Indeed, was antebellum America secular?

To answer his title question definitively, yes or no, is to commit oneself to a vision of the present in which religion recedes into oblivion, or flowers, or does battle with its secular other. Definitive answers, moreover, serve a politics of normativity for they help determine the ideas, objects, and persons to be jettisoned, not to mention what views of the world become authoritative, which moral feelings count, and which ones become unaccounted for and forgotten.

Warner engages crucial work on secularity even as he considers the dissolution of the entrenched differential of the religious and the secular. Consequently, Warner’s essay is also incitement for a renewed interrogation of the history of the difference between the religious and the secular and how that difference makes a difference in the lives of individuals—no less for historical actors than for the scholars who study them.

Such interrogations must be rigorous and responsible to the archive but also, at the same time, be deft and willing to account for the precipitous declining ground of secular analysis. Such interrogations, I would add, portend nothing less than a reorientation of historical inquiry.

So although the question of whether antebellum America was secular cannot and should not be taken at face value, it and other similar queries have done much to establish the taken-for-granted status of the differential in many arenas of American life—jurisprudence, corporate culture, mass media, religious institutions, academic environs. What happens, Warner asks, when the categorical difference between the religious and the secular is shown to be historically contingent, politically expedient, and, most perversely, a product of the very era and imaginary this differential is now called upon to analyze? What happens when we possess insight into the making of religion in all of its varied registers yet inhabit a world in which that making has structured the very possibility of our recognition? What happens, as the stowaway Pip so slyly asks, when you unscrew your navel, when the boundary between self and world begins to become undone?

Why this knowledge and why now?

The question of the secular, as I take Warner to suggest, is not merely dizzying. It is, at some level, incomprehensible. And I agree, although I suspect that we have different spins on what incomprehension portends and what the stakes are for analysis.

*   *   *

Warner commends Secularism in Antebellum America for the way in which it illuminates a tension between “analytic distance and normative involvement.” He remains wary, however, of my “Derridean pathos” and flattening of “the complex relations among secularity (constituting the real in a social imaginary and establishing religion as a category), political secularism (a project for regulating religion so conceived), and various forms of ethical secularism.” This is a fair concern (although I would insist that my pathos is Benjaminian) and one that I will not so much counter as qualify with a series of normative claims.

I welcome Warner’s call to distinguish between the background noise from which conceptual patterns of religion take shape, political projects that seek to create these patterns, and the living out and through these patterns. These three analytical distinctions are (and will be) immensely helpful in thinking about a range of contradictions endemic to the secular age and, in particular, the cultivation of selves within discourse and the maintenance of privacy amidst a swirl of conceptual demands. And as Warner himself notes, I, too, have these distinctions in mind.

But I have to admit that analytical differentiation was not my primary concern while writing Secularism. Instead, I sought to tell a story that conjured the dense experiential measures of a secular imaginary circa 1851. Rather than distinguish between the moods and motivations, the institutional directives, and the conceptual atmosphere, I focused on the relationality of concepts across cultural fields—remarkable moments in which abstract workings of discourse channeled through frail human beings.

My book is full of moments in which people experience intensity without an identifiable cause, an affect that is quickly given emotional shape and linguistic form. My narrative strategy was to highlight the experience of agencies from beyond and without as a way to tell a story of how the buffering of selves was achieved by way of one’s vulnerability (and response) to discourse. These are moments, I argued, that secularism got under the skin—not as some dominant force that invades and snatches the body away from you but rather, a moment in which neither the self nor the world was in charge. Or to put this another way, a moment when the self became the self through its exposure to discourse, an exposure that did not boil down to seamless incorporation but generated a complex process in which submission was accompanied by swerve, structuration by negotiation.

In the end, I was interested in framing the particularity of secularism’s excess. Background conditions that were not merely contextual but were agents in a distributive field. For to study secularism is to study those forces that originate in a human world but nonetheless assume an inhuman intensity.

*   *   *

Secularism is about the conditions and processes that generate religion. These conditions are not immediately present to consciousness and these processes structure more than matters of religious adherence. The “location” of these conditions—perhaps even their ontology and mechanics—is a matter of contention (informed as it is by disciplinary location).

In Secularism in Antebellum America I asked a set of questions about these conditions and these processes as they related to a range of Protestant subcultures in the northeast, circa 1851. How did they convince themselves that they were religious or not or somewhere in between? According to what criteria and why? What were the effects of their conviction, for themselves, for others, and for us?

The truth (and falsity) of religion was forged in relation with slaves, Mormons, immigrants, Catholics, and native populations. Violence—real and imagined—against these populations was integral to the making of the secular imaginary I sought to account for, as were internal divisions within the orbits of Anglo-Protestantism. I did not emphasize these conflicts as much as I might have because I was more interested in demonstrating the epiphenomenal nature of conflict—by which I mean the way in which particular conflicts, bloody and real, were effects as much as causes of secularism.

So, for example, those who took violent issue with Joseph Smith’s revelations assumed that some religions were true and some were absolutely not. While Mormonism may have emerged out of the fires of revivalism, antipathy toward Mormons served to consolidate an evangelical public sphere even as the resulting authority of evangelical truth served to naturalize anti-Mormonism beyond evangelical precincts. In taking issue with the truth of Smith’s religion (the excess of his free choice, his literalism applied to a supplemental scripture, the hints of ecstasy and erotics that simmered beneath his pious stance) Mormon haters in Carthage, Illinois participated in the same discursive field in and through which Smith experienced his First Vision in 1820. That spring, in the woods of Manchester, New York, Smith was stuck in the dilemma of voluntarism. As he pondered the question of which church he should join, the golden plates were revealed to him.

*   *   *

Upon examination of different geographic sites, different epistemic registers and social arenas, different language games and institutions, I concluded that the making of religion in antebellum America was a massively normalizing phenomenon. Perhaps even more so than had been previously acknowledged.

I was animated, for example, by the multiplicity of sites where spirituality was being made, encouraged, diagnosed, and promulgated. Spirituality and its advocacy could be found across all manner of sites—from the American Tract Society headquarters on Nassau Street to the colporteur knock on the hinterland door, from the dexterous phrenologist with his calipers to Unitarian sermons, trance lectures, penny presses and etiquette advice manuals, from spirit communiqués and ethnographic encounters to the dreams of prison reformers and their wards, and the burgeoning discipline of moral science. Much went into the making of spirituality as a self-evident faculty of the human. Spirituality, as theorized at mid-century, served to instantiate a sense of potential immunity. Indeed, the “most spiritual man” was “the one most quickened with potential life” according to Universalists [E.F., “Spirituality,” The Universalist Quarterly IX (July 1852)]. Moreover, the conceptual terrain of spirituality fueled all manner of political projects directed at cultivating selves that were porous to the degree that the traffic between self and world was ideally and naturally a matter of self-regulation. Spirituality, in other words, did not so much allow individuals to deny porosity as much as forget it, strategically, in relentless acts of self-cultivation.

Here I witnessed a particular making and deployment of what, according to Charles Taylor, is the defining mark of the secular age—a buffered self. A buffered self is a discrete entity. A buffered self is smart in the brain and free in the person. A buffered self can, therefore, stand at distance from the religious to the degree that religiosity is one choice among many. For Taylor, the buffer is that which cuts across whatever distinction one would like to posit between the religious and the secular. Once located, this buffer “will demand from myself the highest attainable perfection in all things; and will apply negatively, —that I avoid all injury by self-control; and also positively, —that I secure all practicable improvement by self-culture.” The buffer, as a mechanism of self, serves to differentiate between 1) a western world in which individuals choose vis-à-vis the religious and 2) the “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” and oftentimes chose for the individuals in question.

But how did this kind of self emerge as a default setting across the religious-secular continuum? What kinds of desire and force were at play in the making of a buffered situation—a self thinking about itself thinking about the world, from a distance, and a social environment that guaranteed the ability of that self to think, securely, across that distance? What about the constraints that enable the buffer?

Whereas Taylor places a definitive value upon the buffered self and its potential to stave off the world long enough so as to seek what he calls a state of fullness, I am skeptical of the concept of a buffered self—both then and now. I am suspicious of the way in which it feels so damn good, how it makes everyone an artist, how it offers an ironic defense against the algorithms that incessantly call upon us. For it is the buffered self that bolsters a bit too much and gives tremendous advantage as one seeks tactics and subtle strategies of resistance.

So I can appreciate the political freedoms instantiated by all manner of buffering formations: the social contract, provisions against pick-pocketing and leg-breaking, my mortgage, my life insurance, my Amazon wish list, my hyperlinked name at the top of this post, the MRI machines that resonate with my hydrogen nuclei (and erase my credit cards in the process), the designer drugs tailored perfectly to my taste for elliptical perception. But these formations do not resolve my porosity into a bounded commodity to manage and exchange. Their authority depends upon the persistence of my porosity and not its resolution.

And vice versa.

For the buffered self, I contend, is an advertisement, more of a social ritual than ontology. Earnest celebrations of the buffer make it incredibly difficult to sustain conversations about the ways in which the self is subject to the agencies of the object-world, to history, to strangers and expertly branded institutions, to forces that do not announce themselves as such. There is fullness and pleasure to be had in such relays, for better or for worse. As an advertisement that has been wildly successful, the buffered self occludes from consideration the complex conditions of its own possibility. And finally, theoretically, a buffered self leaves little room for the experience of dread, insights into the plurality of worlds we inhabit together, and consideration of the range of agents within those worlds.

*   *   *

Disenchantment is bound up in theses of secularization—a description of feeling and style within modernity as much as a prescription for thinking. Disenchantment is linked, of course, to Max Weber’s classic statement of the diffusion of instrumental rationality. As Weber made clear in “Science as Vocation,” a will to and dependence upon calculation had become a reigning principle, perhaps even an ethical imperative. In a lecture so sharp in its bleakness, Weber diagnoses an acute condition of reason—marked not by certainty per se but by the expectation of certainty. Passionate belief, in other words, is at the heart of disenchantment, namely, the belief in the human ability to rid the world of forces that, if they were to resist calculation, would effect us in incalculable ways. An abiding sense of incomprehension would serve the interests of neither State nor science nor sustained hierarchy.

Under the sign of disenchantment, the world at-large, and especially human being, become subject to efficient calculation to such a degree that the world and the human become means to the ends of organization and systematicity. As a generalization, Weber’s is generally true. But what is most interesting about Weber’s claim, and most in need of elaboration vis-à-vis secularism, is an analysis of the conditions that make such means possible and such ends desirable. For when such critical work is undertaken, we begin to sense that disenchantment is an apt moniker for neither the phenomenological nor sociological registers of modernity. Like the buffered self, disenchantment is a fiercely defended wish, often fulfilled but not a fait accompli.

This point is bound up in my interest in spiritualism as a complex of ritual practice, ideas, and affect. At mid-century evangelicals were horrified by spiritualism which they saw as an irrational and dangerous affirmation of an enchanted world. Spiritualists, in turn, insisted that séances and trance lectures would loosen evangelicals up, curing them of their unhappiness and their insanity. As one spiritualist journal suggested, it was precisely the accounting for ghosts that was the mark of a true best reasonable self—“the influence of Spiritualist teachings not only does not tend to produce insanity, but has a positively counteracting tendency” [The Spiritual Telegraph 1 (1853)].

In the myriad ways in which ghosts were named at mid-century, one can witness the strange play of enchantment and disenchantment that I argue is indicative of the secularity of a long nineteenth century. On one hand, we find throughout the spiritualist archive moments in which individuals sense that their very being was located elsewhere, on the horizon, outside of themselves. In these moments they sensed themselves in the throes of mediation, shot through with something ill defined, that nonetheless determined their present and future states of being. These moments, as strictly defined by the terms of secular modernity, were enchanted. Yet, on the other hand, these moments were indices of future certainty and fodder for ever more elaborate schemes of calculation.

