Kosmin and Keysar and others are already analyzing who has given up worship, belief, and other modes of religiosity. I am more interested in what is happening as a result to the societal and social functions of religion. Thus, I would hypothesize that an increasing number of people are finding religion irrelevant in and to their everyday lives, and to the social, cultural, and other roles they play in society. They are not only “religious nones,” but they are no longer thinking about religious matters. Consequently, I think of them as seculars.

However, there is a second group of seculars who still adhere to some religious practices and beliefs, but for whom religion is otherwise equally irrelevant. From my function-centered perspective, they are, de facto, about as non-religious as the “nones,” and have removed all but a remnant of religion from what Habermas would describe as their “lifeworlds.”

This second group of seculars uses religion in three ways. One is to meet social obligations, to satisfy familial requests, and to be seen in church or synagogue on the highest holidays. They may also send their children to Sunday school, but only so that they learn enough to choose between becoming secular or religious as adults.

Another use of religion derives from its traditional sorting function, exemplary of which are the people who continue to label themselves Episcopalian because (and as long as) that denomination still denotes high social status—even if they never have anything to do with the religion itself. Religions that are connected to ethnic identities are put to the same use, as long as ethnicity continues to be one of the country’s sorting mechanisms.

A third, and more important, use is therapeutic—a resort to religion’s traditional function as self-administered therapy. The people who continue to believe in heaven or an afterlife are convincing themselves that life will be better one day. Meanwhile, those who pray to deities in crises and situations of extreme uncertainty are indulging in a socially constructed form of self-assurance.

These uses of religion are often based on norms “inculcated by family and community,” as Christopher McKnight Nichols points out. The people who act on such norms are also described as spiritual. They are Hout and Fischer’s “unchurched believers,” but none of the uses to which they put religion conflict with becoming secular members of society.

Although the number of seculars is rising, they are nearly invisible socially. One reason is the continued visibility of religion. Religious conflict is newsworthy; as a result, fundamentalists are all over the media in excess of their numbers.

Also, many of the largest and most powerful institutions as well as commercial, public, and private organizations are invested in the continuation of religion and involved in one or another religious network. The blessings of well known but uncontroversial religious figures still add legitimacy to almost any venture.

Seculars are also invisible because they do not gather in congregations, establish institutions, or become involved, as seculars, in culturally or politically significant activities. In addition, seculars have not yet cut visibly into the cultural and political influence of organized religions, although they have helped to bring on the chronic financial pains from which most of them now suffer.

Being non-religious, the seculars are not likely to join the secularists and humanists who replace religious organizations with secular equivalents. Seculars will also distance themselves from atheists and agnostics, who are still preoccupied with the very deities whose existence they deny or question.

Perhaps the seculars’ main effect on American society and culture, at least in the foreseeable future, will be symbolic. As their number increases, cultural, political, and other marketers will take note, and some of the country’s religious symbols will begin to lose credibility and legitimacy. Laura Olson points out that Democratic politicians are already cutting back their rhetorical reliance on deities and one of these days this nation may even be removed from under its god.

However, most of the values now described as Judeo-Christian will persevere, since these are so well established and so widely institutionalized that they are now being secularized. In fact, many of these values began as non-theistic justifications for reciprocity, trust, altruism, and other social processes essential for the survival of any society. Consequently, Judeo-Christian values have been, and can continue to be, interpreted to justify everything from participation in social welfare and other helping activities to supporting unnecessary wars. Adhering to these values can even be interpreted as a secular way to be spiritual.

Nonetheless, religious philosophers and leaders can be expected to continue arguing that the purposes of life must be justified by a god. They will also insist that society’s rules and values cannot be legitimated if they are not anchored in a deity. Eventually, however, people will slowly realize that the purposes, as well as the rules, values, and practices of life about which they argue are all human constructions, that they can be grounded in secular purposes and principles, and that the arguments will continue, even if all the participants have become seculars.

If the various fundamentalist religions remain at current strength, political conflict will likely increase, since even reluctant seculars will have to join some battles in the continuing culture wars. Whether the growing number of seculars will cause a decline among the fundamentalists, or whether they will attract new adherents, remains to be seen. In any case, the fundamentalist leaders will portray the seculars as devils and use them to hold on to or mobilize their constituents. Conversely, Hout and Fischer suggest that increases in fundamentalist activity may lead to an increase in the number of seculars.

Eventually, some seculars will undoubtedly support the various organizations that press for a greater separation of church and state, and even more may get behind efforts to put an end to the tax exemptions now granted to religious institutions. The resulting political battles will last a while, but government officials who always need additional tax revenues can be predicted to side with the seculars as soon as it is politically practical.

However, most existing economic, political, and other interest groups and voting blocs will remain basically unchanged. Seculars will continue to have different class, racial, gender, and other interests, and can therefore be expected to engage in economic, political, and cultural battles with their fellow seculars. Even religious nones come with a variety of political and cultural ideologies. Consequently, seculars will also be on all sides in political struggles over the distribution of income, the allocation of public goods and the exercise of governmental power.

Predictions about a secular future for America are risky because religious revivals have occurred so often. Also, global economic problems and climatic disasters may eventually create sufficient worldwide chaos to spur global religious revivals. However, these will most likely be taking place in a world with a growing number of seculars.

What is at stake in the secular age? In A Secular Age Charles Taylor provides us with an answer to this question that is compelling in several respects. The secular age does not stamp out belief as a source of meaning, morality, fullness and selfhood; rather, the crucial changes affect the conditions of belief. As the conditions of belief have changed to allow those living in Western modernity to choose among several paths, the differentiation and privatization of religion and the decline of religious belief and practice became a historical option. Read against the rigid determinism of several philosophers, sociologists and scientists that have written on religion and secularism, Taylor’s account is a breath of fresh air. He provides us an opportunity to see that what is at stake is not exhausted by commonly perceived conflicts such as science vs. religion, or liberation vs. subjugation, or immaturity vs. coming-of-age. He shows that these are in fact spurious distinctions, and that the true issue is more complicated or far easier, depending on how we look at it.

Once we begin to frame the stakes the right way and recognize the complexities of what it means to live in a secular age, we’ll be able to reconcile and set aside the conflicts with which the secular-liberal order currently appears fraught. This gloss on Taylor provides us with two of the key concepts he employs: recognition and reconciliation. The present age is wanting of both, but provides conditions that make both possible.

Here we might become suspicious of the triumphalist overtones of his conclusion. How is it that Taylor can come to the conclusion that our current predicament bears all the seeds of harmonious order? How inclusive is this assessment of the whole gamut of experiences in secular modernity? What is his assumed horizon?

One possible riposte to Taylor is to point to the boundaries he draws around “Latin Christendom” as the locus of his master narrative of western modernity. Due to this restriction, he runs the risk of being blind to crucial connections overstepping the bounds of the West, whether cultural, economic, political, or a combination thereof (as in empire). Taylor himself concedes this is a potential weakness and that additional work is needed. I want to point to another boundary that is drawn in A Secular Age: that within western Christendom against a group Taylor calls “fanatics.” Doing so will help illuminate the implicit politics that inform Taylor’s narrative—an endeavor already begun in prior contributions to this blog by Stathis Gourgouris and others.

