a morally significant act. Yet, under conditions of deep moral pluralism, it is precisely those kinds of strong evaluations that are likely to be contested. Consider the standard defense of the smoking of peyote—an otherwise illegal drug—by US courts (post-Smith). While injecting drugs merely to “get high” would count as a trivial, frivolous purpose, injecting drugs for spiritual purposes, as practiced within some Native American groups, rightly fall under the category of a morally significant act deserving of protection. But what if individuals not belonging to a religion sincerely claim that they are also using drugs for spiritual purposes? Does “spiritual purpose” extend to dealing with depression, seeking higher truths through controlled intoxication, or coming to terms with existential pain? How far exactly is moral life in the immanent frame pregnant with spiritual purposes?

The other issue is whether freedom of conscience should permit individuals to do bad or unjust things. Taylor and MacLure avoid the difficult question of whether freedom of conscience positively protects a right to do wrong. One very preliminary hypothesis: In the philosophical tradition of thinking about conscience—whether Greek, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, or Kantian tradition, to name just a few—conscience is respectable and admirable, not only as a subjective individual faculty to live in conformity with one’s own good; it is, more deeply, respected as the faculty to live in conformity with what one sincerely perceives to be the demands of the good (which is why Antigone’s dilemma is so poignant). In the natural law tradition, conscience is the faculty with which individuals exercise practical judgement about how to apply a general objective moral law to concrete cases. Individuals are fallible, and consciences may err. But conscience is admirable because it is a sincere, though fallible, attempt to find the good. Conscience, therefore, cannot demand us to do evil, inhuman, or outrageous things, even though it can mislead us about the good. But if there is a deep (if complicated) connection between respect for conscience and a non-subjectivist assessment of its content, then individual strong evaluations will likely be an unreliable guide about what conscience really requires of them.

Where does this leave us? To conclude, I see Taylor and MacLure’s succinct but densely argued chapter as the most promising attempt to articulate the morally admirable human faculties traditionally protected by freedom of religion, in ways that respect the deep pluralism of the secular age. I have pointed to some problems, which are not so much fatal flaws as unavoidable tensions within the politico-legal philosophy of religious exemptions.

The suspicion is that liberal neutrality about religion ultimately “piggy-backs” on ideas, conceptions, and values that originally made sense in a world comprehensively structured by a broadly Christian ethics. In that world, where early liberal ideas of toleration and freedom of religion were articulated, Christian ethics provided the moral framework within which “strong evaluations”—between good and evil, significant and trivial, etc—were taken for granted. Then it could be coherently assumed that “religion” was a good thing; that any activity pursued under the aegis of religion was therefore also good, and that churches were alternative, self-standing sources of normativity to that of the state. Religion on that view operated as a normative “black box,” the content of which the state could try to ignore. It is when this box is thrown open by the egalitarian impulse of the secular age that the need for new “strong evaluations” re-appears. Yet those strong evaluations are inherently problematic in a world where there is no publicly validated religious or moral faith, and where the state is expected not to take sides between different ways of conceiving and living the good life.

Egalitarian liberals have struggled to define, in a way that is suitably non-sectarian and evaluatively neutral, the morally admirable faculties that traditional freedom of religion can be said to protect. Taylor and MacLure rightly seek to locate those human faculties in the moral predicaments thrown up by ordinary lives, and in the strong evaluations that individuals make in the process. Yet the emphasis on conscience tends to favor a Protestant understanding of what a religion is, as well as being parasitic on an implicit, unarticulated theory of the good. All of this only illustrates one of Taylor’s most profound contributions to political philosophy, pointing to the complex ambiguities that beset the liberal ideal of neutrality towards the good life. And I have sought to provide the sketch of a Taylorian critique of Taylor—a modest testimony of the astonishing fecundity of Taylor’s thought.

A version of this text was presented at “Charles Taylor at 80: An International Conference,” held in Montreal on March 31, 2012.—Ed.

First, the exposition. Most importantly, (S) is about religion; it is a “stance towards religion,” as Bilgrami puts it. He wants to narrow the concept in order to give it analytic purchase and clarity, and so he distinguishes it from “secularization” and “the secular.” Others have made similar distinctions, of course, but usually in order to identify a range of discourses and practices that are not obviously about religion but nevertheless central to its historical construction: Charles Taylor’s “secular age,” for example, or Talal Asad’s “anthropology of the secular.” Bilgrami goes in the other direction: he knowingly excludes from (S) a whole range of things that might be said to belong to the secular. Meditating, for example, on why some religious communities tend not to speak out against their more extreme fundamentalist elements, Bilgrami writes that:

In the case of Islam, this defensively uncritical psychology has been bred by years of colonial subjugation, by continuing quasi-colonial economic arrangements with American and European corporate exploitation of energy resources of countries with large Muslin populations, by immoral embargoes imposed on these countries that cause untold suffering to ordinary people, by recent invasions of some of these countries by Western powers, and finally by the racialist attitudes towards migrants from these countries in European nations.

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, economic neo-liberalism, and the presumed cultural superiority of the West do not seem unconnected to the history of secularism. Some might add mass incarceration and other forms of state-sponsored violence to the list, techniques of the body and new sensory repertoires, even capitalism itself.

(S) runs directly counter to this discursive expansion of secularism. We might think, Bilgrami writes, that the “rhetoric of ‘secularism’ … plays a role in the anti-Islamist drumbeat of propaganda that accompanies these other factors,” like neo-liberalism and the legacies of colonialism. But even if that is so, he argues, “the right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined, but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination….” For Bilgrami, to discuss these things under the rubric of secularism is to make a category mistake.

I don’t intend to be making a point of which Bilgrami is unaware. Indeed, the whole goal of his paper is to produce a remarkably modest, minimal account of secularism (a goal not all of the commentators on the paper here on The Immanent Frame seem to have grasped). But it’s important to see what that minimalism entails. Here is Bilgrami’s description of (S):

In a religiously plural society, all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and evenhanded treatment except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve, in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

Importantly, (S) does not stipulate what the polity’s substantive ideals are or ought to be; it says only that those ideals have lexical priority over religious ideals when the two come into conflict. Modern democracies will likely tend toward familiar ideals—freedom of speech and association, for example—but other kinds of societies may well place other ideals first. The point is simply that those ideals, whatever they are, come first.

Bilgrami admits that this picture of secularism is “more adversarial” toward religion than Taylor’s multicultural ideal of neutrality. But it is adversarial in a limited sense: (S) only cares about religion “as it affects the polity. It is not dismayed by or concerned with the presence of religiosity in the society at large or in the personal beliefs of the individual citizens.” For (S), private religion is fine: even public religion is fine. Conflict only arises when religion tries to drive policies that run athwart the polity’s ideals. In that case, and only in that case, the lexical ordering kicks in.

Lest this sound imperious, Bilgrami emphasizes that the only reasons for holding (S) in the first place are “internal reasons” (a concept he adapts from Bernard Williams).

Internal reasons are “reasons we give to another that appeal to some of his own values in order to try and persuade him to change his mind.” We are all internally conflicted in some way. This doesn’t mean blatant contradiction, in the sense of believing both p and not-p; it just means that there are tensions among values that an interlocutor can help bring to the surface. In the same fashion, reasons for holding (S) must be “internal”—that is, those reasons cannot be separated from the values and commitments of the individuals or groups holding (S). They are not universal or context-independent. So internal reasons will persuade some people but not others. However, as with John Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus,” Bilgrami suggests that there are plural reasons for holding (S). In a plural society, it is the consensus that overlaps, not the reasons. In the matter at hand, then, secularism should drop talk of universal rights in favor of seeking “local concepts and commitments within the [religious] community … that might put pressure on the community’s own practices.”

This is not only a matter of reasoning with someone in a cognitivist way. For even agents who hold tightly to an apparently unconflicted set of principles are subject to the changes of history: “internal conflicts may be injected by historical developments into moral psychological economies.” Indeed, most successful activist movements work in exactly this way, by bringing to light or making visible a historical change already underway, thereby forcing majorities to confront the historically-bound nature of their own commitments, which they might otherwise have continued to think of as timeless.

Yet the historical record certainly offers plenty of examples of unchanged minds, or of minds that change and then change back, or of minds that change for the worse rather than the better, becoming more entrenched, more dogmatic, and so on. These possibilities don’t register very strongly in Bilgrami’s paper. This is what I meant when I said above that one tonal register of this paper is hope. For Bilgrami has a humanist confidence that the movement of history will eventually force illiberalism to confront its own internal tensions. Here is where he takes an evaluative stand: he believes this not for metaphysical reasons (some grand Theory of History) but because to believe it is to care about the truth in a certain way. To want to argue with someone and convince them that their own deeply held principles are tension-filled and therefore ought to be modified is to care about truth as you see it in such a way that you want others to see things your way too. This is a sign of respect, and it also fosters an ethical project: generating “empathetic attitudes of engagement with the tradition and mentality of those one opposes.”

I like all this very much. It nicely sidesteps much of what is unpalatable or just plain shallow in some fashionable versions of relativism. It proposes a kind of dialogue that is respectful but also deeply committed to getting things right. And its picture of truth is dialectical and internal: we move toward truth through the hard work of examining internal points of tension within our own substantive commitments and moral/psychological principles. (This is why I think Justin Neuman rather misses the point when he writes in his post that Bilgrami is too ready to generalize about groups of people; as I understand it, one primary purpose of Bilgrami’s emphasis on moral psychology is to make it harder to engage in such generalizations.)

And yet it is clear that (S) depends upon a certain historically-specific definition of religion.  It builds on a picture of “religion” as ideally heading towards post-Westphalian Protestantism—a formation that, several historians have plausibly argued, helped to build the modern nation state as we know it. It seems likely that this hopeful trajectory is in some tension with a different theme that emerges in the middle of the paper. Here Bilgrami notes that secularism as a policy is the result and requirement of a post-Westphalian Western Europe, which strove to develop a “feeling for the nation” by identifying internal others (the Jews, the Irish) and thus “inventing” the problem of minorities. For Charles Taylor, those cases in which majorities and minorities are understood in terms of religion demand secularism in the form of neutrality. Bilgrami is skeptical that secularism as neutrality can actually handle the challenge of majoritarianism. When majorities and minorities are defined in terms of religion, he argues, “there inevitably arises a sense that religion itself is the problem, even though the historical source of the problem lies in majoritarianism.” At this point something stronger than neutrality is needed, namely the lexical ordering.

What I am calling the secondary tonality of tragedy enters here, because Bilgrami is clear that it didn’t have to turn out this way. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, tried hard to prevent the development of a situation in India (of nationalism and majoritarianism) that would in turn require secularism. (This argument isn’t really developed in the present paper, but Bilgrami has written of it elsewhere.) In this example, history is not a progressive force that gradually loosens the hold of illiberalism, but actually creates the conditions in which illiberalism can flourish, which in turn brings forth the need for (S) as our best hope in a situation that hasn’t turned out very well.

