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JB: About fifteen years ago, you wrote that the distinctive contribution of German sociology of religion is theory, and that at times sociology of religion in Germany is even subsumed under “grand theory.” Is that still the case?

HK: Well, perhaps we now have to say that theory was the distinctive contribution of German sociology to the sociology of religion. I doubt one could still claim today that the distinguishing feature of German sociology is its theoretical contribution. This is in part connected to its international visibility: German sociology of religion does not particularly stand out at the international level. We are now talking about a time long after the formulation of the theoretical contributions of Niklas Luhmann, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Luckmann, and others. Since then nobody has come forward with a distinct contribution on the international level.

However, in principle, German-language sociology of religion—I would include Switzerland here—still places high value on theory. The reason is—and I suspect this is a bit different than elsewhere—that it regards religion as part of general sociology. I believe that is a characteristic perspective that stands out in comparison to other national sociologies of religion and the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. Religion is treated as part of a broader concept of society, not just as the object of a subdiscipline.

Of course, we have subdisciplinary departments, but they are relatively few and relatively indistinct. Even in comparison to other European countries, the sociology of religion in Germany is very weakly institutionalized, but that is also a consequence of the principle that religion is regarded as a part of sociology and as a social phenomenon.

If you are asking what has happened since that time, what you find are continuations, further developments of existing approaches. Matthias Koenig builds on the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt; Detlef Pollack practices classical church sociology with the addition of some Luhmannian theory; Monika Wohlrab-Sahr is strongly in the line of Ulrich Oevermann; and I stand in the tradition of Thomas Luckmann. These are all connected to classical German grand theories that we, in the second or third generation, run through empirically. I think that is what sets the current generation apart. We don’t pursue grand theory as our main vocation. We have rolled up our sleeves and attempted to apply theory empirically in a number of different ways.

I would even go one step further and claim that our main contribution is our quite sophisticated methodological discussion. Methodology has become the focus of discussion. This debate has come quite far and has even been incorporated in religious studies (Religionswissenschaft).

JB: Does the sociology of religion in Germany have any input into issues that touch on religion that have high public visibility, such as the current debate around circumcision?

HK: [Laughs] German sociology of religion—well, perhaps I should first clarify what we are talking about here. We are talking about a mere handful of professorships that deal with religion among other areas. In other words, we are speaking of an institutional nullity compared to other countries. That has a lot to do with the fact that, in Germany, we have religious studies, which is far more institutionalized and also has a sociology wing, much like religious studies in the United States. But even religious studies is hardly present in public discourse.

Another factor is that the churches play a far different public role than in the United States. The churches are official interlocutors of the state and the public, and they fill this role using highly professional means. So no, the sociology of religion does not play any public role. We are a purely academic enterprise—though, considering how few of us there are, we are still amazingly effective.

JB: Your book on popular religion is written for a wider public audience. How do you view the potential public role of sociological research on religion?

HK: I had Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s book Religion as a Chain of Memory in mind as a kind of form to emulate, and I was surprised that my book wasn’t particularly noted by the public and that the public did not seem able to handle it. My book on near-death experiences, Reports from Beyond (Berichte aus dem Jenseits), got a much more popular reception, but I basically only slipped the sociological debates into it.

I assume that this has something to do with the role of religion as a public topic. In Germany, this topic is influenced much more by the interested parties than by scholarship (Wissenschaft). Scholarship on religion plays an astonishingly minor role. Similarly, religious education in public schools is not scholarly instruction; it is instruction by the actors, although it is still seen in connection with the state.

In summary, I don’t believe sociology of religion is a big topic in the German public. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I know that the older church sociology often resonated with the wider public because it was seen to confirm the public’s prejudices about religion.

JB: Let me attempt a somewhat crude comparison of intellectual traditions in the sociology of religion. In France, for instance, the factor of integration has been very important since Durkheim, and we can see that as an expression of the French republican social model. In American sociology of religion, the main innovation has been the rational-choice approach, and we can read that, too, in parallel to the social model: live and let die. Would you say that in Germany there is a similar parallel between the theoretical approach and the social model?

HK: Roughly speaking, it is the model of secularization. Not only more recent scholarship in the sociology of religion, but Weberian and Simmelian sociology also asked what remains of religion after secularization, what secularization does to religion. Presumably, the answer is the expulsion (Austreibung) of religion from society.

That is German sociology of religion’s main preoccupation, whether in the shape of a Luhmann’s theory of differentiation, Overmann’s secularization theory, or in Habermas’s work. That, in any case, was the big topic until the early 2000s. Since September 11, 2001, and its consequences, other aspects of religion have surfaced as public interest has turned. But throughout the twentieth century, secularization has been the keynote.

Religion was regarded as the Other of modern society, if you will, something that had to be kept in mind because of modernization. That’s the reason why those among us who theorized on the basis of the life-world—the anti-rationalist basis, so to speak—were among the few that were perceived as “pro-religious.” That applies to Luckmann as well.

Nobody ever doubted structural secularization, despite the considerable institutional presence of the churches, and I believe that is a unique trait of German society—a trait that is often overlooked.

JB: I would like us to return to the question of what has changed since 2001, but first could you tell me a bit more about the extent to which secularization theory is still accepted?

HK: That also has to do with the role of the sociology of religion. When I began working in this field in the 1980s and 1990s, the tenor in German society was that the churches would die out, that religion would phase out, and that negative growth would continue apace. When sociologists were asked, they just had to confirm the image of empty churches or, in our case, the reshaping of religion in a modern cast.

Since September 11—not any earlier—this has changed in an ambivalent manner. Since then, it’s not religion that is being taken note of, it is Islam. That was the “double shock” that happened in Germany. People started noticing the presence of a new, vital religion. Of course it was already there before, but the Twin Towers really raised awareness. It took a few years, but awareness of Islam and its establishment are now underway.

