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?

Over the past decade, scholarly inquiry into contemporary religion has moved from an understanding of religion as waning in the face of ongoing secularization toward a focus on the mutual constitution and interaction of religious and secular that underpins both the ideology of secularism and modern religiosity. This has produced pathbreaking research into the dynamics of religious transformation and generated deeper insights into the relation between religion and modernity. Importantly, these insights yield a new theoretical standpoint that transcends secularist ideologies according to which religion is bound to disappear—or at least to retreat into the private sphere—yet at the same time makes these ideologies subject to investigation. The fact that public debates about the so-called resurgence of religion often affirm the fault lines between “religious” and “secular” positions testifies to the fruitfulness of this new standpoint.

However, as outlined by Courtney Bender and Ann Taves in the introduction to this volume, framing our inquiries within the religious-secular binary may cause us to overlook ideas and practices that emerge in relation to this binary and yet are not fully contained by it. This volume calls for a broader framework through which these ideas and practices may come into view. Of key concern here is the puzzling field of spirits and spirituality. Placing emphasis on spirits or spirituality invokes quite different sets of practices and notions of personhood that each require detailed historical and ethnographic study. Still, it makes sense to bring spirits and spirituality together under the banner of the “spiritual,” provided this is not taken as “a resting point” (or as a fixed “third category”), but rather as a “beginning place” for fresh inquiry into the paradoxes and contradictions of the religious-secular-spiritual nexus (see also Bender and Taves, introduction, this volume). Paying attention to the “spiritual,” as the contributions to this volume show, challenges a view of modernity as disenchanted and thus as opposed to past or distant cultures that are “still” enchanted.

Such a view of enchantment as bound to erode with modernity underpins not only the by now much critiqued paradigm of secularization but is also lingering on, albeit less explicitly, in more recent studies. Charles Taylor’s seminal work A Secular Age (2007), which has played a key role in reframing the contemporary study of religion, is a case in point. Taylor has noted that religion in modern societies is subject to transformation rather than simply “vanishing,” or “returning” after a period of repression. In other words—and here Taylor’s perspective resonates with Talal Asad’s position outlined in Formations of the Secular (2003)—secularization and disenchantment transform modern religion instead of abolishing it. Not only does Taylor use secularization and disenchantment interchangeably, thereby linking the privatization of religion to the decrease of spirits, he also suggests a development from belief in spirits, which he associates with premodern, enchanted societies, to a quest for spirituality in the secular, disenchanted age. My reason for invoking Taylor’s work is that it explicates a quite widely shared, yet to some extent problematic, perspective. Seeking to unpack and rethink the relations between secular, religious, and spiritual—the central concern of this volume—this chapter will critically address the association of secularization and disenchantment, and the idea of a progressive transition from a concern with spirits to a concern with spirituality, by bringing in some complicating materials from my long-term anthropological research in Ghana.

In his introduction, Taylor quotes an example from my book Translating the Devil (1999): the case of Celestine who is accompanied by a stranger, who, it turns out, is only visible to her, not to her mother, and whom she later identifies as the Akan spirit Sowlui whose priestess she becomes. Taylor presents this case as a “contemporary example” that illustrates a condition of lived experience in which spirits are still an immediate reality—an experience that has eroded in our modern civilization. Taylor’s interpretation of this case raises intriguing questions. While I certainly agree that in the setting I described the visible, material world is held to be linked with, and manipulated by, the invisible realm of spirits, I have difficulties with a view of contemporary Africa as bearing resemblance to the still enchanted prereformation period (that is, before 1500), for this implies a temporalization of other cultures and, as Johannes Fabian put it, a denial of coevalness. That is why many anthropologists today feel uneasy about invoking contemporary cultural forms as “windows to the past.” Certainly, in the case of Ghana, as will be pointed out in more detail below, we encounter a modern secular state that witnessed, after the turn to democracy and the liberalization and commercialization of the hitherto state-owned media in 1992, the emergence of a heavily pentecostalized public sphere in which much emphasis is placed on spirits. Spirits, it appears, elude confinement to the category of religion and appear in all kinds of settings, including politics, economics, and entertainment. Spirits, in other words, are not just there, as signs of a traditional past, but reproduced under modern conditions.

The point is that we have to explore, in a historical perspective, how African cosmologies of the relation between spirits and the physical world intersect, in complex ways, with the evangelizing work by Western mission societies, the introduction of the modern (colonial) and postcolonial state, and its transformation in our current age. In a somewhat later publication, Taylor himself questions his earlier perspective propounded in A Secular Age and makes some “hesitant comments about developments outside the West, or on a global scale,” asking, “What is the West, after all? What are its limits?” Discussing the globalization of certain Western forms, such as missionary Christianity, he also refers to my historical-ethnographic exploration of missionary affirmations of the existence of a spirit world in Translating the Devil and submits that the Christian reenchantment of old gods may not be simply a “transition phenomenon,” thus questioning his earlier suggestion of a linear move from ancient regime to modernity that entails secularization and disenchantment. He ends his piece with a pertinent question: “Are all regions of the world fated to head towards the predicament of Western modernity, with a disenchanted world, a strong sense of a self-sufficient immanent order, and a staunchly buffered identity?”

I think that recent anthropological work suggests that this question must be answered in the negative, while at the same time we need to take into account the actual spread and impact of Western forms in areas such as Ghana. The key question is how to develop a more encompassing framework for understanding the relation between secular and religious and, by implication, “public religion,” that acknowledges historical and cultural specificity and difference yet, at the same time, accounts for actual Western influences, albeit by “provincializing Europe.” This is the concern of this chapter. Instigated by Taylor’s invocation of the case of Celestine as an instance of a still enchanted world—which he defines as “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in”—I will probe into the complicated relation between spirits, religion, and the secular. My aim is to show how in the Ghanaian setting we encounter a process that may well be described as secularization (provided we do not mean by this the vanishing of religion, but its reconfiguration in the setting of [post]colonial modernity) and the concomitant constitution of modern religion as a separate category, which, however, intersects with the category of “spirits” and “the spiritual,” and hence enchantment, rather than disenchantment. As I will show, the category of spirits cannot be reduced to a timeless, primordial substratum in African cosmologies, but is subject to being framed and remediated by missions and contemporary Pentecostal media. On the whole, by calling attention to spirits I seek to call into question the association of secularization and disenchantment and to think through the implications of the resilience, and even proliferation, of spirits for our understanding of contemporary religion in a global perspective.

And indeed in American media the question is taken at face value and given opposite answers, with strong normative implications. In the “Yes” camp are people like Susan Jacoby, whose book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004) argued that America, contrary to the claims of the then-ascendant religious right, had been founded in rationalist skepticism about religion. (Despite its subtitle, which might promise some inquiry into historical conditions, the book is a narrative of heroic secularists and a digest of their “heritage.”) In the “No” camp are evangelical historians such as David Barton, who believes that America was founded as a Christian republic, with no presumption of equal participation by Jews, or atheists, let alone Muslims; even Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” he argues, was meant as a “one-directional” wall (if one can imagine such a thing), blocking government out of religion but not the other way around.

The disagreement between Jacoby and Barton has become a classic example of an echo chamber effect. Both have websites and enthusiastic followings (especially Barton, who essentially self-publishes), and both are likely to remain indifferent to anything that might be said here. (Jacoby’s is a simple author site but Barton’s is much more extensive; it also attracts rebuttals on many counter-websites.) Both positions, though stated in their extreme and polemical form in the nonacademic press, have more or less respectable versions that hold considerable power, especially in law.