And, finally, the third tonality. Whether history is ultimately progressive or tragic, it is at least dynamic. Religion, by contrast, seems quite static. In Bilgrami’s schema, secularism points out to religion (or waits for history to do the pointing out) that its picture of things is full of internal tensions; it thereby hopes to convince religion to sign on to (S)’s lexical ordering for reasons that remain religious (that’s the overlapping consensus part of the argument) but have now been pluralized (that’s the moral psychological part of the argument). I don’t get any sense that for Bilgrami the arrow might sometimes point in the other direction. Like Lars Tønder and a few of the other commentators on the paper, I wonder whether this simply reintroduces the conceits of secularism (its confident sense that it is right, and that history is on its side) in more modest garb. Can we really envision, on Bilgrami’s grounds, an engagement that reveals that secularism, too, has internal tensions that should be confronted—a conversation, that is, that actually changes both participants? This is the possibility that William Connolly gestured toward in a brief reading of Søren Kierkegaard in Why I Am Not a Secularist, and that Tønder develops very nicely out of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “tolerance of the incomplete” in his piece: “rather than beginning with the issue of how to order political ideals,” Tønder writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic begins in the midst of lived experience, where perceptions, judgments, and ideals have not yet reached the threshold of conceptual clarity….” This would lead to epistemic modesty of a different kind—neither a liberal recommendation of tolerance because we might turn out to be wrong, nor the modesty of the overlapping consensus, but a modesty born of the sense that things are still in flux, still in process, and that all of us find ourselves suddenly in the middle of things and without fully secure footing. Elsewhere I’ve suggested that the romantic theory of the fragment offers a useful way to think about this kind of modesty.

I suspect that Bilgrami would say that I’m missing the point here. (S), he insists at the very beginning of his paper, isn’t a good in itself, and so it can’t be internally conflicted, nor can it be anthropomorphized. (S) merely seeks to promote other kinds of goods (to be established by the polity in question) and it is in order to protect those goods that the requirement of lexical ordering comes into play. Yet there is one good that (S) seems to be not simply protecting but also promoting, and that is the good of helping religions pluralize their own self-conceptions. This is where (S) becomes activist in a way that Bilgrami, I think, doesn’t fully admit. If I may introduce a new term here, we could say that (S) is prophetic in its relation to religion.

There are good reasons to think that religion is more dynamic than Bilgrami’s picture of it allows. Indeed, it seems to me that religion has often been prophetic in its relation to the state—even, perhaps, to the point of convincing it to change its lexical ordering. But that is a topic for another day.

My own interest in the relationship between the religious and the secular centers less around the way the former gave way to the latter than on how the latter has often been created in no small measure out of elements of the religious, elements that emerge as much from a relaxation of its constraints as from an outright repudiation of them. Thus what to other specialists may appear in actual processes of secularization to be a dismissal or negation of the religious often presents itself to cultural historians and theorists to be more than not a reconstruction of the world out of some of those same interpretive and imaginative activities that religion itself set free and that must now be brought into play if some alternative vision of life, experience, or the really real is to take its place.

Robert Bellah has articulated what I mean to identify about this process in his magisterial new book Religion in Human Evolution, where he insists repeatedly that the history of this process, both from one human stage to another—the mimetic, to the mythic, to the theoretic—and from one religious formation to another—the archaic, to the tribal, to the axial—reveals that each stage or phase succeeds what proceeded it not by supplanting or superseding it but by reorganizing and readapting it in new ways. Axial religion does not destroy tribal or archaic religion but makes itself out of elements of the former two that it reconfigures for its own purposes. Hence the emergence of new forms does not require, and cannot take place, by their simple disembedding from older ones. Earlier stages of religious development, as in all evolutionary schemes, are “not lost,” as Bellah argues with the assistance of Merlin Donald, “but only restructured under new conditions.”

This has inevitably drawn me to think again about the argument that Charles Taylor has made in his own magisterial A Secular Age and then restated in the volume in his essay on “Western Secularity.” His is an argument of immense sophistication and complexity that is not insensible of the way the secular is made out of components of the religious, and particularly its interpretive and imaginative energies when they are released from their embeddedness in theological structures, but I am persuaded that his way of modeling this process has cultural and historical problems that Peter Katzenstein’s essay from the same volume on “Civilizational States, Secularism, and Religion” conceptually and historically avoids.

Taylor is clearly aware that the terms “secular” and “religious” have very different meanings in different traditions, which is precisely Talal Asad’s point in his discussion on blasphemy in Rethinking Secularism, but Taylor’s essential proposition that from the seventeenth century onward in the West the secular became a domain understood to be inhospitable to any claim made in the name of transcendence, “that the lower, immanent or secular, order is all that there is and that the higher, or transcendent, is a human invention,” is, at least from a cultural and historical perspective, seriously problematic, if not misleading. Yet before turning to what I find troubling about Taylor’s account of the relation between the religious and the secular in Western spirituality, let me say something first about the narrative Taylor is trying in important ways to correct.

That narrative is a coming-of-age story which has most recently been expressed in one of two ways. In the first, which is found in the work of the late American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, the secular is the result of a process of de-divinization that began, initially, with metaphysical idealism’s attempt to relocate the sphere of ultimate reality not beyond but within human experience; then led to Romanticism’s claim that if ultimate reality is now immanent rather than transcendent, its meanings can be described in more than one vocabulary; and eventually wound up with pragmatism’s assertion that these different vocabularies are ultimately no more than different ways of expressing what we need but only sometimes get. In the second narrative, really genealogy, of the secular, this sequence of historical transformations follows a course charted by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, where the love of God gave way, first, in the seventeenth century, to the love of truth, until the love of truth gave way, by the end of the eighteenth century, to the quasi-divinity of the self, and the idealist or Romantic love of the self succumbed, toward the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, to the realization, variously phrased by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that now nothing can be worshipped as divine, since everything, in effect, is a product of contingencies. In short, the world has not only lost all its transcendent reference but has been emptied of intrinsic significance.

Taylor’s object is to challenge this narrative by complicating it, and he complicates it by showing that the move from a transcendentalist spiritual perspective associated with Late Medieval Latin Christianity to an immanentist spiritual perspective by the seventeenth century was made possible because of the adaptation of religious ideas about the porous character of selfhood to a to a more buffered sense of the self. Here a new religious perspective is being partially remade out of components of the old, but for Taylor the process is one of irremediable loss rather than gain. The modern self is not only dissociated from the realm of transcendence associated with the Late Middle Ages but is now disposed to view religion itself as but one choice among others in the new wholly immanent sphere where, at least for many evangelicals in America, as Alan Wolfe and others have argued, the spiritual challenge is not to get right with God but to get God right with, or for, the self.

While I lack the space to do justice to Taylor’s many-layered explanation of this process, its difficulties become clear in his discussion of the notion of “enchantment,” which he, with Max Weber, takes to be the differentiating essence of Western Christian spirituality before it began what he describes as its “long march to secularism.” The problem with Taylor’s treatment of enchantment is that it is exceptionalist and, at least in the metaphor he uses here, too unidirectional, homogenous, and degenerative. By exceptionalist I mean that Taylor treats enchantment, or the experience of living in what he calls a “magical universe,” as something limited primarily to Christians alone and dependent on the kind of theological transcendentalism that Taylor posits as its precondition. But it is comparatively easy to argue, as Bellah has, for example, that if the experience of enchantment can be said to have been definitively expressed in a well known passage about the fullness of Being from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative,” it has also been expressed in virtually the same terms by former Czech President Vaclav Havel in one of his remarkable letters from prison before he became the leader of the Velvet Revolution. Enchantment in response to a universe experienced as suffused with a sense of divine presence can as easily be evoked, some might argue, by the most abstract natural landscapes of the great nineteenth-century English painter John Constable as by some of the Southwestern canvases of Georgia O’Keefe. The sense of living as a porous self open to the infinite above is, by personal testimony, as easily accessible to astro-physicists (or anyone else capable of reckoning on this scale) who can contemplate a universe composed of up to five hundred billion galaxies like our own Milky Way, which is itself composed of hundreds of billions of stars such as our own Sun, as it can be by ancient Christians, Zoroastrians, or other cosmologists. Taylor might reply that these representations and experiences of enchantment are, at best, intermittent and do not derive from habitation in a spirit or Being-filled world, but surely no one, including saints in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, lived in a continuously enchanted world open to the fullness of Being except in moments, and they needed all the trappings of ritual, symbols, music, and the visual to do so.

Indeed, in the late Middle Ages one of the explicit purposes of Christian art was to assist communicants in developing and preserving a religious sense they were always in danger, even the most pious, of losing. Take, for example, the relationship between Quattrocento painting and Early Modern Roman Catholicism in fifteenth-century Italy. Such painting existed not only, or even mainly, to reflect spiritual concerns but also, as Michael Baxendall has demonstrated, to enrich and augment, and thus change, them however subtly. The artist was interested in doing more than depicting religious material on canvas; he was even more eager to invite the beholder to reflect on it in a specifically religious manner. In other words, the artist’s aim was not merely illustrative or even exegetical but evocative. His public did not need what it already possessed; what it needed, in Clifford Geertz’s words, “was an object rich enough to see it in, rich enough, even, in seeking it, to deepen it.”

Geertz is here drawing on a view of culture, and particularly of the role of the imagination in culture, which assumes that culture in its more creative dimensions is not additive but generative, not merely transcriptive but provocative, that it changes the thing it engages and in ways that are very difficult to map or narrate in linear or sequential form. Despite Taylor’s abundant qualifications, his account of the transformations in the relations between religion and the secular is too episodic and successive, as if the break between the transcendental and immanental was sharp, successive, and final. Taylor would—and does—reply that German and English Romantics were among those who attempted to recover a sense of unmediated Being, but he believes they were doomed from the start because they were already working within what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” But just how immanent was the frame assumed by Romantics in the West if it deserves the description M.H. Abrams definitively gave it as “natural supernaturalism?” In any case, this is a cosmology that has lived a vigorous afterlife in the modern poetry of everyone from Rainer Marie Rilke to Paul Verlaine, and Wallace Stevens to A.R. Ammons.

Second, his presentation of Latin Christianity is too uniform and, for want of a better term, sanitary. What of the masses of people who lived on the edges of this system, often in utterly wretched conditions, or perhaps within its center, but clung to earlier forms of archaic, tribal, and clanish religion that were vernacular, profane, folk, or improvised? I can remember my former colleague at the University of Chicago, the great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, continually complaining to a faculty that made much of its own intellectual strength in the history of Christianity that there was too little history in it. What was being left out of most traditional accounts of Christianity, despite Peter Brown, were the irregular metaphysics, the disruptive logics, the unruly heterodoxies, and the powerful paganisms of people who may have been subjected to the theological and institutional governance of Latin Christendom but who at the same time worshipped their own, as the Anglican prayer refers to them, “ghoulies, ghosties and goblins.” Even more likely, as well as distracting and clearly divisive, was the presence of the carnivalesque, the parodistic, the perverse, the subversive, the sacrilegious, the scatological, the entire realm of Gargantua and Pantagruel, of Rabelaisian, Bakhtian excess that was always threatening to disturb the noise of solemn assemblies and crack the dome of the sacred canopy.

Third and finally, Taylor’s argument conforms to the subtraction theory even as it disavows it—secularism is not only different from religion but less. Where secularism emerges in Taylor’s narrative, religion not only changes but is fatefully, or at least emotionally and existentially, diminished. But that, I would suggest, is not exactly how it happened. The religious and the secular have not only coexisted in their modern formations—Taylor wouldn’t disagree—but actually adjusted to, and profited from, the rearrangements and adjustments required for co-existence with the other. Such was clearly the case with the United States, which is why so many religious scholars consider America to have been the one Western exception to the rule that secularism displaces religion rather than the exception that proves the rule that, as Peter Katzenstein argues, “secularization and religion…were deeply entangled at the outset of the modern state system and have remained so ever since…and the sociological turn in international-relations theory makes it possible to deploy now commonly accepted categories of analysis—culture, identity, norm, idea, ideology—to probe once more the connections between secularism and religion in international politics.”

