As thousands celebrated the victory of the Freedom and Justice Party—part of the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood organization—in Tahrir Square, just a few blocks away a much more somber mood prevailed.

“Let me enjoy another bottle of beer,” said an old man as he plunked some coins on the counter at a local grocery store. “Soon the Jama’a (Muslim Brotherhood) will ban it.” The store owner, Mr. Ahmad, nodded. “Allah yastur al balad, [May god protect the country]—it will be like Sudan or Pakistan.” Clearly, anxiety and divisions still persist in Egypt. The pharmacists at the nearby El-Ezaby Pharmacy also looked disillusioned. This profession in Egypt is overwhelmingly dominated by the Coptic Christian community, who represent about 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, but 90 percent of whom voted for Shafik according to exit polls.

Early in June my colleague Bruce Lawrence and I took some of our students to the African And Arab Research Center of Cairo, where a group of Cairo University professors welcomed us to a round-table discussion on the Egyptian elections. A colleague from Cairo University asked the group to help him decide who to vote for. He said he found it difficult to choose between the Muslim Brotherhood, who he said would “cloak the democratic process,” and Shafik, whose victory “would enable a second and more decisive round of the revolution because of his connections to the unpopular ruling military junta, known as the Supreme Council for Army Forces (SCAF).”

Ironically, only Professor Lawrence and I argued for Morsi while the rest, including the visiting students and the left-leaning Cairene professors opted for Shafik. Professor Lawrence cited eloquently the historical significance and momentous need for change in Egypt, and said Egyptians would never know the real Muslim Brotherhood unless they elected him. My hypothetical vote for Morsi was grounded in my overall philosophical belief in risk-taking as the most genuine path to human progress. It was and is still my belief that the economic ills of Egypt warranted assuming that risk. But many people’s justification for voting for Shafik reflected fear of the unknown. Reverting to a pre-revolutionary Egypt seemed to them a safe bet.

There has been wide speculation on the root causes of Shafik’s popularity; namely, how he carried the governorate of Cairo during the election or manage to get 48.3 percent of the vote despite his leadership status during the Mubarak years. This is not a new phenomenon for societies that have experienced radical transformations. Dispatching a message of ‘fear’ in an atmosphere of uncertainty always pays off in attracting politically-excluded minorities and business elites, as well as a large segment of the middle class. Just look at the results of South Africa’s presidential election of 1994, the US presidential elections in 2004, and Russia’s 2012 presidential election.

Shafik mobilized voters with his charismatic personality, savvy communications skills, and assurances of security by variously stating in interviews, speeches, and advertisements:

“I will clear Tahrir from the wandering kids because I love the revolution.”

“Egypt needs a leader and certainly not a sheikh.”

“Mubarak is my ideal person, but I happen not to agree with him.”

“I will give the young Tahriri revolutionaries chocolates as I love their graffiti around the cities.”

“I will bring law and order back to the streets of Egypt in 24 hours.”

There is another dimension to the popularity of Shafik. It’s psychological. He is a general, and Egypt’s modern history is a history of military leadership and war memorials. The four leaders since 1952—Muhammad Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak are all military figures, and proudly tapped into their roles in Egypt’s wars against Israel to solidify their patriotism and legitimize their leadership. It is no surprise that many of modern Cairo’s bridges and monuments are named after generals and dates of these wars.

Currently, Egypt’s political divisions are particularly evident in Cairo’s public spaces—literally the public squares. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) persisted in occupying Tahrir following the conclusion of the run-off election and managed, in this way, to re-invent Morsi as the symbol of the revolution. Preceding the election on June 12, the headline in the MB’s official newspaper Freedom and Justice introduced Morsi’s win in overseas voting as the “candidate of the revolution [who] leads throughout the Continents of the Globe.” Various groups affiliated with the Occupy Tahrir movement, mostly organized and transported by the Muslim Brotherhood, have gathered in Tahrir since the last day of the run-off campaign on June 15 and are now calling for the removal of the military Amended Constitutional Declaration, re-establishment of the dissolved parliament, and the immediate release of all political detainees.

Meanwhile pro-Shafik groups are looking for alternative physical spaces to express their views and make their voices heard. On the day of Morsi’s swearing-in ceremony, they called for a million man march of ‘Egypt above all’ in Nasr City at the Minassa Podium—where President Sadat was gunned down in 1981 during an annual victory parade by an Islamist fanatic and military infiltrator. Gathering in the Minassa and sometimes numbering in the thousands, these groups are calling for a civilian state and dissolution of the MB organization—this latter demand is in the hands of the Egyptian courts. And following Morsi’s presidential decree to re-establish the Parliament on July 8, they accused him of treason for not upholding his oath of office. While fewer women than ever before are gathering in Tahrir Square, pro-Shafik groups have been putting women at the forefront, displaying nationalistic songs and pro-military signs.

I am glad that the Egyptian people have chosen courage over fear, progress over retreat; and in the words of the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany in Al-Misri Alyawm newspaper on June 25, “the Egyptian revolution has achieved a great victory in dropping Shafik and electing Morsi.” But Morsi’s victory cannot be seen as a total mandate. The difference was only 883 thousand votes. Votes from the Egyptian diaspora might have put Morsi over the top. While Egyptians at home feel the weight and the pain of the continued revolution, the increase of crime and perturbance in their daily life, those who emigrated overseas might have voted for Morsi for other reasons. It can be argued that many votes for Morsi (in Egypt and from the diaspora) were votes against Mubarak rather than votes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is a beautiful painting on the wall of the American University in Cairo (see above)—“Tahrir Square” by the Egyptian revolutionary artist Omar Picasso in which Mubarak’s face is merged with the face of Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of SCAF, alongside the faces of Amr Moussa, the former Presidential candidate and former secretary general of the Arab League, and Shafik. Written beneath their colorful faces are the words of an Egyptian proverb, “He who left son behind is not gone yet.”

Mustafa Kamel, an Egyptian writer whose book, The Final Exit, was seen as predicting the revolt against Mubarak, echoes this view in our discussion of the matter. He said, “Shafik’s victory would have been shameful for all Egyptians, erasing all sacrifices made in the name of the revolution.”

In analyzing Morsi’s victory, however, it is not an overstatement to say that the MB’s marginal victory is worrisome for its leadership. It reflects diminishing popularity, narrowing constituencies, and a problematic connection to the young liberal revolutionaries.  The MB won roughly over 10 million votes in the November parliamentary election, carrying 37.5 seats of the total 508 parliamentary seats. The more conservative Islamist Salafi-affiliated candidates won roughly over 7 million votes, accounting for 27.8 seats. During the first round of the presidential elections the MB garnered 5,553,097 votes; representing only 25.30 percent of the 49 percent of voters who turned out for the poll, and only roughly 300 thousand votes ahead of Shafik. The populist revolutionary Hamdeen Sabahi, the favored candidate of the young revolutionaries, came in third place with 21.60 percent of the votes. Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, a more liberal Islamist, came in fourth with 17.93 percent of the votes. Numerically speaking, this means the MB lost fifty percent of those who had supported them in the parliamentary elections. In the presidential run-off, the MB’s candidate Morsi got less than a million votes more than Shafik, despite the direct support they got from many revolutionary groups, Salafi party sympathizers, and Futuh supporters. In a July 5 interview with the editor of Egyptian daily al-Shrooq newspaper, the visiting spiritual leader of Tunisia’s ruling Islamist Nahda party, Rashid al-Ghannushi, reminded the Egyptian public that Morsi has not won a political mandate, and that he should therefore rule through a unity government.

Morsi’s fist week in office demonstrates his acceptance of this limited mandate, but also his disposition to challenge the military establishment. He has so far been navigating it well. He has tackled major obstacles between the MB and other segments of civil society groups as well as the military junta. While the military establishment insisted in the Amended Constitutional Declaration of July 17 that the elected president must take the oath before the High Constitutional Court, civil society groups and the MB insisted on bringing members of the dissolved parliament to Tahrir Square and having the President take the oath before them. He avoided a clash by visiting Tahrir on Friday, June 29 and giving a nationally televised speech in which he pledged to protect the Constitution, defend the country, and elevate the Egyptian people’s power above all institutions in society. On Saturday, June 30, he paid a visit to the High Constitutional Court (HCC), where he took the oath before 18 black-robed judges of the HCC, chaired by Farouk Sultan, who, a few days earlier, was depicted by the Freedom and Justice newspaper as “corrupt felool, a reminiscent of the Mubarak era.” Further, Morsi thanked the HCC judges for their “role in fostering democracy in the country.” Two hours later, he was at Cairo University, where he met with the leading military junta, thanking them for their sacrifices and dedication to Egypt. In a nationalistic setting, interrupted by an outpouring of statements that “the people and the army are one hand,” he promised to support the army against external enemies morally and financially, praising the armed forces. An hour later, he was part of a military parade, signaling the final transfer of power.

Beyond these official ceremonies, Morsi’s domestic political personality is emerging while his regional intentions are not completely clear. On the domestic front, he is presenting himself as a populist Muslim leader, not a revolutionary, and so far, not exactly a nationalist either.

His religious image also stands in clear contrast to the secular Mubarak. He has memorized the entire Quran, which is a highly respected trait in traditional Muslim societies. He cites Quranic verses in all his speeches, projecting Egypt as a Muslim nation, who will support “Palestine and the Syrian people.” He chose to attend Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar grand mosque, and didn’t allow his security guards to disturb the crowd.

He has requested that his photos not adorn government buildings, and encouraged his supporters to give money to charity instead of spending it on newspaper ads congratulating him on his victory.

He cried at imam Qusi’s Friday sermon on June 29, when the imam pointed out to him that he must fear God and act like Umar Ibn Khattab, the second Caliph after prophet Muhammad, who many Muslim scholars idealize as the symbol of a just ruler.

Many journalists have poked fun at Morsi’s way of talking as being too religiously oriented, far from the norm of the promised non-religious state. On July 2, Emad Abdullatif of the al Tahrir daily newspaper wrote that “Morsi’s Tahrir speech disenfranchised non-Muslim Egyptians.” In the speech, Morsi used a traditional Muslim figure of speech: “I have been elected over you, but I am not better than you.” He demonstrated that he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest as a sign of his connection to the people on the street. When confronted by a group Egypt’s newspaper editors on June 28 on the imperatives of resigning from the MB if he is to be the leader of all Egyptians, he responded to the veteran journalist, Amr Hamzawy, that his resignation “was already done.”

Not all Morsi’s days are so far consecrated in rhetorical speculations of his intention. There are systematic efforts to appear as a pragmatic and a get-the-job-done leader. On one hand, he has adopted a 100-day project of addressing the most pressing needs in ordinary people’s life: traffic problems, police and security issues, bread and fuel crises, etc. On the other hand, he has surprised the Egyptian public on July 8 by issuing a presidential decree ordering the return of the dissolved parliament, which is generally perceived by most Egyptian newspapers as defiant towards both HCC and SCAF. SCAF might not challenge the decree directly, but the HCC has, and the parliament, which has been very unpopular among Egyptians except with Islamist supporters, could become irrelevant as a respectful branch of government, and this could potentially weaken his presidency.

Regional figures see Morsi another way. Dubai’s top police chief Dahi Khalfan responded to his victory by tweeting that “the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood is a doom and disaster for the Egyptians, the Arab and the Muslim nation…and he will come to us crawling.”

