In her opinion “value judgments…are inherently ‘flawed’” for three reasons: because “no ultimate proofs are available”; because “approaching the reality already from a normative perspective limits what we get to see, because we put things into ready-made boxes of discrimination and non-discrimination”; and because they seduce us to compare “practices with principles” rather than “practices with practices.” None of these challenges is convincing. The first reproduces an outdated vision of values vs. facts and of normative vs. empirical disciplines, as if in the (social) sciences “ultimate proofs” resulting in “consensus” were available, as if a “value-free” (social) science were possible—a serious misunderstanding of Weber’s conception of Werturteilsfreiheit. The second is implausible even at first sight because a normative concept of discrimination most of the time is combined with other normative concepts, and these perspectives allow for gradational evaluations instead of either/or. And the third, obviously, would seriously restrict empirical comparisons and evaluation studies in the social sciences, which can and do compare practices with empirically proclaimed or inherent principles. (See below for ‘empirical normativity.’)

Criticizing an outdated, strict separation of facts and values however does not mean that we would have to conflate normative or prescriptive with descriptive and explanatory arguments; quite the contrary. We need to distinguish facts and values in order to analyze the variety of ways in which they impact one another. Such a distinction, for example, is presupposed in my original proposal to replace the principle of secularism “for the purposes of normative thinking—in the realms of political and legal theory, constitutional law, and jurisprudence in particular,” leaving open the issue of whether and, if so, how secularisms or secularities might play a productive role for descriptive and explanatory purposes. Wohlrab-Sahr mistakenly assumes that this proposal was meant also in this regard “to make much of a difference.” Instead, she claims: “what can help us to understand the conditions and to assess the consequences of certain forms of secularism, of state regulations on religion and related social institutions and societal practices, is comparative empirical research rather than the exchange of normative positions (or the substitution of normative concepts).”

This is not the place to analyze the many ways in which values or norms enter into social-science research itself, but it is obvious that even when it comes to basic concepts such as integration there are no normatively neutral terms of integration: why should we value integration and not exclusion or expulsion, and if we do select integration, which variety might we favor? As is quite well-known they run from strong nationalist assimilationism via ‘liberal-national’ integration, ‘republican-national’ integration, or ‘muscular civic-liberal’ integration to different varieties of ‘multicultural’ integration. Whatever the choice one wants to make, it will remain cognitively and normatively contested.

Part of any meaningful analysis of social institutions and practices is attention to the values, norms, or principles inherent in all social action and social institutions. As Wohlrab-Sahr writes, “(n)ormativity here comes into play as part of the reality itself.” Indeed, and one usually calls this empirical normativity. The reference to Max Weber, however, is partly misleading because we need to understand not only values, norms, or principles (normative frames and framing) but also cognitive frames and framing.

If we want to “assess” the whole variety of practices and institutions—meant here to ‘evaluate’ in order to be able to learn something—we know from a long tradition of evaluation studies in the social sciences that we have three general options. Firstly, we can evaluate them in isolation from others by analyzing whether they live up to, and if so to what degree, the self-proclaimed or inherent aims of actors or institutions—comparing “practices with principles” without further “evaluating” these aims. If they do not (for example because of unintended, counterproductive consequences analyzed by social science research), then we can consider what could be done to fix this (i.e. we can cognitively learn). Secondly, we can compare practices and institutions (e.g. historically in the same state or synchronically in other states). This includes “comparing practices with practices” but also comparing their respective inherent principles. The standards of evaluation here require some—always contested and difficult—distance from the objects of comparison (in this sense the standards can be called external) as well as a specification of the perspectives of comparison (see literature on comparative institutionalism in social sciences and also in law). Thirdly, we can try to increase this distance from existing empirical normativities by asking and trying to answer questions concerning which norms, values, and principles deserve to be adhered to or changed, and in which regards and which directions. This is traditionally called moral reasoning or moral theory. The radicalism of such context-transcending normative evaluations—comparing existing principles with moral principles that deserve or ought to be followed—varies widely. It ranges from fairly moderate varieties of contextualized moralities—such as those defended by Joe Carens and myself—which claim to be solidly empirically and historically informed, particularly so as to enable ‘realism-checks’—to more radical distancing, and to the extreme of completely de-contextualized moral theories in the tradition of natural-rights, Kantian and neo-Kantian transcendentalism, or quasi-transcendental formal pragmatics à la Habermas. In this regard, Tariq Modood’s Oakeshottian conservatism is a variety of strong contextualism and remains thoroughly grounded in the specific, particularist national British tradition, but, through the export of his ‘moderate secularism,’ also shows some expansive tendencies. Bhargava and I, on the other hand, defend varieties of moderate and contextualized universalism.

In my view, scholarship includes not only cognitive but also normative learning, and the latter requires normative evaluation. Any comparative evaluation, including the one intended by Wohlrab-Sahr, is clearly more than an “empirical enterprise” and calling it such can only serve to hide the normative evaluations from view (this is what philosophers call crypto-normativism). So, when we want to ‘learn’ something from comparisons of institutions and practices we have to do much more than she explicitly seems to allow.

Finally, let’s turn to comparative empirical research of “state regulations on religion and related social institutions and societal practices” or, in my terms, of governance of religious diversity. As I indicated in the Utrecht Law Review by referring to Casanova, contextualizing secularities or “secularisms in the social sciences is a rapidly expanding research program to describe, compare, and explain the historical emergence and structural conditions of different cognitive and normative uses of ‘secularism,’ particularly in political projects.” First of all, one might question whether it is such a good idea to frame the whole research area of governance of religious diversity through the “lens of … multiple secularities” because one would still have to explain what ‘secularity’ means across all different types or models and, in my view, also in this regard disaggregating ‘secularism’ or ‘secularity’ might be quite helpful (see table on p. 14). Second, I doubt very much whether the construction of the four ideal types of secularity will prove to be useful in comparative research and theorizing. In an article on the perils of modeling I’ve tried to show that designing models at the state level runs into serious troubles, however one wants to do it, even if one allows for changes and critical junctures. The classification of the Netherlands as a state in which “a focus on group balance [was] accompanied by an early debate on tolerance and by practices of non-interference” is as common as it is misleading. Equally so are the indicated shifts, which ignore inconsistencies in so-called national models of governance as well as discourses, local and sectoral differentiation, and hugely diverging, asynchronic, and multidirectional changes in specific practices, to name only a few reasons why we should, in my view, prefer largely disaggregated comparisons of specific practices (over time, in different territorial units such as countries). The latter approach would also allow not only to show that Germany performs poorly with regard to recognizing and financing Muslim schools compared to the Netherlands but also that the condition of being recognized as a Körperschaft öffentlichen Rechts is a serious impediment for accommodating claims of ‘new,’ ‘strange,’ and ‘small’ religious minorities more generally.