Katzenstein’s thesis is that we will not fully understand how secularisms and religions intermingle in global politics—and I would add global social life—until we revise our understanding of how such matters are determined culturally in considerable part by civilizational, and not merely by religious or secular, processes. Here he turns to Randall Collins’s notion of civilizations as zones of prestige which radiate outward to create networks of attraction and repulsion. Rather than viewing civilizations and their components as cultural codes to be deciphered, Collins construes them as sets of relationships and activities that exert magnetism because of the dialogues, debates, and disagreements at their center, thus attracting admirers, challenging uniformity, and stimulating creativity and change. Hence the differences and conflicts around which they organize collective life can become at least as determinative and influential as the structures of assent and consent by which they govern their relations. Emulation and rejection of particular zones of prestige—religion, science, the public sphere, aesthetics—within or between civilizational systems can be deeply entwined, which creates the possibility of cultural commensurabilities being created across civilizational formations that are otherwise quite different. This creates what Katzenstein calls a “polymorphic globalism” in which “various intersections of secularisms and religions are created through never-ending processes of mutual cooperation, adaptation, coordination, and conflict.”

Does this mean that this globalism will be more secular than religious? Hardly. Think merely of the liberal, democratic sentiments that organized political resistance in Tahrir Square (along with a good deal of collective feeling about just being fed up) and the Islamist politics that have replaced it. Or, the possibility of a Rick Santorum Presidency in the United States. Or, better, the reason why the civilization of Latin Christendom was first able to unite, according to Karl Deutsch, and then fated to split. His argument that the spiritual, political, and cultural unity of medieval Christendom—defined by a common Latin language, the legal and spiritual authority of the Pope, the governance structures of the Holy Roman Empire, the military and missionary adventures of the Crusades, the styles of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture—was a transitory rather than seminal stage in history, and was destroyed by the very forces that gave rise to it, couldn’t be further from Taylor’s explanation. Drawing on a model of cultural commensurabilities and overlaps that function as networks of prestige, attraction, and coordination, Deutsch asserts that the economic foundation of the international civilization of Latin Christendom was based on a scarcity of goods, services, and personnel that enabled the growth of a thin web of supranational trading companies sharing language, customs, laws, traditions, family connections, and religion. Capable of traveling over long distances, these trading companies eventually created a superficial internationalism knit together by commerce, intellectual life, politics, and faith. Initially involving three civilizations and two trading peoples, Latin Christianity by the thirteenth century had prevailed over the challenges of Byzantine civilization, Islam on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere, the Jewish diaspora, and Viking conquests, but was then compelled to face its own demise as increasing contacts among village, manor, town, and sect enabled the rate of sectarian division and then regional migration to outpace the rate of international assimilation. What followed was the loss of the thin internationalism provided by Latin Christianity in favor of a more polymorphous regional and creedal differentiation to which modern nationalism subsequently gave rise, but only because the nation and its imperial aspirations could as easily become a vessel for religious enchantments and control as the seemingly more religion-based and ecclesiastically-centered civilization it replaced.

This brings me back to some of the ideas with which I started where, from a cultural perspective, it would appear that the transition from the religious to the secular is less accurately described or modeled as a structure of displacement and substitution than of recovery and adaptation. There is and has been marked change, to be sure, but to go back to Bellah’s discussion of the evolution of religion itself, it is not most accurately figured as a sharp break with the past so much as a repossession and rearrangement of it under new circumstances.

It is, of course, open to question whether in fact the modern social order is undergoing such secularizations. Certainly much of the developing world is experiencing them unevenly and in some cases, such as Egypt today, inversely. This is the context of the current philosophical interest in state secularization, including this subtle and generous essay by Akeel Bilgrami.

Bilgrami enters the philosophic debate triggered by the challenges that uneven secularization pose to liberal-democratic legitimations of state secularization in particular. As John Rawls was early to grasp, we can no longer insist that only secular beliefs and values may engage public reason and hence (more to the point) state rationality. Charles Taylor recently advanced further into post-secularity by suggesting that the Western Church-State separation model has become obsolete. Religion is rather to be managed by a neutralist, but not necessarily secular, state, so as to be treated as just another element inside social “diversity.”

With the Indian case mainly in mind, Bilgrami resists Taylor’s argument that we should thus diminish state neutrality. He argues, however, for a negative concept of state neutrality. For him, the state needs to rank religious practices lower than the ideals and practices of its own “polity,” as he puts it, in cases where they are inconsistent with (i.e. negate) the state’s political ideals. These first-level ideals may vary from state to state, but it is clear that Bilgrami thinks of them in Rawlsian terms both as rights—to life, freedom of speech, and equal treatment under the law and so on, and as goods—like welfare provision, distributive justice, and cheap universal education.

I am in general agreement with Bilgrami’s argument. But I am puzzled by the turn it takes at the point when he squarely confronts the most obvious problem it poses. What about states and polities that don’t accept rights-based, liberal-democratic ideals and the rights and goods that they promise? In such states, there may be no legislative or administrative tension between Church and State, and the demand for neutrality need not get a look-in. The polity may be religious through and through. How might a state-neutralist of Bilgrami’s stripe persuade such a non-secular, non-liberal state to join his position?

The problem is all the sharper because, as has become standard in post-secular liberal arguments, Bilgrami wants to make his case without reference to intellectual secularism. He does so by distinguishing what he calls “atheism” from “secularism.” Atheism (a rather loaded term) denies religion’s propositional truth, while secularism is a “stance towards religion” taken in pursuit of non-religious ends, and which, as such, cannot be true or false. (Here Bilgrami is drawing a distinction similar to the one that Habermas posits between religion’s “validity claims” and its “truth content” [its morality and ethical sociability].) For Bilgrami, there are only “internal reasons” for pursuing secularism (i.e. reasons grounded in one’s own values) not external evidentiary ones. So revealed and natural religion’s falling out of propositional truth is discounted.

Because the secularism that underpins state neutrality is regarded just as a stance set into a particular cultural orientation, Bilgrami contends that mere philosophic argument cannot persuade its enemies of state neutrality’s virtues. That will only happen in history, which Bilgrami claims will follow a particular trajectory. In the future, he supposes, ostensibly unified religious polities will divide. Internal conflicts will erupt in them. They will then be exposed to secularist persuasion by outsiders who can successfully point out contradictions in the confessional polity’s values and legitimations. Appeals to atheism or positive secularism need not play a role in this process either.

Bilgrami calls this historical trajectory Hegelian because of its broadly dialectical progression. He also calls it humanist because it draws more and more people into the same liberal discursive field.

This is an ingenious philosophical prophecy. But the obvious problem with it is that history has not so far worked this way, and Bilgrami offers no good reasons for us to think that it will in the future either.

I can’t address the issues that Bilgrami’s turn to history raises in any depth, so I’ll content myself with three broad points, the first two of which displace philosophic discussion of state secularization by connecting it to capitalism, and thus implicitly to contemporary history’s actual motor. The third places the debate between Taylor and Bilgrami in a different historical trajectory than the one that Bilgrami himself offers, by offering a distant genealogy of Church/State relations.

1. The modern state has an indirect commitment to social secularization, independently of questions concerning diversity, law, and public policy. This is because, under normal conditions, contemporary states are committed to promoting national economic growth, and the conditions for globalized capitalist economic growth are also conditions that advance social secularization. Political philosophers tend to neglect this relationship and its implications when they discuss secularization since they are interested in constitutions, not political economies, and are often also under the thrall of idealized concepts like Habermas’s “public sphere” or Rawls’s “public reason.” But questions about how or whether public reason or constitutions should (in theory) accommodate “religion” are (in fact) largely overshadowed by this underlying material relationship between state and social secularization. Resistance to constitutional secularization in states like Iran is, or will be, undermined by its force, which, we can fairly confidently predict, will largely shape the future.

2. Modern states also nurture the truth protocols embedded in intellectual secularization when, for instance, they subsidize scientific research and technical education. States do this not so much because they want to encourage evidentially-based and scientific truth for its own sake, but, once again, because scientific discoveries and technical competence aid economic productivity and growth. Relations between science and religion are complex—one may even simultaneously be an “atheist” in Bilgrami’s sense and a practicing Christian for instance. Nonetheless there can be little doubt but that science has helped, and continues to help, de-legitimize religious truth as grounded either in nature or revelation. So in funding scientific research and education, states loosely bind themselves to intellectual secularization. Indeed thoroughgoing democratic liberalism, of the kind that Taylor and Bilgrami support, lapses in the education system, since, in certain disciplines, contemporary pedagogy insists on the scientific method. Pluralism and diversity do not apply there. That is the framework in which disciplines like biology and cosmology (the list is long) produce knowledge that encourages religious skepticism, and hence “atheism.” These disciplines too are routinely and properly supported by states, perhaps with most enthusiasm by those whose economies rely most on technical and scientific innovation. At any rate, this again implants a certain secularization into the modern capitalist state.

It is important to note that education’s commitment to science and technology need not appeal to the ethical value of truth and truthfulness as these were spelled out by Bernard Williams in his book of that name. There he argued that a commitment to truth grounded an ethics with the power to establish new associations and forms of sociability. The debate over state secularization also shies away from this attractive thesis.

3. History. Bilgrami’s appeal to history as the setting for state neutrality and its legitimation does not refer to the actual history of state secularization in any detail. This is especially to be regretted since the origins of Western exceptionalism, and hence of modern liberalism and state neutrality, are to be found in the deep history of Church/State relations.

“The West,” as the idea and force with which we are familiar, begins with Latin Christianity’s break with Byzantine Christianity. This was solidly in place by 1000 CE, mainly caused by a split over state organization. The Western empire was committed to dual sovereignty—sovereignty divided between the Pope and the Emperor—while the Eastern empire allowed its rulers authority over the Church. Of course, after about 1400, Western attempts to figure a way of dividing sovereignty between the Church and a territorial ruler violently broke down. New possibilities beckoned. These included: Church reform by accepting state sovereign authority (Martin Luther); attempts at republican theocracy (Jean Calvin’s Geneva); religious civil associationalism (Pietism after Philipp Jakob Spener, and then global evangelicalism); orthodox Erastian confessional state-organization, whether Protestant or Catholic (as in the Gallican mode). Within this array of Church/State relations, a further distance between the Church and State had emerged by the seventeenth century. Civil society along with its elemental subjective component—what John Locke called “opinion”—became important social and political agents.

After the Treaty of Utrecht (1714), when the religious wars ended and a European balance of power was established, the conditions for stable religious “tolerance” emerged inside the machinery of the modern state. At this point, however, the Latin Continent was largely left to Catholicism, and the world’s oceans to Protestant Britain, condemning Protestant Northern Europe to a structural disadvantage whose bitter harvest the twentieth-century would reap. After Utrecht, commerce, finance capital, civil society, and private opinion all flourished, further marginalizing ecclesiastical institutions as powers. A century or so later, after the revolutions of 1848, the ideological machinery for securing national unity was largely transferred to nationalism.