In a June 30 statement, widely understood to be addressing his anxious Gulf neighbors, Morsi said “Egypt will not export its revolution” and “Arab national security is Egypt’s priority.” A more engaging step toward the monarchies of the Gulf was declared on July 8 that the President’s first international trip would be to Saudi Arabia. This is a clear contrast to President Nasser, whose presidency never masked his ambition in exporting his revolution.

Turkey’s foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, was the first non-Arab statesperson to visit the President. He informed many Egyptian newspapers on July 5 that, “he has a blank paper for the President to list his needs from Turkey.” Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan already contacted Morsi on Sunday, June 24 to express his congratulations. Islamists of the Arab Spring often speculate their eagerness to replicate the Turkish model of democracy. Morsi alluded to honoring the peace treaty with Israel, but refused to answer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call despite Netanyahu’s letter congratulating him on his historic victory. However, he accepted a phone call from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but made no promise to accept his invitation to visit Iran. This is a complete departure from the legacies of Sadat and Mubarak, whose leaning toward Washington and Israel was equally replicated in their aloofness from Tehran.

As Morsi settles into the presidency, major questions still lurk in the minds of many Egyptians: What type of leader will he be? What will be his relationship with the military establishment? How will he address the issues of poverty and corruption? Will Egypt duplicate Turkey’s Islamist model of business-oriented government? Will it look like Pakistan’s ever-failing state’s institutions? Or will it curve its own model of Islamo-democratic state? As the Arabs say, Allah a’alam—only God knows.

For more on the Egyptian elections, please read our recent off the cuff discussion.—ed.

Alfred Stepan

*  *  *

JB: You recently co-edited a volume, Rethinking Religion and World Affairs, that emerged from an SSRC working group you chaired. You have an essay that appears in the volume, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” that’s an updated version of an article you published in the Journal of Democracy in 2000. The article was clearly prescient; it’s still relevant for republication today. What got you thinking about democracy, secularism, and religion in the late 90s?

AS: I had recently finished co-authoring with Juan J. Linz our book, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, and was thinking about the status of democracy in the rest of the world. Many analysts were saying that without Western secularism, along the lines of French läcitė, democracy would not take root elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. I was not then a specialist on comparative religion but I had traveled frequently to India, and I was absolutely certain that you don’t need secularism in the classic social science sense of declining religious belief and complete emptying out of religion from public space, in order to have democracy. Indeed, the only place in the world where the French type of 1905, aggressive, religiously unfriendly secularism co-exists easily with modern democracy is in academic texts. In fact, 1905 French secularism doesn’t now exist in any democracy in the world, including France. In 1958, de Gaulle came back and in essence said “the old argument was that all French citizens would go to our public schools and learn everything about French Citizenship and history—they don’t. About 25% of all our school children are in Catholic schools, so let’s give some money to the Catholic schools so long as they include a lot in their curriculum on French history.”

The word “secularism” carries a lot of negative baggage in Arab countries because for many speakers of Arabic the word has a connotation that is anti-religious. So if the argument is “Democracy must be secular,” and if people are parsing that in their heads in an Arabic speaking country, they may be understandably putting some version of the following question to themselves: “If secularism means being anti-religious, and if to be a democracy you must be secular, then as a good Muslim should I support democracy?”

JB: So you saw problems with secularization theory and the prevailing theories of democratization.

AS: What I was increasingly convinced about was that the relationship between democracy and religion as theorized in the classic studies of secularism was not the norm in many countries that were actually democracies. Classical secularist arguments often entailed an empirical prediction that the role of religion would inevitably decline with modernity, and a normative prescription that it should. In the contemporary world neither the prediction, nor the prescription, seemed defensible to me. What is imperative for democracy, however, is some degree of “differentiation” between religion and the state. But I was convinced that there are many ways to arrive at sufficient differentiation, despite this not having been adequately thought about or documented. I was also aware that among the “first generation” of democratization theorists, such as Adam Przeworkski, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Laurence Whitehead, or even Juan Linz, none of us was then writing on religion and democratization; but this had to be done. I was personally aware of the possibility for theological and political change within religions because Vatican II and Catholicism’s “aggiornamento“ of the 1960s had a significant positive impact on three democratic transitions I had written a lot about: Brazil, Chile, and Spain.

JB: Was there a catalyst in the 90s that got you thinking about religion when not a lot of other people were?

It is hard to say there was one catalyst. But I do remember a conversation with Ernest Gellner in the mid-90s in Budapest that encouraged my pursuit of the possibility for arrangements like the twin tolerations. I was the first president and rector of Central European University and Gellner was the director of our Center of the Study of Nationalism. Gellner was one of the most famous theorists of nationalism and one of his many specialties was Islam. We disagreed on many issues but had numerous friendly exchanges. Gellner had a theory that Muslims were “secular resistant,” and if you’re going to have democracy in a Muslim-majority country you needed a version of secularism rather along the lines of French läicité. For this to endure, the military had to be the “reserve power” and the meta-constitutional force upholding secularism. So, if democracy is to exist in a Muslim country it’s got to be like Turkey. Turkey had a series of military coups d’état, many of them to control Islam, in 1960, 1971, and 1980. I felt uncomfortable with Gellner’s conclusion because I had often been exposed to such essentialist arguments about Catholicism being “secular resistant.” I had also written a number of books on transcending military-controlled regimes and disliked any idea of the permanent indispensability of the military.

My current research leads me to many anti-Gellernian findings. I show how Indonesia has had a “twin tolerations”-friendly approach to religion, the state, and democracy since 2000 and, unlike Turkey, no coups. Senegal’s version of “twin tolerations,” involving democracy and mutual “rituals of respect” between secular state officials and Sufi religious leaders, is also unlike Turkey; again, no coups. Turkey itself, in some important ways, has become less Gellnerian. In the 80s and much of the 90s, the Turkish army was pro-Western Europe and most Islamists were anti-Europe. However, once the moderate Islamist AKP became the ruling party in Turkey, in 2002 via elections, many of their leaders realized that they had a chance to rule Turkey democratically. They also saw that the norm among European Union members was that religious people have some legitimate role to play in civil society and even in political society. Also, the book by Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe, and my writing on “twin tolerations” reinforced this view. More and more, AKP leaders realized that European countries had a religiously-friendly form of democracy, but that Turkey, since Attatürk, had a form of authoritarian secularism imposed from above with military help; and they came to believe that joining the European Union would be better for religious freedom in Turkey. For the same reasons, the military became less pro-Western Europe.

JB: What does a healthy relationship between democracy and religion look like?

AS: My reflections on the ten-year book project I recently published with my co-authors Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies, increasingly guided me toward thinking about the “multiple secularisms” implicit in the concept of the “twin tolerations.” The book is principally a “primal scream” against the French idea of a nation-state with one hegemonic language and one hegemonic culture for countries that are in fact multinational. Some of the findings in the book, from one of the largest census-based surveys in the world (27,000 individuals in India, 10,000 in Pakistan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, and 10,000 in Bangladesh) are illuminating. Again and again we document that “multiple and complementary identities” are often the norm. Concerning religion, we created an index of the intensity of religious practice, with three dimensions to the index, and we also created another index of intensity of support for democracy, again with three dimensions taken into account. We did this to test an increasingly accepted hypothesis in India that the more intense the practice of Islam, the less the support for democracy. Many analysts were also worried this was happening among the Hindus, given the Hindu nationalist BJP. We found that in India, among each of the four major religions, the greater the intensity of religious practice, the more the support for democracy. How solid is this finding? It is a Pearson Chi-squared three-star finding, which means that there’s one chance in a thousand that this pattern happens by chance. It’s been replicated in Indonesia; Indonesia is the same.

Elsewhere I have looked at compulsory paid religious holidays in “separatist” pattern countries (France and the United States), in countries with “established church” patterns (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), and in countries with what I call a “positive accommodation” pattern (Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland). In these eight democratic countries there are sixty-one compulsory paid religious holidays for the majority religion, which is Christianity. They have zero for any minority religion—Judaism, Islam, etc. In Indonesia, the majority religion is Muslim, but they have six such Muslim holidays and seven for other religions. In Senegal, it’s seven holidays for Muslims, but six for Catholics, who represent less than ten percent of the population. Senegal also pays for some Catholics to take a pilgrimage to Rome. In India, where the majority religion is Hindu, there are five Hindu holidays and twice as many for minority religions. The Indian government also grants some subsidies for Muslims to make the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. This is because religion is accepted as a normal part of people’s lives. The state thus deliberately goes out of its way to show respect for the different religions in the country.

JB: In April 2012, you published an article, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” in the Journal of Democracy. The article does a great job contextualizing the current transition to democracy, in view of Tunisia’s political history, and of producing information that was not, until your article, in the public domain. Indeed there is an element of almost “breaking news” journalism about the piece.

AS: I am honored at the thought that a comparativist can occasionally give “breaking news “to the world. In fact I started my career as a special foreign correspondent for The Economist in West Africa and South America. That was a long time ago, but I still approach research with the tenacity of a journalist and with the aim of discovering new material. I don’t think some political scientists are aggressive enough. I am too often told that “nothing exists on the subject” when what is correct is that nothing is on the net about this. Much of my most interesting new contacts and materials emerged out of interviews with leaders. Two of the most important Islamic political theologians and party leaders, Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Ennahda in Tunisia, and Adurrahman Wahid, the head of the 40-million member NU in Indonesia, spoke to me several times, which of course was interesting in itself, but since my time with The Economist, such interviews also lead to talks with their rivals. Some scholars are surprised that so many key political activists are willing to talk at length. I work on the assumption that if I can get in the door, and if I seem an informed listener, no one is bored by the story of his or her life. They talk, and if they want to demonstrate a point, they may search in their papers and give me a copy of what turns out to be a little known historical document.

JB: Did anything like this happen while you were working in Tunisia?

AS: The most original and important insight I gained into why secularists and Islamists were able to make a democratic coalition in Tunisia, unlike their counter-parts in Egypt, emerged precisely like this. Ghannouchi had told me a number of times that he, and other major Ennahda leaders, had talked to major secular leaders about overcoming the obstacles so as to enable them to jointly resist the dictatorship of Ben Ali and possibly pave the way to a democratic transition. But no documents were forthcoming in my first visit in March 2011, or my second visit in June 2003, but on my third visit, after the successful elections that produced a Constituent Assembly, four of the five largest parties in the Constituent Assembly—moderate Islamist Ennahda and three secular parties—gave me documents, often signed and with their Party leadership position. I have written about this in my Journal of Democracy article and in a previous contribution to The Immanent Frame. Here I only want to stress that these parties had met regularly and often secretly since their first meeting in Aix-en-Provence in France in June 2003 and hammered out “twin toleration” types of agreements on the formation of a sovereign space for democratically elected officials and a space in civil and political society for democratic Islamic activists.

The process was surprisingly like the one in Chile in the eight years before the defeat of Pinochet. In Chile, the socialists deeply distrusted the Christian Democratic party, which had supported the coup by General Pinochet in 1973. For their part, the Christian Democrats felt that the Socialists had contributed to what they saw as growing violence under Salvador Allende. But in the early 1980s both the Christian Democratic and the Socialist parties were in opposition to Pinochet and began meetings similar to those that occurred later in Tunisia. From my conversations with key participants in the Chilean talks and in the Tunisian talks, the continuing dialogues made possible the democratic coalitions that followed free elections in both countries. To date in Egypt, no talks comparable to those that began in Tunisia in 2003 have yet taken place. Given the enduring mutual fears of secularists and Islamists in Egypt, both sides, in lieu of dialogue with each other, have frequently made what I call “Brumairian” compromises with the military.