Taylor’s primary concern in dealing with “fanaticism” (and cognates such as superstition and enthusiasm) is to show how this category was used by exclusive humanists to discredit religion tout court, and by magisterial reformers to designate individuals and groups with dissenting socio-political views. This, he argues, paved the way for the disengaged stance and the fragilization of views and positions characteristic of the secular dispensation. Reflecting on the emergence of disengagement (in considering the work of English historian Edward Gibbon), Taylor writes:

Think of the force of [Gibbon's] style, which broadcasts an irenic distance, what will later be called “unflappability.” It is so judiciously disengaged, only allowing the meanings which structure the narrative to emerge in understated, straight-faced irony. Part of the power of this style for those whom it grips comes from the stance itself, which can seem (if you’re at all inclined this way) so superior to the hot, hyper-engaged “fanaticism” of so many of the people described. How can you not admire this? How can you not feel that this is a superior epistemic stance?

How are we to understand Taylor’s own position between disengagement and “fanaticism”? Of course, he doesn’t want to side with those who provide closure to the immanent frame by rejecting religion on account of its fanatical excesses. In fact, his emphasis on the need for transformation—the last chapter of A Secular Age is called “Conversions” for a reason—might suggest a certain proximity to fanaticism. The fanatic, always an iconoclast that scorns the representation and asserts the need for authenticity, appears to play an important implicit role in Taylor’s story.

Elsewhere, however, Taylor draws a clear line between the kind of position he finds acceptable, and the fanatics. In his discussions of the tensions of secular modernity, fanatics are clearly on the side of evil and of suffering. Taylor goes so far as calling their faith “idolatrous” and “dangerous.” For the most part he equates these “fanatics” with “the bellicose, hegemony-loving parts of U.S. society which President Bush speaks to”—that is, mostly Midwestern—”values voters” that identify with evangelicalism. It is clear from his discussion that Taylor takes this to be against the “spirit of Christianity.” The tension initially created by Taylor’s ambiguous positioning vis-à-vis fanaticism thus breaks down, and “fanaticism” is located outside the Christian tradition as he understands it.

Taylor’s vigilance may in part be motivated by his attempt to create a conciliatory space for believers and nonbelievers. Liberal believers (such as Taylor) and their exclusive-humanist counterparts certainly concur that the religious right is reprehensible. Against the backdrop of premillennial fundamentalist theology, the differences between mainline Christians and liberal-humanist nonbelievers appear petty. Compared to the untamed ways of the savage, the unrefined table manners of one’s neighbor are downright courtly.

But there is more to it than that. In engaging in this kind of implicit polemic, Taylor replicates a common historical pattern. Since the times of the Roman Empire, adherents of deviant religious forms have been labeled (pejoratively) as fanatici by representatives of the state religion (see Conze and Reinhart, “Fanatismus” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe). At least since Luther, the term was not merely used to defame heterodox doctrines, but especially the political and social effects expected to ensue from them. In Britain in the seventeenth century, the term was increasingly used to pathologize Dissenters, i.e., those that broke away from the established church. Hobbes called them “pernicious to peace” and asked, “And what is a fanatic but a madman?” As “madmen,” they were no longer political opponents, but psychological deviants who (one can presume) were subjected to the whole range of “treatments” Michel Foucault documented in his work.

Today’s liberal-democratic states employ several more or less overt disciplinary methods of treating deviant forms of Christian faith and practice. For instance, evangelicals (among other “so-called sects and psycho-groups”) have been the subject of a parliamentary commission of inquiry in Germany. The commission used a personality-structure test on individuals drawn to “radical Christian groups.” (Interestingly, this part of the inquiry was led by a pastor in the established Protestant church.) In France an evangelical Christian told a reporter that “evangelicals make [the French] afraid.” The article continues:

Wariness of evangelicals also lingers in the French government, which has a standing special committee to oppose questionable cults of all types. In some areas, evangelical preachers say they have a hard time getting permits to build new houses of worship, a complaint shared by their Muslim counterparts.

What do we make of these state practices directed against “fanatics”? In a previous posting, Hent de Vries questions the notion that what Taylor calls the “immanent frame”—an encompassing frame “common to all of us in the modern West” inclining us to understand the world primarily in immanent terms—is an “open space” permitting unforced choices between several “options.” I agree with de Vries that Taylor’s frame-analysis leaves much to be wished for. There may indeed, as Taylor claims, be such an overarching frame that makes us—in the words of Erving Goffman—”tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable.” However, as we learn from media studies and scholars of social movements, it is not sufficient to study the dominant frame; crucially, the process of “frame sponsorship” that promotes some frames while marginalizing others must also be understood. The state practices of which I just provided a few examples are part of this process of frame sponsorship. They, along with the dominant frame, rely on a system of power connected to, but much more diffuse than, the liberal-democratic state. This play of power gets lost in the way Taylor tells the story.

In a slightly different way than this term was intended by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, these regulating procedures are instances of “the democratic policing of Christianity,” that is, efforts to rally Christians behind established state institutions. It is not just the secular republics of Europe that engage in this kind of policing. Even Taylor, otherwise opposed to reductive “subtraction stories” that consign religion to a marginal position, exhibits this kind of wariness of strong religious commitment. There is something fundamentally Constantinian about his project.

We might further ask why Taylor (along with many other liberal commentators) finds it necessary to pinpoint a group that “revert[s] to living in another bubble, enjoying a false confidence in their own hard-edged truths.” Why have polemics against (religious or political) fanatics been such an enduring feature in Western states, particularly since the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries? In fact, early thinkers of the bourgeois Enlightenment that used the term in a polemical vein were often quite reflective about it. The French encyclopedists, otherwise confident that the spread of reason would stamp out (religious) fanaticism, wrote that nothing great could be achieved without “outraged zeal” [On ne peut rien produire de grand sans ce zèle outré qui...met au jour des prodiges incroyable de valeur et de constance]. Rousseau and Herder made similar concessions. To Taylor and other liberals, however, the fanatic only figures as a menace to liberty and justice, never as its champion.

In an essay in defense of fanaticism, Hauerwas argues that attempts to distinguish fanatical from non-fanatical stances, like the attempt to distinguish terrorism from “just” war, is bound to fail. Just as there is nothing intrinsically good about (as Alisdair MacIntyre puts it) “dying for the telephone company” (i.e., in conventional warfare), there is nothing intrinsically bad about fanatically bearing witness to a “particularistic” tradition. Attempts to silence such particularistic traditions in the interest of ensuring the peace are counterproductive “because, contrary to liberal sentimentality that assumes if people only come to know one another better violence is less likely, the exact opposite may be the case.” In fact, he argues, traditions that embody alternate rationalities and trigger “epistemic crises” by questioning the legitimacy of the state’s rights to police, punish, and wage war against outsiders are a greater cause for hope than any universalistic ethic entrusted to the institutions of the state.