Barton is a former Vice Chairman of the Republican Party in Texas, and his historical narrative is designed to show that party politics and Protestant piety go hand in hand. Indeed, he thinks that America was founded on just that idea, before it was betrayed. His website, Wallbuilders, leads with a news section before promoting its own historical justifications. In the summer of 2012 one lead news item was this:

Conservative historian David Barton, in his outstanding new book, “The Jefferson Lies: Exploring the Myths You’ve Always Known About Thomas Jefferson,” has once again presented an opus that shines the light of truth on the lies and propaganda of atheism, progressivism, liberalism, humanism and secular elites who possess a venal hatred for American exceptionalism…

The others were all Fox-style headlines about gay people and Obamacare. The historical items included a Daniel Webster statement, marshaled on the website as “arguing persuasively . . . for requiring a profession of belief in the Christian religion as a qualification for holding public office.” In fact it doesn’t, if you read it carefully, but that isn’t my point. The point is that historical questions about antebellum secularity tend to bear strong normative burdens generated by presentist understandings of the stakes.

The recent critical literature on secularity, as many readers of this blog already know, has broken with the questions and assumptions of Jacoby and Barton alike, in a series of ways. One of the most basic themes in the literature is that modern secularity—in the Euro-American North Atlantic and in the colonial contexts that these nations created—gets much of its meaning from the consolidation of “religion” as a special form of belief and experience, a process that accompanied the development of rival modes of legitimacy and moral feeling. What came to be the privileged markers of religiosity, moreover, are characteristic of Christian (even Protestant) self-understandings. The key questions are what you believe (with the assumption that you attach yourself to propositional attitudes) and how strongly you believe it (since “conscience” has trumping force). Other modes of religiosity are either sidelined (as with ritual practice, collective worship, or legal observance, where belief in the usual sense may not be at stake at all), denigrated (as in the pejorative meaning now given to “piety”), or recognized only as a social or political function only incidentally associated with religion (as with family law or the provision of welfare services). One of the effects of secular governance, both in how it regulates and in how it recognizes, has been to reshape all forms of religion in this mold, with greater or lesser degrees of success. In recognizing religions, it establishes equivalences; sets norms; and sometimes even acts as an ecclesiastical authority deciding what is or isn’t a legitimate exercise of religion. As a consequence of this process, we cannot answer questions about how religious or how secular a culture is by measuring the extent of religious belief. Despite powerfully enduring institutions and long-durée patterns of culture—not to mention the active and constant work that so many parties devote to preserving the illusion of permanence in categories like religion—what counts as religiosity changes, both in legal-political spheres of elite power and in the organization of ordinary life.

Once we begin to think of secularism as the background created by the foreground of “religion” so conceived, secularism no longer seems the right word. Secularism suggests indeed something on the same plane as religion: a body of beliefs and doctrines more or less present to consciousness as a distinguishing and optional affiliation. But most of the work of the last decade or so has not been about secularism in that sense, but about the secular conditions that structure even the religious once religiosity has become one option among others—conditions to which some forms of religiosity are much more adapted than others. For this reason Charles Taylor speaks of secularity rather than secularism, though the distinction is not always sharp. Secularity refers to a variety of social/cultural/political conditions that structure the question of religious adherence in ways not usually present to consciousness, even though our decision in response to that question is said to resolve our relation to the fundamental conditions of our existence. Whenever we seem to confront a choice between religion and secularism, in short, we may be sure that the form of the choice is not ours.

The new literature on secularism, then, for all its analytic distance on the presentist stakes of conflict, is not without normative implications. It’s just that those implications are deeply unsettling. What normative stances are available to secularism so named? What do the secular norms of the legal-juridical sphere have to do with my personal resolution of the demands made on me to commit to some scheme of belief or another? Are the available options of religiosity or “spirituality” themselves ordered by this regulatory discourse? It is difficult to be a conscious human being in mediatic societies without meeting this demand for commitment; but since that demand arises most often in a field defined by political antagonism, what are my chances of prescinding from the given forms of antagonism?

Few books illustrate this tension between analytic distance and normative involvement more than John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America. It is an imaginative and intelligent engagement with the critical literature I have been referring to, including the very different intellectual programs of Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. Modern’s book is also argumentatively elusive, presenting itself as a series of studies rather than consecutive exposition. The case studies are not what one might predict, given the title: evangelical understandings of mass media; the development of the category of “spirituality” in the matrix of phrenologists and spiritualists; prison reform at Sing Sing; and fantasies about machines—with fragmentary comments on Moby-Dick throughout.

A reader who has not been following the recent literature on secularity will be surprised to find that Secularism in Antebellum America is mainly about evangelicals and spiritualists. The organization of the book would seem to put him in the “No” camp in response to the question of my title, with David Barton. But in Modern’s book the dialectical relation of the terms takes the form of paradox. Perhaps too much, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Modern’s most compelling chapter, titled “Evangelical Secularism,” lays out the paradox; even its title to most readers will seem oxymoronic. Modern beautifully analyzes one side of the semiotic ideology of antebellum evangelicals : its imagination of media and the social field. (I say “one side” because he does not take up the language of sincerity, conversion, and experience, as Webb Keane does so well in Christian Moderns.) Modern examines the tract and Bible societies, with their massive projects of publication and colportage, as well as the tracts themselves and such statements of evangelical theory as Robert Baird’s Religion in America (1842). Following such scholars as David Nord and Candy Brown, but giving their work a new critical analysis, he examines the imagination of the social behind the evangelical obsession with networks, technology, and communication. Evangelicals of the period equated true religion with a conversionist public discourse, which of its own logic required mass dissemination at the same time that it pointed to its own omnipresence as a sign of its spontaneous authenticity. Evangelical religiosity was fused with a modern semiotic ideology of connectivity and circulation as progressive forces capable of establishing a broad social and religious order by the unfolding of their own immanent dynamic principles. (Here Modern intersects with, but does not discuss, important recent analyses of evangelicalism as modern social movement; see Craig Calhoun’s The Roots of Radicalism or Michael Young’s Bearing Witness Against Sin.) If America was in many important ways secular by the antebellum period, he concludes, it was so largely because of evangelicals themselves.

In making this argument, Modern amplifies a theme of Charles Taylor, who has argued in A Secular Age that the long history of secularity consists more of unintended consequences to reform movements within Christianity than to a hostile campaign of suppression or emancipation from without. In the American case my own current research has led me to go further and say that the evangelical normalization of conversionist discourse as a criterion of religiosity directly construed society as secular even before there were any secularists in the modern sense of that term. Evangelical conceptions of conscience and conversion, together with evangelical practices of the public sphere and the voluntary system, are not only the markers of evangelical modernity but the very conditions from which the default secularity of the social is projected.

The effects went beyond the evangelical organizations themselves; Modern notes that the antebellum period, far from being a “flowering of religious pluralism,” was marked by a shared resonance of such themes among “conservative evangelicals, liberal, experimental, and erstwhile Protestants” (15), partly because evangelicalism was “an imperial discourse” that colonized its rivals, setting the terms by which people could recognize themselves as religious. If that is true, it seems to follow that a history of the secular in the period should look beyond the surface differences and conflicts among these different branches of Protestantism. Because of the way they imagined their social world, they all benefitted from the embedding of a “nonspecific Protestantism,” as Tracy Fessenden calls it, at the same time that they understood their own religiosity fitting their own voluntary affiliation into the normative order of large-scale networks and publics. For Modern, the close relation between evangelical forms of religiosity and a secular social imaginary points us to what is most intractable and analytically challenging about modern secularism: the way it resides not just in overt doctrinal positions of political or ethical philosophy, but in the fabric of modern sociality, at such a deep level that the manifest conflict between religion and secularism, while real, is also structured by misrecognition.

I have somewhat adapted Modern’s argument in summarizing it this way. Here’s the way he puts it: “I have chosen the name secularism to refer to that which conditioned not only particular understandings of the religious but also the environment in which these understandings became matters of common sense….To make inquiries into secularism is to ask how certain concepts of religion (and the social formations that revolve around them) became consonant with the way things were—in essence—as portrayed by a secular political order” (7-8). This sounds a lot like some concepts of ideology, though Modern also thinks that secularism “cannot be approached as an ideological ruse” because “it neither deceived nor promulgated inaccurate representations of reality. On the contrary, secularism has been part and parcel to the very constitution of the real” (9).