This trajectory ends in the global system of state capitalism we know now, and whose only fully legitimated constitutional form is liberal democracy. But the triumph of democratic state capitalism has not fully met the expectations established by its own normative bases. In this situation, it becomes possible to hope not for more democracy and liberty, not for better and fairer capitalism, not for stronger states, but rather for a divided sovereignty along associationalist lines. That is, for a partial return of the Latin Christianity’s founding structure, for a new dual—or multiple—sovereignty.

Since the late-nineteenth century, that hope has, indeed, driven a minor political-theory lineage with both right and left inflections. On the right: Frederic William Maitland, John Neville Figgis, Otto von Gierke. On the left: the young Harold Laski, G.D.H. Cole, Paul Hirst, and Christian socialism à la R.H. Tawney. And Christian socialism is where Charles Taylor began his career, and which at least intermittently continues to guide it from afar, even (I’m willing to conjecture) when he is arguing the case for a post-secular liberal-democratic constitution as in the essay to which Bilgrami replies.

My brief and bold genealogy of Church/State relations places Bilgrami’s debate with Taylor in a different historical context than the one that Bilgrami supplies himself. It makes it clearer still that one of his differences with Taylor is over the sheer extent of state sovereignty in relation to religion. Taylor wishes to reduce democratic state sovereignty, Bilgrami to maintain it. As I said, I think he is right about that, especially in cases like India. But given the internal contradictions of democratic state capitalism, its failures to meet its own norms and purposes (e.g. equality of opportunity and participation, liberty, widely-based prosperity), I find myself also willing to imagine situations in which the state foregoes its monopolization of sovereignty, and accedes some of its power to associations. As far as I am concerned, these cannot, however, be religious associations, since the argument against religion’s validity claims has indeed been won.

From this perspective, the real challenge becomes: how to imagine and invent strong non-religious associations with substantive values and satisfying practices of life? Associations capable of taking back some state sovereignty, admittedly (as Bilgrami urges) in ways that don’t threaten state neutrality? One theoretical possibility would be for atheists (associating in the interests of truth) to take over the Churches’ rich and solid institutions from the inside, which might indeed herald a return to older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination. But that is just a politics of hope and imagination.

" width="200" height="300" />

I want to argue that one of the deep reasons for the commonality between religion and the secular is not only historical—that the values that prevailed in a dominantly religious world were not lost during the secularization processes—but philosophical: whether the beliefs that people hold are religious or secular, they are beliefs. As Steve Bruce wrote, “Although it is possible to conceptualize it in other ways, secularization primarily refers to the beliefs of people.” At the extreme edges of secular and religious thought, people deny that they hold beliefs—propositions that they embrace about what is true—and say instead that they have truth. This can obtain in any religious thinker who claims that God or scripture or the church hierarchy has given them the truth and they have ready access to it—or in secular thought, where trust in empiricism, in scientific methods, or indeed in secular reason can be so extreme that the notion that we live with beliefs and hypotheses becomes supplanted by the certainty of truth. It seems to me that in the public sphere certainty is especially dangerous. You can hear the difference between my saying “I believe this is true and you believe that is true and let’s discuss that,” and “I know the truth, I am right and you are wrong, end of discussion.” The reason plurality is a good—and I think it is a good, and not just an historical and sociological fact—is that it promotes multiples views, and the reason it is good to protect multiple views is that they offer dissent to any orthodoxy; without them we are at risk of being coerced by those promoting certain truth. Furthermore, the open debates of opposing beliefs strengthen them all and enable the beliefs on the table to become, well, better beliefs.

There is so much to admire in Akeel Bilgami’s thoughtful paper: it argues for the importance of contextual historical specificity when we talk about secularism, as any characterization of it has to come to terms with vast cultural and political differences—for example a liberal secularism (like  that of the US) vs an authoritarian secularism (like that of Ataturk’s Turkey), and how the case of India in the early 20^th century led to certain concessions by the government to Muslim law and practices for specific historical reasons. He is sensitive to the contextual political reasons why, so often, a devout majority can remain silent about the small numbers of extremists and fundamentalists in their community who, because the media pay more attention to them, end up mischaracterizing the goals of the whole community.

But my engagement with questions about the secular, to date, has been to question the reification of a secularism/religion or secular/sacred divide, and hence, I am uncomfortable when Bilgrami defines secularism over against religion. In Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, I zoned in on the early modern period, when the sacraments were under full scale attack by Christian Reformers, and discovered that even then, the logic of sacramentality was not erased, but transferred into the wider sphere of secular culture. The poet David Jones noted that the primary meaning of the sacramental is sign-making, and he said “not only are the arts characterized by the activity of sign-making, ultimately the very work of the sign implies the sacred.” This is because it evokes something beyond itself, something that transcends the sign and thereby participates in transcendence, and transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of mystery, that is, what is beyond our comprehension, control, and use.

I argued that it would be helpful to shift our categories from sacred vs. secular to instrumentality, wherein all is subjected to use for our ends (and in religious history, that can and has included the divine, which has been regularly hijacked for political ends) vs. mystery (or respect). Surely, religion has been the domain not only of mystery but also of instrumentality, as has the secular, and something tragic happens when the sacred is instrumentalized as it has been in religious history, while something salutary takes place when the secular invites mystery or sacramentality into its purview. Now, reading Akeel Bilgrami and Charles Taylor has forced me to turn my attention from the arts to politics. I shudder to think of how woosie it sounds to bring concepts like mystery or sacramentality to our political life, and I won’t do that explicitly, but I do want to say that if nothing is sacred—and I think this is a very rich expression in our language, that even this debased use of the term ‘sacred’ has nonetheless come to signify that nothing would have any value—and the world is simply material and mechanistic, everything can be bought and sold and used. So if we do need a secularism, and I am persuaded that we do, I am more comfortable when its boundaries are not hard and fixed antagonistically against religion.

I agree with Akeel Bilgrami that if secularism carries weight, it is from internal grounds—appealing to the specific and substantive values that figure in specific moral psychological economies—not on universal grounds. And I admire his saying this because it is far more difficult for his position than just the easy route of a universal. But I worry about his confidence in the secular sphere’s beliefs, and the way that confidence makes him create a lexical ordering in which the secular is understood over against the sacred so that when they conflict in the political sphere, secular goals must be given priority. What if, under liberal secularism, we believe that each person has a right to own property, but then another group—whether religious, like the Diggers in the 17^th century, or secular, like socialists in the 20^th—comes along and argues that property must be held in common. According to Bilgrami’s logic, this difference would not be settled in a dialogue of equally legitimate positions; rather, under a secular liberal regime, the private ownership position would have to obtain in his lexical ordering. Under Charles Taylor’s model of a neutral secularism that includes diverse beliefs that are adjudicated on an equal playing field, something else might emerge from the discussion of disparate beliefs, but it would not be obvious from the beginning what that would be. It might include ideas, for instance, about regulating ownership of property, that none held prior to the discussion.

Conversely, while I am more comfortable with Charles Taylor’s secular sphere because it is not set over against religion, but includes diverse beliefs, including non-religious ones that have equal legitimacy and equal voice in a political debate, I have a worry about the neutrality of a secular sphere as a container for strong beliefs, a neutral container that is devoid of beliefs itself. I worry that it is too weak to respond when any of the beliefs that it contains becomes so strong that they want to hijack the neutral territory where they are allowed to dwell. What happened to the secular state when Hitler took control?  Why did the beliefs about rights and law crumble? Weak secularism—the container theory—does not protect us from incivility or hatred, from the violence of purity-thinking that leads some to think that those who hold different beliefs are infidels. While European wars of religion left the public sphere so shaken that they wanted to separate church from state, it was, needless to say, the secular wars of nationalisms and ideologies that devastated the 20^th century. If weak secularism is just a container for diverse beliefs, attractive for a neutrality that doesn’t take sides, I wonder if we need a more robust concept of secularism to protect the goals sought by it. By the way, in  his embrace of liberty, equality, and fraternity as characterizing secularism, I don’t think that Charles Taylor has posited such an empty container.

So, what would a strong secularism be? It would neither coerce religious or non-religious belief, nor would it privilege one belief, as Taylor has noted. But it would also do more: guarantee that differences of belief—or opinions—are heard, as Taylor modestly puts it, “that we try as much as possible to maintain relations of harmony and comity between the supporters of different religions and Weltanschauung.” Now, this last proposal strikes me as an urgent agenda for secularism, for where it has failed, secularism has failed—failed, not in the sense of failing to be  neutral or non-religious, but in the sense of failing to protect its positive goals of genuinely respecting diversity of belief, of values, of practices, and among the people who hold them. In a strong secularism, these respects would be protected—protected against the idolizations of human or divine power, that is, protected against various secular voices or religious voices who claim to authorize the only truth.

Like Taylor, I sense that we have arrived at a crisis in American secularism, due to a conflict between the goals of protecting free expression and protecting respect for diversity. While our First Amendment robustly protects citizens from having their beliefs coerced by the state, and offers protection to express diversity of opinion, when these opinions include disrespect for the beliefs of others, even disrespect of others themselves, that too, is protected. Our courts resolutely do not want to interfere with the content of speech, or to begin the vexed business of sorting what is all right to say and what is not. So, when a fringe group picketed a marine’s funeral with hateful slogans that said God was punishing Americans because of its Gays, Jews, and Catholics, the courts protected their free expression to do that. They have interpreted the free speech amendment broadly, to protect speech despised by the majority of citizens. This includes the right to proselytize on behalf of a minority religion and also the right to criticize another religion. But how does this square with the goal of secularism to respect diversity, indeed that values more, fraternity. The solution cannot be blasphemy laws, which Bilgrami, it seems to me rightly understands as  interfering with freedom of speech. I think of the recent notorious case of a Christian woman in Pakistan who was convicted of insulting Islam and was tried and sentenced to death. Since 1999 the United Nations has passed a resolution every year that asks countries to take measure to prevent criticism of religion, This began as defamation of Islam, became defamation of religion, and is now vilification of religion. This gives international justification to blasphemy laws. But as spokesmen for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty have argued in an op-ed,  “the time has come for the international community not only to reject the UN resolution protecting blasphemy laws, but to directly condemn blasphemy laws as profound violations of freedom of religion and speech. Protecting such values is the reason the UN was founded in the first place.” So how do we steer a course between the potentially conflicting values of mutual respect and open expression of critique?

At stake is a way of understanding how we arrive at our best beliefs about how to live together with dignity. I would say this project has three distinctive features: this quest is ongoing, it is marked by multiple voices, and it is achieved by ceaseless debate. To reiterate, in a strong secularism, the search for the most just way to live together is understood as an ongoing process that requires debate between the searchers. The more opposing positions that are tested against one another, the more vigorously these positions are defended, the better the search proceeds. According to this hypothesis, “we never know…what man or even what manner of man will, by striking out on a new path which everyone else regards as not worth exploring, make the next significant contribution to the search.” Hence “all would-be participants must be welcomed, encouraged, and above all, listened to.” This three-fold way of thinking about the quest for the best beliefs is not mine, but John Milton’s. Like the liberty, equality, and fraternity that Charles Taylor embraces for his secularism, it is time-tested.