Our appreciation of the more complex history of religious governance in the West does not necessarily refute the normative importance of religious freedom in contemporary debates about religion and democracy. Indeed, as I hope will be clear in the following remarks, I personally endorse such efforts, at least where—as is the case in significant portions of the global south today—they resonate with the aspirations and circumstances of local actors. To understand such resonances as well as the alterities and resistances that ideas of religious freedom may encounter, it behooves us to deepen our understanding of the genealogy of democracy and religious freedom in the West. I do so here by way of three brief points.

The first is that democratization in the modern West did not give rise to a stable and universally valid practice of religious liberty, but a variety of governance regimes that, in most countries, secured religious freedom for some faith communities while restricting rights and privileges for those outside the imagined national community. Second, the form religious freedom and governance took in each Western country bore the unmistakable imprint of path-dependent struggles among different religious and class coalitions, all attempting to project their influence into the structures of religious governance. Third, the resulting varieties of religious governance seen in the modern West remind us that the practice of religious freedom was never the result of some unitary principle or hegemonic discourse, liberal or otherwise. Inasmuch as this is the case, those interested today in promoting—or critiquing—efforts to develop a more inclusive practice of religious citizenship in the world would do well to direct their attention to not just abstract principles of individual autonomy, but also to the situated practices, coalitions, and balances-of-social-power that ultimately determine which among the several varieties of religious governance are likely to prevail.

Behind my comments is a general reservation with regard to current debates on religious freedom. There is a tendency among proponents and critics of liberal freedom alike to over-intellectualize and homogenize the genealogy of religious freedom in the modern West. This simplification results in part from a tendency to conflate philosophical genealogies of religious freedom with a more comprehensive sociology of the real-and-existing varieties of religious governance. Although philosophies of religious freedom offer insights into the ways in which human rights and subjectivity were imagined and rationalized by intellectual elites, the struggles that gave rise to different systems of religious governance involved a more varied assortment of actors, norms, and powers. More important yet, the individuals and groups involved in such contests came to subscribe to notions of religious freedom, where they did so at all, on grounds that had as much to do with group identities and interests, and social pacts through which both were advanced, as they did any ontological commitment to individual autonomy or the sanctity of personal belief.  All evidence suggests that there is a similar diversity of motivations and political ontologies operative among those in the global south today who have concluded that some variety of religious freedom is congruent with their own needs and aspirations, even where liberal-philosophical ideals of individual autonomy are not. In settings like these, it may be more sociologically realistic to speak of “civic pluralist” rather than just “liberal” religious freedom, so as to emphasize that individual rights here may be most effectively secured through social pacts and arrangements that recognize group identities and rights as well as philosophical liberalism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the individual.

As the sociologist David Martin pointed out more than a generation ago in his A General Theory of Secularization, and as historians of religion like Hugh McLeod or political scientists like Ahmet Kuru and Jonathan Fox have more recently underscored, there was no single pattern of confessional freedom in modern Western Europe during the long century in which electoral democracy took hold. No European democracy, including laicist France, adopted the American model of a constitutional wall of separation combined with a relatively competitive and religionized public sphere. The majority of Western European countries recognized a state religion or several state-approved religions; most still do today. Most regimes of religious governance countenanced religious education in public schools. With a few notable exceptions like France, the majority of European countries do still today, although the aims of the courses in some schools are shifting from indoctrination into a particular faith tradition to education about religions. Most European states also provided tax revenues for the maintenance of schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and religiously-based associations.

Although some European countries extended state support to several religious communities, no European country provided equal treatment for the entire array of religious communities resident within its borders. In this sense, full religious freedom for most of the modern period was not universal, but selective and circumscribed. As with Jewish communities in the late nineteenth century and Muslim communities in Europe today, the terms for admission to the ranks of state-recognized religions were usually not constitutionally specified; they were instead the contingent result of social struggles and political pacts among representatives of different religious and class coalitions.

Today some supporters of religious freedom might be tempted to dismiss these examples as illiberal and undemocratic, and leave the matter there. But my point is simpler: these and other examples demonstrate that the history of democratization is not the story of the progressive maximization of any single democratic value, whether the autonomy of the individual or some other, but an evolving balance among several, sometimes discordant, public ethical values, along with the social groupings who served as their carriers. The history of religious governance in modern Europe’s consociational democracies, like the Netherlands and Belgium, illustrates this point with particular clarity.

Until the 1960s, the Netherlands—a laboratory for many Western ideas on republican freedom and economic liberalism—had a political and religious system organized around guaranteed group representation by way of what were known as religious “pillars” (verzuilingen). This arrangement was the pacted framework within which democratization in the modern Netherlands emerged, and it was premised on a more communitarian notion of citizenship than acknowledged in Atlantic liberal models of democracy. The pillars were vertical social structures based on the Netherlands’ four major ethico-religious groupings: Roman Catholics, orthodox Protestants, Reformed Protestants, and secular humanists. Since the 1990s, efforts have been made, still not fully successful, to secure state recognition for a fifth pillar, the growing community of Dutch Muslims.

In their heyday, the pillars were social and not ecclesiastical organizations, governed by a non-clerical administrative board. Established in the aftermath of the nineteenth century’s struggles among Dutch religious communities and secular humanists, pillar administration provided state funds for religious education, hospitals, and other social services. Even labor unions were organized in a pillarized way. Although regarded as prerequisites for the democratic peace, the pillars were controlled by leaders in a way that was, as the Dutch sociologist Anton Zijderveld once put it, “rather authoritarian and elitist,” even if allowing a “remarkable social and political pacification.” Civic peace and religious freedom were thereby secured by way of mechanisms that were as much vertical and communitarian as they were liberal.

The point of this comparison is not to suggest that religious governance in Dutch society was somehow an exception to the Western liberal rule. On the contrary, the consociational example is interesting because it makes more salient processes and tensions endemic to democratization and religious governance across all of Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Even as electoral democracy was being established, the emerging system of religious governance had as much or even more to do with group rights and elite pacts as it did any foundational commitment to individual autonomy. The precise balance of religious rights and exclusions also showed the imprint of nationally-specific cultures, struggles, and compromises. One could say that the history of religious freedom in the modern West looks very different when seen from the perspective of mundane struggles over religious education and finance rather than, say, liberal philosophers’ political ontologies.

It is also useful to make comparisons like these because the situations they evoke are far closer in organization and political dynamic to the religious landscapes in much of today’s global south. In matters of religion and governance, of course, there is no single “global south” or “new majority.”  The religious and political heritage varies greatly in different countries and regions. What is similar between parts of the global south and modern Europe, however, is the way in which the heightened mobility and plurality of people, goods, and ideas have given rise to new religious and ethical movements and, with them, calls for regimes of religious governance capable of accommodating the new plurality. Just as was and is still the case in the West, the precise form of these appeals has varied. In countries where national identity has long been fused with a more-or-less established religious community whose borders are policed by well-entrenched elites, pluralism and religious freedom, even in a consociational form, may appear or be portrayed as intrusive and inauthentic.  Elsewhere, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa or East-Southeast Asia, the relative weakness of a hegemonic world religion may create a more open and competitive religious market. Even here, however, the task of scaling up from religious diversity to a public ethical and legal framework that explicitly embraces such plurality is anything but guaranteed, dependent as it is on the passions and interests of different religious and class groupings.

The implications of this analysis for proponents of religious freedom are by no means dire, but they are cautionary. They imply that progress toward a sustainable and inclusive religious freedom depends, not only on the constitutional affirmation of principles of individual freedom, but on the creation of a public ethical culture and alliances of interest across and within ethical communities. No less important, and, again, contrary to some philosophical representations of religious freedom, the social motivations for popular support of religious freedom may have as much to do with the recognition and defense of group identities and interests as it does any self-conscious commitment to the autonomy of the individual.

Rather than a counsel of pessimism, however, this prescription is, as I understand it, quietly encouraging. It suggests that religious or—as I prefer to call it, subsuming it within a more plural and contingent ideal—civic pluralist freedom is a condition to which people in diverse societies can and will aspire because it allows them to resolve certain problems of co-existence in conditions of deep religious and ethical difference. Inasmuch as this challenge is pervasive in contemporary societies, we should not be surprised to see that many non-Western moderns rally to some variety of civic pluralist freedom. Equally important, and as has always been the case in Western democracies, even where people in different societies embrace civic pluralist freedoms, their reasons for doing so may well be based on religious ontologies more varied than those highlighted in liberal philosophy’s imaginary of autonomous individuals.

In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: If we consider concepts like “Muslim democrats” or “Muslim democratic formation”—I don’t know if you use that phrase—it seems clear that these concepts have either been under-acknowledged or under-recognized. Given these conditions, can you give us an example of democratic formation in a Muslim-majority country that would be an instructive example to and for the West? An example that says, “Here is a vibrant form of democratic life, and it took place or is taking place within the Islamic world, not despite Islam.” I think one of the bad-faith narratives about Islam says that democracy happens in the Muslim world despite Islam, despite what Islam wants for itself.

RH: Well, I think there are two striking examples. And then there are a number of still important but, for a variety of reasons, less salient examples. But the two most striking examples of Muslim democracies today are Indonesia and Turkey. People will point out that the Turkish state was until recently Kemalist, and was therefore a largely laicist state. On these grounds some would say that the Turkish case is too exceptional to figure in any discussion of Islam and democracy. But since the 1970s Turkey has experienced an Islamic resurgence comparable to that which we’ve seen across most of the Muslim world. In Turkey, as the political scientist Ahmet Kuru has so insightfully argued, the state structure that was put in place during most of the twentieth century was more aggressively secularist than that in the great majority of Muslim societies around the world. Inevitably, then, Turkey’s democratization shows some path-dependent contingencies and imperfections, not least of all with regard to ethnic minorities like the Kurds or religious minorities like the Alevis. That said, the continuing relaxation of military controls, the growing openness of electoral competition, and the preference among observant Muslims for an ethicalized profession of Islam rather than a woodenly formalistic implementation of sharia codes—all this bespeaks a political development of global importance.

The path-dependent nature and imperfection of democratization in Indonesia is somewhat different. Indonesia is sometimes described as a secular-nationalist state, but the reality is more complex. The country’s constitutional framework is a multi-confessional, “confessionalized” state, in the sense that the state is actively committed to the promotion of religion as a public good.

But the way in which this confessional commitment has been realized has varied over time, in a manner that both expressed and influenced Indonesian politics. From ‘65-‘66 until 1998, Indonesia was ruled by an authoritarian and, at first, conservative, nationalist ruler, President Suharto. However, in the last fifteen years of Suharto’s New Order government, the country witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of Islamic observance in society. Although, in the last five years of his rule, Suharto attempted to deflect the growing opposition to his rule by cultivating ties to anti-democratic Islamists, in the 1990s the country nonetheless developed a lively pro-democracy movement at the forefront of which were Muslim activists and intellectuals. Since Suharto’s fall, conservative Islamists have been consistently rebuffed in national elections. But small alliances of radical Islamist militias have taken advantage of the post-Suharto spring to press, sometimes violently, for curbs on Christian church-building as well as non-conformist Muslim groupings like the Ahmadiyah. So yes, there are path-dependent peculiarities and imperfections to democratization in Indonesia, as in Turkey, but this is par for the course in the democratization game, including here in the West. Democratization is always characterized by heightened levels of public participation, and at times this participation may result in massification that undermines rather than strengthens citizen rights and democratic institutions.