I think the perception of non-Islamic religion is a very different story. In Berlin you notice that religion is not seen as a considerable vital force, but in parts of west Germany that is markedly different. There, religion often has a direct, local influence.

When the pope was in Berlin we observed that he traveled between specially prepared islands, and the routes in between were heavily guarded, like when the president of the U.S. paid a visit in the cold war era. In Vienna, in contrast, the pope really was in the city.

Public discourse has changed considerably, however. Journalists and public opinion began recognizing religion and valuing it differently. Whereas before they perceived religion as the Other of modernity, now journalists are interested in what is happening in this area, and they are able to report on it in ways that are marketable.

The ambivalent thing is that, on the one hand, the belief based on modernization theory in religion’s expulsion continues to influence society as a whole—including the churches, which continue to shrink. On the other hand, it is evident that there is this dynamic—in Islam as well as in other religions—that is somewhat surprising, and in trying to name it, the concept of spirituality comes up. The concept has become established in a somewhat murky way as a stand-in to name something that has nothing to do with the established forms.

But the way these issues are represented in public has in fact turned around in a manner that probably is hardly understood in the U.S. because there is little awareness of the fact that the idea of secularization was backed by everyone, even the churches, into the late nineties.

JB: The manner in which religion is present in public has a lot to do with church–state relations, and I think many Americans are surprised to hear that in Germany we have religious education and church taxes.

KH: Yes, exactly. I cannot emphasize enough that we have one of the highest levels of institutionalization in our church structures, even when compared to other European countries. The hiring process for professorships at public universities, not just in theology but in sociology as well, involves bishops. We don’t see this state of affairs as a scourge, but I assume that elsewhere it is difficult to imagine that professors for secular subjects at public universities would be hired in this way. That’s just one example of this institutionalization. The concept of religion in Germany is strongly pegged to these enormously strong institutional structures.

JB: So the concept of spirituality enables one to say, there is religion, which is administered by the Roman-Catholic and Protestant churches, and then there is spirituality, which is anything else that is going on.

KH: Yes, precisely, and it has far-reaching ramifications. When I was conducting interviews on near-death experiences, many people denied that the experience had anything to do with religion. Religion is something that only has to do with churches, and they didn’t see any kind of connection. The word “spirituality” fills this void which we once referred to with the term “invisible religion.” It fills this void in a positive manner instead of leaving a negative absence. That’s one of the big changes, and I think from an American perspective it is difficult to understand.

JB: Let us get back to what has changed since 2001. To scholars of religion and public life, Habermas’s Peace Prize speech in October 2001 stands out. The speech is widely perceived to mark a turning point in Habermas’s œuvre: Ever since, religion has played a bigger role in his thinking. That is a dimension of his current work that is getting a lot of international attention as well.

HK: Yes, I agree. There was also his conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger.

JB: Perhaps you could say a few things from your vantage point about the impact his thinking is having here and about the research or public debates it has stimulated.

HK: Habermas is the leading intellectual at this juncture. Habermas is more of a symptom for a social development that he anticipated. I’m a bit ambivalent. Habermas has really gone through two turning points, and the most recent one that you refer to was the smaller of the two. In my view, the bigger one was his transformation from a sociologist into a philosopher—from the author of The Theory of Communicative Action seeking to describe social developments to the ethicist who wants to help shape social reality (though, I have to add, that was part of his ambition earlier as well). His most recent turn falls into this second phase in which Habermas is working as an ethicist and defines himself as such. The sociologist and the philosopher are two different Habermases, if you will, so I would first want to make that distinction.

But even coming from The Theory of Communicative Action his turn toward religion is not a big stretch. He says so himself. He begins his reading of Durkheim recognizing that religion bears the resources of communicative action and that religion is a means to transcend the subject. By the way, my own stance is not very far from Habermas’s. I hold him in high regard, because I think that the work he is doing on the recognition of the other dovetails with a Schützian concept of transcendence. His belief in the rationality of language follows a thoroughly religious motif—a secularized, Greek-philosophical variant of religious conceptions.

Habermas doesn’t only think that we should be able to understand each other; he thinks we can understand each other. Our ability to understand resides in the rationality of language. As such, he has religious traits from the outset. If you read The Theory of Communicative Action and then his speech, you’ll find that, in his speech, he concedes what he previously only expounded in evolutionary terms. In other words, he weakens his modernization theory and concedes that religion plays a role that he ascribed to it all along.

The fact that he can do so “out loud,” and that he does so in 2001, is a symptom of the reversal in public debate. Religion isn’t just recognized as a public player in the sense that José Casanova meant, but as a modern contemporary. That’s the reversal in the German debate, and Habermas is an expression of it—possibly even the first noticeable expression, and possibly even somebody who carried this reorientation forward.

In 2001, Habermas was the intellectual of the Federal Republic, much in the same way Adorno was in the 1960s. Habermas is one of the few to epitomize the classical image of the intellectual, that is, somebody who doesn’t just appear as an antitype, but as a representative. As such, he is a symptom. His debate with Benedict was a logical consequence.

JB: And then they “agree in operational terms,” or how did they put it?

HK: Yes, I think their premises are similar because they are both based on special forms of communication—the “mysterium fidei” in the case of Benedict—except that Habermas thinks that it is built into  linguistic communication.

JB: You said that Habermas’s position likely was a symptom of changes that were already underway rather than something that stimulated change. Even so, has his position stimulated debate, whether in the wider public or in more specialized circles?

HK: I’m not sure Habermas had that kind of effect. It’s clear that the terms of debate have shifted. Something has indeed happened, and Habermas signals it as a symptom: It is possible now to talk about religion and to take it seriously, not merely—as Casanova sees it—as a voice in the public canon, because that is a role the church in the Federal Republic has played since the days of Adenauer, but as something that impacts present-day society.