Such a debate can certainly help to confront our taken-for-granted assumptions with other per­spectives: European religious liberties look different when compared with a multi-religious society like India (even if not explicitly mentioned in Bhargava’s paper) and its practices of accommodation and vice versa. And the participants in the debate obviously agree upon a common definition of the “problem” that Europe faces: namely to socially, legally, and politically integrate its ethnic and religious minorities, especially its Muslims.

But here the consensus comes to an end. I would say it necessarily comes to an end, because no ultimate proofs are available for value judgments. As value judgments they themselves are inherently “flawed.” What can help us to understand the conditions and to assess the consequences of certain forms of “secularism,” of state regulations on religion and related social institutions and societal practices, is com­parative empirical research rather than the exchange of normative positions (or the substitution of normative concepts). Such research would have to be a common endeavor of scholars from different parts of the world. And it would imply that they take note of the research that is already available in a variety of languages, but has not been translated into English and therefore does not exist in the global discourse.

The problem of normative approaches is visible in the ongoing debate on the “crisis of secularism in Western Europe” as well. One of the problems is that the reality of the so-called “moderate” secularism(s) of Europe on the one side is compared to an abstract principle, called “principled distance,” on the other. Veit Bader has rightly pointed out—and Rajeev Bhargava would probably agree—that the practice of Indian secularism, which this principle relates to, is no less ambivalent than in the different cases of European secularisms, even if the problems are not the same everywhere. But then we would have to compare practices with practices rather than practices with principles. On top of that, more than one or two types of European secularism exist. Different traditions of secularism, secularity, and religion-state relations exist in Western Europe (not to mention in Eastern Europe), with different consequences in practice. Saying this does not neglect common concerns, the integration of migrants being one of the most eminent.

Another problem of value judgments is that concrete examples are usually given in order to support a claim instead of exploring the conditions and effects of a certain phenomenon. In a world where English has to serve as a substitute for the languages which we ourselves don’t speak (may they be Hindi, French, Arabic, Russian, German or any other language), we have to rely on volumes and articles in English that give us overviews on world-wide developments. However, the examples presented there do not always paint an accurate picture of the reality in different countries and regions. Sometimes this is due to a lack of information, sometimes it is because the primary interest in practices of discrimination does not always allow for differentiated perspectives and ambivalent results.

Even if Rajeev Bhargava is correct in his general statement that European countries (and their “secularisms”) have fundamental problems with including Muslims, he is not so in regard to some of his examples. I just refer to the German examples that he gives: Muslim private schools are indeed rare in Germany, but if they are acknowledged by the state, they do get state funding. For example, this is the case with a Muslim elementary school in Berlin. However, private schools in Germany are not as important as they are in other countries. As far as religion in school is concerned, it may be much more important to see how the integration of Islamic education in public schools develops. This process is moving along slowly; however it is ongoing. Some federal states have started to offer Islamic education in the universities, an important step toward the inclusion of Islamic theology faculties alongside the Christian theology faculties that have always been part of German academia.

Bhargava highlights prohibitions against ritual slaughter as another example of discrimination. Here again, reality is more complicated. In Germany, slaughtering an animal without prior anesthesia is generally prohibited for reasons of animal protection. However, exceptions to this rule are granted for reasons of religious freedom. This has been confirmed in Supreme Court rulings of 1985 and 2002 that dealt with the case of a Muslim butcher, and was reaffirmed in a government statement in 2010. It is true that prior to 1985, exceptions were given to Jewish butchers rather than to Muslim ones. And still, there are insecurities when the administrative courts have to decide over such exceptions and over the number of animals to be ritually slaughtered. To speak of discrimination in general, however, does not match the reality. The inclusion of animal protection—like environmental protection—as a constitutional norm was only possible after the Constitutional Court had decided positively over the Muslim butcher’s case in 1985. Here again, the societal debate is highly controversial. Not only animal protection groups, but also right wing groups interpret these rulings as signs of political correctness. Nevertheless, they exist and are practiced.

The third example that Bhargava gives involves the construction of mosques. As far as the law is concerned, such construction is subject to the same zoning and land regulations that govern the construction of other houses of prayer. There certainly is no legal discrimination, and applications to build mosques are usually approved if the formal requirements are fulfilled. However, this does not mean that no problems exist. The announcement that a mosque is planned to be built often leads to protests among the population; and often this protest is fuelled by right-wing groups. In some cases of conflict, the initiators ultimately withdraw their construction plans. In other cases however, the conflict has been given an institutionalized form (for example through public hearings), where both sides were able to express their concerns. As Jörg Hüttermann has shown in his study “the Minaret,” the outcome of these hearings may very well be positive: the conflicting groups begin to acknowledge each other and to envisage concrete persons instead of vague dangers. This institutionalization could be interpreted as an example of direct “state intervention” into majority/minority-affairs (see Bhargava’s essay), but it is rather the moderation of a community process.

I do not list these examples in order to neglect the difficulties that migrants, especially Muslims, are facing today in Germany as well as in other European countries. Discrimination is a serious problem in many of them. However, the examples indicate that things are not as clear-cut as they seem, and that the outcome of current conflicts depends on a variety of factors. Tariq Modood certainly could list further examples from Britain, with its stronger multiculturalist practice, for example the growing inclusion of Muslim chaplains in correctional facilities.

Even France, which has repeatedly been the object of “bashing” due to its “affaire des foulards” and its ban on the public wearing of the burqa, in a not too distant past was widely looked upon as a positive example because of its integrative model of citizenship. The principle of “jus soli” and the practice of integration attached to it were then considered to be much better able to integrate newcomers than, for example, the German principle of “jus sanguinis.” And for quite some time the French model seemed to fulfill this function rather well. Let us not forget that the “affaire des foulards” in the beginning was not simply a majority vs. minority conflict. The headmaster of the school in Creil who prohibited Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in the classrooms was himself a migrant from the Antilles. One could say that he sought to uphold a principle under which he himself was able to succeed. And the school, up to then, had been quite successful in integrating minorities. Even here, the minority/majority relation seems much more complicated than the language of discrimination indicates.