While the intellectual ambition in this argument is formidable, and identifies a key conceptual difficulty in the analysis of secularity, two very significant problems arise from Modern’s decision to use “the name secularism” for this comprehensive formation. The first is that the forms of antagonism disappear from analysis; they look epiphenomenal. But anyone familiar with the intense antebellum conflicts among different versions of religiosity will no doubt feel that something is lost in an analysis that focuses only on the shared background. Modern expresses understandable dissatisfaction with the disciplinary norms of historians, who seem to feel that historical analysis must be rooted in and faithful to the self-understandings of all its actors; he wants instead to tell stories about the taken-for-granted or the misrecognized. But surely the very field of religious competition is part of that taken-for-granted background. That field was both delimited by violent forms of exclusion, as in the killing of Joseph Smith, and at the same time expanded throughout the public sphere, as in the overturning of blasphemy laws in the same period. This is, after all, a period dominated by rivalry between Southern and Northern versions of religious nationalism; the Confederate Constitution has a preamble polemically designed to counteract the godlessness of the Union counterpart. The different parties of religious struggle might have shared elements of a secular metaphysics, but they certainly put competing spins on its political implications. To what degree did secularity get its shape from antagonisms and spaces of competition rather than agreement?

A second problem is that secularism itself disappears. Those versions of secularism that are localizable as projects of governance, ethics, or struggle are so flattened as to be barely distinguishable from their background conditioning. I would suggest that a distinction between secularity and secularism is analytically necessary here, though to say this is to open two very large problems: what is the relation between secularity (as background) and those projects of secularism that can appear as specific positions against that background? And second, how are we to understand the apparent contradictions between those versions of secularism that reside in governmentality or liberal politics, and those that, like religion, orient persons to their existential conditions in an ethical problematic?

I take these as elementary questions about secularity, but it is astonishing how often they are obscured. The currently fashionable talk of the “post-secular,” for example, rests on a conflation of secularity with a specific program of political secularism; the latter may be in crisis, but there is no way of telling how deep that crisis is without understanding how political secularism is only one manifestation of secularity.

We are so accustomed to thinking of secularism as a body of doctrine deriving from the highly rationalizing elites of law and politics that we might forget that such elites do not simply form themselves.

Just as there is always a gap between theological discourse and “lived religion,” so there is a gap between legal-political secularist discourse and ordinary secularity. Take disestablishment—apparently the simplest doctrine in the whole repertoire of secularism. But what, in practice, did establishment mean? The range of variation in the colonial and early national period was wide, but often included: levying taxes for clerical salaries, choosing ministers, allotting land and labor for meetinghouses, compelling attendance, dividing time through sabbath laws, mapping the local hierarchy into the seating charts of the meeting house, ritually organizing government functions such as elections and meetings, recognizing legitimate forms of private life through personal and family law, monopolizing public ritual discourse, maintaining a joint church/state monopoly of consecrations for marriage and other functions, joint keeping of birth/death records, delivering care, etc. These elements were not fused by principle; all were highly variable in practice, and differently in different jurisdictions. Each was contested in some cases, and could sometimes be suspended or adapted for special arrangements, as when Baptists or separate Congregationalists secured meetinghouses in territories theoretically covered by another congregation. In what contexts did people try to philosophize or rationalize the field of variation in light of a consistent principle? And in what contexts did people intervene to change practices in order to make them conform to a conception of principle? Even on this basic question, doctrinal discourse is no reliable map to the practical questions it tried to codify. Disestablishment in the discourse of elites sounds like a clear matter of principle; disestablishment on the ground came by fits and starts over a very long period and was often significantly out of sync with common dogma.

Although Modern makes no distinction between the background conditions of secularity and secularism, the complicated relation between them is central to his argument. He puts it, rather oddly to my mind, in the language of enchantment. Against those who think of disenchantment as a force that battered religion and reduced it to private belief, he suggests that disenchantment “has been one of the most significant enchantments of the secular age, registering its effects from a distance and in the process conjuring a host of normative assumptions about how reality is in essence. Consequently, what is most remarkable about spirituality in the antebellum period is how it reflected the impossibility of distinguishing between disenchantment and enchantment even as this division was relentlessly pursued in its name” (124). By “enchantment” Modern seems to mean the forces that impinge on subjects and condition them in ways they do not control. The very technologies that put us in control—or so we assure ourselves—are themselves things we do not control; Modern takes this to mean that the disenchanters are the most enchanted of all. Further, he notes another dimension of enchantment in the self-confirming loops between those political projects we generate for establishing a right order of religion and the epistemic frames that have already made it seem inevitable that such an order of religion should be the only true one. Think for example of the contradiction of Christian nationalism: we inhabit a Christian nation but at the same time we must convert it from secularism to make it a Christian nation. The same relation holds, in Modern’s view, for the kind of secularity that confirms itself as a default condition by means of a disciplinary discourse on religion.

I think he is pointing to something important, but I would put it in a different way. This use of the term enchantment has almost nothing to do with what it means in Max Weber’s work. As I’ve noted elsewhere, most scholarly discourse in English about enchantment suffers from a translation problem. Weber’s term is closer to “demagicalization.” In English, “enchantment” is associated with positive affects such as wonder and reverence, and only under the sway of such associations, I think, can anyone imagine that “reenchantment” would be a good thing, let alone a change that could be willed into being. Taylor has usefully expanded the contrast with his analysis of the “buffered” self of modernity, reminding us thereby of the gains that make disenchantment invaluable to modern subjects, to the point that in many ways we cannot imagine giving them up. (Simon During’s excellent study of secular magic can be taken in this sense as an account of the performative production of a buffered self by means of an entertainment industry of enchantment.)

Modern may have that analysis in mind, since the point seems to be that the freely affiliating and buffered persons of evangelical/secular religiosity are themselves conditioned and disciplined by the normative sociality in which religion shows up for them. And this is a profound insight. But to call it enchantment lacks the specificity of demagicalizing projects within religion, and of the distinctive achievements of buffering. And by identifying disenchantment simply as a higher form of enchantment Modern leaves the analysis in a frozen paradox, with more than a hint of a familiar style of intellectual pathos. When the object of critique is generalized and removed from the space of antagonism, critique itself seems powerless against it; or rather, critique projects 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. Modern is much given to the Derridean language of “haunting” to perform this pathos.

Modern detects enchantment in the heavy reliance—across both secular and evangelical contexts—on the progressive unfolding of impersonal machine culture and the circulatory smoothness of a networked society as forces guaranteeing that the shape of social reality would inevitably conform to the wished-for ideal. This dependence, he thinks, entailed haunting; and although he does not connect the dots (and even repudiates causal narrative) he implies that the literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting he sees in technological society.

I have taken this detour through Modern’s argument partly as an advertisement for a book I admire, partly as a caution about its analytic terms, but also as an invitation to think about 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. These are clearly not identical. In fact, they can be contradictory. Political secularism of the liberal kind is defined by its eschewal of normative ethical projects; it presents itself as the procedural neutrality necessary to plural societies but minimizes its claims on the kind of personal affiliation by which it defines religion. The kind of ethical secularism we see in Whitman, on the other hand, eschews that structuring contrast of neutral procedure against personal commitment. It presents itself as a project for becoming the kind of person who can rightly recognize the conditions of existence, and although it is an attempt to overcome Christianity it does not secure its stance as a privileged default against the particularities of religion.

It is probably beyond anyone’s grasp to write a fully satisfying history of secularism in antebellum America, and Modern no doubt wisely emphasized the partial and speculative character of his own project. He has certainly deepened our understanding of the field, and his book illustrates strikingly how rapidly the analysis of secularity is emerging. The more we understand, the more problems we see.