Habermas insists we refer to present-day society as “modern,” not “postmodern.” But it is a different modernity from the one he describes. So postsecularism was a kind of attempt to do something with “post” after all. He rejects postmodernity, so he has to introduce a different “post.” He sees religion as a sign of modernity. But I feel I must point out—and this is where the “provinciality” of the Habermasian debate becomes apparent—the notion that religion is a force of modernity is a theoretical line that I was already acquainted with by way of Berger and Luckmann’s work from the 1960s. They always emphasized the productivity of religion for modern society, albeit in a transformed shape. In any case, all this was certainly a novelty for the public-critical discourse that was long dominant in Germany, by which I mean the critical theory-influenced discourse. In fact, the religious situation in Germany isn’t what has changed—it actually remains largely unchanged, religion hasn’t become any more fashionable—but public discourse has changed. The fact that one of Germany’s leading intellectuals raised his voice to acknowledge religion certainly played a big role in this. There’s no doubt about that.

Habermas is not a critical theorist, or only to a degree, so that may be why he was able to make his most recent turn rather easily.

JB: Often the first turning point in Habermas’s work is seen to be his transformation from critic to state-supporting (staatstragend) thinker.

HK: Yes, but that was already Adorno’s function in the 1960s. You will hardly find anybody who was more present on public television than Adorno, who served as the Federal Republic’s conscience. The Federal Republic had to put its conscience on display. Habermas is also present in this function, as the intellectual who epitomizes this good conscience on an international scale, the sincere German, morally unencumbered in a way that Arnold Gehlen and others were not. That’s the role Habermas plays, and that is the source of his high national and international visibility.

JB: In the case of Berger, many speak of a turning point as well—between 1969, when he published The Sacred Canopy and was a clear defender of secularization theory, and the late nineties, when he recanted.

HK: Yes, Berger undoubtedly had to change his views, but Luckmann wrote an essay about the “myth” of secularization as early as 1969, and The Invisible Religion goes a different path and asserts the productivity of religion. By the way, it’s not a coincidence that The Invisible Religion has not been reissued in English for several decades. It’s an argument that works better in the continental European context—the book is still very successful in Poland, for example, though not in France.

In part 2 of the interview, Professor Knoblauch will talk about his own work on popular religion and spirituality, as well as his relationship with smoking.—ed.

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

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

Instead, the new metaphysicals travel long distances to stand on “power spots” far away in Sedona or Stonehenge, journey back in time to live in the spiritual skin of a past incarnation in a distant land, and spin out of their own flesh and place to see the world from an astral body. “Refusing,” or at least ignoring more local metaphysical pasts, the new metaphysicals are not intrigued in the same way as Courtney Bender was (an intrigue, by my guess, that many of her readers will share) by their proximity to the power spots of Cambridge: William James’s study, for instance, or the salon of Cambridge matron Sarah Bull, who hosted earlier spiritual crossings with, among others, Swami Vivekananda.  That the new metaphysicals feel a lack of history and a dearth of “religious culture” in such a storied place is more than just ironic for Bender. This sense of rootlessness and loss is in fact at the heart of their spirituality: “To the shopworn question of how contemporary spirituality shapes a response to feelings of alienation that attend to modernity, we must necessarily ask how contemporary spirituality itself articulates social alienation in the center of its projects.”

Before going any further, I should acknowledge that I have lived in parallel to The New Metaphysicals for quite some time, as I talked with Courtney Bender about her fieldwork—reading a chapter here and there—and shared references with her while writing my own book on Protestant “supernatural liberalism.” Shaped by our conversations, and perhaps a little synchronicity, my reading of her book was nevertheless an experience of both surprise and recognition.

First, the surprise. Even though I had read some of this material before, I was startled anew by the confidence of some of Bender’s interlocutors, especially the educated woman who believes that past life regression demonstrates that she was a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish scientist who avoided the fate of Nazi death camps. Strong in her own conviction, she then goes on to convince a woman she meets at a mystical discussion group that in her past life she was the scientist’s depressed wife. Akin to Mormons baptizing your dead whether you asked them to or not, believers in past lives use metaphysical/theological warrants to pluck the dead from the past, invigorating their own lives in the present. Like Michael Saler and Andrew Perrin, I wanted Bender to “prod” them on their assertions and the implications of their willful appropriation of the pasts of other—very specific—people.

Bender, with her evocative and gentle prose, however, is not interested in exposing either naiveté or vampirical spiritual resurrections. Instead, throughout all the chapters of The New Metaphysicals, she works tirelessly to show why the practices of contemporary spirituality—however bizarre a scholar or skeptic might find them—make a kind of sense that we should find, not just surprising, but also uncannily similar to our own.

And this is where the recognition comes in. With reference to both theory and methodology, Bender makes a strong case for why the line between her secular self and their metaphysical selves was always potentially breachable, despite the fact that she persisted in holding to her own ways of thinking, exempt from the chains of enchantment that linked the stories of her respondents. The overlap occurs in the shared sense that interpretation is the key to “freedom”—a freedom that is not an “escape from the system,” but an ability to understand how and why we are in the predicaments we inhabit, whether a personal debt crisis or a crisis on an international scale. As Bender writes: “To live within metaphysical projects is to accept the reality of forces that work on everyday life and to learn to interpret things in the world as results of their effects. And while there is no reason for us to collapse the difference between popular sociology’s invisible forces (“the state,” “the economy”) and metaphysical forces (“karma,” “energy,” “soul clusters”), metaphysical practitioners had no difficulty in doing so. Each system articulates individuals as embedded within systems, social processes, or “forces,” and each domain presents moral stories about how these can be changed, resisted, and lived within.”