Polemics against “fanatics” thus seem primarily to be motivated by the need to overcome legitimation crises. That would explain the persistence of these polemics in Western modernity: no social and political order has ever been able to claim universal legitimacy. Every public is an “illusory totality” that always excludes a “counterpublic” (on these terms, see Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience). While certain counterpublics may be able to penetrate into and alter the public sphere (as Taylor argues), the horizon of possible experiences still remains restricted. Even Taylor has to limit the horizon in his project, even though he is quite generous in terms of the positions he is willing to admit. As any observer of contemporary Christianity knows, “fanatics” constitute a sizable group, for better or worse. One wishes there was some kind of reflection on the ramifications of this in a book the size of A Secular Age. This would have made for a more truthful, if more troubling, image of secular modernity.

There has been no theologian more sensitive to these two horns of secularized America than Nicholas Wolterstorff. In his famous rejoinder to Richard Rorty, and in numerous longer pieces, Wolterstorff has persuasively and passionately reminded us that within American democracy there are no grounds on which to restrict citizens from thinking about public, political, and social matters with their religious convictions out in front. He writes in his article “The Irony of It All,” printed in The Hedgehog Review, “The founding idea behind liberal democracy, certainly in its American version, was not that religion should be kept out of public life and that anti-religious secularism should take place as the orienting ideology for our life together.” In fact, Wolterstorff argues that when it comes to really important matters for our democracy, we need recourse to our own comprehensive perspectives. That’s because for Wolterstorff the right to speak religiously in public carries with it the demand to speak well, clearly, and with recourse to reasons and explanations. Wolterstorff claims in an article in Religion and Contemporary Liberalism that secularism’s anti-religious bias has had an “inhibiting effect on serious reflection by religious communities.”

In these sorts of words we can hear a distinguishing characteristic of Wolterstorff’s voice: a clear-eyed willingness to criticize fellow Christians. Wolterstorff has long tried to convince Christians that they need not hold their noses in order to participate in democratic liberalism. His latest work, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, is, in part, dedicated to correcting the Christian view that human rights talk—because it necessarily relies on a greedy self arrogating right for a person’s own well-being—represents “one of the most pervasive and malignant diseases of modern society.” In Justice, Wolterstorff seeks and finds plausible Christian grounds for supporting human rights.

Wolterstorff speaks as passionately to the second aspect of secularization: the need to realize that one’s fellow citizens hold different religious commitments and assumptions. He heralds a “dialogical pluralism” in which “we the people must be open to both religious and secular voices of various sorts presenting…and explaining…[their] views.” Dialogical pluralism is an art whose virtues involve not simply “listen[ing] attentively and openly to alternative views,” but potentially what Wolterstorff calls “appropriation.” In Justice, he describes appropriation this way: “‘Yes, there are some mistaken assumptions in his way of setting up the issue; but after one has made allowance for those, there remains a very interesting point.’” We trade reasons with those whom we disagree with, not simply because we want to know what they are thinking, but because what they are thinking may actually offer us and what we’re thinking possibilities we had not previously considered. Appropriation marks the transition from listening to learning. Wolterstorff writes: “This subtle practice of appropriation…is fundamental to the dialogue between theists and secularists.” Had he changed “secularist” to “seculars,” this sentence would, by my lights, read even better.

Because I am a secular and not a secularist, I hotly anticipated the publication of Wolterstorff’s Justice. It has thus been with tremendous surprise, and even chagrin, that I’ve read this text. To be fair, the bulk of the book is devoted to showing that human rights talk has its roots not in a secularist Enlightenment but in biblical traditions—just the sort of stuff I’m interested in appropriating. But what’s alarming is that Wolterstorff’s account of human rights leads him to make a series of incendiary claims against secular non-theists like me. They are strong enough to distract from the more substantive work he does on a theistic grounding of human rights.

Wolterstorff claims that there is no adequate secular grounding for human rights and it is unlikely that there ever will be one. He claims that the “only adequate grounding is a theistic grounding which holds that each and every human bears the image of God and is equally loved by God.” He turns downright apocalyptic at the thought of having to live in an American democracy with secular non-theists. “Suppose,” he writes, “that the religious heritage that gave birth to our moral subculture of rights erodes?” The barbarians will soon be at the gates. Here are his series of conclusions: The “recognition of human rights cannot, over the long haul, float free of its theistic origins,” the “future of human rights is more imperiled by the secularist rejection of religious foundations than it is by Islamic critique of the Declaration [of Human Rights],” And, finally, “if this [Judaic and Christian] framework erodes, I think that we must expect that our moral subculture of rights will also eventually erode and that we will slide back into our tribalisms…we must expect that that subculture will have been a brief and shining episode in the odyssey of human beings on earth.” Recall that he begins Justice with a call of “dialogical pluralism,” “appropriation” and a seeming relish for conversation between theists and non-religious seculars. By the final pages of Justice these notions are a distant memory.

Wolterstorff once claimed to be “menaced” by Richard Rorty’s “American Sublime.” Is it now my turn to be menaced, this time by Wolterstorff? To be sure, Wolterstorff does not call for restricting my freedom of expression. And he even acknowledges that he had not expected to find that secular accounts of human rights are without grounding; this surprised him. Nevertheless, his attacks on non-theistic viewpoints feel ad hominem, and one cannot but conclude that, for Wolterstorff, secular readings of human rights and democracy, readings without God, are toxic, and that secular citizens are not trustworthy.

I am not sure what Wolterstorff wants to accomplish with this polemical flourish. I imagine he would maintain that he is simply speaking his mind and conscience. Wolterstorff does not say that he wants to begin excluding non-theistic contributions to human rights discussion and policy. It’s hard to see him being for this, but I’m reminded by how corrosive he thinks the non-theistic is. Perhaps Wolterstorff wants to lead non-believers to a place where they have no logical choice but to become theists; he thinks that if one is inclined to believe in human rights (as many of us seculars are), then his argument for a theistic grounding represents nothing less “than an argument for theism.”

I do not know if Wolterstorff thinks that because he has produced an excellent theistic grounding of human rights, theists will now spring to the fore to enact those rights in just ways. I readily acknowledge that the history of the American pursuit of justice cannot be told without religious folk. Descriptively, William James may very well be right when he says in The Will to Believe that “those who have religious faith…will on the battle-field of history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall.”  But like James, I see this power of religion not necessarily relying on certain theistic grounding, but on the right to believe in metaphysical uncertainties. Regardless, many a non-religious person has drafted off of these types of religious winds and risked his or her life for causes of justice. More, when it comes to implementing and living up to the demands of human rights, I am not sure that grounding matters. In the face of many of the world’s worst human rights violations, there has been no shortage of people who were absolutely certain that those violations were fundamentally wrong. What seems to plague us humans is an inability to muster up the courage, will, and strategic acumen to act on our most passionately held and grounded convictions. Having grounded convictions has not made for being adequately convicted.

As a salve to Wolterstorff’s rough treatment, I found myself returning to one of the saints of my American sublime, Ralph Ellison and his essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station.” America, Ellison claims, has made the word “democracy” sacred. What makes democracy sacred for Ellison is not that it issues in common agreement on reasonable or certain foundations. Democracy is sacred because democratic practices, in their “insist[ence] on being made flesh,” remind us of our continued failings to live up to democracy’s ideals: “By arousing in the believer a sense of the disrelations between the ideal and the actual, between perfect word and the errant flesh, they partake of mystery.”

