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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Commodification of Religion

There has been considerable amount of research on how commodification and the Internet are transforming the religious lives of young people. For young Muslims, Internet use is an important means of building a consensus about, for example, whether the use of henna for cosmetic purposes is com­patible with Muslim tradition or whether dating and premarital intimacies are compatible with the life of a “good Muslim.” Whereas the religious sys­tem of communication in an age of revelation was hierarchical, unitary, and authoritative, the system of communicative acts in a new media environment are typically horizontal rather than vertical, diverse and fragmented rather than unitary, devolved rather than centralized. Furthermore, the authority of any message is constantly negotiable and negotiated. The growth of these diverse centers of interpretation in a global communication system has pro­duced considerable instability in the formal system of religious belief and practice. In Islam, for example, there has been an inflation of sources of authority, since through some local and specific consensus, almost any local teacher or mullah can issue a fatwa to guide a local community. Because new media provide multiple channels of access and encourage discursive interaction on blogs, they bring about a democratization of knowledge and religious lifestyles. Although there is clearly a digital divide, more and more people have access to these religious sites of communication. There is a democratization of Islam in the sense that many young Muslims bypass their traditional ulama and imams in order to learn about Islam from pam­phlets and sources, but this is equally true of other religious traditions.

There is in very general terms an important growth of religion online. In developing an account of the commodification and democratization of religion, let me return to the matter of ineffability, concentrating on the issue of communication and modern Islam. How is the Internet shaping the daily lives and religious practices of young generations? One obvious answer is that it makes the actual collective practice of religion—such as going to church or to the mosque—no longer necessary, and the result is that reli­gion online becomes online religion. The Internet has therefore only served to reinforce the problem of authority. Within the Muslim diaspora, where young Muslims face new problems relating to personal conduct, the new Internet intellectuals create personal websites, providing religious or ethi­cal rulings on various questions relating to religious conduct. These e-mail fatwas are not recognized by traditional shari’a courts as admissible evidence and cannot be readily enforced, but they clearly have an influence within the diaspora. They become authoritative, as users compare these rulings against other sites and e-fatwas. The debate on the Internet between multiple Mus­lim audiences constitutes an informal shari’a in which a communal consen­sus can emerge around controversial issues related to appropriate practice in new environments.

In summary, the Internet is an important technology for creating an imagined community for individuals and groups that are separated from their homelands and exist as minorities in alien secular cultures that are often hostile to Islam. These Internet sites also serve to reinforce the indi­vidualism that many observers have associated with neo-fundamentalism because, in the case of Islam, the global virtual ummah, or community of believers, is the perfect site for individuals to express themselves while still claiming to be members of a community on whose behalf they are speak­ing. We can conclude therefore that these forms of religious communica­tion are characterized by a principle of subsidiarity by which authority rests in the local and specific act of communication rather than in a principle of hierocracy.

These media contribute to a growing subjective individualism that is very different from the rugged ascetic and disciplined individualism of early Protestantism. This emerging religious subjectivity can be interpreted as a facet of the “expressive revolution” that had its roots in the student revolts of the 1960s. In the new individualism, people invent their own religious ideas and borrow religious practices from diverse traditions. The result has been a social revolution flowing from both consumerism and individual­ism, and as a result, “Capitalism’s success eroded class rivalries and replaced the activist and utopian mass politics of the inter-war era with a more bloodless politics of consumption and management. Goods not gods were what people wanted.” Consumerism helped to break down the old division between religion and the world, contributing to the contraction of the span of transcendence.

Religious lifestyles get modeled on consumer lifestyles in which people can try out religions rather like the way they try out a new fashion in hand­bags or shoes. In a consumer society, people want “goods not gods,” and to a large extent their desires can be satisfied by consumer credit. A new indus­try has emerged, concerned with spiritual advice on how to cope with the modern world while remaining pious and pure. Pious lifestyles are marketed by religious entrepreneurs who need to brand their products in the spiritual marketplace.