Michael Saler challenges Bender for suggesting, if not actually claiming, that soul clusters and the economy share a certain kinship as conceptual “forces.” Saler insists that there really is a difference between the forces of “astral energy” and “the economy,” since the “latter tends to be employed self-reflexively and contingently, whereas the former tends to be buttressed by mere assertion and blind faith.” Having just lived through the G20 meetings in Toronto, however, I find it hard to credit that talk about “the economy” is either self-reflexive or contingent. Though perhaps not as easy to join as a mystical discussion group, this most recent power spot gathering of “world leaders” was full of assertions and blind faith. A day after pledging at the G8 to devote $1.1 billion to global maternal and child health over five years, Canada’s government went on to spend $1 billion over three days as they hosted the summit in the heart of downtown Toronto. And after dispensing this extraordinary sum, much of which was spent on the visibly invisible force of “security,” the Canadian Prime Minister proudly announced that the G20 nations had all agreed that they would cut their deficits in half (or would at least try to do so) by 2013. Self-reflexivity was not the first word that came to mind in this latest performance of economic reasoning and expenditure.

On the level of methodology, Bender’s insights are equally unsettling of boundaries, as she describes the disjuncture between what she considers an “interview” and what her interlocutors consider a “conversation.” Just as her new metaphysicals resisted history, Bender resisted synchronicity; similarly, just when she thought she was “interviewing them,” they thought they were conversing.  Well aware that the attention of a social scientist was a potential path to credibility—whether in the eyes of their own community or on the stage of science—the people who spoke to Bender were not willing to accept her views or experiences as outside of their webs of interpretation. At its boldest, conversation could become a “penetration of the self,” in which interlocutors could access each other’s “energetic interiors,” as when Wes, an “energy intuitive,” attempted to intuit the quality of energy inside Bender’s mother’s womb when she had carried her, and invited Bender to return the favor.

Though Wes does not succeed at teaching Bender the techniques of energetic intuition, he does get her thinking about just what kind of social (and) scientific encounter the interview might be. If metaphysicals (and other religious practitioners) use the interview as a form of testimony, in which they confide their “religious experience” to a questioning scholar, it is also the case that scholars have long used the interview to pin down “religious experience.” As elicited in narratives, religious experience also ends up being a concept “shared” and worked at by both metaphysicals and social scientists alike. Whether willing or unwilling, the shared nature of this project can be keenly demonstrated in the classic crossover book, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, a scientific text with a popular appeal—in Bender’s words, “a pedagogical textual environment in which it is expected that readers will encounter the residue of others’ strongly resonant, singularly authoritative experiences and thereby seek their own.” Pointing to these shared conceptual spaces elicited both through our methods, in which “experience” is signified, and through our theories, in which we imagine active forces that we cannot see, Bender goes a long way toward confronting what she calls “the deep mystifications of our secularisms.”

The New Metaphysicals is an elegant book that does the work of shoveling fog with remarkable concision. The book’s stories do not convince me that embracing the promise of the moment frees anyone from the burdens of the past—at least when looked at from the vantage point of the social scientist or humanist. However, sitting with these stories of chakras, power spots, and synchronicity should be enough to convince anyone that to ignore or deride their tellers is to close one’s ears to modalities of thought and experience that resonate across a wide range of “religious” and “secular” frames, including those that we are more accustomed to thinking with, whether Protestant, Catholic, or capitalist. Listening to the new metaphysicals, as Courtney Bender channels them, is an experience in retuning the scale of analysis, not in its scope but in its key.

Undoubtedly there is, as Bryan Turner suggested, a code that gives the idea of a “strong program” a positive normative charge. Let’s take pause to understand what this is about. What we call the “strong program” in the sociology of religion refers to a perspective that focuses on religion as an autonomous phenomenon that has causal impact, rather than something that is determined by non-religious factors. Apart from the clearly normative binary of strong/weak, what is the attraction of this image?

First, for people of faith, the autonomy of at least some religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reality of the supernatural, and thus is a logical analytic goal. Indeed, as Asad and others have argued, the carving off of a domain of social reality as “religious,” autonomous, and separate from other, “secular” domains was precisely a mechanism by which the early modern Church was able to maintain a space for religious authority vis-à-vis encroaching secular authority. Likewise, Courtney Bender has recently argued that the residual categorization of religious experience as ineffable, pre-cultural, and inexplicable extends from attempts of early twentieth-century scholars to carve off a domain of human experience that would not be susceptible to scientific analysis. We should not be surprised that this is an enduring motivating interest in the scientific study of religion.

Second, at least since Kant, the idea that human beings give form to the world, rather than simply being determined by it, has been one enduring basis of the idea of human freedom. And for scholars who, regardless of whether they have faith, see the concept of human freedom as a cornerstone of human dignity and morality, the irreducibility of religion is an important image. Christian Smith’s work on “moral, believing animals,” for example, clearly works in this direction, as do Charles Taylor’s writings on the self and religion.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the idea of a phenomenon’s autonomous reality provides a time-honored foundation of legitimacy for a discipline’s professional activity. If there is a domain of knowledge dealing with X, it is most obviously in the interests of specialists in that domain to underline and drive home the reality and importance of X. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics has become the seminal text in linguistics precisely because it succeeds in portraying language as an irreducible formal system of signs beneath the messy details and disorder of actual speech. Emile Durkheim sought to create a foundation for sociology in turn-of-the-century France by arguing that society was a reality sui generis that needed a new discipline to study it. Talcott Parsons sought to do the same in the U.S. context through his thesis that scholars from different disciplines and countries had simultaneously and independently converged on the “voluntaristic theory of action,” in which values and norms were irreducible. And most recently, Jeff Alexander has largely succeeded (if we judge by the burgeoning numbers in the ASA Culture Section) in creating a foundation for cultural sociology by arguing that culture is an autonomous phenomenon that has causal power.