DKK: By massification, I assume you mean, not just popularization, but a sort of populism that can infuse democratic systems. As you know, there is an anxiety even among democratic theorists that thoroughgoing democracy—not quite radical democracy—in that sense, isn’t necessarily a good thing, insofar as there are popular formations that are primarily concerned to establish the authority of a particular mindset.

RH: That’s right. Indeed, I use the term to refer to a situation in which one sees, in whatever sphere—be it religion, politics, cultural life, the economy, etc.—heightened rates of popular participation, but without that participation necessarily being regulated or regularized by democratic or pluralism-embracing norms. So, massification can lead in some instances to democratization, but it need not: it can team up with highly uncivil and anti-pluralist movements or imaginaries. The challenge in any modern democratic system, then, is to take that heightened mobility and mobilization that characterize so much of modern society and canalize them in ways that reinforce a culture of democratic proceduralism and citizen rights for all. The history of mass politics in the mid-twentieth century West reminds us that the outcome of efforts like these is never a foregone conclusion.

DKK: You have written that Suharto had, at one point, sought out either moderate or even liberal Muslim leaders as he was trying to re-think what Indonesia was as a nation. And then he moved away from these moderates and liberals toward more conservative, traditionalist, and dogmatic figures. How do you explain this move? Would you ascribe Suharto’s shift in policy to anxiety about massification, and the anxieties about the loss of control?

RH: There were issues related to massification, but Suharto, actually, was a fairly effective administrator and, more importantly, a brilliant if at times ruthless tactician, a master of selective mobilization, which in many instances took the form of “divide and conquer.” As the Islamic resurgence gained momentum, in the mid-1980s, he realized that it posed a threat to his rule. Indeed, as one of his advisers told me in 1992, he looked at what had happened in Iran, and he realized that, for tactical reasons, he’d better engage the organized Muslim community more effectively. But his first tack, as you said, was to reach out to Muslim moderates, if you will—indeed, even Muslim liberals, such as a dear friend and teacher of mine, Nurcholish Madjid, who died a few years ago, and who was really one of the great thinkers of late twentieth-century Islam. So, Suharto first reached out to Madjid, as well as to other Muslim reformers who were linked to mass organizations, thinking that intellectuals and leaders of Muslim mass organizations would allow him to co-opt and control the Muslim community.

DKK: Normatively speaking, in terms of these moderate or liberal Muslim political theorists, what were they telling Suharto, particularly in contrast to the conservative views he sought out later on? I’m curious about that difference.

RH: What those leaders told Suharto is that he had to take steps to contain corruption, including that of his children, and to transition to a democratic political order. Nurcholish Madjid was quite explicit about this in his speeches and writings, though he was not a vociferous, street-fighting opponent of Suharto—other people, like Abdurrahman Wahid, the now-deceased head of Nahdlatul Ulama, and the man who was president of Indonesia from late 1998 to 2001, played a more complex and mass-politics game. Both men, however, spoke of the importance of free elections, a deepening of citizen rights, religious freedom, and civil society, and both too saw parallels between Indonesia and the earlier processes of democratization in Taiwan and Korea.

DKK: “Five Tigers.” That sort of rhetoric.

RH: That’s right. Indonesia has always been unusual in that, although it is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on matters of politics and economics many in the political class have looked as readily to East Asia as they have the Middle East for political and economic lessons.

In any case, because Madjid, Wahid, and others continued to press for democratic reforms, from about 1994 to 1998 President Suharto reached out to hardline Islamists who had earlier been his critics, and he succeeded in winning them to his cause by alleging that the democracy movement was really a kind of Christian-influenced organization, and that democracy itself was antithetical to Islam. But the great majority of Muslim leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s had already concluded that constitutionalism and democracy were not merely compatible with Islam but required by the circumstances of modern life and politics.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

Given that “religious freedom” seems to be a troubling concept at the moment, it might be worth returning for a moment to the 1950s, to mark the difference between then and now, if only to highlight the contours of what we now take to be obviously and empirically identifiable as “religious pluralism.” The 1950s was an era of many things—the Beats, the Cold War, and bestsellers like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale, a psychologist and Christian minister, boldly proclaimed that Americans could experience a better life (more friends, more money, more happiness) by cultivating a positive mindset. The book was widely panned, but Peale was very much of his time: as he wrote, everyone—no matter their creed or religion—could benefit from positive thinking. All Americans could do as the first chapter implores: “Believe in Yourself!”

Peale’s book features as an important exhibit in Will Herberg’s 1955 Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Herberg used the popularity of positive thinkers such as Peale as evidence that the social and political forces of sectarian difference were waning. Postwar America brought Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together in new ways—in suburban enclaves, in public schools, and on the factory floor. Herberg’s analysis of religious pluralism and “the American Way” echoed classical Durkheimian and Weberian articulations of secularization. Along with Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy) and Robert Bellah (“Civil Religion in America”), Herberg extended and confirmed classical theories’ understanding that religion’s privatization (institutionally and individually) coupled with new social interactions among multiple religious individuals contributed to secularization. In the American case, they noted, individuals’ beliefs were increasingly private and atomized (“believe in yourself!”), yet nominal religious identity remained an important marker of the true scope of religious pluralism in American democracy. Or, as Herberg put it, Protestant-Catholic-Jewish pluralism revealed the religion of America to be democracy itself: the plurality of religions points to a “common faith” called democracy, itself the “religion of religions.”

Today, this analysis of religious pluralism sounds archaic, if it is noted at all. Today, sociologists who study religious pluralism in the United States observe robust religious differences and a plurality of observable groups. The shift is significant, particularly in its implications for how we think about religious “freedom.”

Why did this shift happen? The usual answer is that religion changed. It had been private, but it became public. Something “happened.” Given the benefit of hindsight, many scholars now find the story of radical upheaval in the 1960′s as the engine behind this shift to be incomplete or misleading. But that said, sociologists working at the time observed “religion” working in ways that they had not predicted, and which demanded theoretical revision. Of the many alternatives proposed, the “religious economies” model rose to the fore as the strongest alternative and revision to secularization theory.

Religious economies models focused particularly on the question of pluralization of religions and its effects on religious participation. In a marked turn from classical theory, this model’s proponents argued that religious plurality and vibrancy is a natural consequence of limited or absent state regulation of religion. In the United States, therefore, religious vibrancy can be explained as the consequence of religious groups operating in a religious free market, one made possible (or perhaps better put, revealed within) the First Amendment. Where state regulation is absent, religious groups are free to organize as they wish, and rise or fall based on their abilities to appeal to religious consumers. Religious economies models borrow explicitly from the Chicago School of economics. So, in this model a rational, voluntary, religious actor will consistently seek out the religious option with the compensatory system that best suits her. Individual religious freedom is maximized in a religious marketplace where multiple firms exist. Competition has the effect of increasing religious vitality and fervor rather than marking its decline, and creating an ongoing religious equilibrium. Thus, as the argument goes, a plurality of Protestants—Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, even Mormons—vie for members. Over time, the losing firms are those who can’t attract or hold members, and the ultimate winners are all those people who can maximize their religious potentials in a firm of their choosing.

This is all well and good, detractors note (and there have been many critics). Except, however, for the fact that this free market model also generates a whole bunch of religious losers. These are the people that are not playing the game at all, or are not playing it very well. Jews and Catholics, slaves, Native Americans, and so many others are difficult to place into the religious economies models. Not surprisingly, they often appear to be differently and often not adequately religious (or, by extension, even adequately American).

The illusion of the free market is the subject of Bernard Harcourt’s recent genealogical critique of the Chicago School of economics. As he argues, the concept of the naturally regulating, universal free market recurs in multiple generations of free market economic thought. Where the market is conceptualized as naturally existing, he notes, regulation becomes an enemy: the state’s meddling poses a threat to the naturally developing and self-regulating equilibrium. But this is not all, of course, for as he notes, the self-regulating free market also is threatened by those actors who are not able to self-regulate—those economic actors who are not free and rational, for example. Whether they refuse to act as proper self-regulating economic actors or because they cannot do so, they become unnatural actors. Thus, even as regulation threatens market equilibrium, it nonetheless plays an important role in policing and regulating those actors. The state can protect, rehabilitate, regulate, or penalize them. Harcourt argues, in short, that one of the effects of the logic of the free market is to designate those economic actors who are free of the need for regulation and those who are not so free.

We can take the analogical step to consider how Harcourt’s observation may relate to free market religion. Religious economies models view the failures of various religious groups to participate in the market as problems inherent in the groups themselves—failures, for example, to cast off religious peculiarities so that they can participate in the thriving religious commerce of modern democracies, and real, “free” religiosity. They rarely if ever point to problems that might be inherent in the market itself: that it might not be as free as they imagine, or that it might in fact be regulated, or regulating.

I am hardly the first one to point to the limitations to the religious economies models. As I have noted, the criticisms have been legion. But none of these serious critiques have stuck. One has to wonder, why not?

One reason, I believe, is that even the staunchest critics of the religious economies models share its basic premise—namely that a plurality of religious groups indicates the presence of religious freedom, and that this freedom furthermore indicates the presence of democracy. While it is explicitly articulated in the religious economies model, it is embedded as an operating premise in almost every recent analysis of religious pluralism.

Take, for example, scholars who analyze religious pluralism with institutional models. Sociologically speaking, an institutional model identifies organizational fields (for example, religious, financial, educational, or the like) that are so designated because of the various laws, regulations, cultural norms, and professional rituals that both define its legitimate actors and enable their functioning and coordination. Various regulations and norms operate within and at the boundaries of fields, and have the effect of shaping (or demanding) some measure of conformity by all actors who participate within them. As such, an institutional approach both calls attention to a field’s norms and regulations and to the cultural rituals and habits that normalize them. We could imagine that the study of a religious field, then, would identify the norms of “freedom” shaping actors’ views of their position within a field, and the legal and social structures that demand conformity to them. Altogether, it seems that sociologists drawing on these models would be well positioned to challenge the illusion of the free religious marketplace.

But surprisingly, this is not what we hear. Instead, sociologists who use this theoretical frame nonetheless maintain that the field of American religion is free, both from state control and state support. They likewise argue that the salutary effects of this freedom are such that new entrants to the field are uniquely able to determine their own, “authentic” spirituality. No one compels them to be other than what they truly can be: naturally free religions, able to interact peacefully with each other. As one of the fiercest critics of the rational actor model thus argues, religious groups are “free to find … fertile soil or perish.” In the United States, “each group could embody its religious impulses in the pragmatic organizations that the American experiment made possible. It was a system born of the Protestant impulse, but nurtured in the pragmatic and pluralist democracy of the United States.”

In America, religion finally comes into its own, in all of its manifest plurality. Insofar as religious groups willingly submit to freedom, they certainly change. But their transformation is not into an American norm but into freedom itself. This regulation is self-evident and natural. The free market allows—and in fact trains—religious groups to be free: to cast off the cultural and political baggage or problematic connections to other parts of life. What we confront in these theories, and what ties them together, is much less a theoretical frame of pluralism than a political doctrine of freedom.