Milton’s Areopagitica begins as a tract against prior censorship and necessarily becomes a tract on liberty and in turn a rumination on the best process of truth-seeking. It did not change the licensing laws in his time; but its far reach extends to the pages of virtually every First Amendment textbook in US law schools. It is full of stunning extended metaphors for truth that always suggest that our access to it is partial, our formulations of it are incomplete, and hence we must engage in endless debate: in one, truth is compared to a light, “but if we look not wisely on the Sun itself it smites us into darkness. The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.” Thinking that truth is already achieved is dangerous:  “truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain, if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” Diversity and debate must be encouraged: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions, for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. …What some lament of [the vigorous differences in opinion] we rather should rejoice…[for it enables them] to reassume the ill deputed care of their Religion in to their own hands again.”  And he imagines, amidst this diversity, fraternity: “A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all of these diligences to join and unite into one general and brotherly search—but we must forgo the crowding of free consciences into canons and precepts…” There must be “many Schisms and dissections made in the quarry and the timber ere the House of God (for him, England, but for us, ironically, “secularism”), can be built.” I need not remind you that this eloquent spokesman for liberty of conscience, diversity, and free speech was a deeply religious thinker. (And of course, Bilgrami is right that historical contexts matter: Milton in his time was only talking about Protestant sects disagreeing, as Catholics in 17^th century England were perceived to be too dangerous to come to the table).

His metaphor for the search for truth is particularly stunning:  while the body of Truth may have once been whole, “that lovely form has been hewed into a thousand peeces and scattered to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled boy of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lord and Commons, nor ever shall do, til her Master’s second coming. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking.”  Far from dissent and diversity of belief being problems to overcome, they are embraced as  explicit goods that enable progress toward success: none must be able to forbid the search for truth, especially not those who “think it a calamity that any man dissent from their maxims,” for the ongoing search requires testing by opposing beliefs.

I agree with Charles Taylor that at this point in history, unlike at the founding of the US, we need secularism, not to protect the individual from the state, so much as to protect the contemporary climate of diversity—this means protecting two things which are not always compatible: protecting the right to express different beliefs, but also protecting the very process of dialogue and the equal respect that grounds such dialogue. Bilgrami suggests that we must say, “you are my brother and I think you are mistaken.” But that process is endangered when beliefs—religious or secular—are taken to be inviolable and hence nonnegotiable truths, or lexical priorities. Having truth by the beard ultimately harbors the danger of incivility toward those who don’t see the truth as we do—the axis of evil, the infidels. This is why a strong secularism must give institutional expression to the ethos that all are welcome in the search for the best beliefs about how to live together. And it is also why anything that hints at a normative secular solution—whether contract theory, utilitarianism, or human rights founded on negative liberty—is going to be partial at best.

It is because that Truth of how best to live together is a mystery, not fully graspable, knowable, manipulable, after all, that we need to approach the dialogue with the other with full respect—to listen, learn, and evaluate. So I guess mystery turns out not to be so woosie for politics, after all.

Another way to say this is that I agree with Taylor’s assessment that we are in an era of reflexivity regarding religion in which belief is always questionable and there are many different positions, that this is a good, the outcome of the Enlightenment and the romantic Counter-Enlightenment, and surely, we need that same reflexivity in our secular beliefs.

Following a critical analysis of different theoretical approaches to the question of secularism in current scholarship, and a critique of the underlying concepts of religion and the secular and the way they are interrelated, we argue for what we call a post-religio-secular perspective. This notion aims at an understanding that conceives of the public roles of religion not as explainable, and preliminary, phenomena (as the evolutionist paradigm of modernism would hold) or as regrettable aberrations that ought to be fought (as the liberal bias dictates). Rather, the post-secular-religious turn in the study of religion can be described as a scholarly attitude that not only is critically engaged with the assumptions and politics of the religio-secularist paradigm but seeks to open up new spaces for the study of religion by self-consciously taking into account the historicity and thus perspectivity that such study necessarily entails. The post-secular-religious stance opens perspectives that allow for new epistemologies and methodologies with regard to the religious and the secular—freed from the monofocal, evolutionist, and Eurocentric assumptions of the modernist framework that links religion and politics as a binary pair and to that extent remains attached to organicist perceptions of division (between the religious and the secular/politics) or integrality (as evidenced in the discourse of the theologico-political).

Politics of Religion-Making

The realities of global and local early-twenty-first-century politics put scholars critical of the religio-secular paradigm in a challenging position. While most of us engage in theoretical projects that take for granted the failure of secularism—indeed, many of us would question or reject most if not all of the premises of secularization theory—it has to be acknowledged that on the level of politics the religio-secular discourse has, especially in times of a perceived “return of religion,” not lost its pervasiveness (as, for example, Charles Taylor’s designation for our “secular age” [secularity 3] indicates). To the contrary, this “return” has reinvigorated secularist forces, which often respond with interpretations of the role of religion in political conflicts invoking pictures of a cultural if not civilizational clash. The political reality forces us, paraphrasing Talal Asad, to think about the conditions in which the dichotomies between “the religious” and “the secular” do (still) seem to make sense in so many public discourses. Such inquiry needs to ask questions about political and epistemological hegemony: “How, when, and by whom are the categories of religion and the secular defined? What assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them?” In different ways, the chapters constituting this volumecontributors to Secularism and Religion-Making tackle these programmatic questions. They analyze cases where religion does seem to make sense and investigate how notions of religion and the secular are reified within specific, local and transnational, competitions for intellectual, material, and political resources.

The key concept or “critical term” that has guided the work of the contributors to the volume is religion-making. Broadly conceived the term religion-making refers to the ways in which religion(s) is conceptualized and institutionalized within the matrix of a globalized world-religions discourse in which ideas, social formations, and social/cultural practices are discursively reified as “religious” ones. Religion-making works, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, by means of normalizing and often functionalist discourses centered around certain taken-for-granted notions, such as the religion/secular binary, as well as binaries subordinated to it (such as sacred/profane, this-worldly/otherworldly, etc.). We see the notion of religion-making not as a homogeneous analytical concept, but, rather, we see it as a heuristic device that allows us to bring into conversation a wide range of perspectives on practices and discourses that reify religion (as well as its various subcategories and associated others, such as, most prominently, the secular). Religion-making is thus a heuristic tool for analysis and deconstruction, and does not have any aspirations of reinstating notions of authenticity and essence through the backdoor by comparing different religion-making projects. The critical work done by the term religion-making is not concerned with the evaluation of authorizing and legitimating claims of any particular religion-making politics in a normative or normalizing sense. Far from aiming to endorse any particular religion-making processes, we rather want to foster perspectives through which these processes are contextualized and historicized within the frameworks of particular epistemes of religion and the secular, respectively.

The chapters of this volume incorporate and combine theoretical (philosophical/theologico-political) with descriptive-analytical (historical/sociological/anthropological) modes of critique. In this way the volume seeks to avoid the impasse between theory and empiricism that continues to be a hallmark of many books with a focus on the politics of religion and secularism. Without losing sight of the theoretical issues that are constitutive of this volume, in regard to the politics that we put under the critical lens, it is useful to distinguish the ideal-typically among three different levels and discourses of religion-making, as well as the linkages between them: (1) religion-making from above, that is, as a strategy from a position of power, where religion becomes an instrument of governmentality, a means to legitimize certain politics and positions of power; (2) religion-making from below, that is, as a politics where particular social groups in a subordinate position draw on a religionist discourse to reestablish their identities as legitimate social formations distinguishable from other social formations through tropes of religious difference and/or claims for certain rights; and (3) religion-making from (a pretended) outside, that is, scholarly discourses on religion that provide legitimacy to the first two processes of religion-making by systematizing and thus normalizing the religious/secular binary and its derivates.

What we term religion-making from above refers to authoritative discourses and practices that define and confine things (symbols, languages, practices) as “religious” and “secular” through the disciplining means of the modern state and its institutions (such as lawmaking, the judiciary, state bureaucracies, state media, and the public education system). While state institutions represent dominant positions of power within public discourse, other non-state actors in the public sphere might also sometimes assume positions of normative efficacy, be it certain media (mainly print and television, possibly also the Internet), influential public personalities (opposition politicians, public intellectuals, showbiz and media stars), or corporate enterprises. The example of neoliberal U.S. pundits arguing for a remaking of Islam may serve as an example to illustrate the often unabashedly political nature of such religion-making, revealing itself in very Foucauldian ways as an act of governmentality aimed at creating liberal-secular subjects. In a 2003 report published by the RAND Corporation, a conservative U.S. think tank, the “Islamic world” is depicted as in a severe crisis of identity posing a major threat to the “rest of the World.” Islam needed to be brought in line with Western/American interests. It is a difficult operation, as is frankly admitted: “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex.” One of the heralds of neocon U.S. American dreams of civilizing Islam, Daniel Pipes, drove this language one step further. In 2004 he remarked that the “ultimate goal” of the “war on terrorism” was “religion-building” in the sense of a modernization of Islam. In his view, “only when Muslims turn to secularism will this terrible era of their history come to an end.” The imperialist tone of such statements is part of the rhetoric of the “new world order” and the “Middle East Project” envisioned by the conservative U.S. political circles that had been related closely to the Bush administration. To sum up the hardly concealed concern behind the arguments of the cited U.S. neocon pundits, the West/United States has to engage in a remaking of Islam, analogous to nation-building referred to as religion-building, with the goal to create a modern, that is, secular, Islam in line with American interests and a neoliberal, modernist frame for religion as secured by the doctrine of secularism (see Saba Mahmood’s sharp criticism of the liberal biases underlying secularist rhetoric and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s critique of the recent Chicago Council report on religious freedom). The examples point not only to imperialist ambitions within U.S. politics, but more broadly exemplify drastically how political religion-making discourses can be. In line with the U.S. American tradition of liberal secularism, U.S. religion-builders are less concerned with keeping religion out of politics than with regulating its political manifestations (such reformist politics directed toward Islam are also present in Europe).

While scholars of postcolonial studies have discussed the role of religious and secular discourses in the legitimation and administration of the nation-state, less attention has been directed to cases in which marginalized sociocultural communities have adopted the language of religion as a means of empowerment vis-à-vis assimilationist politics directed against them. Such religion-making from below forms a dialectical relationship with religion-making from above, implicitly accepting the latter’s hegemony, to the language and semantics of which it responds. Whether perceived as acts of emancipation, appropriation, or subversion against hegemonic religious and secular knowledge regimes, religion-making from below has played important roles in local discourses of religion and secularism.

Religion-making from below operates via processes of cultural translation. Translation here needs to be understood as a two-way relationship. Translation of the language of the religio-secular construct into new territories can be forceful and violent, as evidenced amply in postcolonial studies. But one should not understand the appropriation of religio-secularist discourses as necessarily resulting from coercion. Credit needs to be given to the more complex dynamics of agency in the adaptation of these discourses in non-Western vernacular languages. Charles Hallisey has discussed this dynamic as “intercultural mimesis—a phrase denoting the cultural interchange that occurs between the native and the Orientalist in the construction of Western knowledge about ‘the Orient.’” In other words, while it is indisputable that the politics of translation of the concept of religion beyond the Christian West were molded by the power imbalance that is characteristic of Orientalist scholarship and its objects of study, analysis of this translation process has to provide sufficient space for the agency of local appropriations of elements of this discourse. We need to think the appropriation of the Western discourses of religion and the secular in a manner that does not reduce local actors to the role of passive objects but instead focuses on “local productions of meaning,” that is, the agency of locals in the encounter with Orientalist knowledge.