But I would like to suggest that the “strong program” is actually a weak model for where we should be going in the sociology of religion, for one negative and one positive reason. First, while a healthy sub-discipline probably does depend on studying a phenomenon that actually exists, the politics of representation also needs to be taken into account. In his description of the religious inclinations (or disinclinations) of various social classes and strata, Max Weber argued that there was an elective affinity between the position of intellectuals (such as priests, theologians, and scholars) and the rationalization of religion. Of course, in sedentary societies there will always be “religiously musical” individuals who become specialists in thinking through and logically organizing ideas regarding the supernatural. But they also thereby create a role for themselves as theological interpreters, and thus have a rational self-interest in emphasizing the importance of logically coherent religious thought. This rational self-interest becomes a political interest insofar as it simultaneously dis-empowers people who do not engage in rationalized religious practices. When having a “moral order” is considered a fundamental component of human nature, then those whose religious practices (or lack of them) appear eclectic and inconsistent become less-than-human “others.” When “true” religion is considered autonomous and disinterested, then people whose religion is oriented towards practical interests and engaged in everyday life are portrayed as insincere and vacillating, and their religious practice as inauthentic and unsustainable. We sociologists of religion need to soberly realize that our structural position is going to lead us time and again to emphasize the sui generis reality, coherence, and irreducibility of our subject matter; and need to have enough self-reflexivity to realize that this may unduly impact our analysis, and in ways that in turn may unduly impact people.

Second, arguments about the autonomy of religion should not dominate our research, even though they legitimately remain of interest for some, including those who feel their faith threatened by science, or for those interested in neo-Kantian arguments that underline humans’ freedom by pointing to their form-giving capacity. Beyond these topics, the “autonomy of religion” issue remains of limited interest in the larger debates of the discipline. Indeed, while the main point picked up in discussion of the working paper was the assertion of vitality in the sub-discipline, I think John Evans is right to suggest that the trend line depicting articles on religion in major journals should be read as flat. At a minimum, given the growing public interest in religion over the past two decades, I think we need to ask why this upward trend is not more impressive.

Instead of trying to continually prove that religion matters, we should take the “stronger” starting point that “of course religion matters,” and simply concentrate on what it is and how it is involved in contemporary social and political issues. Not “why does it still exist?” but “how does it exist?” “how does it relate to its ‘others’?” “how does it affects people’s lives?” and, of course, “who creates it?” “who has the control of its means of production?” “who has an interest in its moving in this direction or that?” In such an approach, religion can plausibly be either cause or effect (or non-causal), and either good or bad (or neutral). Such a robust engagement of the problems of modernity is what will make the sociology of religion a vital subfield and contribution to our social world.

As such, Christian Moderns is part of an expanding, interdisciplinary discourse about liberalism, modernism and secularism.  Within anthropology, the key figure in this discourse is, of course, Talal Asad, who figures centrally in Keane’s account. Within philosophy, one naturally thinks of Charles Taylor, who is also frequently cited. But one thinks, too, of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean Elshtain.  Turning to theology, Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank come to mind.

Christian Moderns nonetheless stands apart in at least two respects: in method and in conceptualization.  Whereas the foregoing works mainly employ a historical and critical approach that contrasts the modern West with its premodern self and its heterodox variants, Keane works mainly comparatively, using the Indonesian mission encounter to unearth the doxa of modern Euro-American culture.  Further, whereas Asad relies mainly on the genealogical strategies of Foucault and Nietzsche, Keane adds Latour’s theory of “purification” and “hybridity.”  In reading the semiotic ideology of the Sumbanese as a form of fetishism, which attributes agency to words and things, Keane argues, the Dutch Calvinist missionaries are compelled to articulate their own semiotic ideology, which views authentic moral agency as arising out of a self-conscious disentanglement of an immaterial and interior self from all forms of the material and the external.  But this process of purification is necessarily incomplete. Humans, after all, are social and physical creatures. Thus,  processes of purification inevitably give rise to new forms of hybridity—in this case, to new texts, rituals, incantations and so on, either directly, in the form of routinized religious practices or, indirectly, in the form of heterodox religious movements, such as Pentecostalism.

On all these counts, Keane’s account of purification is remarkably consistent with those set forth by the philosophers and theologians.  With Taylor’s accounts of excarnation and the buffered self; with Elshtain’s account of autonomization and sovereignty; with MacIntyre’s ferocious attack on the putative invulnerability of the liberal self, and so on.  On two other counts, however, it goes beyond and even challenges them. First, by highlighting the role of colonial encounters in the purification process.  And second, by emphasizing the role of missionary work, not simply in spreading Western religion, but, paradoxically, in diffusing Western secularism as well.  As such, Keane’s account subtly pushes back against theories of “multiple modernities,” which tend to portray “world civilizations” as bounded entities evolving independently in accord with  their own “cultural logics.”

That said, Keane’s comparative approach does have the inevitable weaknesses and blind-spots, and these emerge clearly in the contrast with the more historical and critical works of Taylor and company.  By tracing out the historical genesis of modern conceptions of moral agency, Taylor and company are able to isolate multiple turning points in the genesis of modern secularism including:  Ockhamist nominalism, the neo-Epicurean transvaluation of natural law theory by Grotius, Hobbes and Hume, the disenchantment of the cosmos via providential deism, the sacralization of the state in Rousseauian republicianism and its Jacobin offshoots,  the aestheticization of the self in late Romanticism and so on.  Keane is of course well aware of this weakness and of the incompleteness of his account.  But he seems less aware of the crucial blind-spot: the existence and persistence of competing semiotic ideologies and rival visions of moral agency within the Euro-American tradition.  For MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Elshtain, Milbank and Taylor critique modern liberal secularism not from without, but from within, by drawing variously on Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.  Amongst many other things, they argue that moral agency is necessarily embodied via the cultivation of virtue; that tradition is not the opposite of rationality; and that worldly sovereignty must not be monopolized by the secular state.  In other words, they dispute the central tropes of modern, liberal secularism.  Keane, by contrast, eschews critique of this sort, preferring instead to raise the semiotic ideology of Euro-American culture to greater self-consciousness. To that degree, however, he remains a captive to the very ideology he wishes to critique, since increased self-consciousness as an end in itself is, after all, one of the governing tropes of moral agency in the West.  Does this mean that prophetic critique is the only possible form that a critique of secularism can take? That one must be a theist to be a critic in our secular age?  By no means.  Political philosophers such as Quentin Skinner, Phillip Pettit and Michael Sandel, amongst others, have elaborated a powerful neo-republican critique of modern liberalism.  William Connolly, meanwhile, has used Nietzsche and James to develop a theory of “deep pluralism” that is neither secularist nor theist.  Even Jürgen Habermas, that icon of Euro-American enlightenment, has recently urged his partisans to recognize the untapped “semantic potentials” and “moral resources” still contained within religious languages and communities.  In his call for a post-secularist philosophy, Habermas seems to be heralding the emergence of new hybridities. If so, perhaps the latest wave of purification has crested.