In my closing section, after having made a certain appeal to an historically constituted Hegelian subject, I had suggested that, for my purposes, such an appeal was insufficient. What is also needed is an ethical stance from which one sees history as necessarily allowing the possibility that internal reasons may in the future be efficacious in changing the minds of those whom one deeply opposes on some moral or political issue, but to whom one has not yet been able to provide any such internal reasons. What makes the adoption of this nested modality (“it is necessary that it is possible that…”) an ethical stance?

The answer, according to me, was that the stance reflected some aspects of an ethics of humanism, in particular its attitude of fraternity or brotherhood towards all human others. Mehta expresses some doubts about whether fraternity could possibly be what is at stake here, without some further supplement.

To understand the issue, one needs to situate the stance I was recommending in the context of what it was a stance against. I was rejecting a certain form of relativism about reasons. Such a relativism says: if there are, at a given time, two irresolubly opposed points of view, there are not sufficient grounds to think that history will necessarily throw up possibilities for either side to change the mind of the other in the future, by producing internal conflict (as Hegel might say) in the other’s point of view.  It may be that the most that history guarantees is that of another kind of nested modality, merely an iterated possibility—“it is possible that it is possible that such an outcome will emerge.” If that is the best one can expect from the appeal to history, a relativism may loom. We might have to say that each side in the moral or political dispute has the truth or the right on its side because there are no internal reasons that either can expect to provide to the other. It was this view, which I thought should be rejected. But my grounds for rejecting it, as I have pointed out in previous responses to comments, were not predictive, not based on some metaphysical understanding of history’s possibilities. It was an ethical stance regarding how to see history’s relevance for reason and for subjectivity.

In a somewhat ostentatious bit of rhetoric to make things vivid, I had expressed the point about humanism and fraternity that attaches to the position I was taking (against those who think we should capitulate in this way to relativism), as follows. When two parties are in a vexed moral or political dispute, there is something more ethically attractive about someone who says, “You must (where this “must” is not backed by sanctions or force or violence or any such thing, but rather is an expression of a deep desire to persuade the other via the providing of internal reasons) be my brother” than someone who says “You can never be my brother.” The relativist is happy to rest with the latter (“You can never be my brother”). I had thought one should insist on the former, that it was ethically the better stance.

As should be obvious, given the sort of philosophical issue that I’ve just expounded in which this rhetorical contrast was made, humanism and brotherhood (or fraternity) were intended very explicitly by me to mean something restricted. It meant that, in a dispute, each party wished to include (via persuasion on the basis of internal reasons) the other and indeed all human beings, in the truth. Like any humanism and ideal of brotherhood it was inclusive of all human beings but not in any other sense than that special and limited sense of inclusiveness that I’ve just italicized. (There are two points that should also be obvious and I will put them down in this parenthesis as asides. One, of course, the truth would be truth by their own lights, there being, for them, as for anyone, no other lights but their own. Two, the sort of truth involved would be something in the political or moral realm since those were the relevant examples for my concerns. So the “truth” I was concerned with was not something remotely theoretical or scientific but was interchangeable with “rightness” and I discussed examples such as the truth or rightness of free speech versus the truth or rightness of censorship, in the face of, say, a “blasphemous” novel.)  The idea is that it is a humanism, a form of fraternity with other human beings, because one cares for them enough to want to include them in something that is important in one’s life: the moral and political truth (of course, as one sees it, but that should go without saying). However, because one wants to include them in something like the truth, I went on to say this:

To many humanists, such talk of brotherhood—flowing as it does from an ideal of caring for something so abstract as truth, and wanting to share that abstract thing with others—will seem too intellectualized a way of talking compared…to the down-to-earth ways in which we talk of the humanist values of brotherhood…

Mehta thinks something like this too of my view, calling its sources of fraternity “thin” compared to the sources of ordinary notions of fraternity that have been with us for a long time. What I was doing in this passage was frankly admitting that this humanism, unlike other more familiar forms of humanism that we also value, is not the inclusiveness of felt solidarities with other human beings which come from, say, compassionate regard for them and supportive relations with them. It comes rather from wanting them to partake in something that one cares for (the moral or political truth). Someone might ask, and given what he says, it might be a question that is nagging Mehta too: Your view may involve a caring for the truth, but why is it any kind of caring for them to want to include them in the truth? The answer to this can be conveyed in many ways. Here is one. One can imagine a father saying to his daughter, who has just told him that she believes something that her friend in school has convinced her of—say, that being cutting and superior towards others will make her attractive to and respected by her circle of friends: “I don’t care what your friend believes, but I do care for you and so I care that you believe what is right, and it is right to be kind to people.” That thought, “I care for you so I want you to believe what is right,” when writ large, i.e., when applied to all of humanity (including those with whom one is deeply disagreed on important matters) rather than just to one’s own child, is the humanism that I am targeting. (The point is not phenomenological. It would be far-fetched to think that the feelings one has for one’s child must carry over to the writ-large ideal of including all of humanity, but we knew that already in the passage we frequently make from such feelings as we have for one’s siblings to talk of the “brotherhood of man.”) So, wanting to include others in the truth does reflect a form of regard and caring for them, in this sense I have just mentioned, but what I was admitting in the passage was that—because the caring comes from such an abstract or “thin” source (wanting them to partake in the truth)—it is very unlike having feelings of compassion for them or actions and relations of support shown towards them.

Mehta asks:

The question I want to raise is whether…his version of humanism can deliver the fraternal caring that he thinks it can without some additional warrant and supplementation.

I must ask in response: if I am to deliver this fraternal caring about which I had made this frank admission explicitly in my essay in the passage just cited, what else, what supplementary thing do I need to do that Mehta is asking of me? I don’t see that I need to do anything other than what I had done in my paper. I had posited a form of humanism that brings one’s caring for other human beings in integrity with one’s caring for something abstract like the truth, by wanting to include other human beings in the truth. So, when asked, how can my humanism deliver caring of this sort, I can only repeat that it is delivered by taking the ethical stance that I think needs to be taken regards how to see the relation between history and subjectivity. I see history as necessarily offering possibilities of opportunity to include in the truth those subjects whom I currently take to be subscribing to something false—unlike the relativist who sees history as not necessarily offering any such possibilities, and who therefore asks me to allow them their own and different truths which, by my lights, are falsehood. Nothing more can be required for its delivery. To take the ethical stance against relativism is to care for others in this way—as possible partners in subscribing to what one takes to be something of great importance, the moral and political truth.

What Mehta misses is that I am multiplying notions (or adding a further notion) of fraternity. I am not holding fast to the familiar (or, if you like, “thickly”-sourced) form of fraternity as the only form there is, and struggling to find a way of supplementing my idea (of caring for others in a way that wants to include them in the truth one cares for) so that I go from this idea to that familiar (or “thickly”-sourced) form of humanism by the further step that the supplement provides. No, I am asserting that my idea, this way of caring for others, is itself a form of humanism, though a distinct form of humanism, not to be conflated with the other more standard form of it that is familiar from a long intellectual history, some parts of which Mehta obviously has at the back of his mind, when he asks whether it is fraternity and caring that I am really tracking.

I think Mehta fails to see this because in some places he writes as if my humanism consists in merely saying that one should care for the truth. That, by itself, can’t possibly be the form of fraternity or humanism I recommend because I myself point out that someone can care for the truth and say, regarding this matter of including others in the truth, “I don’t include you in it and so you can never, in this specific sense, be my brother.” To say this is not necessarily to cease to care for the truth. It can be said with a view to hoard for oneself, the truth that one greatly cares for. That for me is a distinct possibility, a possibility that makes me philosophically anxious, and I take and urge an ethical stance against it. And it is that ethical stance which is a distinct form of humanism, a distinct form of inclusiveness of all human others. To take such a stance is to say “You must be my brother,” it is to care to include all others in the truth. So, as I said above, the humanism consists not just in the caring for the truth but in the bringing together into an integrity the caring for the truth and the caring for others such that one wishes always to include others (whom one cares for) into the truth (which one cares for). There is, therefore, no distance between the ethical stance and the fraternity. I need no supplement.