Triggered by the emerging field of postcolonial studies following Edward Said’s Orientalism, awareness of academia’s complicity in the essentialization of particular others has increased considerably. The work of Said and those who followed in his footsteps has forced self-proclaimed or thusly institutionalized “Orientalists” to reflect on the history of Orientalist disciplines and their role within imperialist projects. The multifold implications of scholars in imperialist projects unmasks pretensions of objectivity and reveals that religion-making from the pretended outside is often closely linked with more politically motivated religion-making from above. The academic study of religion in particular has been implicated in imperialist projects and Eurocentric discourses more generally, and it still plays, especially in the United States, where its institutional position is much stronger than in Western Europe and despite an admitted increase in self-critical reflection to this extent, an important role in the objectification of religion(s). Unraveling such entanglements, as an inquiry into the politics of religion-making brings along, is therefore a challenging project particularly for the discipline of religious studies, since it entails the theoretical and methodological deconstruction of the very concept (“religion”) through which this discipline is legitimated. World-religion courses are flourishing, and classes of this or similar kind belong to the bread-and-butter courses of many religious studies departments. It will be interesting to see in which ways the academic discipline of religious studies can respond to the challenges that it will have to face once it recognizes and positions itself more deliberately toward the historical biases that contributed to its creation, as well as the religion politics in which it is still involved. The problem of course is not new, and many readers will be familiar with J. Z. Smith’s controversial dictum “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.” Tomoko Masuzawa’s recent work on the Invention of World Religions has further increased awareness of the urgency to raise critical self-reflection on the involvement of the academic study of religion in the making and re-making of the concept of religion. Beyond the very existential problem that this constitutes for institutions organized around religious studies as an academic discipline, the relationship between this discipline and the genealogy of the religion and world-religion concepts is itself an interesting and most important field of inquiry. In this context Peterson and Walhof have rightly asked about “what is the proper agenda for religious studies in a context in which the object of study, religion, has been invented or worked over by powerful economic, social, and political forces.”  Such questions need to be addressed in order to understand better the role of both academic and political elites and institutions in the making and remaking of “religion” and the “secular”.

*  *  *

NS: What exactly do you mean by the sacred in All Things Shining?

SK: Usually when we talk about the sacred, we punt the question and kick it off to Nietzsche. He said that the sacred is whatever you’re not allowed to laugh at in a given culture. One of the ways that you might characterize our age is to say that there’s almost nothing left that people aren’t allowed to laugh at. You can take a kind of ironic distance with respect to almost anything. That gives us a certain kind of freedom, of course. You might think of that as progress over what we had before. On the other hand, it also destabilizes lives, because it makes it very difficult to know on what basis one should make decisions. In a sense that I think we owe to Charles Taylor, we call this a secular age, an age without a notion of the sacred. That doesn’t mean there are no religious believers in it—obviously there are a lot of religious believers in America, for instance. Instead, it means that the role of religious belief in a person’s life today is different than it was in earlier epochs in the history of the West.  Our commitments, including our religious commitments if we have any, seem to take place in the general social context of what is always and essentially retractable, and for that reason they cannot ground our lives in the way they might.

NS: How does it differ, would you say, beyond everything being potentially funny?

SK: As a matter of caricature, for instance, you could say that in the Middle Ages, if you came across someone who didn’t share your religious beliefs, then it was socially justified for you to think of them as less than human. This was a justification for all sorts of religious wars. But this move doesn’t seem to be socially sanctioned in the modern West. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who make that move, but we call them fanatics. I think this is a kind of progress. But such progress has an undermining effect. If it’s true that you have to take seriously the possibility that someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs is nevertheless living a life worthy of your admiration, then you can’t think that the life that you aspire to live is a life whose principles can be gotten from your religious beliefs alone.

NS: Then is the kind of polytheism that you call for structured by the condition of pluralism?

SK: Yes, I think it is. But this polytheism is importantly different from relativism. It is not the view that any set of values is equally good as any other set of values. Rather, it’s the view that there’s a plurality of possible good lives that people could aspire to live—some of which are incommensurate with others. It leaves open the possibility that some lives are just objectively bad and not worth living. But we’re not in the position, and don’t want to be in the position, of identifying what the objectively bad lives actually are.

NS: Does this polytheism address the existence of gods?

SK: That’s a really good question. And a hard question. I think the book is neutral with respect to that question, at least on one interpretation of it. What the book is against is the idea that the only source of meaning in life is the individual. That’s the view that we think ultimately leads to a kind of destructive nihilism, of the sort that we find in David Foster Wallace, say. In a certain way, we’re against the Enlightenment ideal that the most basic characterization of us is as autonomous agents who can freely give meaning to our own lives. You can’t make something be meaningful for you just by deciding that it’s going to be meaningful. There’s something psychologically plausible about this. If you’re going to experience certain aspects of your life as mattering more than others, you can’t expect that to happen just by deciding it will be so on your own.

NS: But you can expect it from gods? Are your gods really there in some sense?

SK: It would be silly for us to say, for instance, that Athena really exists. Almost nobody would accept that. But there’s a genuine phenomenon that Homer understood, which is the phenomenon of human excellence taking place in the context of masterly, skillful activity, which, when you perform it, isn’t experienced as having you as its source.

NS: Such excellence has to be, even in a vague sense, given to us?

SK: That’s right. Especially if a culture is in danger of nihilism—that we’re going to experience nothing as having any more meaning than anything else—then the conception of human beings that characterizes us essentially as autonomous is going to be inert. We need to look somewhere else. And no other epoch prior to our own was characterized so centrally by the threat of nihilism, precisely because no other epoch rejected so totally the importance of experiencing the meaning of a situation as in some sense given to us. So the question is, is there something in earlier epochs that we could appropriate, consistent with the progress we want to hold on to, that would give us the resources for resisting that threat?  One thought in the book is that it may be worth retrieving and appropriating from our history the various accounts it offers us of how one might cultivate in oneself the capacity to experience the demand for a certain type of excellence as given to one in a life or a situation

NS: It’s common for Western philosophers to go back to the ancient Greeks to answer these sorts of questions, but it’s less common for them to turn to Homer, rather than to Plato. Why do you turn to Homer?

SK: The Homeric age was one in which people stood in wonder at the amazing things—and awful things—that could happen to them in their lives. That’s something like the opposite of the nihilistic threat that many say characterizes our contemporary age. This led us to ask what is operating in the background of Homer’s understanding of the world that motivates him to emphasize this mood of wonder. One thing seems especially important for him: that human beings can’t be acting at their best unless they’re in a situation that is drawing them to act, in which the gods are present in their acting. In the Odyssey, at any rate, in example after example, when the heroes do something extraordinary, it is explained by Homer as involving the work of the gods in the agent’s activity.  That doesn’t mean that the gods are responsible for the agent’s action, but it doesn’t mean the agent’s action was performed autonomously either.  The two need to come together in a kind of Homeric middle-voiced action for human excellence to emerge.  Even when characters are acting at their worst, Homer seems to explain it in terms of characters having provoked the gods to abandon them. This runs directly counter to our age, in which being at one’s best is understood as making free decisions, rationally and autonomously. Of course, we can’t endorse everything Homer said. There are ways in which our culture has made progress over Homer’s culture—abolishing slavery, for instance—and that make us want to hold it at arm’s length. A long arm’s length.  But there’s something interesting in this central thought of his culture nevertheless.

NS: So where does that leave the thinker? You mention passages like—quoting the Odyssey—“Be silent; curb your thoughts; do not ask questions.” Isn’t this antithetical to the very philosophical task you’re engaged in? How does one think about not thinking?

SK: It’s true that thinking of the sort that is central to Western philosophy doesn’t seem to play a central role for Homer. He was interested in a paradigm of human excellence that happens in skilled activity, in one domain or another. When you’re at your best in that domain or activity, you don’t experience yourself as the source of the activity. That’s the phenomenon that we’re interested in. Now, I think you could say that this kind of masterly, skillful activity can happen in the context of thinking. Homer doesn’t say that; his paradigmatic characters are characters of action, not contemplation. But when the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century French mathematician Poincaré talks about the moment of insight, he talks about working really, really hard on a problem, and banging his head against it for days and weeks on end, until some moment when he’s not thinking about it at all and the answer finally comes. He doesn’t experience it as having himself as its source, but as having been given to him. That’s parallel to what Homer was talking about.

NS: How does one cultivate this kind of orientation toward the world, if not by just rationally assenting to it?

SK: In order to put yourself in the position of being able to experience these moments of excellence, you have to acquire certain skills that allow you to navigate certain domains. Whether it is Achilles’ domain of being a great warrior, or Odysseus’s domain of being a great adventurer, or the domain of being a great pianist, there’s some kind of skill—often a bodily, physical kind of skill—that you need to perfect before you have the experience of being drawn to do what the domain demands. I think we’re with Pascal on this. He realized that even if you’ve come to be convinced by his Wager—his argument that it is better to believe in the existence of God than not—it doesn’t mean you’re a believer yet. You can’t make yourself a believer by deciding you should be. Rather, you need to find people who are believers and cultivate in yourself the skill of doing the things that they do. Partake in their rituals; learn their skills. Through that, you at least open yourself up to the possibility that you’ll experience some non-identical authority that leads you to act in certain kinds of situations.

NS: How, then, do you choose which domains are worthy of cultivating?

SK: That’s a difficult question, and I don’t think there’s any general answer to it. We don’t have a substantive proposal in the sense suggested by the question. But what we do think is that, insofar as you’re a human being, you’re the kind of being that already cares about particular domains. One way that you could try to figure out what those domains are is by asking yourself whether your life would be as full if you gave up a certain practice for another one of equal functional value. If you think you could make that substitution without loss, then the domain isn’t really one that you care about. But if you feel somehow that it wouldn’t be right to make that substitution, then you’ve discovered that it’s a domain you care about, and that there’s more you could uncover by developing the skills for navigating it.

NS: So, it’s a process of discovery.

SK: It’s a process of discovery, that’s right. We’re the kind of beings that already care about stuff. But we can fail to recognize that about ourselves by taking an ironic distance from everything. To the extent that we’re successful in achieving that kind of distance, it will eventually become the case that nothing matters for us. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But it also means that we’re the kind of beings that can undo that by coming to recognize what we do care about and allowing ourselves to rediscover the distinctions of worth that are already there.

NS: The subtitle of the book speaks of “rereading the Western classics.” But it also seems like a lot of the classics get tossed out, or at least harshly criticized—everything from the advent of Greek philosophy to Herman Melville is stricken with a kind of blight in this account.

SK: Well, Melville is the savior.

NS: That’s what I mean. So, how would one go about reading Western literature on this account? What do we do with the thousands of years in between? What do we do with Shakespeare?

SK: We don’t talk about Shakespeare in the book, of course. It would take another whole book to talk about Shakespeare.

NS: What, then, are we to get out of the authors you do consider?