The mid-century metaphysician Andrew Jackson Davis illustrates something about this distant yet effective backdrop of a secular imaginary, against which choices were encountered and decisions were made. Despite the fact that a spirit had instructed Davis that “the Whole System is a volume which even the highest seraph has not altogether read,”  Davis nevertheless offered detailed maps of the Whole. For even if mapping of the spirit-world was ever incomplete, it was the assumption that there was a “Whole” to be mapped that informed spiritualist practice and identity. To paraphrase Alex Owen’s description of British occultism at the fin de siècle, Davis did not recognize the relativism of his own self-reflexivity and could therefore assume his rightful place as lord of the universe.

Davis, like an American Tract Society official or individuals performing a phrenological exam on themselves, held a belief, and that is what it surely is, in the capacity to measure that which was essential, forever and ever, amen. The rendering of the entire universe, visible and invisible, as effectively compatible was also an instance of incredible discursive investment. Everything and everything, according to Davis, could and should be mapped. It was not the instantiation of systematicity as much as it was the promotion of it as an object of worship.

Warner suggests that one implication of my work is that the “literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting [ ] in technological society.” I would qualify this by saying that it was not simply technology but the discourse of secularism (in and through which machines and mechanical metaphors assumed their strength) that was intensely felt yet never exactly present.

To appreciate the strange ontology of discourse I drew from the testimony of historical actors. I took seriously their visions of haunted terrains and the invisible mechanics of body, mind, and much else. For when alone, at rest “a sweet sense of estrangement begins to creep over me. In such a case, it is truly most delightful to see how sweetly what is left behind insinuates its presence. The walk, the solitary chamber even, are haunted unawares by a feeling which must be called social . . . which is, in fact, a very present presence.” On one level, encounters with “very present” presences were enchanting in the Charles Taylor (and Edward Burnett Tylor) sense—a survival of what we imagine to be primitive proclivities. On another level, such encounters followed a Weberian script of disenchantment in which wonder and dread were evacuated in the name of measured explanation. When incomprehension began to set in, so, too, did the work of parrying it. Yet on still another level, such encounters were not encounters at all. They were matters of enchantment in which the self did not simply experience an inert object world but found oneself in relation to it, mediated by it, and in some weak sense, determined by it.

*   *   *

So Warner is right to point out that bloody, violent religious dissent is largely missing from my story—for there were indeed robust and deeply-felt antagonisms that I do not discuss at any length. My interest in the saturated phenomena of secularism led to different questions concerning how antagonistic positions can serve larger historical trajectories. There was, indeed, a politics to all this spirit-seeing—exclusions and closures that were real yet did not always leave a mark.

For ways of knowing and unknowing, of overcoming the limits of the visible with nothing but the promise of disenchantment, of keeping the incomprehensible at bay through a relentless desire to calculate—bore directly on the management of various populations and the lives within.  Rather than a flattening I would like to think of my chronicle of antebellum epistemics as staging the consequential turns in which selves are affected in ordinary ways by the conceptual terrain of the religious even as they deploy these concepts well beyond their immediate interests. Within the political projects forwarded by John Edmonds and Eliza Farnham (prison reform at Sing Sing State Penitentiary) and Lewis Henry Morgan (anthropology and Indian removal), the art of governance was suffused with existential navigations, ethical binds, as well as the imagination of racial difference. In each of these situations, whiteness reigned. Racial difference was an epiphenomenon of secularism, namely a common sense linkage of true religion with right morality with an essential humanity with whiteness. This linkage was manifest in the cat o’ nine tails at Sing Sing and the legal seizures of native lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, proving, perhaps, that people can bleed and die by the force of the epiphenomenal.

*   *   *

As one studies the making of the religious/secular continuum and the exclusions that support its normativity, one can quickly find oneself writing from a position of pious skepticism. Secularization theses, and more specifically, the secular and the breadth and scope of its truth claims become foreboding in their immanence, in the ways in which they seem to structure so much of one’s analytical choice with so little fanfare. One, therefore, cannot be shy, methodologically or theoretically, when approaching such a theologico-politico-social scheme.

The study of secularism, among other things, gives lie to the old differential saws of structure and agency, cognition and culture. It forces us, among other things, to reconsider the very suppositions of critique as secular.

So I plead guilty to Warner’s charge of standing in awe, of seeking to appreciate (and conjure) something that escapes my analytical frame. But does such pathos, as Warner suggests, “project[ ] from its own powerlessness a problem that cannot be addressed, and before which one can only stand in a vaguely radical appreciation of the tragic”? Well, yes and no.

Secularism does not exist wholly beyond the feelings, principles, and practices it authorizes. However, some part of its logic escapes our sensory orbit, out-imagining our capacity to imagine it, to name it, to grasp in its immensity. This kind of strange ontology cannot be exposed like a garden-variety object of Enlightenment critique. It can be neither cut up nor quarantined nor assayed after dutiful collection.

Herman Melville suggested that such tragic appreciation had its reasons and was the mark of our supple humanity. For Melville, original sin was a condition of permanent enchantment, a condition that could not be overcome as much as continually assessed. (Melville’s perspective was an affirmation of the “pasts” of Edwardsian Calvinism, primitivism, and Catholicism that so many Americans were in the process of defining themselves against at mid-century).  As a matter of metaphysics and writerly conceit, Melville assumed that people were, in part, constituted by powers beyond their epistemic purview—“infinite socialities” that demanded that humans struggle to do the impossible: move beyond mere humanism. “There lies the knot with which we choke ourselves,” wrote Melville. “As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.”

These lines served as my own writerly conceit in Secularism. Indeed, they reminded me of my own failure to grasp the socialities within me, eliciting both suspicion and sympathy for those who claimed otherwise. If grasping for the precision of system is endemic to a secular age, I sought, instead, to provide a diagnosis, and on more illusory, manic days, an anecdote to what Brian Massumi calls the “preconversion of surprise into cognitive confidence.” For what I wanted to conjure was how secularity, political secularism, and ethical secularism swirl together in a seemingly unfathomable mix, which is to say at the level of the historical actor and historian alike.

*   *   *

There is no outside from which to objectify and to take the measure of secularity. No single inquiry can gain definitive leverage uponthe massive yet intricate mechanics of how religion—as faculty, phenomenon, mood, and category—gets real. A range of perspectives is required. Consequently, I see a necessary (but not exclusive) role for genealogical approaches to the secular age. The “entangled and confused parchments” must be given their due even as one seeks analytic purchase upon different layers and different moments of the secular age. In tacking back and forth between an appreciation for the excess of systems and the necessary work of systemization, there is a productive (and dialectical) tension to be had in all of this subterranean earnestness.

Perhaps this dialectic is a disciplinary inheritance of religious studies, ever inhabiting what Leigh Schmidt has referred to as the charged space between suspicion and sympathy, itself a product of the intellectual environs of nineteenth-century America. So perhaps it comes down not to an individual choice between suspicion or sympathy, but rather an embrace of both under the canopy of a future field.

As Warner’s provocation makes clear, scholarship on secularity must offer a sustained engagement with the complexity of the situation and its complicity in that complexity. Such immanent criticism “pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself.” If future critics of secularity were to follow this melody laid down by Theodor Adorno—own up to it boys and girls!—they would seek the impossible: to draw from the inheritance of secular critique while simultaneously resisting its allure.

According to Adorno, “A successful work [of] immanent criticism is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict ‘mere ideology’ loses its meaning. At the same time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains a reflection, without altering the existence of which its failure bears witness.”

In light of this inevitable failure to grasp, from within, the making of an immanent frame, how to continue to write without buying into the reality of belief or the buffer between you and me, me and the archive, you and the archive? What kinds of sentences might yet achieve a hint of leverage—not upon the thicket, the blur, this secularism—but rather in light of it?

“It resists classification…”

Language is a funny thing. Take my epigraph, for example: three words from the fourth paragraph of Frequencies’ project statement. I find these three words interesting—worth re-reading, even un-reading, rather than just reading—because of the contradiction that they carry along with them; for they unsay what it is that we think they just said.

Like I said, language is a funny thing.

To begin this project of un-reading, I start offstage, before the meaning takes place, and note that the removal of these words from a larger context is signaled by those three dots which, when read as a unit, indicate that something is not just passively missing but omitted (as its Greek root, ἔλλειψις , makes plain)—i.e., this notation leaves a trace of the agency, the choice, of the one who has done the extraction. For, much like the verbs “remove” or “omit,” it makes evident that a strategic operation has taken place; what’s more, the 66s and 99s that frame the text inform readers that the removal had surgical precision, for they allow them to conclude that this is precisely how it is in the absent original—“Go, find it, and compare for yourself,” they challenge. “But see here now?” they simultaneously ask, “Something new is happening, right before your eyes.”

Ellipsis and quotation marks—marks by which writers make admissions to readers (akin to Bruce Lincoln’s sense, in the epilogue to his Theorizing Myth, of how footnotes “show your work”) and by which readers are reminded that writers fabricate their texts (they don’t just happen by themselves, after all), doing so by inserting their own uninvited interests into other people’s prior situations, making texts of other contexts, thereby interrupting someone else’s work and putting to new use just this one piece of a past. And it is precisely by such an interruption that meaning is created—“This here thing is related to that thing there, but they are not the same.” Texts re-signified by their extraction from there and their insertion here; old contexts erased (yet hinted at). Nothing stands alone, unaccountable.

Our punctuation marks mark our punctuations.

When I consider the form of the text above, that’s what I come up with. This structure, evidenced but also produced by the punctuation, makes the text’s history profoundly apparent, the specified limits and the edges are there to see, and the manner in which meaning-making takes place—as a staged series of past and present relationships among interchangeable parts—remains. “I am doing something here,” these marks say, in the voice of the writer, “Watch closely.” Because of the punctuation (in both senses of the term: a marking and an interruption), the reader can’t erase the agency of the writer—the historically-situated chooser, Roland Barthes’s scriptor, the one who has set the table for the reader—any more than readers can erase the sign that there was once another place setting at which these words and other readers once sat next to each other, accompanied by no trailing dots, framed by no 66s and 99s. Yet the original is hardly original, of course, for it made reference to, deferred to, its own absent ancestors. Turtles—texts/contexts—all the way down.

 *  *  *

But let’s begin again and ask what happens if I read, instead of un-read, those words—i.e., take for granted the setting in which this language game is played, authorize its rules as inevitable and natural, thereby seeing (or better, not seeing) the spot at which I, as a reader, have been seated as invisible and limitless: Then what do I make of these three words? What if I see them as having no context? What if I drop my attention to the work being done by the quotation marks and ellipsis and, instead, hear the words speak directly to me, much like being captivated by the wit of the dummy instead of the person so successfully throwing the voice? Well, now there apparently is a thing, an “it” we’ll call it, that, like that animated dummy, has an agency of its own (for, we are told, it resists classification); by means of its own huffing and puffing, the absent signifier that goes by its pronoun defies being classed, has no context, and cannot be controlled. Its rugged individualism prevents anything from getting not just too close but close at all, with no one and no thing occupying a neighboring space.

“I can’t quite put it into words” presupposes just such an it, haunting our dreams before language gives it shape.

But if knowledge is said to be the result of the way we organize the world, the way we group things together to arrive at our judgments of similar or different, more or less, near or far—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species—then this dearly distant Cousin It remains forever aloof, all covered in hair and a hat, infinitely removed, and thus an utterly unknowable mystery—just as the vague pronoun-of-a-name suggests. After all, “the rejection of classificatory interest is, at the same time, a rejection of thought” (as Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us in the concluding sentence to his essay “Classification” in The Guide to the Study of Religion).

One reader but two readings of a project statement (though one is an un-reading, really): one results in the trace of history, while the other is shrouded in mystery. But only one is good to think with.