This is a religious construction if I’ve ever heard one. There is a touch of both Augustine and Kierkegaard in these words—Augustine in the way that sin is irremediable, and Kierkegaard in Ellison’s use of mystery, that is, in the way he avoids despair by embracing the unknown that lies beyond reason and human limitations. In other words, Ellison’s democratic vision initiates its practitioners into a form of belief as every bit unprovable as the belief in God. Democratic secular life, Ellison teaches, is a faith-based initiative. We persist with our rituals, our prayers, texts and communities, holding them accountable to each other. At the end, what there is is hope, Ellison’s raft out of this mystery that allows us to find better practical ways of honoring ideals such as justice, equality and human dignity. By this, we keep and invite others into the democratic faith.

There is little triumphant about this democratic vision; failure and grievous mistakes lurk all too near. Humility leads me to think that I do not know where the sources of this sort of hope come from. The more seculars—non-religious and religious alike—come to admit that democratic life relies on the evidence of things unseen, the more they might find themselves swapping stories. I’m inclined to consider as democratic allies all who hope for ever better forms of justice, equality, and human dignity, in full recognition of their improbability and fragility. I could care less whether their accounts of justice, equality, and human dignity are based on God, gods, or something more footloose and fancy-free. They are all secular now.

The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor’s second secularity, a decline of religious belief and practice among ordinary people. The degree of religious practice varies from country to country, but almost everywhere temples, mosques, churches, and shrines are ubiquitous and full of people, especially during festival seasons. Even in China, where the government actively propagates an atheist ideology and has severely restricted open religious activities, it has been estimated that as much as ninety-five percent of the population engages from time to time in some form of religious practice.  Moreover, throughout Asia there have been impressive revivals and reformations of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious beliefs and practices—Asia is religiously dynamic.

However, this dynamism is of a different kind than that found in the United States, and it cannot be explained in terms of the narrative Taylor uses in the North Atlantic world. Asian religious developments are often misread by both Western observers and Asian scholars trained in the Western social sciences. When Western scholars have looked for religion in Asian societies, they have often looked for it in the form of private faith.  But in most Asian societies, much of religion is neither private nor faith.

It is often not faith, in the sense of a personal belief in doctrines.  In China, for example, there have been literally millions of temples built or rebuilt in the countryside over the past three decades.  Most people doing this rebuilding would be hard pressed to give a consistent and coherent account of the Daoist or Buddhist philosophies that one might think were behind this revival.  Even the rural Chinese Catholics I studied could only give a vague account of the creed to which they were supposed to assent.  Most of the people building temples and churches seem driven by the desire to create a place where they can carry out rituals that would give some order to their lives and their community life.  It can be meaningful to carry out such rituals even if one does not believe in the theology that supposedly underlies them.  For example, in the Chinese Catholic villages I studied—which typically consisted entirely of Catholics who had carried on their identity through many generations—there are many “lukewarm” Catholics who don’t regularly pray, are skeptical about doctrines, and don’t follow many of the moral teachings of the Church.  Yet they still consider themselves Catholics and would still want to be buried with Catholic funeral rituals because that is the way to connect, in life and death, with their natal communities.

Collective ritual, in this and many Asian contexts, comes before personal faith, as do collective myths—stories about gods or spirits or blessed events such as apparitions, healings, or miraculous occurrences. Rituals and myths are public rather than private.  Even when they have to be carried out surreptitiously, out of sight of suspicious government regulators or condescending urban-based mass media, they are, in the local context, public.  Under such circumstances they create alternative public spheres that sometimes complement, but at other times contradict, the public projects of their governing states.

This is a form of religious practice akin to what Charles Taylor calls “embedded religion.” The world of embedded religion is “enchanted,” filled with good and bad spirits.  Religious practices are used to call upon the good and control the bad, as much for the sake of the material health and prosperity as for any otherworldly salvation.  One’s community is under the protection of local spirits—patron saints in the European Middle Ages and ancestors and various local protector spirits in many parts of Asia—and although these local spirits may be imagined to be under the control of a supreme being, much of actual popular religious practice is aimed at getting one’s own local spirits to take care of one’s family and friends in the here and now.

These forms of localized, socially embedded religious practices have by no means entirely disappeared in the North Atlantic world.  But as Taylor shows, they have largely been eclipsed.  A key event in this process was the Reformation, which condemned much of Catholic sacramental ritual as “magic,” to be replaced by personal devotion driven by interior faith.  In the United States the prevalent forms of religion are individualistic expressions of a desire for personal authenticity carried out through voluntary association with other like-minded individuals.

Until relatively recently, scholars in the North Atlantic world have usually assumed that modernization entails the eclipse of localized, socially embedded religion. Just as the American government during the Cold War convinced itself and its publics that governments allied with the USA, even dictatorships, were part of the “Free World,” so did American scholars imagine that societies open to influence from the West were becoming “free societies,” composed of instrumentally rational individuals who had sloughed off communal traditions, especially religious traditions. (If there was any future for religion in such societies, it was assumed that it would be in the form of Christianity, brought by Western missionaries, who were welcomed by most governments in the Free World.) The real processes of social development in Asia, however, usually took a different path.

Through colonialism or through anti-colonial and revolutionary movements that sought national autonomy, wealth, and power by building strong, bureaucratically organized governments modeled on those from the West, national political leaders imposed centralized states upon societies that had not undergone the North Atlantic world’s path to modernity.  In particular, these societies had not radically loosened the ties that bound local corporate communities together—especially the local rituals and myths that generated the enchanted identity of such communities.

Thus, the governments that emerged or consolidated in Asia during the Cold War were imposed on top of societies that were still largely assemblages of corporate groups rather than the voluntary associations of a (Western style) civil society. Popular religion was mostly an expression of the identities of corporate groups—extended families and local village communities mostly, but also in some cases larger-scale ethnic identities, as with the Muslims in the western regions of China.  Religious ritual and myth expressed and reinforced particularistic loyalties within ascriptive communities.  The construction of local temples, churches, and mosques was connected to a wide range of economic, social, and political activity. Places of worship were also venues for commerce and public entertainment, institutions for ensuring trust, mediating disputes, and providing welfare to those in need.  They were also nexuses in regional networks of communities with similar religious practices.  Such communities and their networks constituted a kind of public sphere—a framework of connections within which discussions about local affairs could take place, a system of statuses that marked out paths of social mobility and recognition, a site for common celebrations and shared experiences.  These diverse bubbles of public-ness introduced potential weaknesses into the sturdy foundations upon which authoritarian governments wanted to build their version of public order.