SK: On our reading of the history of the West from Plato forward, there’s an increasing emphasis on seeing people as rational, autonomous agents, until it finally becomes the central characterization of ourselves in the modern age. But to the extent that earlier works of art still have in them a sense of us as beings open to an already-given meaning, we think they’ve got something important. Interestingly, different epochs in the history of the West articulate this kind of openness in radically different ways. The wonder Homer has in describing the beauty of Odysseus when he encounters Nausicca, or in describing Helen’s beauty, is a completely different way of being receptive than the sort you find in Dante. Dante thinks that what you’re receptive to is God’s love, which grounds a very different kind of conception of how to live an admirable life than the one we find in Homer. Indeed, their views about the life worth aspiring to are so different that in Dante’s account of the universe Odysseus is consigned to one of the lower circles of Hell. Yet despite this difference, Dante shares with Homer the idea that trying to give meaning to our lives autonomously is what makes things likely to go awry. For him, the people inside the city of Dis are full autonomy freaks, so to speak. They really believe—and Satan is the worst of them all—that the meanings in the world come from the decisions they make rather than from God. Some aspects of Dante’s story are hard to be devoted to, on our view, but he got this really right.

NS: What do we do with the ways in which they fundamentally differ, though? Do we have to choose one over the other—Homer’s Olympians over Dante’s Christ?

SK: The polytheism of the book is a polytheism that runs across Western history. In it, there are lots of different modes of receptivity, and some are incommensurate with each other, but each might nevertheless ground a life that’s worthy of our admiration. It’s up to you and me and every one of us to ask ourselves whether there is anything in a given story that we can appropriate. Each represents a possible way for us to resist the threat of nihilism.

NS: Might this kind of polytheism threaten to bring us around full-circle? You call for “a life attuned to the shining things,” yet this sounds to me suspiciously like a really good description of modern consumer culture.

SK: Those are shiny things, not shining ones!

NS: What, then, is the difference between shining things and shiny things?

SK: David Foster Wallace, for one, was concerned about all the shiny things. He was concerned about the massive amounts of entertainment that we find in our environment, things which won’t let us stop looking at them, and yet looking at them undermines our ability to be at our best. Those are shiny things. Shiny things attract us to themselves, but make us less worthy of people’s admiration in the end. Shining things, as I take it, are the opposite. They’re the kind of things it takes work to be attracted to. You have to cultivate in yourself a skill for recognizing them as attractive. Once you do, they draw you to act in ways that are worthy of admiration.

NS: One of the great aspirations of modern, autonomous reason is to universalize ethics, to agree on what is valuable and what we reject. How does one go about thinking about ethics in your view? There’s a worry among people reading the book that you don’t quite give us what we need to stay away from Hitler rallies. Maybe they see the ghost of Martin Heidegger in what you’re doing.

SK: The Hitler rallies are an important issue; we don’t underplay that. But it’s true that the book doesn’t offer a prescription one can follow that will allow us to distinguish between rhetoric it’s worthwhile to allow yourself to get caught up in and rhetoric it’s dangerous to allow yourself to get caught up in.  We don’t think there is any general rule that will distinguish these cases from one another, and so we don’t think there’s a general principle to apply.  Still, we’re committed to the idea that there is such a distinction, and that one darn well better learn to develop the skill for recognizing it—just as a wheelwright can recognize the distinction, through his skill for working with the wood, between a piece that’s worth using and one that should be thrown out. This might sound risky. It might sound safer to just avoid rallies altogether and stick to just dispassionate rational discourse. But if you are worried about the threat of nihilism, then dispassionate, rational discourse is never going to help. Besides, it really seems as though progress wouldn’t have been made on various issues of social importance if people didn’t allow themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetoric of an articulate leader devoted to the cause of change.  The example we use in the book is civil-rights legislation.  If there weren’t lots and lots of people who allowed themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetorical discourse of Martin Luther King, Jr., then it seems likely that the important social changes he provoked would never have occurred. The danger of never allowing yourself to get caught up in those kinds of situations, therefore, is that it keeps changes for the better from happening. That’s the danger that our critics have to confront.

NS: But I don’t think you necessarily have to choose between a King rally and dispassionate, rational discourse. You could think of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose response to Nazism was by no means cool and rational, but was still predicated on a kind of universalism. He felt that the one God was speaking to him through history, telling him to assassinate Hitler. Could you claim Bonhoeffer as representing what you propose as well? Or even King himself?

SK: Universalism might be a red herring in this case. In a secular age like ours, nobody really wants to deny that, at least on the surface, there’s an apparently incommensurate range of admirable lives. Universalism, in this context, is just committed to the idea that there is a single, unifying principle that brings them all together. But this is a kind of eschatological hope that I think we can step back from, at the moment. Given that we’re not at the end of time, how are we supposed to live in the context of apparent plurality? It seems to me that even somebody who is committed to an ultimate universal story has to deal with this question. So, yes, maybe Bonhoeffer is the kind of figure we could appropriate.

NS: So, to be clear: you’re not requiring people to abandon their monotheism to partake in your polytheism?

SK: I don’t think our position should require anyone to give up their commitment to monotheism—though it puts pressure on monotheism when it’s interpreted in a particular, fanatical way, and most people in our culture can agree that such fanaticism is something more or less to be avoided anyway. Take, for instance, Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He confronts the character of Queequeg, whose way of life is radically different from his. He’s a cannibal! He eats fifty people before breakfast, he’s tattooed all over, and he’s perverse in all sorts of ways—as far from the Christian way of life as you could possibly imagine. Yet Ishmael, who says he was “born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” concludes that he needs to take seriously what he finds to be admirable in Queequeg’s life. It’s Queequeg’s coffin that finally saves Ishmael. Melville seems to be describing a kind of Christianity open to what is admirable in other ways of life.  This kind of open Christianity may still be committed to the idea that, in ways we cannot fathom from here, there is a kind of unity to the apparently incommensurate goods with which we are confronted.  We have nothing to say against that kind of monotheism.  But we are against Ahab’s idea that the meaning of a life cannot be grounded except in an ultimate understanding now of that eschatological unity.

NS: I’m curious about your reflections about how the book has been discussed and received. What do you think was at stake, for instance, in the vitriolic response from Garry Wills?

SK: It’s a good question.  I’m afraid I don’t really understand Wills’s personal background well enough to know what’s at stake for him. It seems to me clear that something rubbed him the wrong way early on in his reading of the book.  Sometimes when that happens a person loses interest in finding out what the book is really about and starts reading it instead for whatever examples he can find of how to win points against it.  I think that something like that must have happened, since that’s the only way I can explain the huge range of mis-readings that the review promulgates.   I will say that on our blog, Charles Spinosa has written an essay analyzing Wills and David Mikics’s responses as motivated by the very commitment that the book is trying to diagnose as what leads to the danger of nihilism.  That seems to me an interesting possibility.

There are a range of other interestingly motivated responses to the book as well.  I recently discovered, for example, that some people are misreading our appropriation of the Homeric Greeks as something like what Nietzsche did: admiring nobility and strength instead of weakness and humility. Nietzsche thought that the noble warriors of the Greeks were worth admiring because they were noble warriors. But that’s not our position at all. We’re admiring them for almost the opposite reason. We’re interested in the idea that you can’t become noble on your own, that there’s a sense in which we require for our excellence non-self-identical authority, and that, in moments of excellence, we experience that what is not-us as drawing us to act in the way we do.

NS: Since we started on Nietzsche, maybe that’s a good place to end.

1.

I begin with three fundamental features of the idea of ‘secularism.’ I will want to make something of them at different stages of the passage of my argument in this paper for the conclusion—among others—that the relevance of secularism is contextual in very specific ways.

If secularism has its relevance only in context, then it is natural and right to think that it will appear in different forms and guises in different contexts. But I write down these opening features of secularism at the outset because they seem to me to be invariant among the different forms that secularism may take in different contexts. It is hard to imagine that one hasn’t changed the subject from secularism to something else, something that deserves another name, if one finds oneself denying any of the features that I initially list below. Though I say this is ‘hard to imagine,’ I don’t mean to deny that there is a strong element of stipulation in these initial assertions to come. I can’t pretend that these are claims or theses about some independently identified subject matter—as if we all know perfectly well what we are talking about when we speak of secularism—and the question is only about what is true of that agreed upon concept or topic. The point is rather to fix the concept or topic. But, on the other hand, such talk of ‘fixing’ should not give the impression that it is a matter of free choice, either. Once the initial terminological points about ‘secularism’ are made, the goal of the rest of the paper will be to show why they are not arbitrary stipulations. So the reader is urged to be unreactive about these initial topic-setting assertions until the dialectic of the paper is played out.

First, secularism is a stance to be taken about religion. At the level of generality with which I have just described this, it does not say anything very specific or precise. The imprecision and generality have two sources. One obvious source is that religion, regarding which it is supposed to take a stance, is itself, notoriously, not a very precise or specifically understood phenomenon. But to the extent that we have a notion of religion in currency—however imprecisely elaborated—‘secularism’ will have a parasitic meaning partially elaborated as a stance regarding whatever that notion stands for. Should we decide that there is no viability in any notion of religion, and should the notion pass out of conceptual currency, secularism too would lapse as a notion with a point and rationale. The other source of imprecision is that I have said nothing specific or precise about what sort of stance secularism takes towards religion. One may think that it has to be in some sense an adversarial stance since surely secularism, in some sense, defines itself against religion. This is true enough, but still the very fact that I find the need to keep using the qualifier ‘in some sense’ makes clear that nothing much has been said about the kind of opposing stance this amounts to. Part of the point of this essay is to add a little precision to just this question.

Second, for all this generality just noted, ‘secularism’—unlike ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’—is quite specific in another regard. It is the name of a political doctrine. As a name, it may not always have had this restriction, but that seems to be its predominant current usage. So, to the extent that it takes a stance vis-à-vis religion, it does so only in the realm of the polity. It is not meant—as the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’ are—to mark highly general and dispersed social and intellectual and cultural phenomena and processes. Unlike the term ‘secularization,’ it is not so capacious as to include a stance against religion that requires redirection of either personal belief or, for that matter, any of a range of personal and cultural habits of dress or diet or… Thus it is not a stance against religion of the sort that atheists and agnostics might wish to take or a stance that strikes attitudes (to say nothing of policies) about the hijab. The increase in a society of loss of personal belief in God or the decrease in church- or synagogue- or mosque-going or the surrender of traditional religious habits of dress or prohibitions against pork, may all be signs of increasing ‘secularization’ but they are irrelevant to the idea of secularism. The reason for this is rather straightforward and obvious. It should be possible to think that a devout Muslim or Christian or Hindu can be committed to keeping some aspects of the reach of his religion out of the polity, without altogether giving up on being a Muslim, Christian, or Hindu. And it seems natural today to express that thought by saying that such a person, for all his devoutness, is committed to secularism. And one can say this while noticing and saying something that it is also natural to think and say: such a devout person, in being devout, is holding out against the tendencies unleashed by the long social and ideational processes of secularization. And we can appreciate the naturalness of this restriction of the term ‘secularism’ to the polity when we observe that the slogan ‘separation of church and state’ (which, whatever we think of it, is part of what is conveyed to many by the ordinary usage of the term ‘secularism’) allows one the church, even as it separates it from the state, or, more generally, from the polity. If we did not believe that the term was to be restricted in this way, we would either have to collapse secularism with secularization or—if we insisted on some more subtle difference between those two terms—we would have to invent another term altogether (a term that has no cognate relation to this family of terms—secular, secularization, secularism) to capture the aspiration of a polity to seek relative independence from a society’s religiosity. I believe that any such neologizing would be a stipulative act of far greater strain and artificiality than reserving one of these terms (‘secularism’) for this aspiration since, as I said, it is anyway implied by the slogans that accompany the term. What then of the contrast of ‘secularism’ with ‘secular’? Unlike the latter term which is often said to refer innocuously and indiscriminately to all things that are ‘worldly’ in the sense of being outside the reach of religious institutions and concerns (outside the cloister, in the mundiality of the world at large, as it were), ‘secularism’ aspires to be more concentrated in its concern—to not merely refer to anything that is outside of that reach, but to focus on something specific (the polity) and attempt to keep it or steer it outside of some specified aspects of that reach.