*  *  *

So just what is Frequencies about then? At the level of reading, its task is to document something that defies knowledge—“spirituality” being the noun formerly known as it. The object of this online archive therefore defies language, since language is nothing but classed specificity—for good or ill, a rock is not a pebble, neither is it a stone and hardly a boulder. For whatever reason, these things matter to us and the way we sort the matter that matters is found in the specifics of language. “Over there” is the unspecified region where we ask someone to put—we wouldn’t even say “place,” since we don’t much care—something of little or no consequence. But an item that defies placement, defies relationships of similarity or difference inasmuch as it apparently occupies (of its own volition) a class of its own, is in a space where there are no relations and thus no consequences—a space beyond all places we could possibly set at all dining tables in all possible worlds. It is a space of fantasy, outside of history and thus apart from language (whatever sense it makes to phrase a claim like that within language and within this historical moment; like I said, language is a funny thing).

What is clear is that the results of my reading and un-reading are rather uneasy partners. For on the one hand, we have framed three words and three dots that show the work, that stand for the happenstance, always changing relationship between text and context, writer and reader—how each are always the other too. Meaning historicized. No text stands alone. Yet on the other, we have three words, alone, referring to no writer, no reader, but to the absent, incomparable noun that apparently moves under its own steam. A stand-alone text. Sui generis religion by another name.

A contradiction presents itself (or is presented by another?).

For when the reading is judged from the vantage point of the un-reading—and meaning historicized, I would argue, is the only vantage point to be had for those who name themselves historians—then the writer of the project statement (for there is always a writer, right?) is implicated in an effort to hide footprints, to sweep clear the evidence, and to leave the scene of the accidents of history. For, much like the passive voice, having set the reader’s table with the words of his or her choosing, such a writer then makes a dash for the exit, erasing all evidence of the choices he or she has made, leaving the reader to assume that the table was set by itself. And thus we arrive at a situation comparable to the old dine and dash, a situation where our choices appear free of cost—but only if we get away with it.

Three words—“It resists classification”—followed either by three dots or a dash. Between these two options we have a contradiction in styles at the very heart of Frequencies. Is our object of study incomparable or infinitely comparable?

*  *  *

To be fair, the entire paragraph (one of six, in fact) from which I excised those three words that became my epigraph reads as follows:

Frequencies seeks to commence a genealogy of spirituality. This project approaches spirituality as a cultural technology, as a diverse reverberation, as a frequency in the ether of experience. We begin in a moment when novelists wonder about the divine, psychological counselors advertise as spiritual advisers, and scholars seek to capture spirituality’s ephemeral nature through survey research. Spirituality abounds, even as it is unclear what it is. Whatever it is, it seems hard to capture. Spirituality takes hold beneath the skin and permeates below the radar of statistical surveys. It resists classification even as it classifies its evaluators and its believers as subjects of its sway. Frequencies will focus this profusion into an epic anthology of wide-ranging analysis.

A genealogy of the discursive object “spirituality” is, for me, far different from a genealogy of spirituality—they cannot sit easily beside each other, at the same table. Suggesting that claims of spirituality, in fact the very use of the term itself, is a cultural technology—a technique, used by someone, a technician perhaps, that does something within culture, within history, I gather—is far from seeing spirituality itself as such a technology. But reading the paragraph I am unsure which we are talking about. I fear that what the site might understand as a productive ambiguity, capable of attracting a multiplicity of views, or layers (to stick with the notion of genealogy), is, for me, a paralyzing cacophony. The trouble? In genealogy the pronouns and the nouns alike—things like justice or marriage or gender or civility or self—refer back to historical practices, habits, institutions, ways of organizing, and the agents who made (and, yes, were made by) these contingent structures. Yet in this paragraph, the source of the Nile too often seems to be the ungenealogized—the un-un-read—noun spirituality; like a rumored and alluring Big Foot marching through the woods, looking back at us, coming in and out of focus, the fabricated object is our target, and not the situated discourse that brought us to the edge of the woods and made us look.

And so, reading that project statement, staring at all those trees, those posts, and thereby missing the structure that the un-reading sees as managing the profusion, visitors to the site likely assume that all of Frequencies’ parts naturally and comfortably fit together—a searchable crazy quilt whose busy mosaic hints at a transcendent whole that’s bigger and thus more significant than the sum of its parts. Only in this way would we assume that (to name but three entries) Martin Marty’s interest in the “most sustaining and inspiring elements of what we can call post-modern spirituality…” and Lee Gilmore’s use of language to point toward some unspeakable thing (“that mysterious ‘more’—an ineffable sense of something larger than ourselves”) could somehow inhabit the same space as Gabriel Levy’s entry, in which Frequencies’ main noun appears in ironic quotation marks and, dare I say, reduced to waves. Only by occupying some god’s eye vantage point, where the omniscient narrator sees into the hearts of all those blind monks, groping around that poor elephant, would we think that these three entries had something in common—instead of seeing the former two as data for the third. To rephrase: that we would likely never assume that assorted mediations and lamentations on, say, this or that sense of justice, would appear side-by-side with a genealogical analysis of the discourse on justice itself, yet freely assume such a comfortable fit when it comes to this thing called spirituality is, I think, the problem that requires attention. For, with my earlier reading and un-reading in mind, “a digital compendium in which the ideals of spiritual self-expression and individual flourishing are held in tension with the historicity of those conceits”—to quote from the opening to the project statement’s fifth paragraph—is  one where the tension is so great as to shatter the archive itself. After all, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Three words. Three dots. Three examples.

A dash. A tension. A contradiction.

Three dots and a dash is, of course, Morse code for the letter V, and V—as every Beethoven fan knows, as does any World War II history buff—also stands for Victory; to have it both ways, to hold both a reading and an un-reading in the space of one epic anthology, would indeed be a victory—a victory over making choices and living with consequences, a victory over History, even Death (“Where is thy sting now, eh? For this very critique will be posted at the same site as its object!”). But the historian in me can’t imagine such a totalized scenario, in which we can have our cake and critique it too—leaving a trace of agency and choice while simultaneously obscuring both. No, we have to choose, and live with the consequences.

*  *  *

“Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.”—Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald (May 28, 1934)

Victory for those unwilling to compromise, those with an eye toward the situation, cognizant of the inevitability of choice, aware that “ineffable” is a word like any other and that “the big picture” is every little picture’s fantasy, is therefore not three dots and a dash; instead, it’s three dots or a dash—either we live with the historicity or make a mad dash off the stage of context, of consequence, of accountability. That’s the choice—between the satisfying (but false) closure of Beethoven’s long fourth note or the utter indeterminacy (and thus possibility) of his first three—his three dots, his ellipsis—followed by not just a rest or a pause, but a silence of who knows what length…

leaving us not sure whether to applaud or…

One of the core themes of Christian Moderns is an effort to denaturalize the privilege often accorded to a particular idea of agency in contemporary academic discourse and its neighbors. As many others have pointed out, this privilege has made it hard for us to take seriously people whose views of agency differ from our own, from which follows a host of political consequences. I am not a moral philosopher and my goal is not to establish a normative claim about what agency really ought to be. But as Philip Gorski’s comments make clear, there does tend to be an underlying ethical impulse to anthropology, and it does place a high value on self-consciousness. To the extent that Christian Moderns itself is, as Gorski says, “captive” to this value, it fails to escape its own implicit normativity. I accept this much: my own work does not aspire to a transcendental position. It has a genealogy, and as the book tries to make its case, it consciously and, no doubt unconsciously, presupposes certain epistemic values of the world within which it speaks. To acknowledge this openly is, I think, in accord with the style of critique that insists, for instance, that secularism is a discipline and liberalism a tradition. This is also consistent with a certain kind of pluralism: to admit that this tradition doesn’t supersede or encompass all others is to find, rather, that it takes its place amidst them. If there’s a paradox here, it’s in subjecting oneself to critical self-scrutiny, the universal pretensions of which rest on local justifications.

Gorski is certainly right to point out that there are competing semiotic ideologies, rival visions of moral agency, and multiple turning points within Euro-American history. Christian Moderns shouldn’t be taken as making the excessively strong claim that there is only a single possible semiotic ideology in such a complex world. So the book shouldn’t be reduced to a new version of “the West versus the rest.” Nor does it pretend that the moral narrative of modernity is sufficient in itself. Quite the contrary: the notion that history might be accounted for within a totalizing and unilinear narrative is itself a characteristic ideological feature of the moral narrative of modernity. Moreover, not all possible historical narratives eventuate in modernity. In that respect, those who turn to Thomist and Aristotelian traditions seem to me not so much to be working within liberal secularism, as Gorski puts it, as trying to establish counter-traditions to it. I would draw one point of contrast between historical-ethnographic work and the philosophical and theological texts he invokes. Those texts work within genre constraints that usually impose demands for consistency and coherence on their arguments that are quite distinct from the quite different kinds of demands (pragmatic, economic, political, emotional, cognitive, and so forth) imposed by the contingencies of social existence. Communities exist with degrees of logical and even moral contradiction that few purely theoretical formulations would permit.

Michael Warner pushes the argument of Christian Moderns in extremely valuable directions. First, by stressing the spatial dimensions of evangelical discourse, he productively generalizes the case beyond that of colonialism per se. The addressivity that is built into the pragmatic structure of proselytization is a fundamental basis for the modularity that facilitates both self-expanding publics and self-cultivating subjects. This observation situates the specifically evangelical project in the context of other mediated publics and “counter-publics,” to use Warner’s own term. Thus Warner helps draw together two threads of the story by suggesting how the mutual production of subjectivities and communities works. One outcome, he notes, is the denominationalist imaginary, in which we are surrounded by “others who believe otherwise.” This is certainly true, but it’s worth stressing something that I think Warner leaves only implicit. As is well known, colonialism inspired a host of typologies of human bodies, minds, moral and social orders, which usually involved varying degrees of invidious comparison. But the evangelical project is supposed to view that world of otherness through the lens of possible conversion. Therefore, those “others” who surround us are, at least in principle, if not always in practice, potentially “us.” (As Stephen Berkwitz suggests in his post, conversions may destabilize the relations of similarity and difference that colonial projects had to negotiate.)

Warner then raises the question of ethical agency. I fully agree with his two points about purification: that it cannot account for the whole story and that it inevitably results in new hybrid forms of subjectivity. (Perhaps the neo-traditionalisms that Gorski mentions might be considered in this light.) However, when he says that new hybrids are equally modern, I think he shifts the definition of “modern” away from its initial formulation in the book. If one defines modernity not as an objective description of the world at a distinct chronological moment, but rather in terms of a historical consciousness formed in relation to a certain moral narrative projected onto linear time, then those hybrids are by definition external to that ideological formation. They may, to be sure, point us to the existence of alternatives, such as counter-modernities. But I would resist calling them alternative modernities as some people do (though, it should be noted, Warner does not), for to do so would shake the idea of modernity loose from those totalizing claims that I take to be among the defining features of the narrative of moral progress. Not everything new should be called “modern.” If, as Warner proposes, the key is not purification but, rather, “the creation of modular, extractable, translatable forms”, then we might ask not just what produces those forms but also what gives them their normative weight. Purification, then, would be one way of describing both a key feature of that process of creation and the normativity that underwrites it. And one might say, with Warner, that the category of purification may ultimately be most useful not as an explanation but, rather, as a way of bringing together apparently disparate phenomena, and thence undertake a closer analysis of the forms, their metapragmatic presuppositions, and their conditions of circulation.

Stephen Berkwitz correctly notes that my attention to nineteenth and twentieth century Protestantism comes at the expense of very different themes apparent in the Catholic missions of several centuries earlier. Of course the Calvinists of whom I write were quite aware of the latter, against whom they explicitly defined their own ideology of moral progress. (In fact, one could also mention another omission, eastern Orthodoxy, which produced both its own iconology and iconoclasm, as well as its own mission strategies in the Russian east. And there are, in addition, the various Pentecostal and other evangelical missions that are thriving today.) But my goal is not to account for all colonialisms or all missions. Berkwitz has identified a crucial difference between two distinct periods of European colonialism, one dimension of which is the role played by kinds of missionary enterprise that differed markedly in their doctrines, organizational structures, financial bases, and relations to states. Indeed, states themselves were quite different sorts of things in these two historical periods. I justify my focus on Protestants working during the high imperial age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the angle of approach mentioned above. Furthermore, history makes a difference in how that negotiation of similarity and difference described by Berkwitz could be carried out. This negotiation was a persistent feature of colonial encounters, and could be especially destabilizing in projects intended to transform subjectivities. By the late nineteenth century, the newly emerging anthropological sense of the concept of “culture” was available as one way of sorting out differences among people, and thus of defining “religion.” The peculiar relevance of this historical moment, in contrast to the first wave of imperial expansion, lies in the way that effort continues to shape our discussions today.