He says:

Bilgrami is quite clear that in the first instance the caring is for one’s own conception of truth.

I am not at all clear about that because I am not at all sure what these “instances” are supposed to be, such that there is a first and (presumably) a second. I certainly do say that one must care for the truth. But I don’t rest there. So there is no discrete “instant” at which I rest and say: caring for the truth is all of this humanism I am committed to. I repeat that I couldn’t possibly be saying that because it is I who point out that one can care for the truth and yet say “You can never partake of the truth and therefore never be my brother.” I present this as being the denial of the humanism I am commending in these contexts. So there are no two “instances,” one of caring for the truth and the other of caring for others, with the former coming first and constituting all of my humanism, and a supplement needed to get to the second. Both carings form an integrity (that is to say, they are integrated) and that integrity is the non-standard humanism or fraternity I am commending, over and above the standard or traditional or “thickly”-sourced one.

There is another flaw in Mehta’s way of formulating things. In the sentence I cited above, he uses the phrase “the caring is for one’s conception of the truth.” The idea I have in mind can’t be captured in that phrase. From within my point of view, when I speak or think of the truth, it is just the truth. It is not the truth from my point of view, or my conception of the truth. Thus, if it is I who am doing the caring, it is the caring for the truth (of course, “as I see it”—but this proviso “as I see it” should not be part of how the truth that I care for, is characterized). That part is what goes without saying and it is important that one not say it. To actually say it, to make it part of the formulation of the object of my caring, is to misdescribe what it is that I care for. I (like everyone else) care only from within a point of view. And what I care for is, from within that point of view, the truth simpliciter, not the truth as I see it or conceive of it.

It is perhaps this sort of mistake that leads Mehta to say that the truth can be held by someone in a narcissistic and dogmatic way and when it is, wanting others to be included in it, wanting to share it with others, does not reflect any caring for them. I don’t see that this talk of dogmatism and narcissism has any relevance to what I had to say. First of all, I say often in my paper that the truth that I want to share must be something that is a deep and important part of how I conceive of myself—as someone for whom these things are deep and important. It is not lightly held, not an indulgence or fancy, it is what I consider worthy and care for. I suppose that things that go deep in one’s belief and in what one considers worthy can, by some observer’s rational standards or quasi-psychoanalytic lights, be seen as bits of “dogma” or as “narcissistically” held. But from the point of you of someone who has them as deep and heartfelt commitments (something I had insisted on from the outset), they are not any the less his commitments. Take someone who believes deeply in the goodness of his religion’s great prophetic figure. By someone else’s lights (Richard Dawkins’s, say) it may be a very dogmatic belief, or it may be seen by someone (all dressed up in a Kohutian theory of religion) as serving some narcissistic need to project the self-image of his own heroism onto a distant figure of his inherited religious culture. But from within that person’s own point of view it could still be utterly genuine and sincere and deeply held. And if it is not, then it is not what I said it must be in the way I set things up for the humanism and fraternity that I was expounding. So, for one reason or another, all of this talk about the truth being subscribed to in ways that are dogmatic and narcissistic is quite besides the point for what I want to and did say.

On more substantial issues, his instinct is exactly right (and mine) when he says that Taylor wants a neutralism that is not necessarily secular. I wrote a fair number of words in my essay to try and make that instinct into a sound bit of criticism in political theory. I am sure that I have not persuaded Taylor, but it is gratifying to see that During and I share an understanding of Taylor. If he and I are right, Taylor’s honorable and interesting effort to redefine secularism as his form of “neutralism” fails. Or at any rate—if one takes the view that definitions, being stipulative and conventional, cannot exactly fail—it is not theoretically well motivated. During doesn’t mention his grounds for thinking Taylor to be wrong, but does gesture at broad agreement with the grounds I had presented.

Where he seems to find my dialectic is missing something is at the point when I mention that the implementation of secularism (in those contexts where its implementation is called for) in the face of resistance to it, should appeal to a historicized conception of the subjects who resist it. He suggests that I should have given a thicker sense of the actual historical development that might be needed to bring such subjects around to secular polities and proceeds to guide me to a path by which this might be done by providing a genealogy of how it was in fact achieved in Europe. These genealogical and historical remarks are valuable, but I want to shepherd their relevance to a different part of my dialectic from where he places them.

The entire last two sections of my paper aim to address the philosophical issues that arise when secularism is called for but is resisted by religious identitarian groups, and they argue for a historically constituted conception of political subjectivity with dynamic possibilities for the presentation of internal reasons by secularism to those who resist it. Of these efforts on my part, During says this:

This is an ingenious philosophical prophecy. But the obvious problem with it is that history has not so far worked this way, and Bilgrami offers no good reasons for us to think that it will in the future either. I can’t address the issues that Bilgrami’s turn to history raises in any depth, so I’ll content myself with three broad points, the first two of which displace philosophic discussion of state secularization by connecting it to capitalism [and science’s role in society], and thus implicitly to contemporary history’s actual motor. The third places the debate between Taylor and Bilgrami in a different historical trajectory than the one that Bilgrami himself offers, by offering a distant genealogy of Church/State relations.

In response, let me repeat first what I had said in response to Colin Jager: I come bearing no prophecy. I have no predictive aims. What has perhaps misled During (which is why I say that his historical remarks are relevant at another stage of my dialectic than where he offers them) is that I was possibly not clear enough that at this stage of the paper, I am discussing a philosophical problem and invoking the relevance of history in a very philosophical mode.

When I had asked what secularists might do in contexts in which secularism is necessary but in which it faces religious identitarian resistance, I was really asking two questions that were narrowly philosophical. First, is it right for secularists to impose its policies from on high via the force that states possess or should it come to secularist policies inclusively by negotiation with those who resist it; second, should one justify this or that secularist policy to those who resist it by pronouncing some universal, “externalist” claim for its truth or should one seek “internal” reasons in the conceptual vernacular of the very groups which resist the policy. (These two questions are obviously related since the notion of negotiation in the second disjunct of the first question is of a piece with the ideal mentioned in the second disjunct of the second question, the ideal of seeking internal reasons in a conceptual vernacular of those who oppose one.) It is in the context of these specific questions that I introduced the appeal to history. The appeal was: If internal reasons are not available in these efforts at negotiation at any given time, one should not grant anything to relativism (relativism being the view that both parties to the negotiation have a right on their side, a relative right!), but rather one should (as a normative stance) see the party with which one was negotiating as consisting of historically constituted subjects whose moral-psychological economies might, as a result of changing historical circumstances, go on to develop internal conflicts that make them more susceptible in the future to revision of their views via internal reasons.

I had left things relatively schematic here and said nothing very specific about what sorts of historical changes might make for internal conflicts in the thinking of those who resist secularism. I did give one example of how a change in even many conservative women’s thinking in America in favor of pro-choice policies was partly shaped by historical changes in the nature of the economy owing to a proportional increase in employment opportunities in the service sector over the heavy goods manufacturing sector, as well as owing to the general shift away from industrial capital to finance capital. Such changes opened up greater possibilities for women’s work outside the home and that introduced new aspirations in women and that, in turn, introduced conflict in their thinking which may well have led to a deliberation towards pro choice. But, other than that example, I had not said much about specific historical developments that might bring about changes of mind towards secularism. During is disappointed in my silence on this score and thinks that I might have looked to actual history to fill the void in what I mean history to be doing in this stage of my paper. The instruction he is offering me might, thus, be formulated as follows: “Don’t leave things so schematic. Look at the past and notice how much the rise and then the flourishing of capitalism as well as the centrality of science in society did to shape secularist polities and then seek or hope to make (or to predict and prophesize less schematically than you have) historical changes of that kind in those societies in which there is resistance to secularism.”