To create national unity, maintain social control, and mobilize large and diverse populations, modernizing governments needed (or thought they needed) to get control over religious practices that fostered particularism, regionalism, and ethnic distinction.  There were two main strategies. One was to suppress religious practice—destroy temples, ban public religious rituals, eliminate religious leaders (by forcing them to change their professions, by imprisoning them, and sometimes by executing them)—and to replace this with a quasi-religious cult of the state and its leader.  This was the strategy of the People’s Republic of China and North Korea.  An alternative strategy was to co-opt religious leaders and to segregate religious communities, the strategy followed by Indonesia under Suharto. There, in the name of “Pancasila,” the regime restricted proselytization among the five main religious groups (Muslims, Catholics, Reform Protestants, Hindus, and Buddhists), and co-opted the leaders of each group by making them members of state-sponsored commissions.  Some countries adopted a mix of the suppressive and co-optative strategies, which was the case in Taiwan under the Kuomindang.

During the Cold War these various strategies seemed to work, at least on a superficial level. Throughout East and Southeast Asia local religions seemed to be tamed and rendered irrelevant to the big issues of the day. In some cases, as in China, religious practices disappeared from sight. In societies that relied less on sheer repression and more on co-optation, religion contributed some vibrant local color, while remaining comfortably within the grip of the state and irrelevant to the politically directed processes that supposedly constituted national modernization. As such they were mostly invisible to Western social scientists.  Anthropologists studied them, but mostly in an attempt to document them before (as it was presumed) they inevitably faded away, or to develop comprehensive theories about the roots of pre-modern religious experience.  Even anthropologists did not generally assume that such religious activities were especially relevant to current political or economic developments. Meanwhile, political scientists, economists, and even sociologists almost completely ignored them.

However, none of these strategies used by Asian states to tame local religions actually destroyed them. The suppression strategies drove the practices underground while in many cases maintaining the communal ties with which these religious practices had been intertwined.  The co-optation strategies helped to reproduce and maintain communal religious identities.

The recent emergence of religion as a visible force in Asian social and political life is at least partially connected with the end of the Cold War, after which Asian states in the “Free World” that had counted on strong support from the USA have found support diminished and at least partially contingent on adoption of democratic reforms.  Such states, including South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, have been losing the capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation.  Meanwhile, the communist regimes of China and Vietnam have had to loosen some of their social controls to permit economic reforms and integration into global markets.  Throughout the Asian region, a plethora of religious practices have blossomed forth.

It is unclear whether the loss of capacity to tame local religions through suppression or co-optation has actually led to a quantitative increase in religious practice, but the weakening of state capacities to control religion has at least made local Asian religious practices more visible, more energetic, and potentially more politically consequential.  All of a sudden the increased visibility of religion breaks down the imaginary communities of modernizing societies that Western intellectuals had created for themselves. Asian religious transformations now command the attention of all sorts of social scientists.

Thus, like America, Asia is “awash in a sea of faith.”  But the Asian sea of faith is different from the American one. Asian religious practices are less individualistic and more communal, socially embedded, and locally particularistic.  This makes it more difficult to imagine how Asian religions could be accommodated into the standard liberal model for political incorporation (often based on the American experience), which officially considers religious belief a personal preference of individual citizens, who will then form all sorts of different but overlapping private religious associations in an open religious marketplace and expect that these private associations will share enough in common that they will tolerate one another but have enough differences that they will not coalesce into any unified opposition to the state.  We are becoming more aware of the limitations of this liberal model, even in established Western liberal societies like the United States.  How much more difficult might it be for this liberal model to accommodate the local, particularistic, communal religions that are becoming newly visible in Asia?

Probably too difficult. It is not impossible in most parts of Asia to develop moderate, democratic, stable but adaptable polities, but we would have to expect that the paths to such an outcome would be different from the North Atlantic path.  The direction of these paths may depend on the precise ways in which local religious cultures are affected by secularism in the third sense defined by Charles Taylor: of a move to a society in which religious belief and practice are no longer unchallenged but seen as one option among many, and not necessarily the easiest to embrace.  I will discuss this third form of secularism in my next post.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]

Can this analytic framework be applied outside of the North Atlantic world, particularly to Asian societies?  Taylor himself would not claim to have created a framework for a universal theory of comparative religion.  But this framework, grounded in a particular cultural and historical experience, may nonetheless be useful for cross cultural comparisons.  The conditions for its comparative use, however, would be as follows.  First, we acknowledge its limitations from the outset.  Second, we apply it as a first draft approximation to understanding the historical transformations of religion in another culture to see if there is at least a rough fit with these processes. Third, we are careful to see how it doesn’t fit and then use this discrepancy as a stimulus to expand our horizons. This can set into motion not an objectifying, essentializing gaze upon cultural difference, but a fruitful dialogue across cultures.

This is the approach I will try to take in this post, as I explore the fit between Taylor’s framework and contemporary developments in East and Southeast Asian societies, concentrating mainly on the political and religious transformations taking place in these societies in the aftermath of the Cold War.

In form, all modern East and Southeast Asian governments are secular in the first sense of the term defined by Taylor.  They are based on constitutions that do not ground the state’s legitimacy on beliefs in realities that transcend this world and do not privilege any particular kind of religious belief.  They relegate religious belief to the private sphere. Even the constitution of the People’s Republic of China guarantees freedom of religious belief as long as it is kept private—so private that it is not expressed in any venue that is not approved and regulated by the state.  East and Southeast Asian governments arrived at their present-day secular constitutions through various, often tortuous, paths throughout the course of the 20^th century, but, in formal terms at least, they conform to North Atlantic models of state neutrality with respect to religion.  This is an example the sociologist John Meyer and his collaborators would call global “institutional isomorphism,” a tendency of political, economic, and cultural institutions around the world to assume a uniform style of formal organization (based on Western templates).

But the secular form of Asian political institutions often masks a religious spirit.  Some examples:  Japan has a secular constitution, but many of its government leaders have felt compelled to pray for the spirits of the war dead at the Yasakuni shrine.  The pressure to visit the shrine comes from nationalistic constituencies within Japan, but it is indeed a pressure to worship at a Shinto shrine, presided over by a priest, which purports not just to memorialize the names of the dead but actually to contain their spirits.  (Japan’s Asian neighbors are more upset about this than Americans. Could this be because Asians take more seriously the living presence of spirits of the dead?)  Through its “Vigilant Center” at the Ministry of Culture, the government of Thailand is supposed to protect the nation’s culture and values by, among other things, keeping people from using images of the Buddha for profane purposes. The Indonesian government is based on a national ideology of “Pancansila,” which proclaims a national unity based upon mutual tolerance among believers in an “Almighty Divine.” And even the government in China, which is supposedly led by the atheist Communist Party, takes it upon itself to carry out religious functions.  It has claimed the right to determine who is the true re-incarnation of the Panchen Lama (and will undoubtedly do the same for the next re-incarnation of the Dalai Lama).  It claims to be able to determine the difference between true religion and “evil cults,” and tries to root out even private belief in “evil cults” like Falungong.  Moreover, the Chinese government invests enormous amounts of money in spectacular public rituals, like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, which are redolent with symbols of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.