Two things are thus worth pondering at greater length than this forum allows. First, we can consider the consequences of our current concept of religious freedom. Our public discourse has, for a host of reasons, abandoned an earlier vision of religious pluralism that focused on the private religiosity of individuals, and that was designated by the shared language of a civil religion or spirituality (and which as even Herberg noted, is so easily transformed into the nightmarish, anti-democratic transgression of religious nationalism). Rhetorically and politically, we need our religions to be more clearly identifiable than that. In order for religions to be free, they must be differentiated, both from each other and, more importantly, from the elements of society that would regulate them and keep them from being free. Except that, as Harcourt’s examples would remind us, this freedom is an illusion. Much like the “positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale, our pluralist thinking hides the mechanisms through which we recognize religions as free or many, and hides the reasons why we find those evaluations useful or necessary.

Second, the “new” sociologies of religion claim to have successfully challenged secularization theory, but it is clear that most sociologists working in this framework now cling even more tightly to one of its central tenets: differentiation. In fact, we could argue that our current political and sociological uses of pluralism depend upon—and demand evidence of—religion’s differentiation from other parts of social life. It is only through differentiation that religion is free. This “fact” of theory and empirical work itself demands further exploration of the twinned and complex visions of religious toleration and economic freedom embedded deeply in liberal political theory, from Locke and Smith to Mill and beyond.

For if the power of the positive religious thinking embedded in religious economies models highlights anything, it is that our concepts of free markets and free religions are tied in deep ways, and not only analogically. I doubt that embarking on a historical or genealogical project will allow us to shed the pluralist thinking that inhabits us. But we might be in a better position to observe and speak of its effects.

Let us begin with secularism, which rather than “a stance,” I would suggest we call an ideology or, to paraphrase Michael Freeden’s definition of ideology, a way of simplifying a complex social reality whose kernel would otherwise escape the understanding of the many. In simplifying complexity, ideology is a practical guide for “converting the inevitable variety of options into a monolithic certainty which is the unavoidable feature of a political decision, and which is the basis of the forging of a political identity.” In simplifying complexity, secularism worked and still works as a practical guide for making decisions at the state level. This helps us to see why secularism cannot be identified with the liberal nature of politics or a form of government. Indeed, it pertains to the affirmation of the authority of the state, prior to and autonomously from any form of government. It is crucial to keep sovereignty separate from government to better grasp the difference among secular projects. Countries in which the state has never won the competition with the church over the regulation and control of individual behavior are forced into a stronger politics of secularism. This fact is primed to condition the tenor of politics, even in those countries that have embraced constitutional democracy.

Bilgrami rightly argues, for instance, that the ideals that motivated the political regime that Atatürk imposed on Turkey defined an authoritarian regime, although secularist in character. Secularism can, of course, open the state to a liberal transformation of the nature of its political regime, but to make this possible other kinds of vindication are needed that endow individual actors with prerogatives that limit the power of the state—beginning in the eighteenth century, this is what the bills of rights and constitutional revolutions have done.

What does a secular state need in order to be more liberal or for its politics to acquire a liberal nature—namely, respect for individual freedom against political and religious authority? This question brings me to the last issue in relation to which I would like to propose some additional comments on Bilgrami’s article that pertain to religious pluralism as an unavoidable condition for making secularism of a liberal nature, even when the government is formally democratic. The argument I would like to propose is the following: a mono-religious society, which has the chance to produce a secularist project has less or weaker chances to produce a liberal society, even when and if it embraces a democratic form of government. In mono-religious societies, secularism is destined to be more radical than in pluralist societies even when the state is democratic, because in these societies the risk of theocratic temptation is stronger. The issue of pluralism is sensitive above all in a constitutional democracy, whose public sphere and civil society is naturally open to host ideas and opinions of any kind.

I would like to strengthen my comment with reference to an empirical case that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere. It pertains to a constitutional democracy in a society that is mono-religious, and in which Bilgrami’s two features of secularism—the ideas of the separation of church and state and that the state maintains a neutral equidistance from different religions within a plural society—are difficult to attain.

During the Parliamentary debates on issues of artificial insemination in Italy two years ago, the Speaker of the Italian Low Chamber, Mr. Gianfranco Fini felt the need to specify something that might seem redundant in a constitutional liberal democracy. He declared that “the Parliament should not pass laws that are inspired by religious precepts.” Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a prominent Catholic theologian very active in Italian public debate, replied immediately:

The issues on which Catholics intend to be active in politics are not definable as ‘religious precepts’ because they pertain to fundamental rights that are written in human nature, demonstrable by reason, and endorsed by the Italian constitution. Catholics are in the right position for actively participating in the public and parliamentary debate against abortion and euthanasia and to protect family.

As this brief exchange shows, the Italian Parliament and the Roman Catholic Church are presently engaged in a political confrontation that is radical because it involves sovereignty—of civil and of canonical law. The confrontation involves more or less an explicit ideological battle between secularism and theocracy. Yet contrary to older confrontations between the state and the church for the acquisition of supreme authority over human actions (the external domain of behavior), in contemporary constitutional democracies the conflict over the control of civil authority is performed in deliberative style, through the posture of reasoning and the language of rights. This dialogic transformation of politics has opened the public sphere to religious citizens in a new way. At the same time, it also poses a new set of potentially serious problems for constitutional democracy, particularly in societies that have a predominant religion.

In his answer to the Speaker of the House, Monsignor Sgreccia adopted a style of reasoning that John Rawls’ revisited public reason and Jürgen Habermas’ post-secular democracy would consider legitimate. Indeed, while publicly proclaiming principles that he derived from his comprehensive doctrine, Monsignor Sgreccia made an effort to reach out to non-religious citizens by arguing that those principles can also be accepted by them because they are in agreement with the principles of public reason contained in the Italian constitution although expressed not in the form of public reason (like constitutional rights) but in the philosophical language of natural rights, according to the Thomistic tradition. Endorsing this discursive style would seem to be a secure passport for citizens with comprehensive doctrines to actively participate in the public sphere of deliberation.

Hence, Habermas has argued that in post-secular democratic society religious citizens have the right to participate in public discourse with their own principles and convictions. In fact, Habermas is even more generous than Rawls and thinks that the limits on individual liberty that Rawls’ injunction of translation of “private” reasons into “public” reasons contemplates is still too demanding and, moreover, unequal, since it demands more of religious citizens than non-religious ones. In Habermas’ view, thus, Monsignor Sgreccia should be allowed even to claim publicly that the law of the Italian state should be consistent with his “religious precepts” without bothering to engage in any sort of stylistic translation. Indeed, as an ordinary citizen who participates in public opinion formation but not lawmaking, Monsignor Sgreccia should not be asked, not even in the name of what Rawls would call an informal or moral “duty of civility,” to rephrase his religious arguments so as to make them in agreement with the language of civil rights. The question is that Sgreccia’s argument was direct and strong enough to reach the parliament and the Catholic representatives whom all political parties include. In any event, the Italian Parliament produced a very restrictive legislation on the individual choice to procreate through artificial insemination. “Deliberation” in the public sphere was easily translated into the law; the vision of the Catholic majority was able to impose itself over all the citizens, thus violating both the principle of equal rights and secularism. A mono-religious democratic society can easily be subjected to what liberal theorists called the “tyranny of the majority.”

This example shows that liberal democratic theories of public reason, although in different ways, are tailored to and on a philosophical reflection of the liberal societies that are the home of practiced religious pluralism. However, they are—Habermas’ more so than Rawls’—hardly suitable and safe if extended or applied to liberal societies in which one religion enjoys a strong majority and pluralism is only predicated in the constitution but is not a lived experience in society. In relation to the place of religion in the public sphere, I would suggest that along with Rawls’ distinction between liberal societies and despotic societies (whether decent or not) we make also a distinction within liberal societies, among those in which religious pluralism is both a juridical and a social reality, and those in which religious pluralism is protected by the law but is not a social reality or an ethical culture that inspires the public reasoning of ordinary citizens.

This Hegelian distinction/relation between the juridical and the ethical level is important and meant to suggest two ideas: first that we must regard the norm (of constitutional democracy) always in its porous relationship to the actual cultural life of the society, and democracy always as both a set of principles and procedures and an actualization that is contextually specific; and second, that in mono-religious societies—and democratic societies in particular, in which the state’s equidistance is a precept that does not receive the support coming from the practice of religious pluralism—the state cannot avoid adopting a more secularist politics.

In conclusion, I would like to strengthen Bilgrami’s appeal to the relevance of the context when issues of state/religion relationship are at stake. In matters that have a direct impact on the individual freedom of religion and social peace such as the presence of religion in the public sphere, political theorists should pay close attention to the ethical context and the historical tradition of a given society without deducing practical conclusions from an ideal conception of democracy and liberalism. This pragmatic suggestion of going back and forth from the ideal norm to the context is an admission of the fact that a political practice that is liberal in a pluralistic religious environment may turn to be anti-liberal in a mono-religious society. Pluralism is the essential condition within which we should situate the discourse of the role of religions in the public sphere and the issue of secularism. Without pluralism (as a social fact or as an actual plurality of religions, not only a formal declaration of rights) a constitutional democracy has a weaker liberal nature and may generate decisions that are not more liberal or tolerant than those made in a non-constitutional democracy (or in a decent illiberal society, to paraphrase Rawls).

According to Jean Daniel, the French commentator and founder of Novel Observateur, in his “Islamism’s New Clothes” article in the December 22, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, the answer is: very badly. In his view, the recent elections in Tunisia amount to a “counter-revolution.” It would appear from what he says that the elections could only count as a revolution if they had followed the script of a French model of 1905 laïcité –the most religiously “unfriendly” form of secularism of any West European democracy. Such a model, in a more extreme form, was imposed by the state in the authoritarian secularism under Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali, who ruled Tunisia without free elections from Independence in 1956 until the Arab Spring.

Having witnessed, and written about, over fifteen efforts at democratic transitions and having visited Tunisia three times since the start of the Arab Spring, I would argue the opposite: A much more appropriate description of the political situation in Tunisia is to call it the Arab Spring’s first completed democratic transition.

Fifteen years ago my colleague Juan Linz and I, in our book  Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe, spelled out four necessary requirements for a successful democratic transition. First, sufficient agreement has to be reached about political procedures to produce an elected government. Second, a government has to come to power as the direct result of a free and popular vote. Third, this government de facto has to have the authority to generate new policies. Fourth, the executive, legislative, and judicial power generated by the new democracy must not have to share power with other bodies de jure (e.g. the military, or a religious power). Tunisia is within days of actually meeting all four of these requirements. Egypt has not met even one.

How has this been achieved in Tunisia? There is a deep back-story involved here which is only now being publicly documented and which I will spell out in much greater detail in an April 2012 article in the Journal of Democracy. However, the essence of the story is the gradual construction of a democratic and relatively consensual opposition, involving both secularists and a religiously-based, Muslim party, Ennahda, a construction that began eight years before the fall of Ben Ali. A strikingly similar process of political rapprochement and commitment to non-violence and democracy began in Chile in the 1980s, involving the secular Socialist Party and the religiously-based Christian Democratic Party, roughly eight years before they defeated Pinochet in an election and formed a successful ruling coalition.