Third, secularism, as a stance regarding religion that is restricted to the polity, is not a good in itself. It seeks what is conceived, by those who favour it, to promote certain other moral and political goods, and these are goods that are intended to counter what are conceived as harms, actual or potential. This third feature may be considered too controversial to be regarded as a defining feature, but its point becomes more plausible when we contrast secularism with a more cognitive (rather than political) stance regarding religion, such as atheism. For atheists, the truth of atheism is sufficient to motivate one to adhere to it and the truth of atheism is not grounded in the claim that it promotes a moral or political good or the claim that it is supported by other moral or political values we have. By contrast, secularists, to the extent that they claim ‘truth’ for secularism, claim it on grounds that appeal to other values that support the ideal of secularism or other goods that are promoted by it. Secularism as a political doctrine arose to repair what were perceived as damages that flowed from historical harms that were, in turn, perceived as owing, in some broad sense, to religion. Thus, for instance, when it is said that secularism had as its vast cradle the prolonged and internecine religious conflicts in Europe of some centuries ago, something like this normative force of serving goods and correcting harms is detectably implied. But if all this is right, then it follows that one would have to equally grant that, should there be contexts in which those goods were not seen necessarily to be goods, or to the extent that those goods were being well served by political arrangements that were not secularist, or to the extent that there were no existing harms, actual or potential, that secularism would be correcting, then one could take the opposing normative stance and fail to see the point and rationale for secularism.

2.

I want to now turn from features that define or characterize secularism to features of its justification and basis of adoption.

In a paper written in the days immediately following the fatwa pronounced against Salman Rushdie, called “What is a Muslim?,” I had argued that secularism had no justification that did not appeal to substantive values, that is to say, values that some may hold and others may not. It was not justifiable on purely rational grounds that anyone (capable of rationality) would find convincing, no matter what substantive values they held. I had invoked the notion, coined by Bernard Williams as ‘internal reasons,’ to describe these kinds of grounds on which its justification is given. Internal reasons are reasons that rely on specific motives and values and commitments in the moral psychologies of individuals (or groups, if one takes the view that groups have moral-psychological economies). Internal reasons are contrasted with ‘external reasons,’ which are reasons that someone is supposed to have quite independent of his or her substantive values and commitments, that is, independent of elements in the psychologies that motivate people. Bernard Williams, recapitulating Humean arguments against Kantian forms of externalist rationality and the universalism that might be expected to emerge from it, had claimed that there are no such things as ‘external reasons.’ Whether that general claim is true or not, my more specific claim had been that there are no external reasons that would establish the truth of secularism. If secularism were to carry conviction, it would have to be on grounds that persuaded people by appealing to the specific and substantive values that figured in their specific moral psychological economies. Such a view might cause alarm in those who would wish for secularism a more universal basis. Internal reasons, by their nature, do not provide such a basis. As, I said, internal reasons for some conclusion that will persuade some people, may not persuade others of that conclusion, since those others may not hold the particular substantive values to which those reasons appeal and on which those reasons depend. Only external reasons could persuade everyone since all they require is a minimal rationality possessed by all (undamaged, adult) human minds and make no appeal to substantive values that may be variably held by human minds and psychologies. Alarming thought it might seem to some, there is no help for this. There are no more secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.

Charles Taylor has convincingly argued that in a religiously plural society, secularism should be adopted on the basis of what Rawls called an ‘overlapping consensus.’ An overlapping consensus, in Rawls’s understanding of that term, is a consensus on some policy that is arrived at by people with very different moral and religious and political commitments, who sign on to the policy from within their differing points of view, and therefore on possibly very different grounds from each other. It contrasts with the idea that when one converges on a policy one must all do so for the same reason.

What is the relation between the idea that secularism should be adopted on the basis of an overlapping consensus and the idea presented in the earlier paragraph about internal reasons being the only reasons available in justifying secularism? A very close one. The latter idea yields (it lies behind) the former. The relation is this. Internal reasons, unlike external reasons, may vary from person to person, group to group. This may give the impression that there simply cannot be a consensus if we were restricted to the resources of internal reasons. But that does not follow. Or at any rate, it only follows if we assume that a consensus requires that all sign onto something (some policy or political position, such as secularism) on the same grounds or for the same reason. In other words, on the basis of an external reason or reasons. But such an assumption is a theoretical tyranny. Without that assumption, one could say this. If there is to be a consensus on some political outcome on the basis, not of external but of internal reasons, it will presumably only be because different persons or groups subscribe to the policy on their own, different, grounds. This just is the idea of an overlapping consensus. If there were external reasons for a policy, one could get a consensus on it of a stronger kind and would not need to hold out hope for a merely ‘overlapping’ consensus.

Perhaps all this is obvious. However, for reasons having to do with Rawls scholarship, I have been a little wary of this use of the notion of overlapping consensus since in Rawls it has always been a notion embedded in the framework of his celebrated idea of the ‘original position,’ i.e., the idea that one contract into policies to live by without knowledge of one’s substantive position in society. I find myself completely baffled by why the idea of the original position is not made entirely redundant by the notion of an overlapping consensus. If one did not know what one’s substantive position in society is, one presumably does not know what one’s substantive values are. If so, the very idea of internal reasons can have no play in the original position. It follows that if one were to adopt an overlapping consensus on the basis of divergent internal reasons that contractors may have for signing onto a policy, then the original position becomes altogether irrelevant to the contractual scenario. Of course, if one were to completely divorce the idea of an overlapping consensus from Rawls’s conceptual apparatus within which it has always been formulated (even in his last published work, The Law of Peoples), then it would be exactly right to say, as Taylor does, that secularism should be adopted in pluralistic society on the basis of an overlapping consensus. But now, the only apparatus one has to burden the contractors with is the capacity for internal reasoning, that is, with psychological economies with substantive values that yield internal reasons. Rawls would not be recognizable in this form of contractualist doctrine. Indeed one would be hard pressed to say that one was any longer theorizing within the contractualist tradition at all, which is a tradition in which serious constraints of an ‘original position’ or a ‘state of nature’… were always placed as methodological starting points in the making of a compact. Shorn of all this, one is left with something that is the merest common sense, which it would be bombastic to call ‘a social contract.’ We now need only say this: assuming no more than our capacity for internal reasoning, i.e., our capacity to invoke some substantive values we hold (whatever they may differentially be in all the different individuals or groups in society), we can proceed to justify on its basis another substantive value or policy—for example, secularism—and so proceed to adopt it for the polity. If this path of adoption by consensus, invoking this internalist notion of justification, works in a religiously pluralist society, it will be just as Taylor presents it, an overlapping consensus, with none of Rawls’s theoretical framework.

3.

The last two sections have respectively presented points of definition of secularism and points of its justification and basis of adoption. I think it is important to keep these two things separate on the general ground that one needs to have a more or less clear idea of what we are justifying and adopting before we justify and adopt it.

In a very interesting recent paper, Charles Taylor, has argued that we need to redefine ‘secularism.’ It is a complex paper with highly honourable political and moral motivations that underlie it. But, speaking more theoretically, I don’t think it is quite as well motivated.

The paper begins by saying that there have been two aspects to secularism—one, the idea of the separation of church and state, and the other that the state maintain a neutral equidistance from different religions within a plural society. The paper wishes to correct an overemphasis on the first by stressing the importance of the second aspect and wishes to modify the second too along the following lines.

In modern societies, we seek various goods and the three in particular (echoing the trio of goods expressed in a familiar slogan) that remain relevant to secular aspirations are, the liberty of worship, the equality of different faiths, and finally, more than just equality, we need to give each faith a voice in determining the shape of the society, so there must be fraternal relations within which negotiations, with each voice being equally heard, is crucial. What is more, because the first aspect’s stress on separation of church and state was too focused on religion, the second aspect’s stress on religious diversity should be modified and expanded to include the fact that in late modernity, the diversity of pluralist societies contains not just a variety of religious people, but non-religious people as well. Their point of view must also be included in the mix. All this is now included in the idea and ideal of a redefined secularism.

So, to sum up his explicit motivations for seeking this more capacious definition of secularism: There is the importance of the state maintaining a neutrality and equal distance from each religion. There is the importance of a society allowing the democratic participation of all religious voices in shaping its polity’s commitments. And there is the need to turn one’s focus away from just religion to acknowledging and respecting wider forms of cultural diversity and a variety of intellectual positions, including non-religious ones. These are all worthy motivations and a society that pursues them would be measurably better than one that doesn’t. The question is how does thinking so make a difference to how we theorize about the meaning or definition of secularism? There is no denying that it makes a difference to secularism, but it is not obvious to me that it is just as he presents it.

One of the things that he finds distorted about secularism while defined along the unrevised lines that he is inveighing against is that, so defined, it has been too focused on ‘institutional arrangements.’ Slogans such as ‘separation of church and state’ become mantras and as they do, they suggest institutional arrangements that are fixed. Once done, it is hard not only to change the institutions, but also to reconceptualize secularism. What is better in order to maintain both theoretical and institutional flexibility is to allow the ideals in questions (the echoes of liberty, equality and fraternity mentioned above) to determine what is needed rather than these slogans, which point to institutional arrangements and stop or preempt conversations about how to theorize secularism. In keeping with this point, he applauds Rawls for starting with certain ideals such as “human rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy” rather than anti-religious (or for that matter, religious principles), and then proceeding to consider the question of secularism to be in line with them.

This is just right, I believe, as are the general moral and political instincts that prompt Taylor’s appeal for a redefinition of ‘secularism’: the desire for greater flexibility, the desire not to tie ‘secularism’ to the polemical sense of non- or anti-religious,’ the desire to establish secularism on the basis of an overlapping consensus of internal reasons. The question is, is it wise or necessary to redefine secularism to pursue these instincts and motivations?

4.

Let me, then, turn to a way of characterizing (I say characterizing because perhaps ‘defining’ is too constricting a term for what both Taylor and I are interested in, but I will not always avoid talk of ‘definition’ since it is the word Taylor himself uses) secularism that is, or to put it more cautiously, that may be, at odds with Taylor’s. (I add this caution because, despite what it seems to me at present, it may turn out that we are not much at odds and it is really a matter of emphasizing different things.)

I have said that it is a good idea, as Taylor suggests, to start with certain ideals that do not mention religion or opposition to religion, and then move on to talk of political and institutional arrangements involving the role of the state and its stances towards religion. So, just because it is what is most familiar to us in our tradition of political theory and philosophy, let us start within a liberal framework, let us start with some basic ideals and the fundamental rights and constitutional commitments that enshrine them, just as Rawls and Taylor propose. Starting with them as the basic, though tentative, givens, I suggest we embrace Taylor’s account only up to a point and then add something that does not seem to be emphasized by him, indeed something that he may even wish to be de-emphasizing in his redefinition.

I propose, then, something like the following non-arbitrary stipulation as a characterization of secularism that contains all of the three features I had mentioned at the outset.

(S): Should we be living in a religiously plural society, secularism requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals, often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

Much commentary is needed on this minimal and basic characterization.

Continue reading here (PDF).