Often, the secular political form is what outsiders see, while the spirit is what insiders apprehend. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western scholars took the formal structure of Asian states as evidence of “modernization,” a universal process of (among other things) secularization that was transforming the whole world.  Even communist China was seen as an example of modernization, although one that had perversely gone astray.  Inside all of this putative political modernization, however, other meanings were being constructed. Emerging and consolidating states were being seen as necessary mediators between citizens and cosmic forces that transcended the visible world.  States contained sacred power—power that could be benevolent but could also turn demonically ferocious, as did the cult of Mao Zedong during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Political secularization, in Taylor’s sense, therefore is a reasonably accurate way to describe the formal structure of most East and Southeast Asian states.  But it doesn’t adequately describe the interior spirit of these states, which must be comprehended through a closer examination of how these states have developed within modern history.  Taylor’s account of political secularization does, however, help us pose the questions of how the external forms and interior spirit of modern Asian states have interacted with one another and what have been the practical consequences of this interaction. It would be beyond the scope of this post to give a full account of the development of Asian states.  But as we consider the development of the social and cultural life within some Asian societies, we can get some sense of how these societies and cultures have been influenced by the interplay between secular form and religious substance within their states. In my next two posts, I will explore the extent to which Asian states and societies have followed Taylor’s path to social and cultural secularization.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

Akbar Ganji: Can you imagine Islamic modernity?

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

Taylor acknowledges the need for such speculative or otherwise affected—hypothetico-skeptical—distancing as a constitutive element and form of faith under the conditions of secular modernity. Indeed, there is nothing that characterizes modern secularity more than this way of seeing (thinking, doing, judging) things in light of their principal “optionality.” But he does not seem to grant this—as it were, dis-positional—stance any logical or ontological space, let alone normative, weight in the age (or ages) that historically preceded modernity (or that, if a relapse or worse conflagration were to happen, might befall our present secular arrangements and undo what he sees as their advancement of humanity as a whole). There is more separation than there is continuity between the “ages.” And yet the contours and prospects of our future seem more in line and in sync with our present than are those which marked our past.

Taylor’s view of the coexistence or even coextensiveness of engagement and disengagement—and nothing else defines having options or “optionality” more—is not so much one that stresses their simultaneity as it is one that highlights the need and chance for changing roles and perspectives, that is to say, of seeing aspects. As Taylor puts it suggestively, it all comes down to questions of “navigation”:

We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in which we live as best as we can the reality our standpoint opens us to; and a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways to coexist.

But we have also changed from a condition in which belief was the default option, not just for the naïve but also for those who knew, considered, talked about atheism; to a condition in which for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones. . . .

This is not to say that everyone is in this condition. Our modern civilization is made up of a host of societies, sub-societies and milieux, all rather different from each other. But the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more of these milieux; and has achieved hegemony in certain crucial ones, in the academic and intellectual life, for instance; whence it can more easily extend itself to others.

The speculative, retroactive postulation of an age of original immediacy (in which no option, let alone “optionality,” can arise or be seen for what it is) and its modern antithesis, namely the discovery and invention of the secular age (in which options are no longer immediately real, but conditioned by a hypothetical, disengaged, posture that was neither imagined nor quite possible before), thus blend here, once again, with a historical and, more precisely, sociological observation from which it must also set itself aside. The fallback or default option for “societies, sub-societies and milieux,” which are engaged in de facto “religion switching”—and, thereby, give further empirical proof of the cultural and, indeed, ontological as well as epistemic-normative pluralism that Taylor’s grand narrative both reconstrues and advocates—remains that of a “excluvist humanism” or “atheism” even though secularity consists, precisely, in the circumstance that our relation to religious and ethnic origins becomes more and more loosened, relaxed, and variable. Religion, in the modern age, turns ever more global in the sense of worldwide, expansive, extensive, and diversified, on the one hand, and of abstract, thinned out, vague, and absolute, intensive, or, indeed, deep, on the other. And, yet, Taylor claims, secularity holds sway over all persisting or re-found religious affiliations, as if the empirical outlook of things mattered less than the still deeper seated transition, whose origins and consequences no narrative—not even Taylor’s own—can aspire to capture in its essence, that is, in its full scope and effect. As such, the “seachange” in question eludes all temporal and spatial coordinates, just as it resists all narrativization.

It is clear, why this must be so, for what has taken place—and continues to take place with every step we make—is, first of all, a perspectival and near-absolute difference between the “then” and the “now” or between the “here” (among us moderns) and the “there” (among those among whom modernity has not yet announced itself or has not sufficiently sunk in): in one word, a shift that has all the qualities of a Gestalt-switch and plays itself out between minimal differences with potentially maximal consequences (just as massive causes, may have only negligible effects, in turn).

But then, if Gestalt-switch there is—between the ages, but also between the worlds, minds, and things or, indeed, options that (eventually) emerge from them—must it not have all the features of “seeing-aspects” as Wittgenstein understood them, and, indeed, of the dual-aspect theory of reality that Spinoza and, in his footsteps, Stuart Hamsphire theorized? And, as a consequence, must this not necessarily mean that there is, again, nothing optional about the different perspectives (of immediacy and mediacy, participation and separation, engagement and disengagement, transcendence and immanence) after all? For, no matter how much we try, from within one “optional” perspective we cannot see the other at all, or, at least, not at will and while continuing to see the first. Further, it would seem unlikely that we ever stand in front of a variety of open options, without having adopted at least one of them. Which is another of saying that we do not have options in a mode or mood that we could describe as optional.

We could feel tempted to construe a dilemma: either faith is optional and, hence, does not quite live up to its very concept and intention (which imply its potential for being fully immersed or engaged and, hence, an instant or instance of “fullness”), or it is not (and, hence, remains immediate and naïve, a magico-mythical stance or apodictic certainty, both of which require no act or leap of faith at all). In either case, faith is, quite literally, not an option. In other words, we are dealing with either naïveté (albeit it in different degrees) or with a reflective faith that must remain deeply aporetic, that is to say, never quite it, that is to say, full or fullfilled, arriving at some “middle position,” at best. For faith to have consistency, coherence, or even substance and consequence, it would have to be dogmatic, unquestioning, sealed off, blocking us from—blinding us for—the alternative view, thus undermining the very meaning and importance of “optionality.” Faith that reflects upon itself is a mere or pure form, whose invariable—even when we call it “fullness”—remains the unattainable measure and criterion for any historically or empirically espoused belief, that is to say, for any revealed, natural or material, content faith may come to adopt.

It is a consequence Taylor is reluctant to accept even though there is much in what he says that points in this direction, when he says that differences in belief throughout time emerge when we acknowledge that, “all beliefs are held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted, which usually remains tacit…The frameworks of yesterday and today are related as ‘naïve’ and ‘reflective’: because the latter has opened a question which had been foreclosed in the former by the unacknowledged shape of the background.”

But should we accept this much? Can I choose an option as such, that is to say, for what it is under modern conditions (i.e., nothing more than a hypothetical view or practice, among many possible and potentially equally relevant and valuable others) and at the same time live and express it to the fullest extent, without halt or reservation, as “fullness” and “fulfillment” would seem to require? Does the tacit character of background framing—the “taken-for-granted” of which Taylor speaks—differ significantly in the two (naïve and reflective) ages? Or does any belief, any engagement, imply that I, immediately, blot out the very background, precisely since the moment we hold any view or adopt any course of action, however habitualized, at least some things—indeed, a vast majority of things—must be taken for granted, without ever attaining the level of explicitness that a meaningful use of “reflection” or “optionality” would require?