This does not imply that I consider the ban on headscarves in schools or the burqa verdict reasonable. However, the story of Creil and its results remind us that it might be useful to take the cultural memory of a society into account in order to better understand the dynamics underlying struggles over religion and secularity. Due to such cultural memory, these struggles themselves have a normative imprint that is perceptible in the way people respond to certain phenomena—in what they defend and what they attack. Normativity here comes into play as part of the reality itself, as something that we need to understand in order to grasp the social dynamics of the reality under investigation. Max Weber has called this “Verstehen” and saw it as a prerequisite for attempts at explanation. This does not mean that we need to like what we get to see. But my impression is that approaching the reality already from a normative perspective limits what we get to see, because we put things into ready-made boxes of discrimination and non-discrimination.

I do not question the value of normative theory for legal and constitutional concerns, and for political theory, even if this is not my field of expertise. For empirically grounded comprehension and explanation of societal and political processes, institutions, and practices, however, it seems to me that its use is limited. In this respect I do not see how the substitution of meta-languages, which Veit Bader suggests, would make much of a difference.

My colleagues and I, in a research group at the University of Leipzig, suggest an approach to the variety of relations between the secular and the religious through the lens of “multiple modernities” and their respective “multiple secularities.” This approach attends to the diversity of cultural conditions and prerequisites of institutionalized secularity as well as to the impact that the encounter with certain “Western” types of modernity has had. Further, it considers the diversity of cultural embeddings of secularity and the guiding ideas that are connected to them. As a first step, we distinguished four types of secularity: secularity for the sake of individual liberty; secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity; secularity for the sake of societal integration and national development; and secularity for the sake of the independent development of societal sub-spheres. These are ideal-typical distinctions, in reality they may overlap and conflict with each other. However, as ideal types (not normative ideals) they may help us better understand some of the driving forces of the conflicts that we face. Secularity—in this perspective—is value-laden in reality, because it is “about something,” and this explains its blind spots as well as the fierceness of some present conflicts. If the differentiation between the religious and the secular is motivated by the guiding idea of individual liberties, other motives (like group interests or national integration) may remain in the background or even be neglected. If, on the other hand, secularity is guided by the idea of accommodating group diversity, individual rights or the independence of societal spheres may in turn be neglected. These assertions could be illustrated by a variety of different constellations in countries or regions. One could also identify “critical junctures” (Kuru), in which dominant patterns and motives undergo change: The Netherlands seems to be a good example of a shift from a focus on group balance accompanied by an early debate on tolerance and by practices of non-interference, toward a focus on individual liberties, accompanied by a strong process of secularization in the population, and finally a shift toward issues of national integration and progress with an accompanying secularist ideology. This example shows that secularity can change its meaning under certain conditions.

This, however, is an empirical enterprise, and these concepts have to prove their usefulness in research and theorizing. The Indian case—in its empirical reality and with its normative underpinnings—is definitely one of the most interesting cases of secularity (in our terminology) for the sake of balancing religious diversity. But this does not make it a normative model for Western European societies. They will follow their own paths, whether we like it or not.

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular institution (i.e., a secular university). Would we say, therefore, that I am displaying the embodied aptitudes and habits of a secular person, and that a study of the educational techniques employed at the university would tells us how secular subjects are formed? If that were the case, then why, despite the plethora of studies on the education system in the U.S., do we not feel quite comfortable when asked to describe the embodied aptitudes of a secular subject? I should clarify before I go further that the notion of “secular” I employ here does not stand in opposition to “religious”; rather, informed by the path-breaking inquiries of the two scholars whose work I want to engage here, the anthropologist Talal Asad and the political theorist William Connolly, I understand the secular as a concept that articulates a constellation of institutions, ideas, and affective orientations that constitute an important dimension of what we call modernity and its defining forms of knowledge and practice—both religious and non-religious. The secular is, in Asad’s words, “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism,” and it is therefore part of the background presupposed by our routine ways of distinguishing secular from religious in law, politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

But let me return to the reflection I had going. I had suggested a little unease with the idea of sending a student off to the university classroom as a site in which to study the formation of the embodied capacities of secular subjects. What about the psychoanalyst’s couch? Or the gym at the YMCA? Or a training seminar for advertising executives? Clearly some of the habits and attitudes honed within such sites of modern self-fashioning must qualify as “secular.” But again the question is begged: what are we implying—conceptually, historically, institutionally—when we designate such affects and attitudes (I am using a copious vocabulary of embodiment) as secular, as opposed to, say, “modern, or “liberal,” perhaps”? I don’t think an answer to this question is readily forthcoming, and the problem is not simply one of an adequate definition.

One reason for our hesitation and uncertainty around this question undoubtedly owes to the difficulty of establishing an analytical distance from what is clearly a foundational dimension of modern life. The secular is the water we swim in. It is for this reason that Talal Asad, in the “Introduction” to his Formations of the Secular, cautions us against approaching it directly, suggesting instead that  “it is best pursued through its shadows.” In this regard, my starting question—What is a secular body?—is blindingly direct, and therefore a rather blunt analytical instrument. That said, I still think it may have its use, less in terms of the answers we are able to give to it than by the kinds of resistance we encounter when we try. That is, to follow where this question runs aground, where it is deflected, postponed, perhaps where it becomes obtuse, uninteresting, may help us to elucidate some of the contours of the concept we are concerned with. Is it the wrong question to ask? Does it force us to rethink our models of embodiment, habitus, sensibility? An answer to these questions could be very useful for getting a better grasp of the secular.

I have chosen to focus on the works of Talal Asad and Bill Connolly because of the impact these works have had on how we have come to pose questions about the secular and secularism. Moreover, within the respective analytical frameworks they have developed, they have strongly foregrounded issues of embodiment—Asad privileging notions of sensibility and attitude, Connolly building a rich and heterogeneous philosophical vocabulary of the passions from such sources as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, among others. In what follows, I want to explore the question I raised above by means of the analyses put forward by these scholars concerning the embodied character of the secular.  In this regard, my goal here is very modest. I ask: What kind of answers do we find in the work of these two scholars to the question, “What is a secular body”? And what might these answers—or refusals to answer—tell us about the practical and conceptual contours of the secular and secularism?