Berkwitz also rightly observes there is inevitably a political dimension to the hierarchies that missions and other colonial regimes of truth produce.  If I fail to elaborate on this theme, it’s not only because that has been the predominant focus of most previous anthropological discussions of missions, but also because that focus often takes so much for granted in its own political common sense, its own grasp of the players and their stakes. In choosing what to emphasize in Christian Moderns, I was trying to reflect on that very common sense, and hoping to elude the teleological narratives to which it can unwittingly give rise.

Like Gorski, Danilyn Rutherford hones in on the ways in which I seem to have been unable to entirely escape the very habits and assumptions on which I am trying to reflect. In her exemplary close-reading of the text, she shows how persistent the vocabulary of belief can be. So let me grant that the word “belief” may cast too broad a net. Perhaps we could speak of metabelief to identify the ideological privilege that certain traditions accord to the giving of assent to propositions, which is then taken to define a religion (thus Asad). But it seems this narrow definition tends to expand into a more general psychologism, by which a postulated inner state is required for any explanation of practices, which are themselves therefore seen to derive from it. As a general account of mind, this is peculiarly intentionalistic and self-objectifying. As an account of religion, it’s empirically dubious (for instance, it tends to ignore the bored pupil in confirmation class in favor of the pious and passionate) and politically suspect (it makes some people judges of the interior states of others).

But as Rutherford shows, it may be impossible to eliminate talk of assumptions, thoughts, and presuppositions altogether from our account of people’s actions. Thus, we need more complex and nuanced accounts of the relations between thought, imputed thought, unconscious presuppositions, and action. These accounts should remain suspicious of the inclination to grant primacy to interiority. Indeed, as Rutherford wisely suggests, careful attention to linguistic pragmatics and other aspects of signification will confound any effort to draw a clear distinction between inner and outer. My inclination is dialectical, that is, to say that tacit understandings help produce material practices, to which people respond with new understandings. This means we have to link the varieties of belief to the different material modalities they imply. We can displace to primacy of belief from our accounts and sort out its varieties.  By attending to the materiality of words, objects, and practices, if we don’t eliminate the inner/outer distinction altogether, we should at least put them into more dynamic play with one another. Practices may be only one dialectical moment of a process of objectification that will also include beliefs, but it is the moment that gives religions both their sociality and their historicity.

Reading through the book has therefore been a bracing reminder of this debt. There are many areas in which I can hope to do little more than re-stage some of his arguments with different materials.

The book performs several important interventions in the emergent discussion of globalization, Christianity, and secularism. Not all of these are polemically marked. For example, I take it as highly significant that although Webb’s analysis centers on the way a certain kind of subject is inculcated in colonial forms, he does not speak, as so many others do, of “the liberal subject.” In fact, although he argues for broad convergences of different evangelical imperatives—the purification of agency in distance from its objects being a kind of spinal emphasis running throughout the book—there is a broad allowance for the many ways this happens in different formal contexts, and a broad recognition that no singular subject needs to be (or could be) sutured around those imperatives, let alone identified with a putatively singular and presumptively secular liberalism. This is salutary.

So is the way he understands his material to cut across the religious/secular divide. He does not assume that the globalizing process of reconstructing religiosity emanates from a source internal to secular governmentality, as a heteronomous constraint. If anything, he seems to see the modular subject of modernity as produced by essentially Protestant means—a claim that, were he working on Europe or Latin America, would need a different kind of development in a way that is imaginable, though it is not the burden of his argument.

And finally, he makes a crucial intervention in focusing on the metapragmatics of forms of religiosity. What is taken to be the content of religion—belief, conversion, prayer—is heavily dependent on its ability to gloss and regiment the indexical dimensions of its discursive forms: creeds, preaching, praying. Commitments of personhood themselves are interpreted by Keane as part of a “semiotic ideology.”

Saba Mahmood also has extended this line of analysis to show that the semiotic ideology at the heart of modern Christianity is one of the central ways that modern secular governance tries to cultivate some forms of religiosity and not others.

In my own research, a few additional dimensions of the evangelical semiotic ideology have become central to the way I understand the process. Let me touch on these briefly. I do not think these represent disagreements with Keane’s approach; rather, they seem to me to be extensions of it, and indeed there are passages in the book that express related observations.

The first is that evangelical discourse has a peculiar relation to space. Practices of discourse—speaking, praying, theorizing, preaching, reading, singing, and so on—work in different ways to organize the space through which discourse moves. So, at one extreme, the London Puritan Edward Dering once defined the Church itself as “a company called together by the voice of a preacher”; all ecclesiology could be reduced to the situation of address established by preaching, which meant that sermon audition was a ritual practice with a significance far from accounted for by the content of sermons.

Evangelicalism is not possible, in either the colony or the metropole, without the socially expansive address of conversionist preaching—my relation to you being partly a matter of how this speech between us might effect your conversion. (The relation between that expansive project and colonial geographies is something I wish Webb would address further.) Conversionist projects—preaching, witnessing, tract distribution, broadcasting, etc.—require and produce a complex set of forms, including both an understanding of the social field of the unconverted, through which conversionist discourse moves (expansively, as across smooth space), and a conception of the addressee as capable of effecting belief of a particularly saving kind. (Hence the irony that evangelical forms that emerged within Calvinist culture led to the upending of Calvinist theology.) God himself came to be reconceived, according to the structural demands of this form of preaching, as a rhetorical god addressing himself to potential converts with impressive incentives for a newly agentialized belief in his existence.

This is illustrated in Webb’s treatment of the discourse of the house. It can be reproduced anywhere, anytime, by anyone, and thus seems to have lost its link to a specific ordering of space and a specific category of speaker. But this is to some degree illusory. Producing the emptiness of the space through which it moves is a major burden of the form.

Or take the form of the creed, on which Keane dilates with such brilliant effect. He is right, I think, to emphasize that giving the creed a textual form makes it “highly portable across contexts,” and that “the circulation of modular forms such as creeds works against the localizing forces on which anthropologists of global religions have tended to focus.” I think he is also quite right to emphasize some unrecognized paradoxes in the rhetoric of belief that a creed articulates. But even while creedal circulation works against some localizing forces, it also creates a new spatialization of its own.

It is not quite true that creeds are unique to modern evangelical movements. Recitations of creeds have been part of national church projects such as Catholicism, at least for much of its history, or the Church of England before Toleration. They functioned as tests of orthodoxy. They supposedly saturated the space of possible belonging. Liturgical recitation of the creed in such a context (and the Apostles’ Creed, which Keane quotes, remains in the Anglican liturgy) foregrounds the reflexive I who believes—only, paradoxically, in order to make audible in public acoustic space and visible in common witnessing the absolutely non-individual (and non-optional) dimensions of affirmation. Credo-ing, if I may so call the practice, produces affirmation as common effort and as anchor.

Even here, a whole set of separations is put in place. We believe these doctrines; others believe something else (presumably elsewhere, or voicelessly excluded, or compulsively named as unthinkable), or it would make no sense to affirm.

Keane rightly observes that reform movements made the creed more private and exacted a different kind of agential commitment in its utterance. (They also made them the object of broad print circulation and comparison.) The semiotics of the credo is subtly but powerfully transformed in the denominationalist imaginary that is the presupposition and entailment of evangelicalism. We who believe are now among the others who believe otherwise; those who do not believe are the necessary environment of our solicitation; my credo-ing allies me (voluntarily, witnessably) with strangers who in a modularly predictable way believe the same, cognitively identical, content. It also marks me off from others who happen to be proximate to me without making the same affirmation.

Thus the space in which the creed is uttered is a space of aggregation; potentially innumerable others might repeat the act because one does so in a default environment supposedly not defined by the creed itself. The effects of spatialization and common witnessing have become only implicit, in order to foreground the enunciating agent. But they are still there.

Second, ethical agency. One of the most powerful parts of Keane’s analysis is his emphasis on the way evangelical discourse requires a recursion in which the subject takes an agential stance on his own beliefs. There is a basic structure here, which is shared between evangelical religion (or religion in general when fashioned in the evangelical semiotic ideology) and the secular practices of critical agency. Subjectivity is purified in its distance from text objects. In secular contexts the resulting subject often disappears into discursive forms that do not appear to be addressing or emanating from individuals at all—science being the most obvious example. But they presuppose for this very reason an effortful labor of ongoing self-relation.

Here we come to my question. It isn’t clear to me that purification—the attempt to make clear separations between agents and objects—fully describes the process. “This purification process, undertaken in the name of religious reform and of modernity, became a paradigm well beyond Western or Christian societies.” For one thing, the forms of evangelical modernity create their own hybrids, as Keane acknowledges two paragraphs later. These include not just Pentecostalist modes of experience, faith healing, magical prayer, and so on, but also those modes of mystery that are produced by the same mass-cultural forms: supernatural fiction, astrology, UFOs, Jesus in tortillas. Granted, many of these make the religious reformers highly uneasy. And it is crucial that the modern order put into place largely by evangelical means does not recognize these as legitimate forms of religiosity. But whatever is modern about the purification impulse is also accompanied by equally modern hybrids. And thus I wonder whether purification, powerful though it might be, gives us the core logic of the modern.

After all, in evangelical conversion an agential stance toward one’s beliefs very often produces not a purification of agent/object relations, but new hybrid spiritual agencies, beginning with the global transformation of personality (emotions, appetites, instincts) that is supposed to be the experience and evidence of conversion itself.

Thus the pattern that seems to me most compelling in the materials is not the purification of agency but the creation of modular, extractable, translatable forms—both of texts and persons—whether those consist in purified agency or not. I can read Keane’s book primarily as a study of the productive dimension of disembedding and its colonial effects.

My main interest, (and objection?) concerns Wolterstorff’s reading of Augustine, and I suppose by extension the dubious nature and place of the Christian tradition in any rehabilitation of rights discourse that fits comfortably within the modern liberal frame.  Wolterstorff focuses on Augustine’s refutation of ancient pagan articulations of the philosophical pursuit of the “good life.” According to the contours of this argument, Augustine represents a “break with eudaimonism,” especially motivated or, to be more specific, inspired by his famous conversion to orthodox Catholic Christianity.  Central to this inspiration is the charitable principle, which Wolterstorff foregrounds in the following way:

I think there can be little doubt that Augustine found Christ’s love command unsettling for his received way of thinking… Augustine interpreted Christ as saying that just as I am an object of my love, so also my neighbor is to be an object of my love.

Augustine’s interpretation of “Christ’s love-command” is the correct one, Wolterstorff confidently concludes, “and…it is indeed incompatible with eudaimonism.”  One has to respond with at least some small qualifications.

First: Where is Paul?  Wolterstorff mentions Paul glancingly in a footnote, with a promise to address the Pauline vision in a future work.  One can legitimately agree about the centrality of the gospel accounts of the command to love thy neighbor, but philosophically and theologically (as well as historically) speaking, the formulation in Romans is prior.  By attending to Paul one discovers usefully and rather early on that “Christ’s love command” qua theological utterance is in fact central to a distinct hermeneutic, one that prioritizes multiple allegorical transformations (sarx to pneuma, old to new, “Jew first and then Greek,” and so on).  For Paul, this allegorical passage means that the (old) unfulfilled commandment reaches its highest and fullest expression in a (new) universalistic ethic which wraps the entire human race into a single fabric of charity and compassion.  This Pauline ethic, however, cannot be extricated analytically from the evental experience that grounded it; Augustine apparently agreed with this insofar as he testified to the power of the conversion of the will and indeed narratively constructed his own experience in terms that were explicitly reminiscent of Paul’s own conversion.  When Augustine hears the voice that tells him to “tolle, lege,” for example, which text does he scan?  None other than Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, of course!