Indeed, we cannot reflect ourselves fully out of our previous or prevalent immediacies and engagements, bringing our background squarely before our eyes. It is as if opting for an “option”—let alone believing, practicing, or living one—operates from within a different time zone, one that escapes all spatio-temporal, that is to say, historico-empirical coordinates and situations. Again, it is as if “optionality” were itself not an option or, in any case, could not be had but reflectively, that is to say, from a metaphysical point of view—indeed, a “view from nowhere” (Thomas Nagel)—never quite attaining the minimal naivité that religious faith (or, for that matter, any belief, practice, or life) requires for its very concept and existence.

Might not a historical shift from “naïve” to “reflective” belief occur one fine (or terrible) day? More cautiously put: might it, one day, be possible or optional, rather than, say, actual or a reality for all? Perhaps, who knows? But all signs indicate that this time has not come yet. In any event, it is almost impossible to imagine what its coming (as in Taylor’s formulation of “coming of age of a secular age”) might mean or imply and, when it comes, excludes in turn. For what would the prize—i.e., the downside or side-effect—of pure reflectivity and non-naïveté be? What will be forgotten or suppressed where “fullness” is attained at long last?

As long as these remain open questions, history has not really begun and its secular age has not yet fully dawned. At the very best, it might very well be in “coming.” But then, this might be the only mode and mood in which we can actually relate to the secular, if at all. To think otherwise would mean to imagine—and practice or live—secularity and its reflexivity, not just as a “default option,” but as the indubitable, near-exclusive “option,” which would mean: no longer as an option at all. The secular would thus be reduced to a fatality and necessity and, thereby, begin to lack all contrast to its putative other, namely “immediacy” and “naïvety.” For, if history allows no more—or, not more than one—option, then it doesn’t allow for reflexivity either. More precisely, whatever reflection it permits in such a (admittedly, hypothetical) mono-causal and unilinear scenario will be at best a near-tautological self-explication from within the given frame of thought and action. Lacking any other option, it will remain self-contained, hence, dogmatic, and leave little to have faith in.

It could be that heteronomous thinking is bad because it leads to unpleasant things. This would be a kind of consequentialist argument and would therefore live or die on the empirical evidence. This is Christopher Hitchens territory. Rightly recognizing that this is not where he wants to go, Gourgouris opts for the other kind of answer, which is to insist that heteronomous thinking is problematic in itself—a kind of formal argument. But at some point any argument along these lines will beg the question, for it will need to assert that thinking for oneself is a good in itself. And that assertion can’t in turn be justified without appealing—heteronomously, if you will—to some scheme of values outside the mode of thinking in question.

At stake here is a certain kind of intellectual posture. In his debate with Mahmood, Gourgouris bases his argument on two suppositions that Mahmood wants to question. Those suppositions are that enlightened reason (“secular criticism”) can be purged of its own heteronomous tendencies, and that religion is an archetypal example of heteronomous thinking. If this description is right, then the dispute is really over the Enlightenment and its legacies—a point that Charles Taylor alludes to in his post in this thread. Like his enlightened forbears, Gourgouris thinks that the critique of religion is the archetype of critique as such, and he thinks that the critical project, while itself at constant risk of becoming arrogant or disconnected, can correct itself from the inside so long as we exercise sufficient care. Mahmood has a different understanding of what “critique” entails. Her more Foucaultian approach involves asking questions about how particular assumptions (that the veil is a symbol, for example) produce particular kinds of subjects, enable and dis-enable certain kinds of work, and so on.

Must we choose sides? Gourgouris apparently wants sides to be chosen. Mahmood wants to question the drive to choose sides. But I would rather try to inflect these choices differently by reading them through a category that has not received enough attention in the debate about secularism. That category is the literary.

***

If we follow Gourgouris and assume for the sake of argument that heteronomy/autonomy is the best scale we have for thinking about the question of critique (though I’m not sure it is), we can see immediately that a certain picture of the intellectual life follows naturally. In this picture, intellectual activity at its best involves the rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy. If we relax our guard, it seems, we’re going to find ourselves mired in some appeal to external authority. In this way certain values are brought into rough equivalence: reflexivity, critique, and the secular (in its proper, non-doctrinal, form).

This picture of the intellectual life as a rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy is what Chris Nealon in the initial post on this thread called “a left-secular structure of feeling.” And its dynamics should be pretty familiar. It is striking, for instance, that this picture is formally very much like the Christian life as it is imagined by St. Paul (“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”) and by Augustine. Both of these thinkers call their flocks to vigilance against patterns of worldly thought and behavior understood to be always just around the bend. Worldly criticism reverses the poles (where before the picture was of people pulled away from divinity and toward the world, now the picture is of people pulled away from the world and toward divinity) but it doesn’t alter the basic pattern. To note this similarity is not to say that secularity is “like” religion. It’s just to remark on our widely shared picture of what the intellectual life looks like: we’re on a hair-trigger, concerned above all never to relax our guard.

But we do relax our guard, or take a nap, or just get distracted for a while. Reflexivity is exhausting, after all. And so things sneak in: unexamined presuppositions, various essentialisms, historical blindspots, moments of “heteronomy.” We trust in authorities when we shouldn’t; take things on faith because we’re too tired or busy to run all the background checks that we might. And then we startle awake, and realize what’s happened. This may, in turn, inspire us to build better defenses and bigger data-bases. But we might also be led to reflect on the inevitability of such moments, and to confront the fact that despite our best intentions we will always betray the rigorous demands of our calling. This is the melancholy of criticism—let me say, melodramatically, of criticism in the aftermath of Enlightenment.

No one practiced this critical melancholy with more effect than Paul de Man. Consider two brief examples from his 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which was for a time perhaps the single most influential essay in literary studies. Discussing the romantic symbol as an attempt to resolve the split between subject and object introduced by Enlightenment reason, de Man dissents from the humanist critics who came before him. Following some hints in Coleridge and elsewhere, those critics had proposed that the symbol repairs the breach between subject and object. De Man, on the other hand, says that subject/object is the wrong problem; the real problem is that we can never escape from time, but by focusing on the pseudo-problem of subject and object the romantic symbol simply encourages us to deny our “authentically temporal destiny” (ie., death) and flee into timeless universals. The symbol, he says, is thus “a temptation that has to be overcome.” Then, later in the essay, having produced an impressive comparison between allegory and irony, de Man writes that “this conclusion is dangerously satisfying….Things cannot be left to rest at the point we have reached.” These are two examples of the kinds of critical restlessness for which de Man is famous. The act of reading itself is the purest form of that restlessness; throughout his critical oeuvre reading appears as dreadful, as painful, as adding up to nothing. The only thing worse than reading, for de Man, is not reading, for that would mean giving in to temptations like that of the symbol, whose “dangerously satisfying conclusions” encourage us to forget about our temporal predicament.