II

Let me start by noting that, while the secular body may remain something of an enigma, we do know quite a lot about the techniques that different religious traditions have developed in order to hone a pious sensorium, i.e., the embodied aptitudes and affects necessary for the achievement of a virtuous life as defined by those traditions. One of the richest and most influential examples of such scholarship is Asad’s own pioneering work on techniques of the body practiced by medieval Christian monks. Extending insights from Marcel Mauss’s writings on body techniques and Foucault’s inquiries into Greek and Christian arts of self-cultivation, Asad examined a variety of disciplinary exercises and techniques of self-cultivation (in short, ritual practices) by which medieval Christians sought to reshape their wills, desires, and emotions in accord with authoritative standards of virtue. I mention this work here because it provides an extremely useful model for thinking about the interrelation of knowledge, practice, and embodiment within a tradition, directing us to forms of collective and individual discipline and to the concepts of self and body that inform them. It is interesting, therefore to note at the outset that, despite an emphasis on embodied modes of appraisal in both Asad’s Formations and Connolly’s Why I am not a Secularist, descriptions of self-cultivation or practices of self-discipline are largely (though not entirely, as I note below) absent from both texts. That is, we find very little in these works in regard, not only to how the sensibilities and visceral modes of judgment of secular subjects are cultivated, but to how they give shape to and find expression in a secular life? Admittedly, a cautious approach to this issue is entirely warranted in light of how new and unfamiliar the secular is as a research problem. Nonetheless, I want to look at certain points in these texts where this question is most directly addressed. One word of warning: the few comments I will make on Asad’s and Connolly’s writings barely scratch the surface of these immensely rich books.

Why I am not a Secularist combines an analysis of secular discourses on ethics, politics, and language with an attempt to show how an engagement with traditions that incorporate an appreciation for affective and visceral registers of existence can be used to generate resources for a productive and necessary revision of secular thinking. Not surprisingly, most of Connolly’s exploration of the embodied character of political judgment is focused on thinkers who stand at some remove from the dominant currents of secular thought, while his treatment of secular arguments tends overall to emphasize the dangers and limitations of their failing to thematize the visceral register. There are, however, certain points in his discussion where the question of a secular bodily ethics comes up. Informed in part by Asad’s account of monastic disciplinary techniques, Connolly writes: “it may be important to understand how representational discourse itself, including the public expression and defense of fundamental beliefs, affects and is affected by the visceral register of intersubjectivity. Public discourses do operate within dense linguistic fields that specify how beliefs are to be articulated and tested and how ethical claims are to be redeemed. But repetitions and defenses of these articulations also write scripts upon prerepresentational sites of appraisal.” The practice of articulating and defending secular political claims, he suggests here, serves to mold and deepen the affective attachments that passionally bind one to the secular form of life those claims uphold. This is one of the few locations where Connolly connects his conceptual analysis of the secular with a kind of institutional practice, albeit a highly discourse-centered one. The question to ask, it seems to me, is: Why, in a book so centered around the task of rethinking secular politics, is there so little attention to the affective attachments that secure the authority of secular political judgments? I will come back to this later.

Perhaps the most visceral element of the secular discourses identified by Connolly is their rejection of the visceral dimension itself. Kantian and neo-Kantian political philosophies devalue forms of life that give priority to their own sensory dimensions, a standpoint that secures the possibility of regulating the place of religion in public life insomuch as religion is understood to privilege this passional, sensual register. Indeed, for Connolly the value of religious traditions for political thought today lies precisely in the resources such traditions offer for thinking about the contribution of affective experience to shaping our practices of political judgment and reason. Secularism suffers, in his view, from its failure to thematize the place of what he calls the infrasensible register—affects and dispositions operating below the threshold of consciousness—within its own style of reasoning.

Kant’s marginalization of Christian theology in favor of a “rational religion” grounded in moral reasoning is a key moment, in Connolly’s account, in the philosophical development of this moral repulsion for the visceral. As he notes, Kant “degrades ritual and arts of the self without eliminating them altogether, for these arts work on the ‘sensibility’ rather than drawing moral obligation from the supersensible realm as practical reason does. The point is to deploy them just enough to render crude sensibilities better equipped to accept the moral law drawn from practical reason. Secularists later carry this Kantian project of diminishment a step or two further.”

I want to pause on this point to ask where it might lead us in thinking about a secular sensorium, or about the sensibilities that give shape to a secular life. Kant’s treatment of the question of sensibility is guided and limited by his primary aim of securing the purity of the moral will, its protection from what are seen to be the contaminating effects of sensible desire. This is achieved through his positing of a two-world metaphysic that ensures the autonomy of the moral will by assigning it to the domain of the supersensible while circumscribing the role of the passions and habits to the sphere of sensible life. Honed sensibilities and practices of self-cultivation do have a positive function in disciplining the cruder drives within the self, but they never directly contribute to moral reasoning. As Kant notes, in a comment cited by Connolly: “Ethical gymnastics, therefore, consists only in combating natural impulses sufficiently to be able to master them when a situation comes up in which they threaten morality; hence it makes one valiant and cheerful in the consciousness of one’s restored freedom.”

One place where we do find in Kant a discussion of sensibilities, and hence a text that might point us toward a conception of a secular sensorium, is in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. While the question of sensibilities is discussed in many parts of that text, here I will simply mention one particular, and highly ritualistic, moment, the dinner party scene, in which Kant lays out a set of guidelines for the dinner host to follow in order to engender the sort of civilized sociability that befits Kantian rational beings: topics that may engender more violent passions among the guests must be avoided at all costs (as must music!); the thread of a conversation must not be interrupted until it has reached its natural conclusion; “deadly silence” must be strictly avoided. Overall, the goal is to maintain a conversational tone that befits a “well-bred, partly sensuous and partly ethicointellectual, human being,” so as to harmonize the inclination to good living with the inclination to virtue and the moral law such that the former does not hinder the latter.

Following Connolly, I would read Kant’s dinner party rules as a pedagogical device geared to disciplining the emotions and attitudes of a secular subject. Why secular (again, as opposed to, say, modern)? If I understand Connolly correctly, it is because the style of restrained emotional expression that Kant encourages provides a normative image of public reason against which the more passional forms of sociability and knowledge associated with religious sects are found to be inadequate, and thus subject to regulation in accord with the doctrine of political secularism. We might say, the secular subject—the Kantian dinner host—is one whose speech and comportment incorporates a recognition of the distinctions authorized by the twin categories of religious and secular. Put differently, a secular person is someone whose affective-gestural repertoires express a negative relation to forms of embodiment historically associated with (but not limited to) theistic religion.