This leads to a second, related observation.  If Paul’s imperative to neighbor-love was ordered around an extreme sense of temporal collapse in messianic expectation—a reading that follows Agamben’s interpretation in The Time that Remains—then Augustine operates under the assumption of a temporal extension of the saeculum.  For better or worse, this is a key to his vision of human history in the City of God.  When understood in this context, the imperative to love thy neighbor becomes a kind of ethical promise that always remains unfulfilled in the civitas terrena, and in fact, what is worse, the promise becomes a mask for the deeper wellsprings of hostility and exploitation operative in the libido dominandi.  Prima facie this might seem to support Wolterstorff’s case against the unreflective individualized discourse that attends everyday discussions of rights: my expression of a claim of a right to this or that particular good can quite easily be seen as an expression of my drive or desire to dominate another person or group of people.  If social and natural goods are scarce, and the battle over them is a zero-sum game, then my rights-claim has to occur as an assertion against the satisfaction of others.  In fact, social reality is much more complex and (thankfully) much more interesting: I would suggest that the tension that resides at the heart of the more common individualized rights-claims also resides at the heart of the exercise of the kind of rights discourse that Wolterstorff wants to bring to the foreground, namely one that revolves around my rights against others, especially when my perception involves the sense of denial, of having my claims to life-goods unfairly or arbitrarily rejected, of being wronged.  What makes me think that this is the case?

Augustine’s critique of the drive to dominate doesn’t stop short of those claims that refer to my rights against being wronged; in fact, it actually focuses on those claims as a highly concentrated place where the libido dominandi might find expression.  In this sense Augustine shows his true colors as a kind of theoretical forefather to the radically negative perspectives proffered in the modern world by non-theologians like Rousseau or Adorno.  For while Augustine’s saeculum becomes temporally extended, its order always remains a mimetic realm in which social life is cohered incompletely under a kind of love (cupiditas) which always strives imperfectly and wrong-headedly to unify the human experience.  In this kind of world, the furniture of social life is constructed from the raw material of human suffering-in-fallenness, and serves in a structural sense to sustain that suffering.  Attempting to transfer the language of charitable love into a discursive framework of rights—even “rights against” instead of “rights to”—does nothing to transcend this condition: instead, as Rousseau would later argue (in an Augustinian vein), under the sign of secularity my extension to you in vulnerability and dependence damages both of us, and extricates us in bonds of mutual resentment.  From here it only gets worse: the mandate of Freud’s kultur means the  sublimation of resentment, which in turn provides the impetus for the expression of social contractarian images which haunt modernity with an untenable choice: either the promotion of the development of the radically independent “natural” being, or the construction of a contract that totalizes and universalizes radical dependence.  Or in the terms familiarized by the Judith Shklar’s critical reading of Rousseau, modernity leaves us with the choice between Man or Citizen as social exemplars.

Such a narrative strays far from the thinkers and problems that populate Wolterstorff’s work, but that is my point: Christian thought serves as one ground for a radically negative critique of immanence even while serving (simultaneously!) as the fundamental origin of the modern, spatialized saeculum.  It constructs the modern world as well as founding a distinctly critical vision of contemptus mundi.  The Christian tradition contains multitudes, and some of its richest and most “positive” systematizers—theologians like Augustine for example—convey as well a subterranean apophatic sensibility, in essence accepting categorizations such as “rights” even while standing at a certain distance from them.  This makes the place of the tradition in any rehabilitation of rights discourse at least somewhat problematic.

The two questions are closely related, for the issue is how communication is achieved across lines of deep difference. Helpful as translation may be, it is not the whole story. Rawls uses the notion of translation to describe the ways in which the rational arguments of religious people are rendered accessible to secular interlocutors. This would appear to involve a kind of expurgation as well, the removal of ostensibly untranslatable (because irrational) elements of faith. But translation is also a common metaphor for describing communication across lines of cultural difference; indeed many anthropologists speak of their work as the “translation of culture.” Translation implies that differences between languages can be overcome without interference from deeper differences between cultures, or indeed from incommensurabilities of languages themselves. It implies a highly cognitive model of understanding, independent of inarticulate connections among meanings or the production of meaning in action rather than passive contemplation. But the idea of translating religious arguments into terms accessible to secular fellow-citizens is more complicated. To be sure, restricting attention to argumentative speech reduces the extent of problems because arguments are already understood to be a restricted set of speech acts and are more likely to be commensurable than some others. But the meaning of arguments may be more or less embedded in broader cultural understandings, personal experiences and practices of argumentation that themselves have somewhat different standing in different domains. (To “translate” a classic religious argument for the existence of God—e.g., one of Aquinas’s attempts to transform faith into knowledge—into secular terms as a demonstration of God’s existence for unbelievers might be informative, but it could not reproduce the meaning of the original argumentative project.)

Bridging the kinds of hermeneutic distance suggested by the notion of having deeply religious and nonreligious arguments commingle in the public sphere cannot be accomplished by translation alone. Perhaps translation is not meant literally, but only as a metaphor for the activity of becoming able to understand the arguments of another—but that is already an important distinction. We are indeed more able to understand the arguments of others when we understand more of their intellectual and personal commitments and cultural frames (“where they are coming from” in popular parlance). In this regard Habermas sometimes signals a “mutual interrogation” or “complementary learning process” that is more than simply translation. This is important and true to his earlier emphasis on intersubjectivity. But this is still a very cognitive conception, and one that implies parties to a discussion—perhaps a Platonic symposium—who arrive at new understandings without themselves being changed.

Where really basic issues are at stake, it is often the case that mutual understanding cannot be achieved without change in one or both of the parties. By participating in relationships with each other, including by pursuing rational mutual understanding, we open ourselves to becoming somewhat different people. The same goes at collective levels: mutual engagement across national or cultural or religious frontiers changes the pre-existing nations, cultures, and religions, and future improvements in mutual understanding stem from this change as well as from “translation.” Sectarian differences among Protestants or between Protestants and Catholics are thus not merely resolved in rational argumentation. Sometimes they fade without resolution because they simply don’t seem as important to either side. A shifting context and changed projects of active engagement in understanding and forming intellectual and normative commitments changes the significance of such arguments (as for example when committed Christians feel themselves more engaged in arguments with nonChristians and the irreligious—including arguments with those who believe secular understandings are altogether sufficient—than they are in arguments with each other). But a process of transformation in culture, belief, and self is also often involved. We become people able to understand each other. This may improve our capacity to reason together, but the process of transformation is not itself necessarily entirely rational.

Habermas is right when he follows Weithman and Wolterstorff in insisting that the acts of translation necessary to the full incorporation of religious citizens and arguments into the public sphere are not the sole responsibility of the religious, but must be cooperative. But we also need to recognize that histories of mutual engagement that produce both common understandings and citizens able to understand each other are not simply matters of translation or advances of reason. They are also particular histories that forge particular cultural connections and commonalities.

Such cultures of integration are historically produced bases for the solidarity of citizens. Whether they can be construed in evolutionary terms as “advances” in truth or along some other dimension is uncertain. As Mendieta suggests, questions of religion crystallize the tension “between reason as a universal standard and the inescapable fact that reason is embodied only historically and in contingent social practices.”  This bears on the nature of collective commitments to processes of public reason and the decisions they produce. The Rawlsian liberal model depends on a “reasonable background consensus” that can establish the terms and conditions of the properly political discourse. Wolterstorff doubts whether this exists. Habermas is more hopeful—and reason for hope seems strongest if what is required is only what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” not a more universal agreement. Hope may be still greater if the overlapping consensus may be forged in multiple vernaculars, and out of cultural mixing, not simply linguistic neutrality.  This suggests, however, that what is required is a practical orientation rather than an agreement as to the truth. This is precisely Wolterstorff’s (and Habermas’s) concern: “that majority resolutions in an ideologically divided society can at best yield reluctant adaptations to a kind of modus vivendi”. A utilitarian compromise—based on the expectation of doing better in the next majority vote—is an inadequate basis for continuing solidarity where there is not merely a disagreement over shares of commonly recognized goods, but over the very idea of the good. “Conflict on existential values between communities of faith cannot be solved by compromise.”

This is of course a crucial reason why Habermas has held that we must separate substantive questions about the good life from procedural questions about just ways of ordering common life. I believe he retains the conviction that this separation is important and possible. It is intrinsic to his support for a “constitutional patriotism.” But it is challenged by recognition that for religious citizens to give reasons in terms “accessible” to secular citizens may be unjustly difficult or even impossible. And it is challenged further if one agrees that religious faith, but also specificities of cultural traditions, may make it difficult for citizens to render all that is publicly important to them in the form of criticizable validity claims.

Conflicts between world views and religious doctrines that lay claim to explaining man’s position in the world as a whole cannot be laid to rest at the cognitive level. As soon as these cognitive dissonances penetrate as far as the foundations for a normative integration of citizens, the political community disintegrates into irreconcilable segments so that it can only survive on the basis of an unsteady modus vivendi. In the absence of the uniting bond of a civic solidarity, which cannot be legally enforced, citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons for their political statements and attitudes. This reciprocity of expectations among citizens is what distinguishes a community integrated by constitutional values from a community segmented along the dividing lines of competing world views.

The basic question is whether or how much commonalities of belief are crucial to the integration of political communities. How important is it for citizens to believe in the truth of similar propositions “explaining man’s position in the world”?

As Durkheim suggested by distinguishing mechanical from organic solidarity, communities are integrated in ways other than by shared values (constitutional or otherwise) and worldviews. But the Durkheimian binary is too simple. Habermas takes it over, to some extent, in the distinction of lifeworld from system. In general (and rightly), he sees a mismatch between the scale of integration accomplished on the basis of systems of money and power without the communicative understanding of participants, and the capacities of the lifeworld to generate such integrative understandings. Insofar as communicative action in lifeworlds yields diverse substantive understandings (and projects) of the good life, it cannot yield the necessary integration on a large scale. But to the extent that communicative action may underwrite agreement on procedures, it may generate a “mechanical” solidarity based on a common view of at least one aspect of the world. This is embodied in the project of constitutionalism, where constitutions are limited to procedural rather than substantive norms. As the phrase “constitutional patriotism” suggests, Habermas also hopes this will help to solve problems of motivation and commitment which are otherwise secured only in commitments to diverse ways of life and solidarities that are incommensurable (such as ethnicities). This invests a great deal of hope in the relatively thin commonality of similarities of propositional belief and acceptance of procedures (however valuable). Communities are also products of a variety of social relationships, recognized in varying degree by their members. Bonds of civic solidarity are produced in networks of practice and functional interdependence that are linguistically recognized as well as on the basis of values and propositions “explaining man’s position in the world as a whole.” Indeed, participation in the public sphere may contribute to this solidarity. Solidarity is not just a condition for reciprocal exchange of reasons in public discourse; it can be a product.

This is not the place to try to defend a different view of the production of social solidarity in which culture is not reduced to common propositional beliefs and the binary oppositions of mechanical and organic or lifeworld and system are complemented by attention to webs of social relations and processes of historical creativity and transformation in culture. My point here is the more limited suggestion that religion figures in these processes in ways that transcend “beliefs.”

Habermas seems to be considering this possibility in his most recent writings. In a post to The Immanent Frame, Charles Taylor notes that Habermas’s “position on religious discourse has considerably evolved; to the point of recognizing that its ‘potential makes religious discourse a serious candidate for possible truth content with respect to relevant political issues.’” (Translation of Habermas quote from Alex Skinner.)

I look forward to exploring this interesting development in Habermas’s thinking at another time.