The consequence of these developments is a growing division between traditional “religion” and modern “spirituality.” Globalization has brought the spread of personal spirituality, and these spiritualities typi­cally provide guidance in the everyday world as well as subjective, tai­lor-made meaning. Such religious phenomena are often combined with personal therapeutic, healing services or the promise of personal enhance­ment through meditation. While fundamentalist norms of personal dis­cipline appeal to social groups that are upwardly socially mobile, such as the lower middle class and the newly educated, spirituality is more closely associated with middle-class singles who have been thoroughly influenced by Western consumer values. David Martin’s study of Pentecostalism also suggests that new therapies and lifestyles can be sustained through mem­bership in Pentecostal groups in which religion and material aspiration no longer conflict.

The new religions are closely associated also with themes of therapy, peace, and self-help. Of course the idea that religion, especially in the West, has become privatized is hardly new. However, these new forms of sub­jectivity and privatized living are no longer confined to Protestantism or the American middle classes; they now have a global audience. These reli­gious developments are therefore no longer simply local cults but burgeoning global popular religions carried by the Internet, movies, rock music, popular TV shows, and pulp fiction. I have described these new forms as pick-’n’-mix religions because their adherents borrow freely from a great range of religious beliefs and practices without any noticeable regard for coherence. It is also a new experimental context in which the iconic can also be the iconoclastic, as represented in Madonna’s experimentation with both Cath­olic and Hasidic personae.

These phenomena have been regarded as aspects of “new religious move­ments” that are, as we have seen, manifestations of the new spiritual mar­ketplaces. Such forms of religion tend to be highly individualistic, they are unorthodox in the sense that they follow no official creed, they are charac­terized by their syncretism, and they have little or no connection with insti­tutions such as churches, mosques, or temples. They are post-institutional, and in this sense they can legitimately be called “postmodern” religions. If global fundamentalism involves the modernization of social groups who are new arrivals to global megacities, the global post-institutional religions are typical of postmodernization.

Finally, spirituality is a mobile religiosity that mobile people can trans­port globally to new sites where they can mix and match their religious or self-help needs without too much constraint from hierarchical authorities. It is a religious orientation that permits rapid and easy transitions between dif­ferent identities, in which modern conversions tend to be more like a change in consumer brands than a searching of the soul. If the new religious life­styles give rise to emotions, these are packaged in ways that can be easily consumed. Brand loyalty on the part of consumers in low-intensity religions is also minimalistic.

Conclusion: New Gods of Communication

In modern societies, the principal characteristics of religion are its individu­alism in association with the decline in the authority of traditional institu­tions (specifically, the church, the liturgy, and the priesthood) and a grow­ing awareness that religious symbols are social constructs. Robert Bellah’s predictions about modernity have been strikingly confirmed in the growth of popular, de-institutionalized, commercialized and largely post-Christian religions. In fact, similar processes are at work in all the major religions. In a differentiated global religious market, the various segments of the religious market compete with one another for followers and resources. Bourdieu’s ideas about the struggle for symbolic capital in the field of religion provide a valid sociological perspective on the volatility of this religious field. The new religions are genuinely consumerist, but while fundamentalist move­ments appear to challenge consumer (Western) values, they are themselves typically selling a lifestyle based on special diets, alternative education, health regimes, dress codes, pilgrimage destinations, and marriage services. The contemporary religious market is consequently highly diversified into a range of competing groups, charismatic movements, Pentecostal churches, traditional religions, spirituality, and the like, but these are all, to varying degrees, influenced by consumerism. The audiences for religious services are also differentiated by class, gender, education, region, and so forth.

The triumph of popular, democratizing, global consumer culture is now having a deep impact on the traditional, hierarchical, literate religions of the past. Perhaps the most important development in modern religion is the changing status of women; one can safely predict that women will become increasingly important in religious leadership, and not simply in liberal Episcopalian churches but in the world religions more generally. Gender is a crucial feature of the new consumerist religiosity in which women increas­ingly dominate the new spiritualities; women will be and to some extent already are the important “taste leaders” in the emergent global spiritual marketplace.