I am trying here to delineate a path that Connolly’s work opens up for asking about what I first called the secular body. While the path seemed clear at the outset, it now appears far less so, for the following reason. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a variety of social transformations took place that are key to our understanding of the emergence of the modern subject, among them, the desensualization of knowledge as described by Ong, the stilling of passionate expression within courtly society that Elias has examined, and, more generally, the increasing internalization of psychic and emotional life within bourgeois society, the transfer of vast realms of experience from the surface of public life into the invisible depths of the lonely individual. These conceptual and social transformations, to which Kant contributed, were not the result of a single overarching process, but were propelled by different, if sometimes interlinking, historical trajectories, circumstances, and problems. In light of this, and recognizing the indebtedness of Kant’s own viewpoints on reason and the senses to these prior developments, should we say that these transformations are part of the genealogy of the secular? To say so, it seems, would entail losing a great deal of the specificity and historical locatedness of that term. So, what aspects of the modern soul are properly secular, and to which history of the body should they be ascribed?

Let me see if I can develop this line of inquiry further by drawing on some of the arguments put forward by Talal Asad in Formations of the Secular. Let me start by saying a little about what I take Asad to mean be the “the secular.” In his chapter on an “Anthropology of Secularism,” which I will focus on here, he states: “I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.” To explore these dimensions of the secular, he examines shifts in the grammar of a number of concepts—myth, the sacred, pain, the human—concepts that articulate practices we have come to identify as secular. The practices that he takes as secular, in other words, are so, not simply because they are non-religious, but because they have been discursively identified and valorized through the discourse of secularism (as distinct from the political doctrine). For Asad, a practice is not secular because it stands in a particular relation to the political doctrine of secularism. Rather, the historical discourse of the secular, as predicated on the opposition religious/secular, is integral to the grammar of the concepts he examines.

Let me draw on two examples from this first chapter in order to pursue the question of secular embodiment. In one section, Asad explores how shifts in the grammar of the concept of myth contributed to the development of the secular tradition of Romantic poetry. For poets such as Blake and Coleridge, the “mythic method,” as Asad refers to it, provided a secular means by which spiritual truths could be accessed and given expression. Instead of the virtue of faith, such poetic geniuses needed only to tune into their deep inner feelings and express these sincerely. Elaborating on these Romantic notions, Asad notes, “This may help to explain the prevalence among Victorian unbelievers of what Stefan Collini calls ‘a rhetoric of sincerity.’ For not only was the idea of being true to oneself conceived of as a moral duty, it also presupposed the existence of a secular self whose sovereignty had to be demonstrated through acts of sincerity. The self’s secularity consisted in the fact that it was the precondition of transcendent (poetic or religious) experience and not its product.” I call attention to this section because it provides an example of what might be called a practice of secular self-fashioning: the honing of a rhetoric of sincerity as necessary to the cultivation of the secular subject. Moreover, there are interesting parallels to be drawn between the romantic emphasis on sincerity and the Protestant concern for the sincerity of speech within ritual professions of faith. But why does Asad not develop this line of inquiry, especially in light of how important such question were within his work on medieval monasticism? Why, I ask, are there so few descriptions of practices in a book explicitly focused on the sensory and embodied dimensions of the secular?

A number of the chapters in Formations explore different aspects of the changing grammar of pain. One element of this change concerns a turning away from a Christian discourse on sin and punishment in ministering to pain and the development, in contrast, of a scientific vocabulary and experimental methods for addressing pain.  “In this example,” Asad writes, referring to Rosalind Rey’s discussion of pain during the Enlightenment, “the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language (“religious obsessions”) but the shift to a new preoccupation—from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body.”  As Asad emphasizes, the new practices surrounding pain and suffering are not adequately grasped in terms of the notion of “disenchantment”—as a secularist narrative asserts—“when what is at stake are different patterns of sensibility about pain, and different ways of objectifying it.” Asad pursues this inquiry into the secularization of pain and the shifting attitudes, sensibilities, and knowledges that have propelled it from a variety of different angles, as it bears, for example, on the practice of human rights, on the conduct of war, on childbirth, on sadomasochism. Given my limited space here, let me stay with his discussion of the emergence of an experimental science of pain. We recognize in Asad’s account of the secularization of pain, with its new sensibilities, styles of objectification, mechanistic concepts of the body and its processes, the basis for contemporary biomedical practice. As we know, biomedical models and forms of reasoning play an immense and growing role in modern society, in terms of both the institutions that regulate the many facets of our lives that fall under the rubric of “health” as well as concepts and practices through which we understand and respond to many dimensions of our experience. In this light, would it be correct to state that the regime of knowledge and power that we call “biomedical” plays a significant role in constituting the secular, and that the disciplinary exercises and institutions put into play by this regime shape us—our attitudes, our visceral reasoning, our patterned hierarchies of the senses—as secular people? In putting forward this suggestion, I am undoubtedly pushing Asad’s cautious and careful inquiry well beyond the kinds of claim he would embrace—but I am interested in trying to ascertain why such an expansion of what we refer to as “secular” strikes us as unjustified or wrong (if indeed it does).

One reason for resisting the equation of biomedicine with the secular would be that we lose a grasp of what is unique to secularity, that the genealogy of the secular becomes fused with and indistinguishable from the genealogy of the modern. We lose an understanding of the way the practice of distinguishing religious from secular gives impetus to the set of shifts that constitute the secular—and hence we lose a sense of precisely what is secular about our contemporary biomedical practices. In other words, the secular dimension of them, the way that they embed a form of reasoning that has its historical basis in the production and mobilization of the religious/secular opposition escapes us. From this perspective, we are right to call our regime of health “secular” but we are not in a position to understand what this entails, lacking as we do, an adequate analysis of how we got here.

In this light, my original question—Is there a secular body?—appears not wrong but premature. We could now understand what I have traced as a certain hesitation and reluctance to give flesh to a secular subject within Asad’s and Connolly’s writing as being founded in a recognition of the danger entailed in posing this question too quickly.