Akbar Ganji is Iran’s preeminent political dissident. A heroic figure to the democratic movement in Iran, he has been likened to Gandhi and Mandela. The London-based human rights organization, Article 19, has described Ganji as the “Iranian Vaclav Havel.” He has been the recipient of over a dozen human rights, press freedom and pro-democracy awards.

Ganji was born into a religious family in 1960, in a poor district of south Tehran. Like many young Iranians of his generation, he was a fierce critic of the US-backed monarchy and an enthusiastic supporter of Ayatullah Khomeini and Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. In the early 1980s he became a member of the new government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and was subsequently employed in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. But like many revolutionaries, Ganji became increasingly disillusioned with the path his country’s revolution was taking, and his thinking underwent a gradual metamorphosis. He channeled his growing frustration with the post-revolutionary status quo into journalism. By the late 1990s he had emerged as Iran’s leading investigative reporter, having produced a body of writing critical of the regime’s suppression of human rights and crackdown on dissent.

Ganji published these reports in a variety of pro-democracy newspapers (such as Sobh-e Emrooz, Khordad, and Fath), most of which were shut down in the conservative clerical crackdown on Iran’s reform movement. He became a household name after the publication of two best-selling books, Tarik khaneye Ashbah (Dungeon of Ghosts, 1999) and Alijenob Sorkhpoosh va Alijenob-e Khakestari (The Red Eminence and the Grey Eminences, 2000). The former has been described by the Washington Post as “the Iranian equivalent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.” His books exposed the dark side of authoritarian clerical rule, focusing on the nefarious role of senior religious leaders in the serial murders of Iranian writers and intellectuals. In these books Ganji also exposed the attempt by clerical hardliners to suffocate the free debate and expression which blossomed in the first term of Muhammad Khatami’s reformist presidency (1997-2001). These widely-reads books seriously damaged the reputation of former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and contributed to the defeat of the conservatives in the parliamentary elections of February 2000.

In April of 2000, Ganji was arrested upon his return to Iran from an academic conference in Berlin. In January of 2001, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail and to five years internal exile (upon appeal he was given a six-year sentence and banned for life from working as a journalist). His six-year prison sentence—which he served out in full—ended in March of 2006. Following in the footsteps of Mandela, Havel and Martin Luther King, Jr., Ganji took to writing from his prison cell. His political manifestos and open letters were smuggled out of jail and published on the internet, sparking an intense debate among Iranians about the future of their country.

In 2005, his last year in prison, Ganji went on a hunger strike that lasted from May to August. His hunger strike mobilized the international human rights community, including eight former Nobel Peace laureates. Thousands of intellectuals and human rights activists around the world spoke out on his behalf. It is generally believed that the global support generated for Ganji during this period spared his life.

In June of 2006 Ganji left Iran. He has been writing and giving talks in Europe and North America, raising awareness about the struggle for democracy in his country, and also advocating against a U.S. military attack on Iran. A handful of these writings were published in April of 2008 under the title The Road to Democracy in Iran (MIT Press). It is the sole volume of Ganji’s voluminous writings in English translation. Despite repeated invitations he has refused to meet with any member of the Bush Administration, on the principle that the struggle for democracy in Iran must be waged from within the country, without foreign governmental support. His interlocutors have consisted exclusively of human rights groups, civil society organizations, journalists, members of the Iranian diaspora community and Western intellectuals. To date he has met and engaged in dialogue with Jürgen Habermas, Robert Bellah, David Held, Ronald Dworkin, Noam Chomsky, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Sandel, Nancy Fraser, Martha Nussbaum, Marshall Berman, Alasdair MacIntrye, the late Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor.

His interest in meeting with these figures has been twofold. First, he would like to introduce the ideas of leading Western thinkers to an Iranian readership, which has a huge appetite for intellectual engagement and dialogue with the West. His second goal is to update and inform his Western interlocutors about the struggle for democracy inside Iran.

Akbar Ganji: Your book Varieties of Religion Today combines discussions of philosophy of religion and sociology of religion. Do you agree with this? Do you agree that this book combines these two different forms of discourse? If it is so, which one of these two discourses is dominant? Is it philosophy of religion or sociology of religion?

Charles Taylor: I think it’s neither and I think we have to add a third discourse, which is history. And I think that in the end there’s a single discourse, which is the only adequate one. Just as sociology without history can’t really get to the really important issues, so at the same time, if you don’t have a deep consideration of the philosophical issues, you can’t do good historical sociology. I mean, for instance, if you want to talk about religion, the development of religion, and let me say in parenthesis that I’m just claiming in that book (Varieties of Religion Today) and in my big book (A Secular Age) to be talking about religion in the West as it’s developed in the last 500 years. And so if you look at that, then you have to, if you are trying to develop a theory of the development of secularization, which means many things. But the two things it does mean is a change in the position of religion in society and also it means, to some degree, sometimes, a retreat of religion of belief and practice.

Now people sometimes confuse these two and it makes for confusion about what we mean by it. Now both these kinds of secularization have happened in the West. The first, the change of the position of religion has been general in the West. But the second, the retreat of religion has happened very, very differently. I mean virtually not at all in the United States. But in Sweden or East Germany very significant retreat has occurred and everything in between. Now you can’t come to grips with this kind of movement without a certain understanding of human motivation, of what is the human motivation in religion.