Globalization theory has focused scientific attention on modern funda­mentalism, which is seen as a critique of traditional and popular religiosity. However, the real effect of globalization has been the growth of heterodox, commercial, hybrid, syncretistic religions over orthodox, authoritative, and institutional versions of the spiritual life. The ideological effects and social consequences of these religions cannot be easily or effectively controlled by religious authorities, and they often have a greater impact than official mes­sages, at least among the young. In Weber’s terms, it is the triumph of mass over virtuoso religiosity.

Pentecostalism has prepared the lower middle classes for participation in the emerging consumer economy of Latin America, and in a similar fash­ion, reformist Islam in Southeast Asia provides newly urbanized people, and especially educated women, with values and practices that are relevant to life in more complex, multicultural urban and largely secular societies, in coun­tries where international corporations have provided employment opportu­nities for young people willing or able to leave their villages for work in the megacities.

The habitus of the modern adherent of deinstitutionalized religion is basically compatible with the lifestyles of a commercial world in which the driving force of the economy is domestic consumption. Megachurches have embraced the sales strategies of late capitalism in order to get their message out to the public. On these grounds, one can claim that modern religions are compromised because the tension between the world and the religion is lost. We may define these developments as a form of social secularization. One can imagine that social historians will object to this argument, claim­ing that commercialized religion was not unknown in the Middle Ages, when pilgrimage and relics were basic elements of the economy of European societies. However, with contemporary social differentiation, the market no longer dances to the tune of the dominant religious institutions. Further­more, these secular developments are global rather than simply local. The result is a sociological paradox or set of paradoxes. Religion has erupted into the public domain, being associated with a number of radical or revolution­ary movements from Iran to Brazil and from Poland to Colombia, but at the same time, religion has been coming to terms with a variety of changes that are the consequence of commodification. More precisely, the secular­ization of religion has occurred through a double movement—democratiza­tion and commercialization. The sense of mystery and awe surrounding the ineffable character of the sacred has been eroded by the liberal ethos of democracy, in which egalitarian, immediate, and intimate relations are valued more than hierarchical, distant, and formal relationships. Religion as an agent of social change has been further compromised by the loss of any significant contrast between the sacred and the world. Religion has special­ized in providing personal services and has therefore been competing with various secular agencies that also offer welfare, healing, comfort, and mean­ing. In this competition, religious groups have by and large taken over the methods and values of a range of institutions operating within what we can, for want of a more sophisticated term, call “the leisure industries.”

It was, then, a stirring sight to see Habermas sit down with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004 for a philosophical dialogue. It is hard not to miss a breath at the image of both men in conversation, one the arch-defender of reason and rationality, described by Habermasian scholar Thomas McCarthy as the “last great rationalist,” and the other, renowned as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and subsequently as Pope Benedict XVI), for his steadfast theological defense of Catholic tradition and moral teaching. At the same time, the twinning of the two Germans made for a fitting tableau: through their long careers, both have shown little interest in sociological realities and have remained intellectually aloof from lived experience.

It was, in any case, an interesting conversation. Among other points, Habermas noted that the Enlightenment project of modernization had gone somewhat awry, has become derailed. In particular, as he had previously elaborated, he noted that globalizing economic markets defy the control of consensual rational judgments, and he lamented not only the extent of global socioeconomic inequality but the mass political indifference toward it. This indifference is part of a longer depoliticization process resulting from modernization and increased affluence and consumerism, highlighted by Habermas decades earlier. For Habermas, the threat posed by current globalizing forces to potentially “degrade the capacity for democratic self-steering,” both within and across nations, makes the need for public communicative reasoning all the more necessary. He thus looks to discover new (i.e., underappreciated) political cultural resources for the democratic revitalization project. Hence, “a contrite modernity,” one characterized by several social pathologies that need fixing, may benefit, Habermas argued, from religious-derived norms and ethical intuitions. He conceded that these religious resources can help human society deal with “a miscarried life, social pathologies, the failures of individual life projects, and the deformation of misarranged existential relationships.”