My sense in reading these two subtle inquiries into the secular, however, is that the authors’ reticence to speak about the embodied capacities and dispositions of a secular subject is not just the result of scholarly prudence, but that it reflects, rather, something about the concept of the secular. What we have seen is that, each time we attempt to characterize a secular subject in terms of a determinant set of embodied dispositions, we lose a sense of what “secular” refers to. Note as well that, while the statement, “He lives a very religious life” gives us some sense of the shape of a life, “He lives a very secular life” tells us almost nothing (except, negatively, that the person does not engage in practices of worship). In contrast, when we speak about secular history, or secular time, or secular literature, or even a secular discourse on pain, we seem to know our way about—in a Wittgensteinian sense of having a feel for the use of our term within certain language games.

To this point, I have attempted to trace out some of the various ways that our attempts to speak about, or theorize, a secular body encounter resistance. What might this resistance tell us about our category of the secular? In the space that remains, I want to explore one possible direction toward an answer to this question.

In both Asad’s and Connolly’s writings, the secular identity of a practice is not simply due to its philosophical foundations—its grounding in a rationalist, empiricist, or materialist perspective, for example. Rather, the practices they explore under the rubric of the secular are those that have emerged through a process of differentiation structured by the binaries of religion/secular, belief/knowledge, sacred/profane, and so on. This is not simply to say that the categories of religious and secular are historically entwined, or that they are reciprocally defining (like man and woman, for example), but that the secular marks a relational dynamic more than an identity. We might restate this argument to say that, at least in many cases, a practice or a sensibility that we designate “secular” is one that depends upon, one that cannot be abstracted from, the secularist narrative of the progressive replacement of religious error by secular reason—what Asad calls the “triumphalist narrative of secularism.” Or, again, in a slightly different formulation, a secular sensibility is one considered from the standpoint of its contribution to that progressivist narrative.

Let me try to clarify this point through an example. Take the tradition of Romantic poetry discussed by Asad. Asad’s account of the emergence of this tradition focuses on a number of early nineteenth-century developments in aesthetic, religious, and scientific practice, including the development of a secular discourse on the meaning of inspiration, and new uses of the idea of myth within both historical and fictional genres of writing. Why is the history of Romantic poetry a starting point for Asad in his attempt to develop an anthropology of the secular? On one hand, this tradition allows Asad to challenge accounts of a necessary or natural superseding of the religious by the secular, by exploring some of the historical contingencies that together enabled a new, so-called secular practice to emerge. More importantly, it is a tradition that owes its aesthetic values to a particular authorizing narrative, one highlighting the movement from religious to secular (from the prophet to the poet; from divine inspiration to creative genius). The sensibilities that the romantic poet’s work gave expression to, and which shaped his audience’s cultivated response, I want to suggest, depended on the rhetoric of secularization (the forward movement from error to truth) as a condition of their exercise. (It is worth noting here that many modern practices, be they aesthetic or social or political, are not subject to the play of the secular/religious opposition, and are not validated by reference to this binarism.)

How does the account of the secular I am suggesting here bear on the problem of the secular sensorium, or what I called the secular body? Let me try to answer this by reference to one particular tradition for thinking embodiment, that afforded by the Aristotelian notions of habitus and virtue. In my earlier book, The Ethical Soundscape, I explored how this tradition had contributed to shaping an Islamic practice of listening to sermons in contemporary Egypt, both in the ritual context of Friday worship and outside the mosque through the audition of cassette recorded sermons. As I described in that book, many people listen to sermons as a means of ethical self-improvement, a way to reinforce and deepen not only their knowledge of Islamic doctrines but also the ethical emotions and attitudes they understand as enabling correct styles of speech, comportment, and moral judgment. Coupled with the proliferation of new listening practices among ordinary Egyptians, sermon tapes provided one of the means by which Islamic ethical traditions were recalibrated to a new political and technological order, to its rhythms, noise, its forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements, its call to citizenly participation. In contrast to a space for the formation of political opinion through intersubjective reason, the discursive arena wherein cassette sermons circulate, I argued, is geared to the deployment of the disciplining power of ethical speech, a goal, however, that takes public deliberation as one of its modalities. Within this context, public speech results not in policy, but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of Islamic virtues and, therefore, of Islamic ethical comportment. The cassette-listeners I worked with sought to forge a habitus—in their terms, such virtues of modesty, humility, and fear of God—that would allow them to achieve excellence in the practices that they saw as essential to Islamic traditions of ethical reasoning, and thus to the revitalization and maintenance of an Islamic society.

Romantic poets, of course, also sought to hone skills that would allow them to achieve excellence in the aesthetic practices they undertook. What distinguishes these two contexts? Sermon listening takes place in and contributes to a tradition of moral reasoning, with its internal notions of the good and a changing repertoire of practices by which the good is to be achieved. The honed sensibilities of the Romantic poet, on the other hand, contribute to the project of the secular only insomuch as they are grasped as part of the movement of negation and overcoming by which the secular emerges from the religious. We might say that the poetic sensibilities themselves are not secular (nor religious, for that matter), but they can be encompassed and appropriated within the narrative of the secular emancipation from religion. They are sensibilities that fit into the game of secularism.

III

The secularist movement as it developed in the mid-nineteenth century encompassed both positive and negative impulses. Its founders, most importantly Robert Owen and G. J. Holyoake, sought, on the positive side, to uncover a new system of moral truth, founded on rationalist, utilitarian, and materialist principles. As Holyoake wrote in 1853: “Secularism is the province of the real, the known, the useful, and the affirmative. It is the practical side of skepticism.” Its negative side lay in its relentless attack on what early secularists called the “speculative error” of religion. The career of our concept of the secular has been shaped by this double vocation, one in which the positive attempt to ground an ethical and epistemological foundation remains dependent on a negative gesture whereby the forms of knowledge and practice posited as religious are continuously overcome. While these twin movements have played an immense role in shaping what we recognize and valorize as the secular-modern, they also account for a kind of instability at the heart of the secular, one evident in the difficulties we encounter when asking about the secular body.

IV

Let me conclude these rather tentative and exploratory reflections by suggesting why such an inquiry is important, particularly for scholars of Islam. It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that any study of contemporary religious traditions necessitates some engagement with religion’s dialectical partner, the secular, understood as a key dimension of the moral, social, and political transformations that have shaped global modernity. Yet, while we have a good understanding of how the doctrine of political secularism—the state-imposed legal separation of religion and politics—has impacted the conceptual and practical development of religious life in many contexts, including Islamic ones, such as in Turkey, Egypt, or Indonesia, we have little sense of the social ontology of the secular, and the kinds of practices, sensibilities, and knowledges that it opens up. Moreover, and as I hope I have made clear, to assimilate the secular to the modern, as has often been the scholarly approach, tells us very little about a key constitutive dimension of modernity.