What motivates human beings in their religious life? Now I think that this motivation is very different in different times and periods. And we might miss this point because a lot of very powerful religions today, Islam, Christianity etc., are very close to each other in many respects in their driving motivations. But if you look wider at Hinduism, Buddhism, earlier forms of religion, you realize that there is just an immense difference. So that’s why I say that you can’t write a general history of secularization. Even writing one about the whole West is maybe too ambitious. But the philosophical element is essential if you take the mainline secularization theory of let’s say a post-war sociology.

People like Peter Berger in his earlier writings or today, someone like Steve Bruce is still continuing, they have a very simple story that the more modernity progresses—you know, things like industrialization, the development of the modern state, social mobility and all these markers—the more they develop, the more religion declines. Now this assumes, they never discuss it, but this assumes that the motivation to religious life in human beings is very shallow and not very profound, so that religious life is tied to certain sociological forms that existed earlier. And when these sociological forms are destabilized by modernity, religion disappears as well. But I disagree with that. That’s the philosophical point that needs to be at the core of your historical and sociological study. If you have a different view, you’ll have a very different theory of the whole development [of secularization]. And I mean to talk about how I see this movement in the West, the mainline theory—I mean the theory I’m attacking—thinks there is a linear movement of secularization as modernity advances. As one progresses the other progresses. A simple functional relationship.

Now according to my underlying theory, you’d expect something different. You would expect that certain developments of modernity would in fact destabilize earlier forms of religious life. I mean for instance the idea of a monarchy embedded in the cosmos connected to God, the kind of picture of the French monarchy, that’s not going to survive certain changes in society that come with modernity. But if the human relation to religion and to God is not as shallow as the mainstream theory thinks, then what would happen in many cases is religion would be recomposed in new forms that meet the new situation. And that is in fact what I would argue has happened in the West. So this is a much more adequate theory to understand this historical and sociological reality, but what it required is a deep understanding of the place of religion in human life. So I would claim that there’s a single discourse and it’s made up of elements that look as though they are drawn from three disciplines, but in fact they cohere together as a single discourse. The three discourses would be philosophy, history and sociology. You can’t do sociology without history, history without sociology, and you can’t do either without a proper philosophical understanding of human motivation. So the whole thing hangs together from those three sources.

[...]

Akbar Ganji: You state that we should have a historical point of view, but when we look at history we realize that in all of these historical cases that all of the democratic states are secular in that religion and state are separated. Empirically speaking, when we look at democracies we see in all of these cases there is a separation of religion and state. This could have three meanings. Number one is that the state does not derive its legitimacy from religion. The second one is that the state does not implement religious law. The third one is that clergy do not have a particular right or not even a particular right to rule. All democratic states share these three attributes…Since you have stated that that first principle lingers on as the other two have waned, what examples could you give in which a modern democratic state derives its legitimacy from divine sources such as from God?

Charles Taylor: …[C]onsider John Locke. Locke believes that we should follow the natural law and the natural law dictates that the only legitimate authority is created by a social contract. But, where does natural law come from? He is very clear. God has created human beings in the state of nature where natural law holds. It is God’s will, according to Locke that we have a social contract. So you get the founders of the American Republic who wrote a “Declaration of Independence” in which they said that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights.” So there are two ways in which legitimate democratic rule can derive from God. One is that the actual formula of democratic rule is God-given. And the other is that certain people, certain clergy, have a mandate directly from God to order the society. And in a certain sense, Western history is a struggle between these two understandings of God-derived authority.

[...]

Akbar Ganji: You have said in this book that we live in a post-Durkheimian world. And it has several attributes. The first one is that religious affiliations have nothing to do with our national identity. The second one is that the varieties of religious convictions have fractured and multiplied. The third one is that the religious life of a person depends on his own religious experience. It doesn’t depend on the church or a clerical order. The fourth one is that religious convictions are not transmitted from one generation to the next generation, but each generation has its own religious convictions that may be different from the convictions of their fathers and mothers. My question is how are these four related to one another and what is specific about this post-Durkheimian world that William James could not have understood or did not understand?

Charles Taylor: Well he understood lots but I think it’s the third one that I don’t quite agree with the formulation. See, a lot of religious life now is driven or determined by people’s sense of their own spiritual affinities. But the spiritual affinity can be with a larger church, a larger church or a clergy. That’s my case. Or it can be with a very small organization of friends, or it can be with a meditation group. So in other words, people don’t say anymore—I mean people never said this but in a sense unconsciously—I’m a Pole so I’ve got to be a Catholic. They are spiritually moved by something. It can be the Dali Lama, it can Pope John Paul etc. They move into that. This kind of following your own religious instinct has been totally legitimated in Western society. I would say that the big change occurred in the 1960s or there about, in which what was previously an elite ethic of authenticity, everybody following their own sense, became a mass cultural phenomenon. You can’t exaggerate this development and it’s a big change, almost a cataclysmic cultural change. But you see, that’s again something in the West. It certainly influences a small stratum of highly educated and mobile people working in the globalized economy, even if they come from India or, you know, they’re to some extent influenced by that. But as a mass phenomenon, it’s a Western phenomenon.

[...]

Akbar Ganji: How do you account for Christian, Jewish and Muslim fundamentalism?

Charles Taylor: I suppose there are different causes but one thing is relatively the same—it crops up again and again. I was saying earlier in my general theory of secularization that modern developments destabilize early forms of religion and that religion has to be recomposed, reformed. Well now there is a certain way of carrying out this reform which is based on a sense of threat. Somebody is depriving us of our traditional religion so we have to rally. And one way of rallying is to say, well, we’ll reach back to the origins and we’ll reproduce this kind of salafist movement. And then there is a terrible pathos here because they never do reproduce it because you can’t. I mean, for instance, take Protestant fundamentalism in this country. The first movement to take on the name and which gave this name wide currency was a Protestant movement that went back very strongly to the Protestant idea that the Bible was the ultimate source of truth. But then they found the challenge was from various kinds of modern science to the Bible, the Bible’s account of creation etc. So the response was to claim that the Bible was all literally true. But this was something new in Christian history, because it required, having made very clearly the distinction between literal truth, literal scientific truth, and metaphorical truth. Now this distinction was only made totally sharp with the arrival of modern Western science.