Many sociologists have elaborated on the perils of globalization and the increased polarization between classes and regions as the profit logic of capitalist markets inexorably trumps normative considerations. Yet only Habermas looks to the religious domain rather than pushing for attentiveness to a rearticulated political ideology of, for example, global social democracy, as a way of reorienting societal thinking about modern socioeconomic pathologies. In his view, “The translation of the likeness of the human to the image of the divine into the equal and absolutely respected dignity of all human beings” offers a way of using religious values to reorient society’s values toward principles of economic and social justice. Clearly, Habermas’s new affirmation of the relevance that religious ideas and ethics have for contemporary political debate marks a major transformation in his thinking. I very much welcome this more inclusive view of religion as a potentially emancipatory political and cultural resource, a resource that can open up and enhance rather than retard public discourse, and energize the creation of more deliberative and more participative social institutions.

Habermas’s view of religion’s potential as a remedial cultural resource for contemporary societal ills is shared by many religious leaders. For example, more than one hundred diverse religious leaders meeting in Rome in June 2009 ahead of the G8 summit collectively affirmed the urgent need for political leaders to recognize the relevance that religious ideas and moral values have in shaping the social fabric. They strongly emphasized that economic and political decisions, devoid of awareness of their moral consequences, cannot serve the common good. These themes are further elaborated in Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) and are in line with a long tradition of Catholic social teaching originating in the late nineteenth century, through which Catholic leaders, drawing on natural law reasoning, have cautioned against industrial policies that marginalize workers and ignore the needs of the economically downtrodden.

Habermas’s new regard for religion, articulated across several venues since 2001, leads him to embrace the term “post-secular society” in order to demarcate the current moment. He is not the only one to use this language, and there has been a tremendous amount of hairsplitting over what exactly the term means and how it is related to the secular, secularization, secularism, secularistic, and post-secularism. The gain in popularity of post-secular terminology comes in the wake of the postmodern, the postcolonial, and the post-national. Many scholars would concur that there really is something qualitatively different about the post-1970s era, enough to warrant a new term that differentiates the modern era (roughly defined as the period encompassing 1770–1970) from the postmodern. As David Harvey has argued, “There has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices since around 1972. This sea-change is bound up with the emergence of new dominant ways in which we experience space and time” and has produced what he refers to as “the condition of postmodernity.” Similarly, the post-national captures the changing legal and political status of the nation-state in the context of the rise of transnational or supranational entities (e.g., the European Union), and the postcolonial offers a dynamic way of rethinking the cultural agency, transformative identities, and differentiated histories of previously colonized peoples.

It is not compellingly evident that the term “post-secular” is newly warranted. After all, sociologists still have a hard time conceptualizing and especially measuring secularization, something that is surely related to the secular. By extension, it is challenging to assess whether or not secularization has in fact occurred given that there is so much differentiated evidence for and against its sociological reality; even the most secular societies, such as the United Kingdom, still have, for example, public rituals affirming the symbolic and cultural influence of religion on government. If we are unsure about the secular, it may be intellectually premature to talk about the post-secular (although it is certainly a stimulating way to change the conversation).

Yet it makes sense for Habermas—as Habermas, and with his Habermasian worldview—to construe a post-secular society. His understanding of progressive societal evolution and his deep intellectual commitment to the triumph of reasoned argumentation—to communicative action rather than strategic action—suggest that he has long construed the West as essentially secular since the Enlightenment. But now that, as he states, the Enlightenment project has been partially derailed and reason subsumed by strategic market interests and political indifference, it is appropriate for him to rethink the secular. Hence, in my reading of Habermas, the post-secular provides him with a useful analytical device for acknowledging not so much the persistence of religion as the partial failure (derailing) of the Enlightenment, a failure that by default brings religion back and into the secular. The post-secular denotes that the secular, like the Enlightenment, fell short of its originally intended destination. It is not that secularization has not occurred; it is just that there are some complications that the persistence of religion has thrown on its tracks. Overall, Habermas is clear that, despite his recognition of religion’s continuing relevance, “the data collected globally still provide surprisingly robust support for the defenders of the secularization thesis.”