In preparing for this conversation, we did not set the task of doing justice to the scope and subtlety of these texts but aimed instead to use them as a starting point for taking stock of and thinking about the ground that has been covered in the critical study of secularism since their original publication. What follows here are five questions that emerged for me in re-reading Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular. They aim to draw together common themes, underline divergences, and generally open Asad’s and Connolly’s texts again for discussion.

First question: What is secularism?

It sounds naive, but disagreement about the basic significance of “secularism” is a recurrent problem in today’s discussions. There may, however, be important reasons for the muddle that besets critical literatures on “the secular,” “secularity,” “secularism,” and “secularization,” sending them around this question again and again.

Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular, at any rate, remain two of the most striking, ambitious, and important restatements of the problem of secularism. To be sure, they acknowledge and grapple with the persistence of familiar and, in some sense, indispensable answers: That secularism is simply the separation of church and state. That it is, more specifically, a form of separation that makes religion private while making power and reason public. That secularism is an ideology. That it is an institutional formation that governs the conduct of individuals and communities. Yet they also show how such answers are insufficiently accurate, woefully unhistorical, and incomplete in more fundamental ways.

In reframing the question, Formations argues not about secularism per se but about “the secular,” and, in Asad’s words, “it is a major premise of this study that ‘the secular’ is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of ‘secularism,’ that over time a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form ‘the secular.’” In Formations, the secular is substantial and concrete. It is a possible object of anthropological analysis. It has a discernible grammar, but it is also historically layered, at times contradictory, quite complex, and best approached indirectly. By way of comparison with “the secular,” secularism is relatively easy to locate as a “concept” and a “doctrine” bound together with, or “centrally located within,” a concept of “modernity” that has recently “become hegemonic as a political goal,” however unequally it is attained in practice around the globe. But “the secular” is not reducible to secularism, and it bears upon rudimentary attitudes toward the human body, contributes to specific ways of training, cultivating, and structuring the senses, and grounds operative conceptions of the human. These formations of the secular enter into complex and at times even contradictory relations with the world’s institutional varieties of secularism, but also with its religious traditions.

In turn, Why I Am Not a Secularist argues neither about secularism per se nor about “the secular,” but instead about the “conceits of secularism” harbored within the intellectual, spiritual, and political configurations of today’s secularists. Secularists prefer to connect secularism to the European experience of toleration among diverse forms of Christianity, “because it paints the picture of a self-sufficient public realm fostering freedom and governance without recourse to a specific religious faith.” And the idea of “secularism” emerges from secularists’ self-presentations as partisans of freedom within the bounds of public reason. Perhaps more precisely, wherever secularism comes from, it can be engaged as a particular political ideal, voiced in a certain way, by an identifiable constituency. As a preliminary definition, secularism is an idealized vision of political life that “strains metaphysics out of politics” and “dredges out of public life as much cultural density and depth as possible” in order to secure the authority of public reason and a rational morality, and the legitimacy of both to govern within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state until such a time as they can govern universally.

Formations and Not a Secularist both approach secularism indirectly by sounding out the oblique tendencies, layered sensibilities, and obscured histories that together incline discourses, communities, and individuals toward or away from certain forms of secularism, which in turn appears as an unstable and mutable formation. To draw questions from this: To what extent is secularism itself an essentially contested concept that is constantly open to reconfiguration? In what ways has the operative significance of secularism shifted in the last ten years? To what extent has it become important to contest or defend new aspects of the secular and new turns of secularism in line with these changes?

Second question: How is secularism related to Christianity?

Charles Taylor, in his recent book A Secular Age, makes a subtle argument about the emergence of a secular age that inherits and perfects the Christian, though Hegel seems to have put a similar thesis in bolder form in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which conclude with the following formulations: “the last stage in History, our world, our own time,” is one in which “Secular life is the positive and definite embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom,” such that “what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work.” The roughly two hundred years between Hegel and Taylor have seen an almost endless variety of attempts to capture the connections between Christendom and Europe or Euro-America. In more and less sophisticated registers, and in a number of important contexts, secularism’s relation to Christianity, the West, and modernity remain live questions.

If Not a Secularist brilliantly diagnoses modern secularism as a distinctly Kantian arrangement, marked by a particular kind of emphasis on the authority and self-sufficiency of public reason, I would like to suggest that what could be called a “Hegelian secularism” has been gaining ground recently. Where Kantian secularists emphasize the detachment of secular reason from religious tradition, Hegelian secularists emphasize the work done by a specifically Christian religious tradition in preparing secular reason, and thus the continuity between this tradition and modern secularism. Secularist discourses today tend to flicker between Hegelian and Kantian modes, pitching secularism at times as an extension of Christianity and at times as a rebuke to Christianity, though these two modes do not seem to be mutually exclusive.

When Formations of the Secular approaches the intersection of secularism (conceived as a modern pattern of organizing public life) with religion (conceived as part of an older tradition), it draws attention to the ways in which a historically specific concept of “the secular” places religions in a hierarchical order. It brings to light, in other words, how some kinds of religion are determined to be compatible with liberal, democratic modernity, while others are not. To quote, “when it is proposed that religion can play a positive ethical role in modern society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever, but only to those religions that are able and willing to enter the public sphere for the purpose of rational debate with opponents who are to be persuaded rather than coerced.” The question here is not as much, “How is secularism connected to Christianity?” but more, “How does secularism’s connection with modern Christianity shape its interactions with other religious traditions?”

Not a Secularist broaches the same problem in two key ways: in thinking about a specifically Christian form of nationalism particular to American politics, and through its engagement with Immanuel Kant. To quickly follow this second thread, a significant measure of Kantian moral and political thought inherits the concepts and commitments of the Judaic and Christian traditions, as well as their confusions—problems, in particular, with the fundamental conceptions of freedom, responsibility, and will. To quote, “The priority of the will today points to metaphysical continuity between the old regime of Christendom and the secular modus vivendi fashioned out of that regime.” Not a Secularist identifies parts of the Christian tradition that remain active within the dense philosophical, cultural, and political background of modern secularism. Rather than arguing that a generic Christianity—or, slightly more specifically, Protestant Christianity—set the conditions for modern secularity, it seems to suggest that Kantian secularism and, for example, Augustinian Christianity emerge as responses to the human predicament, each with possibilities and limitations, some of which are shared.