I repeat: I am not prophesying or predicting any secularist triumph (something I have also stressed anxiously in my response to Jager). I am only normatively advancing (and to use Jager’s term “hoping” for) the triumph of secularism where it seems necessary to do so, i.e., in scenarios that mimic the European setting in which it had in fact been called up as necessary. What During’s instruction ignores is an earlier part of my dialectic in which I myself had given this sort of thick genealogy for how the need for secularism arose in European nations. In doing so, I was, for reasons rather similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s, rather explicitly skeptical of the virtues of the historical transformations in which secularist polities were seen as necessary. It seemed to me that there was no particular reason for countries outside the orbit of European influence and power to seek these transformations. I, again following Gandhi, took colonized countries to be in the orbit only peripherally and unwillingly, and found it quite understandable that they should resist aping these forms of capitalism and centralized state formation which had facilitated the rise of corporate domination in the colonizing nations, using science and technology primarily for corporate gain as well as for highly advanced militaries and armaments. And in my own genealogy, I had fastened on a particular modern form of exploitation of religion in European nation-building, which had grown in tandem with the things that During mentions (capitalism and the use of science in its development as an economic formation), a nationalism that was based on mobilizing majoritarian religious sentiments.  The point then is this: Capital, the deployment of science in the pursuit of profit, large scale technological militarization, centralized states tied in hyphenated conjunction with nations, nationalistic mobilization of religious majorities against religious minorities, all emerged gradually in European “modernity” in a familiar trajectory, and secularism as a political doctrine grew in this web of transformations with a very particular good to offer. It would repair the damage wrought by majoritarian religious prejudice and power often exercised with a sustained form of violence backed by the state and minoritarian religious backlash against it with its own form of prejudice and a more episodic form of violence of resistance. And I had said that once this sort of society with these features had been constructed, it is quite possible that nothing less and nothing other than secularism could be conceived and devised to control the damage, given its cumulative depth and pervasiveness.

So, it is precisely because I had in mind just what During presents in his genealogy that I had said, following Gandhi’s lead, that unless one had some vision whereby all of the world should end up as Europe and the West has, countries outside the orbit of such a European (or more generally, Western) construction, should resist pursuing and adopting these lamentable conditions that made it seem that secularism was a necessary solution. Thus, far from being prophetic, I was actually resisting the tendency to Whiggish declarations of secular outcomes in the future for the rest of the world. In this, I believe, I share something deep with Taylor. But, unlike him, I don’t find any need to redefine secularism, domesticating it to another meaning that better fits the urge we both share.

So, in this earlier part of my dialectic, I had myself denied that secularism could really be understood independently of this entire genealogically traced background of European modernity and nationalism, something that During himself nicely underscores in detail (more detail than I presented) in his comments. But he offers the genealogy to me as something I could introduce at a later stage of my dialectic when I am looking at contexts where secularism seems to be a good thing to advance, in the face of resistance to it. However, these contexts, I claimed, are contexts where, despite such resistance to secularism from religious identitarian groups, the conditions of European modernity described in my paper (and in greater detail in other work) had already been replicated in countries outside the main orbit of European or Western society. (I had in particular considered India in the period of the late 1980s and after when this form of religious nationalism and minoritarian backlash against it had emerged in full force –as contrasted with the period when Gandhi was writing, where there was no such replication.) But –and this is the punch line—if these conditions have already been replicated for the relevance of secularism to be acknowledged and advanced, then During’s suggestion that I accommodate those conditions in my appeal to history at the later stage of my argument, seems redundant. I would not have in the first place been advocating secularism for these societies in which there was resistance to it, unless these historical conditions of European modernity had been replicated in them. This is not to say that I don’t find his genealogical remarks valuable. I do and I am in full accord with them as bearing a relevance to the concept of secularism, as I’ve explained above. It’s just that I would place their value and relevance in a different place in my argument from where he proposes them on my behalf.

I couldn’t end this response without saying that I appreciate and find instructive During’s further suggestion that where secularism is necessary and one seeks to convince others of it, there is no reason to think that the state is the only agency whereby this is done. The sorts of more informal associations that he proposes where there might be such dissemination are certainly worth exploring and emphasizing. I don’t believe that the pursuit of these other sites in civil society where negotiation of a broad kind may be sought should make us think that the state should become abstemious and aloof from such negotiation. The field of force in which (to use my, rather than During’s, concept) internal reasons are sought to persuade others of the importance and need for secularism is capacious enough to include both the state and the more loosely constituted institutions of a wider civil society. (See my essay, “Secular Liberalism and the Moral Psychology of Identity” for some historical examples of how the state can effectively be part of this field of force.)

*   *   *

Let me now turn to the essay by Justin Neuman. This preening response’s repeatedly announced aim is to raise a question about the extent of religious homogeneity in modern societies. Since, in my essay, I had nothing invested in claiming a widespread factual presence of homogenous religious cultures, this striking of an attitude about plural religions is besides any point that was central to my concerns.

I also said very conspicuously that (S) was far less relevant than is often thought necessary by its advocates and gave very specific contextual conditions in which it has its normative relevance and most urgent need for implementation—when societies were under threat from nationalist forms of religious majoritarianism adopted in countries mimicking the post-Westphalian path of modernity in Europe. This strictly implies an acknowledgement that, as things stand historically, its main normative relevance is to societies with more than one religion. Moreover, the author himself registers that I myself point out that any religious group may find itself developing internal conflicts and undermine its own homogeneity. So it’s hard not to think that he wrote his commentary, half-knowing that he was presenting something that, however keen he may have been to put it in the air, was not deeply relevant to the essay he was setting out to address.

I say in the essay that a definition or characterization of an ideal of secularism has a marginal advantage if it has application to both highly pluralized religious societies and relatively homogenous religious ones. If one understands what the notion of an ideal is, one doesn’t need to be told that an ideal that is supposed to apply to two different sorts of conditions is not any less an ideal if one of those conditions doesn’t, in fact, at some given point, exist. But, evidently, I must do some telling. I was characterizing the secularist ideal. Nothing in it lapses if, in fact, societies are now predominantly plural in their religious convictions and practices. Charles Taylor proposed an ideal of secularism that is restricted to certain conditions. I propose one that is not so restricted. I claimed that it is an advantage to be less restricted in this respect—and anybody reading my essay with a view to comment on it rather than a mind to seize some misperceived opportunity to display his own pluralist credentials, would have taken in that non-restrictiveness was offered as a very minor advantage compared to the other much more substantial advantages claimed. Secularism, I had said, is a stand on religion. If it is true that all societies that exist have more than one religion, the unrestricted ideal is at no disadvantage whatsoever. If it should turn out that there is a society in which there is only one pervasive religion, the unrestricted ideal has application in a way that the restricted one does not. That is the marginal advantage I had claimed and nothing in the clichés presented in this essay about how there is a plurality of religions can undermine this claimed advantage. In a characterization of some ideal (secularism, for instance), words like “should there be…” and “If there are…” which I had used in (S) and have repeated just now are precisely meant to protect oneself from making any commitment to the facts that might restrict the scope of one’s characterization of the ideal. So, huffing on about what the facts are at a given time, makes no odds to an ideal, so characterized.  It is exactly this point that is missed by the proposal in the essay that I should remove the opening clause from my formula (S) which reads “Should there be…”

Various other points are also missed or misinterpreted.  I can’t find a thread of connection in the things they get wrong, so I’ll list them below as a miscellany.

1. There is a quite elementary failure to understand the position being taken, when I said that secularism is a stance about religion and in some broad sense in opposition to religion, in a passage such as this:

…by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion.