There is some ambiguity in Habermas’s use of post-secular language. He argues that the term “post-secular society” applies only to those affluent societies “where people’s religious ties have steadily or rather quite dramatically lapsed” since the mid-twentieth century. In this designation, he includes European countries and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet Habermas also argues (in the same passage) that even in Europe, “sociological indicators…of [the] religious behavior and convictions of the local populations” have not changed so dramatically as to “justify labeling these societies post-secular” despite their trends toward deinstitutionalized religion. The confusion with Habermas’s definition emerges because while he talks about “post-secular society,” it seems he really intends to talk about a post-secular Zeitgeist, “a change in consciousness.” Thus, he subsequently clarifies, “Today, public consciousness in Europe can be described in terms of a post-secular society to the extent that at present it still has to adjust itself to the continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment.” Driving this post-secular consciousness, Habermas argues, is the resurgence of religion in Europe, evidenced by the increased participation of churches in public policy debates in some “secular societies” and the increased visibility of religion in local immigrant communities (principally Muslim) as well as religion’s increased global presence, especially manifested through various fundamentalist movements. In short, for Habermas, the term “post-secular” can be applied to secularized societies in which “religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground.”

Because the “post-secular” recognizes the public relevance of religion and of religious ideas in informing civic discourse, I would argue that it is applicable to the United States, notwithstanding differences in U.S. secularism compared to that of Europe or Canada. Although religion has maintained a relatively steady and exceptionally strong hold for Americans, churchgoing Americans typically show a highly autonomous (virtually secular) attitude toward religious obligations and church teachings and, like their affluent peers in Europe and Canada, for example, presume to live in a secular society. Thus, while their religious ties have not necessarily lapsed, they make their own choices about how and when to be religious; their religious beliefs and practices are determined largely by their own authority (acting as modern, self-oriented individuals) than by the coercive power of an external religious authority. Moreover, the United States is secular in that it is a constitutional republic with a strict separation of church and state, and public consciousness of this separation dominates legal opinion and legislative and policy debates notwithstanding the visibility of religion in politics and public culture. In my view, the term “post-secular” is more theoretically robust if we can use it to help us understand the more general relevance of religion as a public cultural resource in all modern democratic societies regardless of their varying degrees or levels of secularism and secularization.

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.

Four guided missiles packed with explosive material hurtled into the morning sky. Though the day was brilliant blue and cloudless, no one saw them coming. They were aimed at a nation that did not see itself at war. Moreover, it was a nation convinced that missiles fired in anger no longer posed a serious threat to its security. The weapons were conventional in the strict sense: they did not carry nuclear warheads.

But the weapons and the attackers who launched them were anything but conventional. The 19 hijackers who commandeered four civilian jetliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, were not sent by a state or nation. They were not motivated by any purely secular or political cause. Born of religious zeal, they sought to strike a blow against a power they believed was in thralldom and service to Satan. Motivated by faith, they wanted to strike a blow for Allah.

Religion, which was supposed to have been permanently sidelined by secularization, suddenly appeared to be at the center of world affairs. Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars. Religious believers were supposed to stay confined to one side of the boundary that sealed private faith off from global public affairs—a boundary that separated the irrational from the rational, the mystical from the purposeful. However, guided by an astonishing combination of zealous faith and coolly calculating rationality, September 11 showed that organized religious believers could act with purpose, power, and public consequence.

And we—not only America, but the whole world of professional policy-making and analysis—were unprepared. As Robert Keohane, a leading international relations scholar, had the humility to admit shortly afterward:

The attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation. They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often been fueled by religious fervor. None of them takes very seriously the human desire to dominate or to hate—both so strong in history and in classical realist thought. [emphasis added]

In his own post-9/11 analysis, however, Keohane also had the honesty to say: “Since I have few insights into religious motivations in world politics, I will leave this subject to those who are more qualified to address it.”

This edited volume picks up where Keohane left off. In the light of religion’s global resurgence, most dramatized by 9/11, it attempts a radical rethinking of the relationship between religion and world affairs, hence the title. It brings together scholars who are eminently qualified to analyze how and why religious motivations, actors, ideas, and organizations matter for contemporary world affairs. It addresses some of the reasons that theories of world politics and world affairs have been slow to address religious factors, how and why religious factors are influencing important global dynamics, and how we need to adapt our theories of world affairs to the realities and implications of this resurgence.