In June 2003, representatives of four of the five largest political parties with the greatest number of seats in Tunisia’s current Constituent Assembly, met in France to launch a “Call from Tunis” (Appel de Tunis). The participants agreed that any future, elected government would be “founded on the sovereignty of the people as the sole source of legitimacy” and be “religiously neutral.”  In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in their draft program of 2007 had asserted that sharia should be the main source of law (and it is probable that sharia will remain so in Egypt’s future constitution). Another principle agreed on in the “Call from Tunis” concerned gender equality. One of the accomplishments of Bourguiba was the creation of the Arab world’s most egalitarian family code which, among many other things, granted the right of women to initiate a divorce, to receive compulsory child support, and to have access to family planning, including abortion. In 2008, these four political parties from Tunisia met again, and re-affirmed and even deepened their commitment to the principles of the “Call from Tunis.”

Within days after Ben Ali was overthrown, the interim government created a new organization to put in order the procedures for a rapid presidential election. Protests against the exclusion of all but technical, legal advisors from the organization led to a new body representing all the political parties and civil society, the “High Commission for the Fulfillment of Revolutionary Goals, Political Reform, and Democratic Transition,” generally called after its chairman, Ben Achour.  This Commission is one of the most successful and consensual organizations in the history of crafting a democratic transition. Nothing remotely like it has yet been created in Egypt, where the military, via the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF), until very recently has structured all significant political dialogue via over 150 unilaterally issued communiqués.

In November of this year, I talked at length with Ben Achour, with members of the political parties in the Commission, and with leaders of civil society organizations, as well as with two of the expert (but non-voting) legal advisors to Ben Achour’s staff. I was also given the key documents the commission had voted upon. Here are the main decisions:

1.  Though many changes were considered to be important for improving Tunisia, it was agreed to concentrate only on decisions that were indispensible for creating a democratic government to make these changes.
2.  It was decided that the first election to be held would be to create a Constituent Assembly, whose task would be to produce a new Constitution.
3.  It was agreed that the Constituent Assembly would appoint a Government, which would thus be based on the legitimacy of elections and also be responsible to the Constituent Assembly.
4.  It was agreed that the electoral system would be one of proportional representation, with every other name on the ballot being a woman. By all accounts the first party to accept this gender parity provision was the Muslim-inspired Ennahda.
5. To ensure that all the contesting parties have confidence in the fairness of the electoral results it was decided to create Tunisia’s first ever independent electoral commission, and to invite many international electoral observers and give them extensive monitoring prerogatives.  In sharp contrast, in Egypt, SCAF initially unilaterally denied the entry of international observers, on the grounds that their presence in the country would amount to a violation of Egypt’s sovereignty.  Eventually, SCAF allowed into the country some election “followers,” whose number and prerogatives were substantially less than in Tunisia.
6. On the issue of what to do with Ben Ali’s official political party, the Assembly decided to ban the party and some of its most important leaders from being candidates in the first election. However, in order not to exclude a large group of citizens from participating in the first free elections, the Assembly declared that former Ben Ali party members and/or supporters were free to form new parties.

On April 11, 2011, approximately 155 members of the Ben Achour Commission voted on this package of measures to create a democratic transition. The vote count was the following: two walk outs, two abstentions and 150 in favor of the package. The negotiations and vote together intensified feelings of solidarity.

Democracy is always only “government pro tem” and always has some dangers that must be guarded against by democratic rules, a non-majoritarian constitution that protects minority rights, a vigilant judiciary, and a free press.

Tunisia’s new democracy, building upon the consensually agreed April 11 decisions, and the electors’ voting decisions, has a reasonable number of credible constraints in place.

A crucial democratic constraint is that Ennahda, with only 40% of the seats in the Constituent Assembly, has had to form a coalition with two secular parties in order to get the necessary 50% plus 1 majority to form a government.  If Ennahda were to ever succumb to pressures from Islamist militants in its base, it would probably be in the interest of the two secular parties in the coalition to withdraw from the ruling coalition.  Ennahda, in the de facto parliamentary setting created by the April 11 laws, could even lose its control of the Constituent Assembly.

Another major constraint is that there is agreement among virtually all the opposition and the government party leaders I talked to—including Ahmed Nejib El Chebbi, the leader of the most important secular party, the Progressive Democratic Party, which polled less well than predicted—that the elections were in fact free and fair. Crucially, Chebbi went on to say he was certain that free and fair elections would actually be held again in twelve to eighteen months, after the Constituent Assembly has completed its work.  When I asked Chebbi why he did so poorly in the Constituent Assembly elections he said he made a mistake of following the advice of his US-based election consultants, who urged him to concentrate on television ads. He told me that in the next election he will spend more time and effort on grass roots organization.  He predicts that, given the problems of the world economy, and the great pressure on Ennahda to deliver on their economic promises, a broader coalition of opposition parties will have a serious chance to form a government after the next round of elections.

Chebbi, and indeed virtually all the party leaders I talked to, such as the incoming Prime Minister of Tunisia, Ennahda’s Hamadi Jebali, and Ennahda’s outgoing party president, Rachid Ghannouchi, now see elections as “the only game in town” for acquiring political power. This political incentive-based assumption, in itself, is one of the things Linz and I argued long ago is necessary for a democracy. The vast majority of political party leaders I talked to praised the work of the Independent Electoral Commission and the role of international election observers and want, and expect, them to play an important role in the next elections.

Tunisia is not Algeria in 1992, nor France in 1905. Nor is Tunisia in the throes of a counter-revolution. To say, as Daniel does, that “the prospect of a Western-style democracy and complete freedom of religion now seems nothing but a fleeting memory” in Tunisia, is to get it wrong. Tunisia may not be putting in place the French-style, 1905 form of hard, secular democracy that Daniel seems implicitly to prefer, but Tunisia is undergoing a democratic transition, one in which secular party leaders and religiously-based leaders in Ennahda are crafting new and promising forms of democratic contestation.

For a start, when talking about secularism we need, indeed, to make “distinctions”: (i) Does secularism rely on the secularization of societies? Of states? Of cultures? (ii) Do we intend to refer to actual practices and institutions, or to existing norms? If we address only norms, as Bhargava does, we should distinguish between (iii) the “norms embedded in the informal politics of states (and non-state actors),” (iv) the “norms embedded in formal, institutional politics and articulated … in laws enacted by legislatures, executive decisions, judicial pronouncements, and constitutional articles,” and (v) the “normative ideals … expressed in doctrines, ideologies, and political theories.”

Empirically, secularization, in all its different meanings (decline, subjectivization, individualization, privatization of religion), is always a matter of degree, and political theorists should carefully avoid advancing the impression that fully secularized societies and cultures exist; they don’t exist in the “affluent Western countries,” particularly those in Western Europe, nor in “north-western Protestant Europe,” nor in the rest of the world, including the US. Furthermore, a fully secularized state, in the sense of a state in which there is a complete or strict separation of state from organized religion, does not exist—not in the US nor in France, let alone in the rest of the states with liberal-democratic constitutions. If we talk about “secular states” (as Modood and Bhargava do) we should specify what we mean by secularity (e.g. the “two autonomies” of the protection of the state from religions and religions from the state). More importantly, we should try to avoid sweeping generalizations (e.g. the famous comparisons between Europe or Western Europe and the US), and we should carefully avoid conflating the construction of country-specific models of secularism—meaning most often the legally institutionalized relationship between the state and organized religions (churches)—so as to adequately represent the actual muddy state of affairs: states are internally differentiated (trias politica) and, similarly, administrations (different departments) do quite diverse, often contradictory things.

All existing, institutionalized relations between states and (organized) religions are under pressure by increasing religious diversity, particularly by the different varieties of Islam (the old and new “other” of Christianity). In this regard there is broad and important agreement between Modood, Bhargava, and myself:

1. There is no general hostility towards religion in “secular states,” not in the US and, generally, also not in most European states. And there is still no “effective challenge” to “political secularism” from fundamentalist Muslims, from predominant churches, or from “radical secularists.” Yet this is only true when qualified with a degree of reservation: we see increasingly aggressive secularist mobilization, combined with right-wing populism in many European countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark.
2. The claim-making of Muslims in regard to “the place of religious identity in the public sphere”—or, in my language, in regard to the visible and symbolic recognition of (non-Christian) religions—spurred highly dramatized conflicts (politics of symbolic action) and a completely ambivalent reactive re-invention of national Leitkultur that tends to narrow willingness and scope to accommodate religious claims and to “destabilize” or “jolt political secularism” whether one wants to call this “crisis” or not.
3. In combination with dramatized threats of Islamist terrorism, wars against terrorism, increasing securitization, and dramatized stories of “failed integration” (marked by a supposed loss of social cohesion, political unity, and loyalty) the space for accommodation of religious claims (as well as houses of worship, education, care, workschedules, etc.) is shrinking in the predominant political rhetoric in many European states, but happily not so in all of them equally and certainly not so, or at the same pace, in actual practice.

My main disagreements with Modood are:

1. His “moderate secularism” masks important differences in symbolic, institutional, and political accommodation of religious diversity amongst countries characterized by various regimes of selective cooperation between state and church in Europe (also neglected or at least not specified by Bhargava).
2. The link between institutional arrangements of state and religions and multiculturalism is historically and empirically not convincing. It neglects important differences not only amongst countries but also between the various minorities covered by multiculturalism policies. Opening up Christian-biased arrangements to broad and deep religious diversity is different from his project concerning “how to multiculturalize moderate secularism.” In addition, the accommodation of religious diversity is institutionalized in the law and practices of most European countries much more deeply and in greater detail when compared with the fairly recent institutions and policies of multiculturalism. In my view, his proposal is counterproductive in most other European countries, but it may turn out to also be so in the UK.
3. His belief that “moderate secularism” provides the resources and the institutional arrangements for such an opening is naïve: moderate secularism is, as Bhargava suggests, “irretrievably flawed” because it defends varieties of constitutional establishment of one (England, Scotland, Norway, Denmark) or two (Finland) Christian religions or Churches or national religions, inevitably sending the wrong, exclusive symbolic message. In principle and practice, constitutional establishment is in tension with equal religious freedoms and with non-discrimination and equality before the law, even if this tension may not pass the threshold of a serious violation of rights guaranteed in International and European conventions. Criticism spelling out the inherent limitations of establishmentarianism need not involve immediate practical or political claims for pluralizing establishment or for disestablishment—in the same way that criticism of constitutional monarchies need not involve urgent practical claims to replace them with republics—but it is important for two reasons. First, it helps us see why removing the cultural and institutional biases will, as Bhargava notes, “not be easy” and, second, more distance from Oakeshottian pragmatism and institutional tinkering is needed to properly address the issue of more adequate institutional arrangements under conditions of deep religious diversity.

So I agree with the main points of Bhargava’s critique of moderate secularism. It can, of course, be doubted whether Europe lacks the “conceptual resources” to deal with deep diversity, but it is quite clear that none of the existing institutional arrangements, given all their diversity, are adequate or convincing, let alone perfect, and some are not even minimally satisfying. The “selective cooperation” countries suffer from institutional rigidity, from Christian bias, from institutionalized exclusion or serious discrimination of old and new non-majority religions. Examples of the so-called strict separation models, such as France or Turkey, suffer de facto from the same flaws and, in addition, violate individual religious freedoms and meaningful collective or associational autonomy of religions. Is then the “non-establishment” model of the U.S. that is not based on “secularist hostility” the viable alternative? Even if one takes into account that the U.S. does not live up to “strict separation” or the famous “wall of separation,” the model itself also suffers from three significant limitations: (1) the absence of meaningful exit options that are guaranteed by a minimally decent welfare system; (2) interest representation restricted to informal ways of influencing governments (networking and lobbying) that privilege big, old, and politically and culturally established (commonly Protestant) religions because they have access to huge power resources; and (3) the rigid public/private split, well known from the treatment of political parties, which also has counter-productive consequences when it comes to all kinds of welfare, social services, and experiments in education.