Secularism was said by me to have a complex history and I was trying to keep faith with precisely that history in my discussion that tried to make my stipulated characterization non-arbitrary. So I cannot possibly have been setting myself up against either Taylor or Asad on that score, when I say that secularism is a stand in some sense against religion. That secularism should have its own ideologies and disciplines (a point I certainly believe myself) does not rule out the fact that it can be understood as being in opposition to religion, for the utterly obvious reason that it may be some part of those disciplines and ideologies that they run counter to the commitments and disciplines of some religions. And if, as Asad says, secular ideology and disciplines can produce new and modern understandings of religions, I don’t see how that rules out the thought that the new understandings of religion can also be something that secularism stands in opposition to. I would think that if it “polices” them, it can hardly fail, at least implicitly, to do so. My own view, I should repeat here, is that modern understandings of religion emerge out of a range of other developments of modernity (such as nationalism devised on the European model, for instance, in the examples I discussed) and secularism nests in these, often introduced explicitly as getting its point and rationale by combating some of the harmful effects it finds these modern developments around religion to have. But I won’t elaborate on that here because it is really too detailed a thought to actually have any relevance to the essay to which I am responding. As for Taylor’s book in which he presents the secular age of Latin Christendom with its own positive humanist construction in contrast with the secular understood as an ideal of subtraction, I think Taylor himself would say that that topic is not quite the topic he is writing about in his essay on which I was extensively commenting. The concepts of “secularization” and “secular” were partly contrasted by me with the concept of “secularism” because I found myself much more in sympathy with Taylor’s book (which is on the first two of those concepts) than with the essay I was criticizing (which was on the third). And within my classification of these terms, some of Asad’s directions of thought can be read as follows. He makes the perfectly correct claim that modern understandings of religion emerge out of the “secular” and the process of “secularization,” and then secularism is constructed with the rationale of policing and repairing the damage done by the political presence of these modern forms of religion. My essay’s argument is, therefore, entirely compatible with Asad’s work and Taylor’s book, though not the essay by Taylor which is the foil to my own essay. This is hardly surprising since it should be plain to a knowledgeable and comprehending reader of my essay that it was, in part, influenced by both of them. But all of this has manifestly escaped the author of this essay.

2. The reply then moves seamlessly from speaking about plurality of religions to speaking more generally about pluralist elements in culture in a sermon that is so familiar that it needs no response, especially since there is nothing in my essay that contradicts these familiar points. All this culminates in the assertion, by now a mantra in our intellectual culture, that identities are multiple, with the authority of Amartya Sen to underline it.

Nobody should deny that identities are multiple for the plain reason that nobody should deny facts. But it is equally a fact that sometimes (as in the case of religious majoritarian mobilization, which was a central concern of mine), people present themselves as having some of their multiple identities matter to them more than others, especially in the political realm, and they convince themselves that it is so. This may even be an illusion on their part. But, as Sen himself points out, a good deal of identity is subjective, not objective, and so calling it an illusion with a view to dismissing it is to simply fail to grasp this basic distinction. Societies can be highly plural in their cultures and yet some mobilizations can put aside the plurality for political and other hegemonic ends. Religion can be exploited for these purposes. When this happens there is a bad form of identity politics as, for instance, in India in the 1980s and 1990s, that appeals in name to religion. The same elementary principle that I invoked earlier when I offered the advice that one should not deny that identities are multiple, applies equally to those who would deny these latter points.

3. I made no empirical commitments whatever on the question of how widespread the practice of female genital mutilation is. My remarks on the subject were wholly in response to an example given by Taylor in his reactions to my paper and I very deliberately and carefully worded them in a conditional, precisely so as to make no such commitments. The essay seems keen to parade some numbers on this question, but there is nothing that they say by way of addressing anything in my essay directly. I was equally careful to expend quite a few words on the question of “who speaks for religions” and religious groups and raised an entire question about this and the difficulty of democratizing those aspects of society in which religious groups are to be counted, since often very unrepresentative points of view get to have a representative voice. The pertinence of this discussion is entirely overlooked in certain attributions that are made to me on this subject of “who speaks for religion,” which I don’t find anywhere in the original essay. The pedantic revisions of (S) offered at the end of the piece in which the term “religion” is changed to “religious persons” (a revision to which I have no objection, as should be evident from much of what I had myself said in my essay) could easily be inferred from precisely the words I expended on the importance (and difficulty) of democratizing the notion of “who speaks for a religion”.

4. At one point we are told that the very idea of a lexicographical ordering such as is found in (S) is only likely to be “available” to those who are already secular. I must confess to finding this so hazy that I don’t quite know how to respond.

Does the remark mean that someone cannot say, “If (S) is what secularism is, I am against it?” I know any number of people who say this. There are several essays by distinguished writers such as Ashis Nandy, written over the last two or three decades, which have said it about a doctrine that is non-neutralist in a way that my lexicographical ordering was trying to capture and roughly codify, essays with titles such as “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto.” Nandy, I wager, would agree that (S), rather than a neutralist ideal of Taylor’s sort, captures secularism, and it is precisely what he is against. I myself, as someone who offered (S), had said, as I offered it, that it is not normatively apt in many contexts. It was one of the chief and explicitly announced goals of my essay, indicated even in its title. And the essay, far from making a clean distinction between religion and politics as this response bizarrely assumes and asserts, actually takes the view that (S) should only be normatively advanced in rather specific contexts partly because in many other contexts and places, religion and politics do not separate and need not separate cleanly.

Or does the remark mean that (S) is not comprehensible to someone who is not already a secularist? If so, I can present to anybody who would make such an astonishing claim any number of people I know who have a perfectly clear understanding of what (S) means and are not secularists. In fact, as you would expect, all those in the first class of people I mentioned (such as Nandy) are a subset of this second class of people just mentioned.

5. The essay cites another paper of mine in which I make a point about how some of the political resentments and angers voiced by Osama bin Laden against American foreign policy, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, etc., finds assent on the street in various parts of the world with large Muslim populations, even as most of those who give this assent are appalled by terrorist violence and the religious absolutism that accompanies this anger and resentment on political matters. A skeptical question is raised about the confidence with which I say this. So let me just say that my confidence is based on what I read in newspapers, what I hear on radio reports and interviews, what I read in blogs on the internet, what I see and hear on television reports and interviews (including on Al-Jazeera), and what I hear in my own personal conversations with ordinary Muslims in different parts of the world that I have visited in the last decade and more.

If and when there are contexts in which one judges secularism—as understood by my characterization of it in (S)—to be a normative necessity, questions arise, as I have said above, of how best to justify (and implement) it to those who are recalcitrant. I had argued that, if in these contexts, there was real resistance to (S) among sections of a society, the ideal in justification and implementation must be a) to seek internal reasons, reasons that appeal to some of the moral and political commitments of the very people who are resisting (S), in order to persuade them of (S) and bring them around to accepting its implementation; and b) if such reasons could not at a particular point in time be found among their moral and political commitments, then one should take the position that history might inject internal conflict into their thinking and this may, in turn, help to provide the necessary internal reasons to persuade them.

What (b) adds to the idea of internal reasons, I argued, is a certain modified (non-deterministic) Hegelian understanding of the relevance of History to human subjectivity, thereby radically transforming “the subject” from the purely synchronic terms in which it has been viewed by a great deal of current philosophizing about society, politics, and moral psychology, to a more dynamic conception.

Jager describes (b) as expressing a philosophy of “hope”. It is his term, not mine, though I am happy to accept the term as capturing something of what is at stake in (b).

Jager, then, puzzlingly adds:

 Yet the historical record certainly offers plenty of examples of unchanged minds, or of minds that change and then change back, or of minds that change for the worse rather than the better, becoming more entrenched, more dogmatic, and so on. These possibilities don’t register very strongly in Bilgrami’s paper.

But these possibilities do get registered very strongly and explicitly in the paper. At a pivotal point in the argument, here is what I say:

This point is crucial. After all someone else may see history as having a rather depressing record in resolving conflict between groups, and resist my repudiation of relativism, a repudiation which has the default lie in the view that it is always at least possible that new conflicts internal to an individual or group will—via internal reasoning—help resolve conflicts between individuals or groups.  Such a person will simply not find the record in history sanctioning this default position. The default says that when there is an intractable value-disagreement between two parties, history may always inject in one of the parties, the sort of internal conflict necessary for the other to provide internal reasons to it. The interlocutor here will deny this, saying that the record of history, does not justify this to be the default position.