To help us think about religion in the public and political landscape, I propose a model—what I call Public Landscape as Varied Topography—in which there is room for various socio-political stances, religious or otherwise. With this model, I challenge those who would attempt to render religion safe in democracies by relegating religious belief and practice to the private sphere. I also challenge those who claim that a vital, robust democracy requires a religious citizenry (that is, those who would essentialize and privilege “religion” as a unique and indispensable moral resource for the health of the nation). My assessment of Rawls and Habermas will build on Taylor and Eberle in their critiques of what Eberle, in this discussion, has called the “differential treatment of the religious and the secular,” or of what Taylor calls the “epistemic break between secular reason and religious thought.”

We can imagine various models for the place of religion in democratic societies, for example, Religion Over the Public Landscape (in which religion is necessary for the health of public and political life); and its opposite, Religion Banned from the Public Landscape (in which religion is kept mostly out of public and political life). Notice that in my favored model, Public Landscape as Varied Topography, “religion” is not in the title. In this model, religion is not initially treated as a special case. One does not decide in advance who may speak or what kind of arguments one may offer in public and political debate. A working assumption in this model is that public voices will usually be varied in form and content. Some voices may be explicitly religious; others may be explicitly non-religious. But these distinctions do not matter, according to this model, because no voice is treated as a special case. Or, to say the same thing differently, liberty of conscience and freedom of speech deem that each voice is a special case worthy of a hearing.

This model makes no predictions about whether allowing a varied public topography is likely to produce more conflict or more harmony. In some instances it may lead to divisiveness, in others to accord. But in any case, harmony, often a worthy aim, is not usually the most salient issue. More salient is attention to open and inclusive conversation, debate, and participation in democratic institutions.

Now, after having noted in what ways religion should not be treated as a special case, this model goes on to acknowledge that, in some sense, religion is a special subject (in light of particular socio-historical circumstances). Given the history of religion in the U.S.— which includes religious persecutions on the one hand and religious revivals on the other—Americans tend to be both religious and wary of religion. There are highly charged issues that pertain to religion in the U.S. that would not merit consideration in other societies. Different societies, different histories, different concerns. In U.S. society, if a belief or practice is associated with religion, that may be enough for it to become controversial if it enters the public space of government or education. This is, in part, because, from our history of religion, we have learned some lessons of caution.

Now, while the Public Landscape as Varied Topography model certainly does not seek to introduce unnecessary conflict, and wishes to contribute to accord where needful, it does nonetheless focus more on honoring the First Amendment than on the reduction of social discord. It seeks to prohibit the government from officially sponsoring religion, on the one hand, and to guarantee the free exercise of religion, on the other. How, in practice, does this model support both clauses? I wish to offer a couple of applications of this model in order to lend specificity to my theoretical reflections.

The model allows religious voices in public and political debate while disallowing state funding and actions that promote any particular religion. The model, then, would largely support U.S. Supreme Court decisions since the 1960s that have, on the one hand, prohibited state sponsored school prayer, and, on the other hand, have allowed public schools to teach about religion—that is, to study religion as an academic subject. This distinction is crucial and reflects the spirit of my favored model: it prevents the state from promoting a particular religion while permitting the state to host the study of, and thereby provide a forum for, religious diversity. Indeed, both acts—forbidding school sponsored prayer and educating students about diverse religious traditions—work in concert as a powerful educational lesson, teaching students about living, working, playing, and debating in a pluralistic society. Studying diversity in this fashion is one of our best avenues to greater social understanding and tolerance on matters pertaining to religion.

Turning now to a different application of the model, let us consider the recent entry of evangelical Christians into public and political debate about climate change and other environmental policies. Increasingly, evangelical Christian organizations have been criticizing the Bush administration’s appalling record on the environment. These conservative Christians are bringing to public debates about environmental policy distinctive theological arguments that refer to the goodness of the natural world and to the biblical obligation to protect all of creation. This obligation, for them, entails political action. The Evangelical Environmental Network, for example—which is concerned about the relation between hurricanes, climate change, and the poor—is lobbying Congress to enact laws to stem global warming.

The proposed model would allow into the public realm these evangelical voices and their religious arguments that address environmental policy. It would not, however, permit government funding for evangelical groups to administer environmental programs, insofar as these groups promote a distinctively theological point of view in the delivery of services. If recycling programs, mercury removal projects, or reduction of carbon emission programs were justified by appealing, for example, to the biblical obligation to care for the environment, they would be deemed unconstitutional forms of state sponsorship of religion.

Again, reduction of conflict is not the chief goal of my model. Still, I cannot help but hope and even believe that acknowledging and honoring our differences in public and political arenas will lead to a more cooperative society. Welcoming the many and varied voices is not only the right thing to do—legally and morally—but it may also be the most strategic way to draw on a powerful, yet still latent, source of strength in pluralistic democratic societies—the vitality of their diversity.

I have argued, then, that we should not attempt to shield civil society from division and conflict by attempting to keep religion out of public and political debate. While I appreciate why many are wary of religion in public, I am convinced that the risk of allowing religion in public and political exchange is not as great as the promise of inviting it in. To my mind, this goes to the heart of the promise of a dynamic democracy in which diversity of perspective is brought to bear on common projects.

What is the relation between my favored model and related themes in the work of Rawls and Habermas? Earlier in his career, Rawls seemed to share Richard Rorty’s wish that religion stay out of public life. But later, in Political Liberalism, Rawls prohibited the public exchange of religious arguments only when addressing “constitutional essentials and questions of basic justice.” Nonetheless, in either the more or less restrictive case, citizens whose outlooks are informed by religion are still required to refrain from making reference to this profound aspect of their identity when engaging in significant political deliberation and debate.

I find this Rawlsian restriction on religious arguments problematic for the following reasons:

• Psychologically, it is not clear to me that people (including legislators) can so neatly uncouple aspects of their identity.
• Politically, it is not clear to me that we want some citizens to repress the actual reasons that tacitly support the only kind of public expression of reasons that Rawls will permit (on this point, see Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition)
• Juridically, it is not clear to me that we can draw a pragmatically useful and meaningful line between “questions of basic justice” and all the other (lesser yet related) issues that pertain to questions of justice and the nature and arrangement of our public institutions.
• And epistemologically, it is not clear to me that what Rawls calls “public reason” can in fact be defended as “the reason of citizens,” that is, as an inclusive style of deliberation that can be said to be acceptable to all reasonable persons.

This epistemological doubt is intensified, not weakened, when Rawls, in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Political Liberalism, permits comprehensive religious doctrines to enter into public reason, provided that “in due course public reasons … are presented sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are introduced to support.” This new concession is essentially offering this: an argument wearing the cloth of religion may be permitted provided that at some point the religious vestments are removed, thus allowing public reason to appear. The only religious argument that can be permitted and trusted, then, is one that could initially have been stated in other terms, namely, in the terms of public reason. And yet this very idea of perfect translation from “non-public, religious reason” to “public reason” is precisely what gives me pause. Can we make sense of these separate languages? And even if we can, is a translation always possible? How long must we wait for the acceptable translation? And why must this burden of translation be placed on the religious?

In Rawls’s stipulated usage, public reason is by definition restrictive. It intentionally keeps out what Rawls calls the “background culture with its many forms of nonpublic reason.” But we ought to wonder: are there not interesting and helpful perspectives embedded in “nonpublic reason” that, in Rawls’s model, would never be allowed to have a bearing on essential and basic matters of justice? Can a line be reasonably drawn between public and nonpublic (private) reason? How is the line to be drawn? The noble Enlightenment hope in public reason should be reformulated, not as Rawls’s hope in public reason trumping nonpublic reason, but as a democratic hope in a lively, rough-and-tumble political process of free and open exchange. This process of exchange—this alternative view of “public reasoning,” namely, the public (citizens) reasoning with each other—is not limited by what all “might reasonably be expected to reasonably endorse.” Rather, this process acknowledges that what is reasonable to endorse is itself debatable, and that some voices in the debate will not always be deemed reasonable by others in the debate. This unkempt process, in my view, goes to the heart of a democracy that honors diversity, equality, and liberty of conscience.

To his credit, Habermas grasps the moral significance of religious perspectives in citizens’ democratic deliberation, and hence he does not attempt to relegate religion to the private realm. Unfortunately, however, he does relegate religion to its own, separate sphere. He writes of religion as if it were a distinctive, sui generis way of thinking or believing. “Religious language” becomes a special language—something set apart from other kinds of languages. This way of thinking about religion, in my view, does not hold up under scrutiny. Religion is a contested umbrella term that has no essential core, no essential form, no essential content. Habermas seems to hold what is sometimes called an “expressive” view of religion: religion expresses moral and aesthetic emotions and perspectives that philosophy (and other forms of secular discourse) could articulate but haven’t yet managed to, or perhaps never will be able to, given the discursive nature of philosophy and the expressive nature of religion. I find this view of religion unconvincing and unhelpful.

It may be empirically true that, given where and how most Americans, for example, are morally educated, to keep such historical religions as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam out of the public life would be to deprive the republic of significant moral resources. But this claim is based on a contingent state of affairs and one that is subject to change. Religion, whether conservative or progressive, is not an essentialistic feature of the moral life. And there is no essential core to religion that requires translation for the good of the republic. So, while I applaud Habermas’s generous efforts to permit religion in the democratic deliberation among citizens, I oppose the way he treats religion as a discrete “language” that is of a different kind from such (so-called) secular discourse that is found in philosophy or in legislative assemblies.

Let me close by noting that while I believe my favored model has legal and constitutional standing, it is not strictly a legal model. For the model to be successful, it must be rooted in and informed by the normative and cultural manners and the character of a nation and its (diverse) citizens. It must critically engage with a society’s democratic culture and laws, its ideals and institutions, its normative reflection and legal constitution. This cultural and socio-historical matrix will inform how we engage with each other in our democratic deliberation: how we express our views skillfully and speak tactfully to our audience, how we offer reasons for our views and listen carefully to those offering counter reasons. And for this reason I believe that our focus should no longer be on religion in public and whether it ought to be there, but rather on the kind and quality of conversation and debate that exemplifies the skills and virtues of democratic public engagement.

What are we to think of the idea, entertained by Rawls for a time, that one can legitimately ask of a religiously and philosophically diverse democracy that everyone deliberate in a language of reason alone, leaving their religious views in the vestibule of the public sphere? The tyrannical nature of this demand was rapidly appreciated by Rawls, to his credit. But we ought to ask why the proposition arose in the first place. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that everyone should use a language with which they could reasonably expect their fellow citizens to agree. The idea seems to be something like this. Secular reason is a language that everyone speaks, and can argue and be convinced in. Religious languages operate outside of this discourse, by introducing extraneous premises which only believers can accept. So let’s all talk the common language.

What underpins this notion is something like an epistemic distinction. There is secular reason, which everyone can use and reach conclusions by—conclusions that is, with which everyone can agree. Then there are special languages, which introduce extra assumptions, which might even contradict those of ordinary secular reason. These are much more epistemically fragile; in fact, you won’t be convinced by them unless you already hold them. So religious reason either comes to the same conclusions as secular reason, but then it is superfluous; or it comes to contrary conclusions, and then it is dangerous and disruptive. This is why it needs to be sidelined.

As for Habermas, he has always marked an epistemic break between secular reason and religious thought, with the advantage on the side of the first. Secular reason suffices to arrive at the normative conclusions we need, such as establishing the legitimacy of the democratic state, and defining our political ethic. Recently, his position on religious discourse has considerably evolved; to the point of recognizing that its “Potential macht die religiöse Rede bei entsprechenden politischen Fragen zu einem ernsthaften Kandidaten für mögliche Wahrheitsgehalte.” But the basic epistemic distinction still holds for him. Thus when it comes to the official language of the state, religious references have to be expunged. “Im Parlament muss beispielsweise die Geschäftsordnung den Presidenten ermächtigen, religiöse Stellungnahmen und Rechtfertigungen aus dem Protokoll zu streichen.”