Does then the “Indian model of secularism”provide a way out of the pitfalls of the “two mainstream western secularisms” if the inter-communal practices are taken in their “best moments” and if “the country’s constitution” is “appropriately interpreted”? According to Bhargava’s interpretation, the Indian model is “inextricably tied to deep religious diversity”; it has a “commitment to multiple values such as liberty and equality … peace and toleration”; it accepts “community-specific rights”; “it does not erect a wall of separation”; “it is not entirely averse to the public character of religions” (public recognition without establishment); “we do not have to choose between active hostility and passive indifference towards religion” or “disrespectful hostility” and “respectful indifference”; it does not exclusively fix commitments “to individual or community values” and does not mark “rigid boundaries between the public and private.” As a “contextual secularism,” it allows and asks for a balance between “different, ambiguously but equally important values” by democratic politics or by constitutional courts.

Apart from the fact that these characteristics often conflict with each other and may work counter-productively in practice, Indian secularism is, nonetheless, in my view intrinsically linked to rules and practices of militant democracy such as constitutional exclusion and bans on religious political parties and secularist restrictions of political speech that are deeply at odds with important freedoms of political communication, the core of any non-paternalist democracy. I agree with Bhargava that we should not present “Indian secularism” as an idealized model or a “blue print” but we should also stop comparing aggregated, existing, but idealized institutional models. Keeping distance from “moderate secularism” as well as from American or Indian secularism, we may be able to develop new and better institutional arrangements, such as “associational governance,” and learn from practices of reasonable accommodation wherever we find them (“democratic experimentalism”).

When we, eventually, discuss “normative ideals”—rights, first-order principles and second-order principles—we will not be helped but instead deeply troubled by the language of secularism. Yet, recently, the heated debates on secularism in the social sciences, politics, political theory, and political philosophy have also infected legal theory, constitutional law, and comparative constitutionalism (see Bader 2010). Generally speaking it may indeed be “too late to ban the word ‘secular’” or to remove “secularism” from our cultural vocabulary. The argument however that “too many controversies have already been stated in these terms” seems unconvincing to me. For the purposes of normative theory, I have proposed to replace all normative concepts of secularism by “priority for liberal-democracy” because I am convinced that we are better able to economize our moral disagreements or to resolve the substantive constitutional, legal, jurisprudential, and institutional issues and controversies by avoiding to restate them in terms of “secularism” or “alternative secularisms.”

With regard to the constitutional status of secularism, we can discern three distinct positions, all sharing the argument that “secularism … in most liberal democracies … is not explicitly recognized in the constitutional text or jurisprudence” and that it has “no clear standing among constitutional values” either: it is “not clear which established constitutional category secularism fits into or what is the underlying value behind it.”

The first position, defended most outspokenly by András Sajó, tries to overcome the absence of secularism in most liberal-democratic constitutions and to streamline their messiness by developing a “more robust theory of constitutional secularism” to remedy the fact that “most democracies are without a strong normative theory or practice of constitutional secularism,” to present a “clear agenda” and a “coordinated action plan” in order to “defend” vulnerable constitutions against the threats of (“strong”) religions.

The second position—argued by, among many others, Bhargava, Modood, Jacobsohn, Shakman Hurd, An-Na’im, and Willaime—proposes to fully contextualize secularism also in normative theory and constitutional law by developing theories of alternative secularism(s): inclusive, passive, moderate, evolutionary, weak, tolerant, liberal, benevolent, ameliorative or principled distance secularism, laïcité plurielle, positive, de gestion, bien entendue, in opposition to exclusive, assertive, aggressive, strong, intolerant, statist, or malevolent secularism.

The third, rather radical position is to criticize secularism in all its varieties as a viable constitutional principle or, in other words, to drop secularism from our constitutional language and replace it with liberal-democratic constitutionalism (LDC) for the following five reasons.

First, secularism is not only, obviously, a very complex, polysemic, and essentially contested concept but also a fuzzy, chameleonic, highly misleading, or cacophonous concept. If we are able to discuss the substantive issues of state-religion relations with less fuzzy concepts we should do so instead of translating all and everything into the language of secularism. If “secularism” is used in constitutions or by constitutional courts and lawyers, we can discern at least twelve different meanings, some of them clearly incompatible with liberal-democratic constitutionalism. A disaggregated taxonomy allows us to understand what we mean when we disagree in our normative evaluations and judgments and to economize our moral and legal disagreements.

Second, constitutions and constitutional jurisprudence provide for such concepts both in terms of rights or first-order principles and in terms of “underlying values” or second-order principles, such as “neutrality” or its reconceptualization as “principled distance” or as “relational neutrality” and “fairness as even-handedness” in cultural matters. The absence of secularism in most liberal-democratic constitutions demonstrates this clearly.

Third, the really important substantive issue is not whether states and politics are “modern” or “secular,” whatever that may mean, but rather whether they are liberal-democratic or, in other words, live up to the demands of minimal, minimal-liberal, and minimal-democratic morality and what this requires in terms of constitutional and institutional arrangements and politics/policies. In the fashionable language of systems theory: from the perspective of constitutionalism the important lead distinction (Leitdifferenz) is not secular versus religious but liberal versus non-liberal and democratic versus non-democratic. This allows analyzing incompatibilities between both “secular” regimes (such as the Nazi regime, the Soviet Union, kleptocratic dictatorships in the Arab world) and “religious” regimes (such as Iran), with liberal and/or democratic ones. In the context of the recent revolutions against secularist dictatorships and the constitution-making in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the use of “secularism” is particularly counter-productive.

Fourth, the principle of constitutional secularism even conceptually eliminates deep and serious tensions between secularism and LDC (e.g. in Turkey and in India).

Fifth, constitutional secularism tends to hide from view structural tensions between liberal constitutionalism (Rechtsstaat, rule of law) and democratic constitutionalism and it undermines reasonable balances amongst the two in general, particularly in cases of militant democracies such as Turkey and India. It also does not help to find reasonable, contextual balances in the many conflicts of rights and hard cases (also acknowledged by Bhargava) that are part and parcel of constitutional jurisprudence in any liberal-democratic state.

In conclusion, replacing “secularism” with LDC should not be misunderstood as a replacement of one ideology (“secularism”) with another equally cacophonous or ambiguous one (“liberalism”). LDC is not a foundational ideology or philosophy but a meta-constitutional and meta-legal theory explaining the constitutional essentials or the core of the various and differing articulations of rights and principles in liberal-democratic international or regional conventions and in state constitutions. It is compatible with many competing theories of the rule of law and of democracy, but does not depend on any of them (including “political liberalism”).

Kahn wants to show the relevance of this view to American politics, which requires making room for dimensions of politics slighted by liberal theory and theories of justice. Domestic or international, politics in the “state of nature”—that is, still awaiting rational regulation—is not, or not simply, defective, since politics, as Schmitt points out, is never purely a matter of following norms. It’s also a matter of will and of “existence.” This existential dimension will always privilege exception over norm, as long as the existence of the people or the nation is at stake. Or perceived to be at stake.

On the level of the “facts,” this diagnosis is hard to dispute. A very good illustration can be found in recent American foreign policy. Like Kahn, I’ve defended (in a paper called “Vers un droit international d’exception?” and in my book Penser l’ennemi, affronter l’exception) the idea that the USA could be seen as a de facto sovereign in the current international situation, at least in Bodin’s sense: they “have nobody above them.” As the Bushian “War on Terror” shows, every international norm, including the norms of the Geneva Conventions, can be suspended as long as this “sovereign“ decides that it faces a state of exception that gives it “emergency powers.” This practice and view have been supported by Bush administration lawyers such as John Yoo, who has deployed arguments very close to those used by Carl Schmitt during the Weimar and Nazi periods in order to defend the presidential prerogatives or the extensive rights of the Führer, the “source of every law.” But even disregarding analogies to Schmitt’s support of the Nazi regime, the question is: what value should we grant to this, to the “fact” that a “sovereign” can indeed see himself as “above” every norm as long as he states that national security is at stake? Should we accept this view of sovereignty  and concede that it is legitimate or inevitable that “sovereigns” can suspend the norms of the Geneva Conventions, treat their prisoners as “alien enemies” and deprive them of most of the basic rights which have been granted to war prisoners during the twentieth century, because, following 9/11, we are all in a “exceptional situation?” Should we admit, as the Bush administration suggested in one memorandum, that torture itself should be accepted as a legitimate means “in exceptional circumstances?” Or should we struggle against this logic, not, of course, in the name of any “political theology” or Schmittian concept of non-liberal democracy, but in the name of our view of what a democracy should be, even in times of “exception?”

I’ve always defended the latter view, and I was happy to see that the Obama administration reintroduced a more “democratic” view of international relations, a respect for the Geneva Conventions, a moral condemnation of torture and of the conditions of “indefinite detention” in Guantanamo, and a criticism of a certain view of American “exceptionalism.” Of course, even in this supposedly more democratic framework, the question of exception and sovereignty does not disappear, so we can say that we still have to deal with Schmittian questions—I would entirely agree with Kahn on this point. But my worry is that the philosophical approbation for political theology risks participating in a justification of an attitude that sees no alternative to conceding “sovereign rights” in exceptional circumstances.

I agree with Kahn (and with Schmitt) about the fact that political theory should leave room for decision and exception. But to me, the main question is: to what extent? Are there no principles that admit no exception? When I read Kahn, as when I read Schmitt, I don’t seem to encounter any such principles—anything like what Habermas thematized in Law and Morality as “indisponibility,” that is, rights that are not at the disposal of the sovereign. Can the sovereign decide that torture is a legitimate practice? The answer, to me, should be no without exception. Kahn would perhaps respond that even if it is an illegitimate practice, it can be made legal by virtue of a political decision. “Torture is the exception outside of law, but the state may be legally justified in defending itself,” he writes at one point in a comment on a decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, apparently persuaded by its logic. It has always been the same (and, according to me, awful) argument, used by some French military officers during the Algerian War, or by the dictators of the Near East who are today falling one after the other, in part as a result of their disregard for human rights and the norms of habeas corpus.

The famous argument of the ticking time bomb, evoked without criticism by Kahn, proves to be a failure of juridical imagination. First, by such an extreme hypothetical case, it is possible to legitimate any practice by contrasting the prohibition you want to challenge to the possibility of state, national, or—why not?—human annihilation. (It’s significant that Kahn feels the need to reinforce this pseudo-argument by saying that this bomb might be nuclear, and that, in a situation that is not specified, the use of torture could here save the state from annihilation: “Implicit in the hypothetical [of the ticking time bomb] is the idea that the bomb might be nuclear. Without an exception to torture prohibition, we face the possibility of the nuclear detonation, that is, we imagine the death of the state.”) Second, the fact is that this argument for the “vital necessity of torture” on the logic of self-preservation has been recently used to legitimate de facto torture in cases where, of course, no such threat could be alleged. Is it this kind of exception that Kahn’s political theology intends to defend? The book’s conclusion suggests that “we” are all, as western citizens, soldiers in the “war on terror”:

The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal. . . . Conscription can now occur to anyone at any moment: It is just a matter of finding oneself on the wrong airplane at the wrong time. At that moment, there will be no discussion, there is only the act.