To draw this into a question, in revisiting Formations and Not a Secularist today, it seems important to ask: Are Euro-American secular discourses becoming more Hegelian and less Kantian, meaning that they increasingly tie secularism strongly to Christianity and to a story about western civilization, rather than to the exclusion of metaphysics and the purity of reason? If so, what new problems does such a reorientation present?

Third question: When are pain and suffering a part of the secular?

Meditations on pain and suffering are central to the arguments of Not a Secularist and Formations, and both books characterize secularism in relation to pain and suffering almost independently of secularism’s commonplace foil and complement, namely, religion. Not a Secularist and Formations agree that a key motivation for secularism is the perceived need to manage and potentially eliminate pain and suffering. Not a Secularist argues that secularists often blind themselves to certain forms of pain and suffering, and Formations adds that secular liberal democracies harbor profound contradictions with respect to pain, which appear when they inflict unavowable suffering, for example, through torture. These books differ, however, insofar as Formations attributes the imperative to master and eliminate pain to a highly specific formation of the secular, while Not a Secularist frames the response to suffering as part of the human predicament. To quote the latter, “People suffer. We suffer from illness, disease, unemployment, dead-end jobs, bad marriages, the loss of loved ones, social relocation, tyranny, police brutality, street violence, existential anxiety, guilt, envy, resentment, depression, stigmatization, rapid social change, sexual harassment, child abuse, poverty, medical malpractice, alienation, political defeat, toothaches, the loss of self-esteem, identity-panic, torture, and fuzzy categories.”

As this catalog suggests, the management of pain and suffering is an extraordinary focal point that draws together a wide range of tendencies generally taken to characterize the modern condition. For example: The biopolitical problem of governing populations through the management of bodies depends in significant part on producing, measuring, and medicalizing pain. Utilitarian or economic calculuses take pleasure and pain as the basis for public policy. After theodicy, modernity faces a new existential problem of interpreting and justifying life’s painful experiences in the perceived absence of transcendent explanations. More examples are possible.

This leads me to ask: In what sense are the responses to pain (and certain failures to respond to pain) “secular” or “secularist,” rather than, say, modern, liberal, American, capitalist, technological, medical, or simply Kantian? In other words, can something like “the secular” be reliably identified in the absence of a precise relation to “religion,” such as in the case of secular attitudes toward pain? It may be that “the secular” is approximately coextensive with “the modern” as the site and condition of almost everything in the world today, but something seems to be lost in extending the category in this way, in much the same way that something is lost through the inflation and over-extension of once precise categories of analysis, such as “Capitalism” and “Neo-liberalism,” or through the scholarly deployment of the concept of “religion,” which, as Talal Asad’s work has done so much to show, was never as accurate as it should have been. A more general way of putting this is to ask: are there identifiable conceptual and practical limits to the secular?

Fourth question: If it is not secularism, is a deep multidimensional pluralism still secular?

Not a Secularist responds to a contemporary crisis of secularism, but its argument is presented as a “cautious reconfiguration,” rather than a wholesale rejection. It suggests that authoritative images of public reason be downgraded, along with the fiction of a “post-metaphysical” political discourse and the paradigm of secularism as the strict separation of politics from religion. But to what extent is the openness to engagement with others that characterizes critical responsiveness related to “the secular,” and what connections might therefore be made between a possible deep pluralism and a non-Kantian secularism? Formations argues that “what modernity [. . .] bring[s] in is a new kind of subjectivity, one that is appropriate to ethical autonomy and aesthetic self-invention—a concept of ‘the subject’ that has a new grammar.” One can imagine that the new grammar of the subject is in important ways a secular grammar.

To put this more directly, if we’re not secularists, are we still secular? If one declines to participate in Kantian secularism—which would chiefly mean that one resists the inclination to project one’s own conceptions of public reason and morality as the sole authoritative and universally binding possibilities—and if one promotes instead a project of deep multidimensional pluralism and critical responsiveness, to what extent and in what ways does one remain secular, if not a secularist? Leaving Kantian secularists aside for the moment, is pluralism nonetheless connected to “the secular” in the sense given to this term in Formations of the Secular? Is it one distinctive possibility opened by and for the secular? And if secularism is being reconstituted today as a more explicitly and self-consciously Euro-American-Christian formation (in the Hegelian, rather than the Kantian, fashion), can this formation still be pressed toward a deep multi-dimensional pluralism?

My fifth and final question goes like this: Nation, State, Capital, Secularism?

Not a Secularist is in many ways a book about nationalism as much as it is about secularism, and it holds in focus the constant political danger that a single constituency will claim to embody and represent the nation. It argues that secularist discourse is insufficient to hold such constituencies in check, and it suggests that an ethos of multi-dimensional pluralism and egalitarianism might fare better against the dangers of nationalism. Formations analyzes similar dynamics in the context of recent European politics. Citing Jean Le Pen rather than Bill Bennett, its analysis of “Muslims as a ‘religious minority’ in Europe” discloses the ways in which European political discourses project universalism (through human rights for example) while they more quietly populate the universal with particular types of people (frenchmen, for example). In line with Bill Connolly’s longstanding project of re-articulating political pluralism, both books focus on the possibility of fostering a democratic ethos that is not premised  on a homogenous nation, nor dependent on securing the state as the key site of citizens’ allegiance, nor committed to a renewed secularization of the world. And while both texts remain guarded about the likelihood of establishing such an ethos, they strongly argue for its political necessity.

One of the points at which they differ is in their assessment of the power and durability of modern secularism. In short, Formations attributes enormous power to secularism, while Not a Secularist suggests that it is faltering. To return to my first question, part of this variance may be definitional, but part of it is related to the different connections traced between secularism, nationalism, capitalism, and the state. Both texts do extraordinary work in mapping these connections; rather than rehearsing their arguments, however, I’d like to conclude with the following questions: What are the most salient connections between secularism, global capital, nationalism and the state today? Is it any more or less possible now to articulate the relations between secularism and these other key world shaping forces than it was when these books were written? Is it important to trace them differently today? In order to contest the forms of violence and injustice particular to modern secularism, is it necessary to place secularism in connection with these other formations? How are we to think about the challenges and possibilities of doing so?