I think that these positions of Rawls and Habermas show that they have not yet understood the normative basis for the contemporary secular state. I believe that they are on to something, in that there are zones of a secular state in which the language used has to be neutral. But these do not include citizen deliberation, as Rawls at first thought, or even deliberation in the legislature, as Habermas seems to think from the above quote. This zone can be described as the official language of the state: the language in which legislation, administrative decrees and court judgments must be couched. It is self-evident that a law before Parliament couldn’t contain a justifying clause of the type: “Whereas the Bible tells us that p.” And the same goes mutatis mutandis for the justification of a judicial decision in the court’s verdict. But this has nothing to do with the specific nature of religious language. It would be equally improper to have a legislative clause: “Whereas Marx has shown that religion is the opium of the people,” or “Whereas Kant has shown that the only thing good without qualification is a good will.” The grounds for both these kinds of exclusions is the neutrality of the state.

The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?

Now the notion that state neutrality is basically a response to diversity has trouble making headway among “secular” people in the West, who remain oddly fixated on religion, as something strange and perhaps even threatening. This stance is fed by all the conflicts of liberal states with religion, past and present, but also by a specifically epistemic distinction: religiously informed thought is somehow less rational than purely “secular” reasoning. The attitude has a political ground (religion as threat), but also an epistemological one (religion as a faulty mode of reason).

I believe we can see these two motifs in a popular contemporary book, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God. On one hand, Lilla wants to claim that there is a great gulf between thinking informed by political theology and “thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms.” Moderns have effected “the liberation, isolation, and clarification of distinctively political questions, apart from speculations about the divine nexus. Politics became, intellectually speaking, its own realm deserving independent investigation and serving the limited aim of providing the peace and plenty necessary for human dignity. That was the Great Separation.” Such metaphors of radical separation imply that human-centered political thought is a more reliable guide to answer the questions in its domain than theories informed by political theology.

So much for the epistemological ranking. But then towards the end of the view, Lilla calls on us not to lose our nerve, and allow the Great Separation to be reversed; which seems to imply that there are dangers in doing so. The return of religion in this sense would be full of menace.

This phenomenon deserves fuller examination. Ideally, we should look carefully at the double grounds for this stance of distrust, comment on these, and then say something about the possible negative political consequences of maintaining this stance. But in this contribution, I shall only really have space to look at some roots of the epistemological ground.

I think this has its source in what one might call a myth of the Enlightenment. There certainly is a common view which sees the Enlightenment (Aufklärung, Lumières) as a passage from darkness to light, that is, as an absolute, unmitigated move from a realm of thought full of error and illusion to one where the truth is at last available. To this one must immediately add that a counterview defines “reactionary” thought: the Enlightenment would be an unqualified move into error, a massive forgetting of salutary and necessary truths about the human condition.

In the polemics around modernity, more nuanced understandings tend to get driven to the wall, and these two slug it out. Arnold’s phrase about “ignorant armies clashing by night” comes irresistibly to mind. What underlies the understanding of Enlightenment as an absolute, unmitigated step forward?

This is worth asking, I believe, because the myth is more widespread than one might think. Even sophisticated thinkers, who might repudiate it when it is presented as a general proposition, seem to be leaning on it in other contexts.

Thus there is a version of what Enlightenment represents, which sees it as our stepping out of a realm in which Revelation, or religion in general, counted as a source of insight about human affairs, into a realm in which these are now understood in purely this-worldly or human terms. Of course, that some people have made this passage is not what is in dispute. What is questionable is the idea that this move involves the self-evident epistemic gain of our setting aside consideration of dubious truth and relevance and concentrating on matters which we can settle and which are obviously relevant. This is often represented as a move from Revelation to reason alone (Kant’s “blosse Vernunft”).

Clear examples are found in contemporary political thinkers, for instance Rawls and Habermas. For all their differences, they seem to reserve a special status for non-religiously informed Reason (let’s call this “reason alone”), as though a) this latter were able to resolve certain moral-political issues in a way which can legitimately satisfy any honest, unconfused thinker, and b) where religiously-based conclusions will always be dubious, and in the end only convincing to people who have already accepted the dogmas in question.

This surely is what lies behind the idea I mentioned at the outset, entertained for a time in different form by both thinkers, that one can restrict the use of religious language in the sphere of public reason. We must mention again that this proposition has been largely dropped by both; but we can see that the proposition itself makes no sense, unless something like (a) + (b) above is true. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that public reason must be couched in terms which could in principle be universally agreed upon. The notion was that the only terms meeting this standard were those of reason alone (a), while religious language by its very nature would fail to do so (b).

Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the end of the day that religion is founded on an illusion, and hence that what is derived from it less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason for greater suspicion being directed at it. The credibility of this distinction depends on the view that some quite “this-worldly” argument suffices to establish certain moral-political conclusions. I mean “satisfy” in the sense of (a): it should legitimately be convincing to any honest, unconfused thinker. There are propositions of this kind, ranging from “2+2=4″ all the way to some of the better-founded deliverances of modern natural science. But the key beliefs we need, for instance, to establish our basic political morality are not among them. The two most widespread this-worldly philosophies in our contemporary world, utilitarian and Kantianism, in their different versions, all have points at which they fail to convince honest and unconfused people. If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God. Of course, our being capable of suffering is one of those basic unchallengeable propositions, in the sense of (a), as our being creatures of God is not, but what is less sure is what follows normatively from the first claim.

To propound the distinction is much easier if you think you already have a “secular” argument for rights which is watertight, as Habermas does for his “discourse ethic” (which I unfortunately find quite unconvincing).

In fact, modern diverse democracies operate on the basis of what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.” We agree on affirming a right to life, but we justify it in our own diverse ways. One proposition that such a democracy cannot enshrine is the view that one of these justifications is canonical and correct, and the others faulty and invalid. The Enlightenment myth can’t be part of the overlapping consensus.

The (a) + (b) distinction, applied to the moral-political domain, is one of the fruits of the Enlightenment myth; or perhaps one should say it is one of the forms which this myth takes. What underlies this? I think there are three important sources, which I only have space to identify briefly here.

The first two can be traced back to Cartesian foundationalism. This combines a supposedly indubitable starting point (the particulate ideas in the mind) with an infallible method (that of clear and distinct ideas) and thus should yield conclusions which would live up to claim (a). But this comes unstuck, and in two places. The indubitable starting points can be challenged by a determined skepticism, such as we find in Hume; and the method relies much too much on a priori argument, and not enough on empirical input.

But even though his foundationalism and his a priori physics were rejected, Descartes left behind (α) a belief in the importance of finding the correct method, and (β) a rationalist temper of mind, which applied to ethics has led to the widespread modern view (which I find both startling and erroneous) that we can derive all right actions from a single highly abstract principle; a premise shared by both Utilitarians and those who write in the wake of Kant.

The third source (γ) is embedded in the modern social imaginary; it is the modern notion of moral order: society, made up of individuals, finds its legitimacy in its defense of rights and its fostering of mutual benefit. The way in which these three work together to sustain the illusion of an epistemic superiority of “reason alone” needs to be worked out in detail. It would be a fascinating and instructive story.

Habermas proceeds, as always, carefully and methodically, but it seems on this occasion with some additional caution and uncertainty about just how far he wants to go. Religion, after all, appears prominently in contemporary politics in the form of strikingly illiberal views and positions, and in a package with practices Habermas can hardly condone. It also appears in more positive and even heroic forms, of course, not least as part of movements for peace, civil and human rights, and equitable development. But Habermas recognizes that the theoretical challenge requires not just accepting “nice” versions of religion, but precisely determining in what way religious positions with which secular liberals may disagree vehemently should carry weight.

At the conference on the occasion of Jürgen Habermas’s Holberg Prize, as in a number of other contexts, the question of what it means to refer to a “postsecular” era was the subject of debate. Helge Høibraaten reflected the concerns of many when he asked whether the prefix “post” wasn’t misleading. Just as the ostensibly “postmodern” reflected cross-currents intrinsic to modernity, wasn’t this true also of the “postsecular”?

We could come at this historically as well as philosophically, noting the dramatic role played by religion – and periodic movements of religious revitalization – throughout the modern era. It is significant not just that Americans remain more religious than Europeans in recent decades, thus, but also that the United States has seen successive waves of Great Awakenings, each transforming not only religious but also apparently secular life. And while the contrast with Europe is not new, having informed both Tocqueville and Weber after their travels in the US, it is also not complete. For the Protestant Reformation was not the last time religion mattered in Europe. We should remember the anti-slavery movement and the influence of especially low-church Protestant religions on a range of other late 18th century and early 19th century social movements, including those also shaped by democratic and class politics. We should not neglect the mid-19th century renewal of spiritualism, even if much of it was outside religious orthodoxy, and we should not lose sight of its fluid relationships with Romanticism, utopian socialism, and humanitarianism. We should see religious internationalism both under the problematic structure of colonial and postcolonial missionary work and in the engagements shaped by Vatican II, the peace movement, and liberation theology. We should recognize, as Habermas does, the importance of religious motivations and understandings (and indeed organizational networks and practices) in a range of social movements during the 20th century, in Europe as well as America, and around the world. And of course we should recognize the growing importance of religion in Europe – largely occasioned by but not limited to Muslim immigration.

What has passed, I think Habermas means to suggest, is not a simple condition of secularity nor even a secularizing trend but (a) the plausibility of the assumption that progress (and freedom, emancipation, and liberation) could be conceptualized adequately in purely secular terms and (b) the plausibility of the notion that a clear differentiation could be maintained between discourses of faith and those of public reason. Note that the assumption and the notion have never seemed plausible to everyone; they shaped secular perspectives more than those of religious people though they did shape the discourse and views of both. In any case, loss of certainty on these dimensions is challenging, most especially for liberalism.

Religion, moreover, is part of the genealogy of public reason itself. To attempt to disengage the idea of public reason (or the reality of the public sphere) from religion is to disconnect it from a tradition that continues to give it life and content. Habermas stresses the importance of not depriving public reason of the resources of a tradition that has not exhausted the semantic contributions it can make. Equally, though, the attempt to make an overly sharp division between religion and public reason provides important impetus to the development of alternative or counterpublic spheres as well as less public and less reasoned forms of resistance to a political order that seeks to hold religion at arm’s length.

This issue is significant for Habermas’s reconsideration of the extent to which prevailing secularist assumptions are adequate for the current era. Not only is there value for public reason to gain if it integrates religious contributions, it is a requirement of political justice that public discourse recognize and tolerate but also fully integrate religious citizens. It is with this in mind that he rejects Rawls’ formulations in which public reason requires arguments conducted entirely in secular terms. Rawls’ reasoning is that this is necessary in order to ensure that all arguments are accessible to everyone. Religious people, in this view, must give reasons for their arguments that are not specifically religious and fully available for acceptance by those who are not religious. But this, Habermas rightly suggests, places an unfair and asymmetrical burden on religious citizens.

Official tolerance for diverse forms of religious practice and a constitutional separation of church and state are good, Habermas suggests, but not by themselves sufficient guarantees for religious freedom. “It is not enough to rely on the condescending benevolence of a secularized authority that comes to tolerate minorities hitherto discriminated against. The parties themselves must reach agreement on the always contested delimitations between a positive liberty to practice a religion of one’s own. And the negative liberty to remain spared of the religious practices of others.” This agreement cannot be achieved in private. Religion, thus, must enter the public sphere. There deliberative, ideally democratic processes of collective will formation can help parties both to understand each other and to reach mutual accommodation if not always agreement.

Rawls’ account of the public use of reason allows for religiously motivated arguments, but not for the appeal to “comprehensive” religious doctrines for justification. Justification must rely solely on “proper political reasons” (which means mainly reasons that are available to everyone regardless of the specific commitments they may have to religion or substantive conceptions of the good or their embeddedness in cultural traditions). This is, as Habermas indicates, an importantly restrictive account of the legitimate public use of reason – one which will strike many as not truly admitting religion into public discourse. Crucially, Habermas follows Wolterstorff in arguing that it is in the nature of religion that serious belief is understood as informing – and rightly informing – all of a believer’s life. This makes sorting out the “properly political” from other reasons both practically impossible in many cases and an illegitimate demand for secularists to impose. Attempting to enforce it would amount to discriminating against those for whom religion is not “something other than their social and political existence”. On more ambiguous grounds, Habermas does hold it acceptable to demand “properly political” justifications, independent of religion, from politicians even if not from those who vote for or endorse them.