[...]

Akbar Ganji: Well you have talked about Catholic modernity in your writings. What is Catholic modernity?

Charles Taylor: The thing is that’s really another use of the word modernity. It’s not that it’s a particular form of modernity. It is how Catholics should understand their roll and position within modernity. And there it was an attempt to, in a certain sense, to relativize modernity. With the fundamental notion that Christianity is something—and you could say this of Islam as well—Christianity is a religion which has lived in a host of different cultures and will live in more cultures and always has to find a way of recreating an authentic version of itself within these cultures. And the idea was that we Catholics look on our relation to Western modernity in that light. This is one culture among many which humans have had and will have, and we have to fight away from the tendency which we have to think of this, or the version that’s been created in modernity, as vastly superior to everything else in history. Or also, greatly inferior because we’ve lost—you know, some people think we’ve lost the age of faith in the middle ages. That instead of looking at it as absolute, as one or the other, we look at it as having to function and recreate the faith in a different way in this civilization, but which is not necessarily superior to the way in which it operated in other parts. And we have to have had the sense of belonging to the transnational and transtemporal.

Akbar Ganji: Can you imagine Islamic modernity?

Charles Taylor: Of course. I mean I can imagine several because there are very different Islamic societies. I mean it would be one that was in real dialog and interchange with the modernity in which it set, via in India or in Europe. Unless we ruin the situation, which we’re capable of doing, we will see develop in the west a Western Islam, which is working its sense of what Islam is in this Western context. And I already know several people that are engaged in that, whether they define it that way or not, they’re engaged in that project. I mean we could wreck this enterprise. If the terrible conflict that I described earlier in which you have Muslims from outside the West that are dying to attack the West and Westerners that reply with this mindless anti-Islamic thing we have been seeing recently, we could crush the space in which this kind of European or Western Islam could grow. But it’s to be hoped that an Islamic modernity will happen, because that’s the normal development.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

This passage comes quite early in Charles Taylor’s new book, while he is still assembling the pieces of the “story” that he will tell over its almost-900 pages. The passage is perhaps most easily read (allegorically, as it were) as a defense of the sheer length of the book. Stories, at least good stories, are full of details that demand time and space in a narrative. They are worth it, though, because they make narratives more like real life: good stories are thick and messy rather than thin and sterile. They take surprising twists and turns, double back on themselves, try things out from another angle.

What is the other option? According to Taylor, the opposite of a history is bare conceptual analysis: “But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what things were like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needs all this detail, this history?” (28). The implication is that a shorter, more strictly analytical book would have missed the heart of the matter. Why is this? Because “this detail, this history” is not just an optional extra, not just a set of examples or illustrations. Rather, details are where the action is. This is a normative anthropological claim: details are where we live, because details are where history lives, and we are historical creatures.

The question that remains, then, is how best to capture this sense of history. Now one answer to this question, which began gathering steam during the period of which Taylor writes, is literature. Literature is frequently praised for bringing abstraction down to earth, fleshing it out, making it live and move. An oft-quoted example of this claim comes from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “[T]he poet’s pen,” he writes in Act V, “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

By far the most sophisticated attempt in this direction, however, belongs to a group of German thinkers briefly gathered at Jena in the late 1790s and known to posterity as the Romantics. This group—principally Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher—came of age in a Germany intellectually dominated by Kant and Fichte. Against what was rapidly hardening into a battle of systematic philosophies, Friedrich Schlegel in particular argued for an anti-systematic approach that he linked to the literary genre of the fragment. Philosophy had run stuck in the wake of Kant, Schlegel argued, because it mistakenly assumed that thinking must begin from a first or unconditioned principle, a still point in a turning world. Schlegel thought this was exactly backwards: philosophy should begin in medias res, with the place where we find ourselves, conditioned creatures that we are. The fragment is the only form capable of answering this requirement, Schlegel proposed, because it reflected the state of incompletion and partiality from which we inevitably begin our reasoning. And part of that incompletion, of course, stems from the historicity of our situation. Thus, writes Schlegel in the famous Athenaum Fragment 116, “Other genres are fixed and capable of being classified in their entirety. The romantic genre is, however, still in the process of becoming. Indeed, that is its essence: to be eternally in the process of becoming and never completed.”

Taylor’s book is hardly a romantic fragment, of course. In its sprawling ambitiousness it is more like a nineteenth century novel by Tolstoy or Eliot. Still, Taylor’s defense of his method is a romantic one precisely insofar as it is literary—precisely insofar, that is, as its emphasis falls on the story that it has to tell.

One characteristic of romantic theories is that aesthetic productions cannot be paraphrased, because to paraphrase them inevitably distorts or misses everything worthwhile about them. (This idea was elevated into a theory of literature as such by the American New Critics, who for the most part hated romanticism but adopted this fundamental tenet into their thinking; see for example Cleanth Brooks’s famous essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase”.) That is the point of the romantic fragment—if you ask what a particular fragment “means” you are asking that it be translated into philosophy’s conceptual language, which is precisely what Schlegel and company were trying to avoid. There is a story about the composer Robert Schumann: after he was finished playing a new piano piece, someone in the audience asked him what it meant. For answer, Schumann simply played the piece again.

In a roughly analogous way, Taylor’s book is unparaphrasable: the level of detail and richness—the story—is so great that any attempt to extract a single thread from it inevitably mars its fabric. It would be better, given world enough and time, to simply read the book again.