*  *  *

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together.

Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain.

This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn. It still structures much of our study and understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. It does so because many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions on which it was founded remain firmly lodged in the minds of international relations scholars, as Bryan Hehir describes in chapter 1 of this book. The meaning of concepts such as “secularism,” “modernity,” “power,” and “public life” is assumed without hesitation or complication. With equal confidence, a sharp boundary is drawn between these concepts and phenomena assumed to be their polar opposites: “religion,” “tradition,” “theology,” “faith,” and “private worship.”

Much classical thinking and practice in world affairs is thus a form of border patrol. It is concerned with policing and strengthening the fence between two worlds. The first world is the “secular” and “public” world in which international actors—nation-states and the multilateral organizations that bind them together—are presumed to make rational choices in the pursuit of political and economic power. The second world is the “spiritual” and “private” world in which religious actors—everything from church hierarchies to clerical councils to violent organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah—are presumed to make faith-based choices in the pursuit of nonrational or irrational goals. As with the empirical assumption about religion and economic development, the factual assumption about these two worlds is that they are two separate universes, with little to no mutual contact or interaction. As with the ethical or normative assumption about religion and political democratization, the ethical or moral assumption about these two worlds is that they should be kept as far apart as possible.

However, it is true that what could be called classical secularization theory recognized the reality and legitimacy of some traffic between these two universes. Classical secularization theory assumed the descriptive and prescriptive forms noted at the beginning: it expected the automatic decline of religion in the face of development and required the hermetic isolation of religion in the face of democracy. On one hand, the forces of development and progress would so impinge on the world of religion that religion would have little to do and less space in which to do it. Modern progress would make the security and comfort offered by religion increasingly unnecessary. Modernization, in other words, would infiltrate, occupy, and diminish the world of the spirit, fostering the “disenchantment” that Max Weber made central to his understanding of modernity. On the other hand, secularization theory held that the forces of democracy should reform and regulate religion to make it compatible with freedom—to inculcate habits of autonomy and rational reflection and encourage individuals to forge new identities as democratic citizens. On closer inspection, in other words, classical secularization theory imagined that the religious and political worlds would and should interrelate to a significant extent.

The crucial point, however, is that the secularization theorists who assigned themselves the task of managing the points of contact between the public “secular” world and the private “spiritual” world allowed—and expected—traffic to flow in only one direction.

The result of this stringent and one-way boundary maintenance has been the long-standing exclusion of religion and religious actors from the systematic study of world politics in general and international relations in particular. This has created a paradoxical situation: religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one of the least examined factors in the professional study and practice of world affairs.

For example, the lead journal for political science in the United States is the American Political Science Review (APSR). In its 100th anniversary issue, an article concluded that “prior to 1960 only a single APSR article sought to use religion as a variable to explain empirical phenomena” and that in APSR “from 1980 on, just one article in American Government put religious factors at the center of analysis; and just two in Comparative Politics.” A similar neglect marked the international relations literature. Daniel Philpott, a contributor to this book, judged that in his survey of leading journals of international relations from 1980 to 1999, “only six or so out of a total of about sixteen hundred featured religion as an important influence.” This neglect of religion in research is echoed in teaching. One of the coeditors of this volume, Alfred Stepan, teaches at one of America’s largest and oldest schools dedicated to training graduate students for international careers in government, political analysis, international organizations, the media, human rights, the private sector, and academia: the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently teaching the first general course on the role of religion in world affairs in the school’s fifty-year history.

*  *  *

Rethinking Religion and World Affairs represents a collective effort to rethink religion and world affairs by questioning the sharp empirical and ethical boundaries that have separated the two. A working group of leading scholars and policy practitioners concerned with religion in the contemporary world was convened by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, to devise strategies to transcend this state of affairs. It soon became apparent that thousands of professors never trained in religion and world affairs would be asked to design and teach new courses, media newsrooms to report on religion in greater depth, and legislators, foreign policy makers, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, and feminist and human rights groups to devise new and more appropriate approaches to religion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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