In this political ontology, the war on terror is constituted as a permanent condition. But this was precisely what was so false and dangerous in the Bushian conception of the struggle against terror, which was presented as a real war—not against a state (indeed with not definite enemy) and not having a beginning or an end—but a war indefinitely “open,” in which the U.S. would be free to launch as many preventive wars as the would judge necessary.  Here Schmitt, the author of The Nomos of the Earth, could be useful in deconstructing this confusion of traditional categories of international law, a confusion that transforms the category of war, which applied to the relationship of one state toward another (two sovereigns!), into a permanent condition, with no precise enemy, no possibility of a negotiated peace. Further, we could add, echoing Agamben more than Schmitt, that the domestic consequence of this confusion is the limitation of liberties in the name of this indefinite state of exception.

Here is the last point of my perplexity: how can Kahn claim that freedom is the center of Schmitt’s thought? I put aside Schmitt’s 1938 book on Hobbes’s Leviathan, where he claims that Hobbes’s distinction of an inner faith and a external confession opened a space for freedom of consciousness, which, with “the first liberal Jew, Spinoza” and his followers Heine and Marx (!), was to become a principle fatal to the organic State. Already in Political Theology, Schmitt is radically opposed to all the theorists who put freedom at the center of their political conceptions and demands. How can one claim that a thinker who approves Joseph de Maistre’s motto, “tout gouvernement est bon lorsqu’il est établi” [any government is good as soon as it is established], puts freedom at the center of his thought? The last chapter of Political Theology is devoted precisely to defending all those Catholic antimodern thinkers (De Maistre, Donoso Cortès, Bonald) who refused to consider freedom as the key to political organization. They wished to put obedience in its place, mainly through the theological argument of original sin (coupled with historical arguments evoking the disorders of revolution). Kahn’s strange interpretation of Schmitt as a thinker of freedom can be explained when we finally grasp Kahn’s own conception of freedom, namely the freedom to sacrifice for a “sacred” authority—God or the nation-State. So Kahn calls freedom what is generally called “obedience,” self-sacrifice, or “duty.” In the conclusion of the book, Abraham’s acceptance of God’s will becomes the paradigm of freedom. But is the will to ultimate sacrifice in obedience to an absolute will a good example of political freedom?

I let the reader “decide.”

However, Kahn’s depersonalization of the sovereign does not entail the disappearance of the sovereign subject, which remains, for without a subject there could be no decision, in Kahn’s (or Schmitt’s) sense. Yet, as one realizes later in the text, especially with Kahn’s remarks on the decision of the philosopher—which is, as Kahn would have it, the decision of “every man”—the subject is potentially everyone, and thus not the sovereign as such, or the classic figure of the sovereign. In fact, the true subject, for Kahn, is simply anyone who is free, and this freedom includes, eminently, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the political, which, from the point of view of political theology, means the constitution, security, and freedom of the nation-state. The decision that grounds and sustains the nation-state, just like god’s decision to create the world, or the decision that commences the creative work of the artist, constitutes, in Kahn’s existential reading of Schmitt’s Political Theology, the essence of freedom, by positing itself as a free, yet not arbitrary, act.

Kahn builds his argument on the dichotomy between liberal theory and political theology. In liberal theory, essence is privileged over existence, reason over will, and endless discussion over decision. In political theology, things stand the other way around: existence, will, and decision have primacy over essence, reason, and endless discussion. If Kahn, like Schmitt, is right to criticize liberalism (albeit for the wrong reason), this does not mean that the either/or logic he seems to employ (either liberal theory or political theology) ought to be accepted at face value. An alternative to this either/or comes from the perspective (and practice) of the common, which maintains the decision as singular but rejects it as sovereign. The sovereign decision is a decision of separation, exception, and exclusion; the singular decision of the common is instead a decision geared toward all-inclusiveness and democracy. The possibility of this alternative is made clear today, not only by those theories that reject both the sovereign, autocratic decision of traditional political theology and the contract modality of liberal theory (which are more similar to one another than we tend to think), but also by the wonderful wave of leaderless revolutions and revolts (contra Kahn’s curious claim that we live in a postrevolutionary time) from Tunisia and Egypt to Spain and even the U.S. (notably, Wisconsin), just to mention a few instances of a common situation known to everybody. Both the sovereign decision and the contract operate according to a logic of inclusion and exclusion unacceptable to the singularity of the common, which is univocal and outside of the either/or of inclusion and exclusion. (Who is included? The citizen, the wealthy, the law-abiding, the able-bodied, and so on. Who is excluded? The poor, the migrant, the prisoner, the physically and/or mentally impaired, and so on.)

The perspective of the common is singular and universal: singular because its reality (or individuation) is unalloyed and uncompromising, and universal because it wills all-inclusiveness and is based on the dignity of all life. To say that it is singular, in particular, means that it reconstitutes the whole within itself and self-sufficiently. This is also its uncompromising nature: it does not suggest that deliberation is futile but that it must occur within the reconstituted whole, which opposes the separation between sovereign and non-sovereign. Indeed, it is not the exceptional decision of the sovereign (even when the sovereign is, paradoxically, everyone) but the singular decision of the common that is truly revolutionary. The singular decision does not imply readiness to kill and be killed; rather, it leads to care. It does not propagate, but rather rejects the ideology of sacrifice and brings about the concrete possibilities of joy and of the good life for everyone. In rejecting the paradigm of sovereignty, the singular decision of the common also rejects the solely formal (hence false) truth of the contract, yet it maintains the accord of being with one another, of cooperation, solidarity, friendship, and love.

Nor does the singular decision of the common will the constitution and preservation of the state; rather, it wills the dismantling of the state’s apparatuses of violence (the prison, the army, and so on) and the implementation of new modalities of care. Thus, if the sovereign decision and the contract are two expressions of the same logic, we can suggest an interesting, as well as surprising, moment of identity between liberal theory and political theology. Indeed, the former is often a euphemism, a mask, for the latter, and the latter a pretext for a regime of terror: the police state and the readiness to sacrifice oneself (and others) for abstractions such as the nation, the flag, and so forth. It is telling that the liberals in power in the U.S. today are not very different from the decisionists of the Bush administration; they normalize the exception, making it permanent (consider, for instance, the routinization of drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries). Hobbes’s Leviathan, suggests exactly this identity. We also realize that the paradox in Hobbes whereby we voluntarily decide to defer the decision by transferring our rights (i.e., our freedoms and powers) to the plane of sovereignty (whether of the absolutist or the popular type) always means that the determinant decision is in fact made for us: we don’t decide, we are decided. This becomes apparent toward the end of Political Theology, where Kahn makes an unsettling remark on the notion and reality of conscription. The remark comes after a brief discussion of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham’s experience of the decision—his having been decided by god—is not understood here, with Kierkegaard, as the experience of fear, anxiety, and despair. There is only a leap of faith, the “Here am I” answering a demand that, in turn, the “modern state extended to every citizen: anyone can be called upon to defend the state with his life.” I quote the remark on conscription in its entirety:

We are radically mistaken if we think this moment of conscription is behind us. The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal, escaping even the formal structures of juridification. Conscription can now occur to anyone at any moment: It is just a matter of finding oneself on the wrong airplane at the wrong time. At that moment, there is no further discussion, there is only the act. We exist, then, inside the Schmittian exception. The question is what we will do, not what arguments will we make. To say that this is unjust is not to explain its political meaning. It is not even to begin to approach the way in which the political imagination constructs the violent act as a moment of sacrifice.

Kahn’s discussion of conscription would seem to complicate what is perhaps the main thesis of his Political Theology: “The decision is the free act.” Kahn, however, understands the dialectic of conscription and freedom in the sense of the Sartrean existential situation. That is, the fact that we decide under circumstances not of our own choosing makes the decision that follows no less “free.” Still, it makes sense to ask whether this is an adequate account of the “free” act. Aristotle, for instance, explains that acting in situations over which we have no power, in which we are “victims,” cannot be called free. And there are also situations of a mixed type, in which we act voluntarily and involuntarily at the same time. How can the decision made in such situations be called sovereign? How can it be the power “of deciding on the exception,” when the exception is entirely fabricated for us? It does not seem to me that Kahn distinguishes between the sovereign decision and any other type of decision—a distinction that must be made, not formally, but contingently and existentially.

As Kahn reminds us, in the decision there is a separation, a cutting off. But in contrast to the sovereign decision, the common decision is a choice to encompass difference in the reconstituted social whole. Thus, knowing the location of the separation is fundamental, for only thus will we know whether the decision is sovereign or not. Is the point of decision reached through the process of deliberation, or is the point of decision attained by virtue of a preexisting (e.g., institutional) separation? In other words, in deciding, do we separate ourselves from a plurality of real possibilities that are thereby not (though they could be) actualized, or is the decision a distortion of the real and an attempt to say that there is no alternative to it? It is only in the latter case that we recognize the sovereign decision. Unlike the sovereign type, the singular decision (or the decision that aspires to the experience of the singular) is not sustained by any preexisting, institutional measures (often amounting to forms of institutional violence). Rather, it is sustained and made possible by a thoroughly contingent, yet careful process of deliberation, whose true value only becomes visible in the light of the decision itself. It is for this reason that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, first deals with the decision, and only after with deliberation, although the order of their occurrence is the opposite in reality. Yet, without deliberation, one cannot arrive at a proper point of decision, that is, a decision determined by the situation itself in its immanent unfolding and not extrinsically, by the sovereign, which is to say, by a single, transcendental subject abstracted from the immanent multiplicity of the common. Without deliberation, in other words, the decision has already been made in the separateness of the sovereign or transcendental sphere, and the performance of the point of decision is a spectacular and grotesque clip, a mockery of freedom. The two types of decision may well have the same formal appearance, or structure, but their ontological formation is entirely different.

The question of the location of the decision is thus very important. As Tracy B. Strong notes in his foreword to Schmitt’s Political Theology, it belongs to the essence of the sovereign, not simply to make the decision (a task more readily acknowledged and understood), but also, in a less visible yet more foundational way, “to decide what is an exception.” Thus, to decide on the exception is not the same as to decide what to do when one finds oneself within an exceptional situation that is not of one’s own choosing. The sovereign decides on the exception, and that means: the sovereign creates the exception, precisely in virtue of the fact that, like god in Abraham’s tragic experience, the sovereign, as a subject/structure of power and violence, is always-already separated from the everydayness of the simple and common decision.

To conclude, we do not need sovereignty in order to decide, and to decide freely. In truth, sovereignty, itself a paradigm of transcendence and domination, makes the free decision impossible for the vast majority of people. The free decision and the free act cannot be separated from life, nor can they occur without deliberation, which takes place collectively, for the sake of procuring the good life for all. The free decision, namely, the decision that has and wills dignity, cannot be the prerogative of this or that nation-state and its pathology of sacrifice. The genuine decision—like freedom, like democracy—can only be common and universal. And it is precisely because of this all-inclusive participation that what is common and universal remains within the immanent fragility of life. The separation and transcendence inscribed in the concept of sovereignty (powerfully analyzed by Jacques Maritain in Man and the State) must be completely eliminated; sovereignty itself must be abandoned if we are to find the route back to the singularity of the common.