It is precisely because I make so much of these possibilities that I construct a considered response to them, a response which gives to what I call the “default” position an unusual status—that of an evaluative stance about history’s significance rather than a mere metaphysical argument derived from the evidence of history’s efficacies in such matters. Thus, the nested modality that I think History must be seen as offering (“it is always at least possible” or better, “it is necessary that it is possible” that History will inject internal conflict into the point of view one opposes) is something that is an ethical stance about the relation between subjectivity and History. So the passage I cited from my essay admits, just as Jager thinks I should, that there is plenty of evidence of unchanged minds in the historical record. (I am only addressing the possibility of “the unchanged mind” that Jager mentions. The other possibilities that he mentions merely complicate what the historical record delivers, and would proportionately complicate the nature of the evaluative stance to be taken, but they don’t change the principle behind it.) It is because that is so that the rest of that section of the paper goes on to offer an argument for an evaluative stance to face up to the fact to which the historical evidence points.  The stance makes a normative demand on us. It asks us to hold sturdily to the default I favor, the particular form of nested modality I think crucial, even in the face of what History suggests in any particular case.

I would not and could not say, as I just did, that I agree with Jager that “hope” is an apt description for the particular way I read the Hegelian subject, if it were not for having acknowledged the possibilities that he presents. However, he attributes hope to me by contriving to suggest (falsely, as I said) that I don’t seriously acknowledge the possibilities in history that he raises, and therefore I must be given to hope almost unconsciously, as it were. But that is not at all the reason why I don’t mention hope explicitly. I don’t do so because I think that, whenever one is taking a view in any seriously committed way (whether it be secularism or any other), the emphasis must be not on a psychological disposition such as hope but an evaluative stance that positively guides our actions—in this case a stance that determines the search for arguments in the conceptual vernacular and the internal reasoning of those whom one is seeking to persuade. One can’t merely hope that they will reason their way out of the view one opposes. One has to seek internal arguments from within their moral-psychological economy, and for that one needs to emphasize in one’s own moral psychology a commitment, a more thoroughgoing evaluative attitude. Hope, as a tendency of mind, no doubt, nests within this overall ethical stance. But it is the stance, not the hope, which is the main thing to stress. That is the only reason why I didn’t mention “hope” explicitly.

There is a second curious misinterpretation in Jager’s comment. I say “curious” because he himself so well summarizes the very reasons why it is a misinterpretation. He rightly points out that for me the relevance of secularism or (S) depends wholly on conditions that were reared in religious majoritarian tendencies in European history and, as Mahatma Gandhi said, secularism should not be imposed on parts of the world where no such conditions are present. But he seems to think in addition to this accurate understanding of my views, that I also have a rather sedentary understanding of the nature of religion. I am actually not sure that I even understand what this means, but to the extent that I do, I find no evidence in my paper (to say nothing of my mind and thoughts) for it. Here is what Jager says in his report of my view:

 …history is…dynamic. Religion, by contrast, seems quite static. In Bilgrami’s schema, secularism points out to religion (or waits for history to do the pointing out) that its picture of things is full of internal tensions; it thereby hopes to convince religion to sign on to (S)’s lexical ordering for reasons that remain religious (that’s the overlapping consensus part of the argument) but have now been pluralized (that’s the moral psychological part of the argument). I don’t get any sense that for Bilgrami the arrow might sometimes point in the other direction.

This is all very puzzling. For one thing, I am not sure what it means to say that history is dynamic. What I said is that the concept of the subject or subjectivity is dynamic because it is constituted by history. That is, the self or the subject should not be viewed in synchronic snapshots at given times, but should be seen as dynamic and open-ended. This does not make history dynamic (which is almost as odd as saying that time is dynamic) but it makes dynamic anything we care to say is constituted historically—such as the very concept of a subject, as I insisted.  Moreover, I don’t see how, given what he accurately presents me as saying, I could possibly think religion is static. It is I, after all, who say that prior to nation-state building exercises, religion within territories with scattered loci of power (i.e. before nation-states of a very specific formation emerged) had a natural, syncretic form of pluralist presence in the lives of diverse people, and it transformed itself as a result of European forms of nationalism and centralized statehood, to something quite else –a force of modern majoritarian domination and minoritarian backlashes to these. Does this not register a transformation of religion, thereby making it dynamic? Perhaps Jager thinks that because this transformation in religion accompanies other changes (and is even caused by these other changes; e.g. the rise of a certain modern form of nationalism), religion itself is not really dynamic. But I don’t know if any change is so purely self-standing that it is unaccompanied and uncaused by other changes; surely Jager is not demanding that for something to be genuinely dynamic, its transformation must emerge like an isolated nugget. Historical events are always holistically inter-linked with other historical events.

But, worst of all, Jager’s last sentence in the passage I have just cited simply fails to notice something I discussed and denied very plainly. In this he is not alone. This misreading is also doing much work in Jeremy Webber’s comment, which I’ll respond to separately. For now, let me just cite something I say in the paper that directly contradicts that offending sentence in Jager. After I present my account of how a Hegelian and historically constituted subject can always be susceptible to new forms of internal conflict that might lead to deliberating one’s way towards accepting (S), I go out of my way to say that this should not be understood as a Whiggish complacence about secularism being the end to which we are (or must be) all moving.

 …there is no Whiggish guarantee of a consummation of the historical process in a secular liberal outcome.  That is not pessimism, it is just a recoil from a deterministic historicism.

What I point out in this passage is that if one does think that (S) is a good thing in some context, one need never succumb to relativism so long as one took the right view of History’s relation to subjectivity. From the point of view of someone who finds secularism necessary in some context, the recalcitrance of religious identitarian positions (whether majoritarian or minoritarian), need not cause one to succumb to a relativisitic pessimism regarding either the correctness of one’s secularism or its achievability through internal reasons. From within such a point of view, the Hegelian ideal of the Subject-in-History rules out this pessimism regarding the possibilities for secularism. And I point out that what would wrongly be thought of as pessimism should instead rightly be described as something else—which is that there is no reason to think that secularism is how things will end up. That last predictive attitude (things will end up our way) is Whiggishness regarding secularism. I disclaimed it in so many words. To take a stance that one should persevere for the search for internal reasons to remove the recalcitrance in one’s fellows is perfectly compatible with the non-Whiggish position that I avow explicitly and Jager urges on me, missing the passage where I avow it.

I have deliberately and repeatedly italicized words expressing conditionalities in the previous paragraph. The point of this emphasis is that if one were to think of secularism as necessary in some context, then from within the point of view of that commitment, the idea that there will be no Whiggish end in favor of secularism, does not discourage the search for that end via the construction of internal reasons to change the minds of others who oppose that end. The confidence that drives one’s search is due to a normative stance that one takes, not because one smugly expects History to favor the secularist point of view one has adopted in taking the stance.

Thus, the passage from my essay that I cited strictly implies that I would allow what Jager thinks I should allow—that, as he puts it, “the arrow might move in the opposite direction” from what one’s ethical stance urges upon on. The point is that if two sides take opposing positions on some political issue (secularism, as it might be), then each side, from within its point of view, would take a certain normative or ethical (not predictive) stance on how History should be viewed when seen as constitutive of the subjectivity of those one is opposed to. No side should be complacent about how things will end up on the basis of any historical evidence they summon. But each side must press its position as a normative or ethical stance against relativistic readings of the evidence to which history may point. And I, given the topic of my paper at that stage of its argument, was describing what it looked like from one of the two sides, the point of view of someone who thought that in a particular context secularism was the right view to take of the polity. It is missing the point, therefore, to read this as an assertion that the arrow of history moves or must move only in the direction of secularism.

All this is so central to and so explicit in the last third of my paper that I feel at a loss as to how to improve things so that I should not be misunderstood in the way that both Jager and Webber have misunderstood me. Perhaps I should simply have repeated these points in the paper so that it would be impossible to fail to notice them. In any case, I am glad of this chance to repeat them here.

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

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred Stepan

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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