Habermas seeks to defend a less narrow liberalism, one that admits religion more fully into public discourse (including both democratic will formation and the rule of law) but seeks to maintain a secular conception of the state. He understands this as requiring impartiality in state relations to those of any religious orientation or none and to all religious communities, but not as requiring the stronger laïc prohibition on state action affecting religion even if impartially. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the liberal state and its advocates are not merely enjoined to religious tolerance but – at least potentially – cognizant of a functional interest in public expressions of religion. These may be key resources for the creation of meaning and identity; secular citizens can learn from religious contributions to public discourse (not least when these help clarify intuitions the secular have not made explicit).

In this “polyphonic complexity of public voices” the giving of reasons is still crucial. Public reason cannot proceed simply by expressive communication or demands for recognition, though the public sphere cannot be adequately inclusive if it tries to exclude these. The public sphere will necessarily include processes of culture-making that are not reducible to advances in reason, and which nonetheless may be crucial to capacities for mutual understanding. But if collective will formation is to be based on reason, not merely participation in common culture, then public processes of clarifying arguments and giving reasons for positions must be central. Religious people like all others are reasonably to be called on to give a full account of their reasons for public claims. But articulating reasons clearly is not the same as offering only reasons that can be stated in terms fully “accessible” to the nonreligious. Conversely, though the secular (or differently religious) may be called on to participate in the effort to understand the reasons given by adherents to any one religion, such understanding may include recognition and clarification of points where orientations to knowledge are such that understanding cannot be fully mutual. And the same goes in reverse. Since secular reasons are also embedded in culture and belief and not simply matters of fact or reason alone, those who speak from non-religious orientations are reasonably called on to clarify to what extent their arguments demand such non-religious orientations or may be reasonably accessible to those who do not share them.

Indeed, one could argue that a sharp division between secular and religious beliefs is available only to the secular. While the religious person may accept many beliefs that others regard as adequately grounded in secular reasons alone – about the physical or biological world, for example – she may see these as inherently bound up with a belief in divine creation. She may also regard certain beliefs as inherently outside religion, but even if she uses the word “secular” to describe these, the meaning is at least in part “irreligious” (a reference to a different, non-religious way of seeing things and not simply to things ostensibly “self-sufficient” outside religion or divine influence). It is necessary to demand that the religious person consider her own faith reflexively, see it from the point of view of others, and relate it to secular views. Though this amounts to demanding a cognitive capacity that not all religious people have, it is not one intrinsically contrary to religion and equivalent demands are placed on all citizens by the ethics of public discourse. What the liberal state must not do is “transform the requisite institutional separation of religion and politics into an undue mental and psychological burden for those of its citizens who follow a faith.” And with this in mind, Habermas also suggests that the non-religious bear a symmetrical burden to participate in the translation of religious contributions to the political public sphere into “properly political” secular terms – that is, they must seek to understand what is being said in religious terms and determine to what extent they can understand it (and potentially agree with it) in their own non-religious terms. In this way, they will help to make ideas, norms, and insights deriving from religious sources accessible to all, and to the more rigorously secular internal discursive processes of the state itself.

This line of argument pushes against a distinction Habermas has long wanted to maintain between morality and ethics, between procedural commitments to justice and engagements with more particular conceptions of the good life.

We make a moral use of practical reason when we ask what is equally good for everyone; we make an ethical use when we ask what is respectively good for me or for us. Questions of justice permit under the moral viewpoint what all could will: answers that in principle are universally valid. Ethical questions, on the other hand, can be rationally clarified only in the context of a specific life-history or a particular form of life. For these questions are perspectively focused on the individual or on a specific collective who want to know who they are and, at the same time, who they want to be.

Habermas does not abandon the pursuit of a context-independent approach to the norms of justice. But he does now recognize that demanding decontextualization away from substantive conceptions of the good life as a condition for participation in the processes of public reason may itself be unjust.

A further couplet of questions is also opened which may prove challenging for efforts to preserve a strong understanding of (and wide scope for) context-independence and universality in moral reasoning. First, is a genealogical or language-theoretical reconstruction of reason adequate without an existential connection between social and cultural history on the one hand and individual biography on the other? Second, is “translation” an adequate conceptualization of what is involved in making religious insights accessible to nonreligious participants in public discourse (and vice-versa)?

In my next post, I will argue that mutual understanding between religious and non-religious participants in public discourse requires transformation, not just translation – a process of transformation in culture, belief, and self.

I disagree with this differential treatment of the religious and the secular — not only Habermas’ particular formulation, but any position relevantly like it. I favor an alternative understanding of the moral expectations those already committed to liberal democracy reasonably have regarding the role of religious reasons in justifying political coercion. According to that alternative understanding, religious and secular reasons have exactly the same role to play in justifying coercion, whether in the political decision-making of ordinary citizens or in the public advocacy of the members of the legislature. I briefly sketch that position below.

For a number of fairly obvious reasons, it would be a morally terrific thing if each and every citizen in a liberal polity had what each regards as adequate reason to support each piece of legislation to which she is subject. Each citizen and legislator therefore has some reason to try to approximate that ideal state and so has some reason to abide what I prefer to call an ideal of conscientious engagement. This ideal has roughly two analytically – not temporally — distinct components.

First, citizens and legislators should do their best to determine which of the feasible political options before them is morally best, and then they should support the very policy they responsibly believe to be morally best. When they do so, they should employ the epistemic resources available to them, and they may do so by relying on any of the truths they responsibly take to bear on the matter at hand. So if I am a secularist who believes that some version of utilitarianism is the sober moral truth, then I have all the reason I need to employ my utilitarian convictions to determine which of the policy options before me maximizes the relevant goods. In that case, my support for some legislation might properly depend on a rationale I know that many of my compatriots properly reject. A comparable point applies forthwith to other believers, whether Christian, Wiccan, Hindu, Kantian and whatever. (It should go without saying that I cannot do the best I can to determine which policy option is morally best without listening to my compatriots, learning from them and, in particular, opening up my political convictions to their critical scrutiny.)

Second, citizens and legislators should do their best to persuade their compatriots to support the policies they take to be morally best. In my view, respect for their compatriots as having great and equal worth requires citizens and legislators to do what they can to approximate the ideal state of affairs in which all have what each regards as adequate reason for the laws all must obey. With respect to some of my compatriots, this will involve articulating the arguments that actually persuade me: hopefully some others will be persuaded by the arguments that I actually find persuasive. But for those who have fundamentally different normative commitments, the arguments that convince me will ring hollow. And in that case, I have to exit from my parochial point of view, see how things look as others see them, and then do my level best to articulate reasons that persuade them: to the secular utilitarian, I can try to show that my favored policy maximizes net value; to the Conservative Protestant I can appeal to the Bible; to the Muslim the Koran; to the Catholic, church authority or natural law. Of course, when I exit from my parochial point of view, I do not thereby aspire to some common, shared, accessible, public or universal perspective. I exit from my point of view into the equally parochial perspective of the person(s) whom I hope to persuade. In some cases, I will be able to articulate one argument that is able to persuade those who inhabit importantly different worldviews, and in that case I will be able to articulate a rather more ecumenical argument. I might have pragmatic reason to do so, but so far as I can tell, I have no better moral reason to articulate one argument that persuades three people than three distinct arguments that persuade the same three.

So I should form my political commitments as best I can given my epistemic resources, listen to others and revise my commitments in light of what they say, try to persuade others by appealing to their commitments and hopefully get them to see matters my way. Moreover, I should expect my compatriots to return the favor: they should form their political commitments as best they can given their epistemic resources, they should listen to me and revise their commitments in light of what I say, they should try to persuade me by appealing to my commitments and hopefully get me to see things their way. In so doing each of us strives to maximize the number of people who support the policies they believe in good conscience to be morally correct.

But of course, in the real world, we seldom reach consensus as to why the laws that govern us are appropriate and we seldom reach convergence on the laws to which we must submit. We disagree about both what and why. No matter how assiduously we strive to articulate arguments that persuade others that our favored policies are correct, there will always be some epistemically competent and morally sensitive peers who are utterly unpersuaded – and rightly so given their noetic endowment. That is the cost of living in a pluralistic liberal polity. Disagreement is endemic and ineradicable. Moreover, at some point the conversation has to stop and we have to make a collective decision about what to do. Forced choices are unavoidable. Faced with such forced and contentious choices, each of us should act as conscience dictates, with the result that some of us win and some lose. The cost of living in a pluralistic society is that some of us will inevitably be subject to laws we take ourselves to have adequate reason to reject. This is how it has been, is now, and ever will be.

Now the ideal of conscientious engagement mentions nothing in particular about the justificatory role of religious reasons in liberal politics. It’s a general position that applies to religious and secular reasons, political decision-making and advocacy, citizens and legislators. But its implications for that topic are not difficult to draw out. I’ll mention two and then draw a general conclusion.

First, the ideal of conscientious engagement requires citizens and legislators to do their level best to articulate some rationale that their compatriots find persuasive, and because a pluralistic society will inevitably include some secularists, it follows that those who support some policy on religious grounds must do what they can to articulate some secular rationale for that policy. So religious citizens and legislators must attempt to articulate secular reasons for their favored policies. Or, to adopt one of Jurgen Habermas’s suggestions, religious citizens and legislators may rely on others to translate their religious arguments into some secular equivalent. Note, though, that what’s good for the religious goose is equally fine for the secular gander. If secularists support some policy to which their compatriots have religious objections, then secularists have an obligation to exit their parochial perspective, inhabit the mindset of their religious compatriots, and do what they can to persuade their religious compatriots to support their favored policy. Of course, I am assuming here that for a secularist to provide a religious believer with a secular rationale need not be for the secularist to provide the believer with any reason that should persuade, or that is even accessible to, the believer. This assumption seems correct: the secular is not the locus of the universal, the common or the accessible any more than the religious is of the particular, the parochial or the sectarian.

Second, although the ideal of conscientious engagement requires citizens and legislators to strive to persuade their compatriots, it recognizes that those aspirations will sometimes meet with failure, and it permits them to support laws for which some of their compatriots lack what their compatriots regard as an adequate rationale. This general claim applies to religiously grounded laws: it’s possible in principle that citizens and legislators support some law for which they have an exclusively religious rationale even though they fully comply with the ideal of conscientious engagement, and hence it’s possible that they permissibly pass some law that has only a religious rationale. This possibility is, so far as I can tell, politically unlikely in the liberal polity with which I am most familiar, viz., the United States, where any law that is passed must, as a practical matter, have the support of no doubt a variety of secular reasons. Nevertheless, it is a logical possibility and should it be realized, nothing morally wrong need have been done: a law which lacks adequate secular support need not be morally defective in any respect. Of course, a comparable point applies to laws that are unpersuasive to religious believers: it’s logically possible though politically infeasible that citizens and legislators pass some law that lacks any rationale that’s persuasive to certain religious believers and such a law would not necessarily be morally defective in any respect.

These two implications of the ideal of conscientious engagement for the proper political role of religious reasons exemplify an important principle: not only does the ideal of conscientious engagement treat religious and secular reasons equally, any normative constraint that applies to the reasons on the basis of which we make political decisions or advocate for our favored policies must apply impartially to religious and secular reasons. Pace Habermas, this impartial treatment of the religious and secular applies not only to citizens, but also to legislators engaged in the work of the legislative branch of government. Equal treatment of religious and secular reasons is the order of the day, whether in the halls of Congress or around the dinner table: religious believers have no more, and no less, a responsibility to aspire to persuade their secular compatriots than secularists have an obligation to aspire to persuade their religious compatriots; if laws that lack a plausible religious rationale are permissible, then so are laws that lack a plausible secular rationale; if secularists may support laws solely on the basis of reasons that fail to persuade religious believers, then so also may religious believers support laws solely on the basis of reasons that fail to persuade secularists.