Note that this is not criticism undertaken in the name of liberation. As de Man pictures it, all that reading can do is tie us ever more intimately to the object of our critique. Having seen through the “dangerous satisfactions” that emerge when we stop reading, the critic cannot then take refuge in those satisfactions without bad faith. But having also recognized that the pull of such satisfactions is so great that no amount of criticism will ever fully emancipate him, the critic finds himself plunged ever more deeply into a condition both intolerable and necessary. The only way to resist the temptation to stop reading is to keep reading, but the reading simply reconfirms the power of the temptation to stop. Loving what you hate; hating what you love: this melancholy predicament becomes the critic’s professional identity.

***

De Man was not especially interested in religion or in the secular, though he did assume that modernization meant secularization, and he wrote of religion as a typical example of the “dangerously satisfying” conclusions against which he set his critical project. So in that way he was a secular thinker, though I think he understood pretty well that criticizing something is not the same thing as leaving it behind. Indeed, one might read most of his writing as a continual rediscovery of the stubborn fact that the thing you most want to leave behind is also the thing you can’t leave behind—like St. Paul, who cannot do what he wants to do, but instead does the thing he hates to do.

For de Man–and for many of the literary critics writing in his wake—this kind of vexed melancholia simply was the literary experience. It is a secular experience, but of a tragic kind. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the picture painted by Edward Said, in his “Secular Criticism” essay, of the heroic worldly intellectual, resolutely suspicious of anything that might entice him to rest. Said’s metaphors in that essay, as throughout much of his work, contrast the “the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home” with the exile and homelessness that is for him the mark of the critic. Because he is not at home, the critic is able to take the measure of modernity and its loss of filiation: “because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism,” Said writes. The critic is permanently homeless in this conception—and once again there’s an interesting inversion of the Christian imaginary here, something of which Said was very much aware.

Said’s more programmatic statements may lack the melancholy quality often found in de Man, but Said’s own body of work attests in manifold ways to his deep attachment to the very objects whose siren call he must nevertheless resist. And in this way Said’s secular criticism, like de Man’s version of deconstruction, foregrounds the relationship between secularism and the literary without ever quite saying so. To be sure, Said makes it clear that by “criticism” he means more than simply “literary criticism.” Yet it is also evident that he is modeling habits of critical attention upon the forms of attentiveness solicited by literary writing. “Obviously I’m not suggesting that everybody has to become a literary critic,” he once noted in an interview. “[T]hat’s a silly idea. But one does have to give a certain attention to the rather dense fabric of secular life….” Note the elective affinity among secularism, criticism and literary “attention.” And of course, the importance of literature to Said’s image of criticism has been further reinforced by the fact that many of those currently writing under Said’s influence are located in departments of literature.

***

Gil Anidjar’s recent book, Semites, pushes this line of thinking as far as I’ve seen anyone take it. One project of the book is to mediate between the positions of Talal Asad and Edward Said. (This is one of the things at stake in the Mahmood-Gourgouris debate. In the background, meanwhile, stands the legacy of Foucault and Said’s own critical use of Foucault.) So we get an interpretation of Orientalism in which it emerges that Said’s real target in that book was secularism. I don’t have room here to go into the complexities of Anidjar’s counter-intuitive argument, and in any case what’s relevant to my discussion here is the shape of the book rather than its local engagements. What is that shape? The first half of the book traces, in genealogical fashion, the complicated histories of the categories of Jew and Arab, Semite and Aryan. Having established how fraught and entangled those histories are, Anidjar turns in the second half of the book to “Literature.” The publisher’s description on the back of the book, in fact, says that the book “turns to the literary imagination as the site of a fragile and tenuous alternative, the promise of something like a ‘Semitic perspective’.”

As I understand it, the political resonance of that last phrase is found in the book’s historical argument that “Jew” and “Arab” where once jointly “Semitic,” so that a “Semitic perspective” would be an important alternative to prevailing contemporary narratives of “Jew vs. Arab.” The stakes, then, could not be higher: the “literary imagination” holds out something like the promise of reconciliation, in the sense of which Said spoke of it (see the essays collected in The End of the Peace Process). As Anidjar writes, “I attend to the way in which the texts of Arabic and Jewish literatures undo the narrow limits to which they are confined by the topological imagination and by the disciplines.” And later: “throughout and against history, literature resists.”

What the book largely offers, however, are discussions of that confinement—by the discipline of comparative literature, for example—rather than of literary resistance to it. I confess that I’m still trying to follow Anidjar’s argument, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but it seems to me that in the places where we might expect discussion of literary texts, we are given instead a resonant picture of the kind of critical brooding I have been discussing. That is, it is the critic’s relation to his object—anguished, anxious, treasonous—that interests Anidjar. The idea is that any such relationship will betray the most important thing about literature, indeed the only thing that matters about it, namely its resistance to history. The critic, who is institutionally located and bound by networks of affiliation she can never quite escape, can only ever be a representative of history, and of the disciplines, can therefore even at her generous best—again with the largest stakes in mind—only imagine a “two-state” (that is, institutionally and historically determined) solution to such intractable questions as that of Palestine. The one-state solution for which Said advocated and which he turned sometimes to literature in order to imagine—that is destined to remain out of reach, though not out of mind for the critic aware enough of her own failings.

It is Paul de Man who becomes the guiding figure in Anidjar’s account. Riffing on de Man, Anidjar writes of “The [critic's] treason, which is also an active joining (a treacherous obedience), a belonging without allegiance, perhaps.” This, he concludes enigmatically, “is the promise, no more than a promise and, equally, the threat of another future, if not of another modernity.” What I take this to mean is that the critic’s treason is the promise of another future because it holds out the possibility of breaking definitively with the past. But this promise is also a threat, because any true break will throw all cherished categories out of the window. And this will be true not only for our illiberal/facist/fundamentalist opponents but for us too, no matter how progressive, generous, and reflexive we imagine ourselves to be.

But this is for the future. What does critique looks like now, in the aftermath of enlightenment? For de Man and Anidjar (and possibly Said) it seems to be a reflexivity so crosscut with humility and tragedy that it keeps generating, as if in compensation, a concept of literariness that is always just around the bend. I think it is not accidental that de Man’s own critical career continued to circle around those texts loosely termed “romantic”—the works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that were striving to come to terms with the secular horizons opened up by the Enlightenment, and striving to find a voice for ways of being that those secular horizons were unable or unwilling to recognize. What I think de Man sensed in those texts and writers is what Anidjar senses in de Man. If we had to label it, we could call it “non-heteronomous critique.” Or, we could just call it “literature.”

First, a few remarks on Gourgouris’s repeated use of the term “anti-secular” to describe and dismiss my arguments. This gesture of course invites a simple counter-response: “No I am not anti-secular” or “Yes, I am.” Such a framing fails to address the complicated set of questions that the symposium “Is Critique Secular?” opened up to reflection and to which I alluded in my earlier post. Notably, calls for the embrace (or for that matter rejection) of secularism are premised on a putative opposition between secular and religious worldviews wherein each is defined as a necessary and stable essence that is superior to the other. It is argued that there is an essential kernel to secularism that must be preserved and defended from religious extremism and backwardness. For some this is secularism’s scientific rationality, for others it is secularism’s incipient objectivity, and for yet others it is secularism’s strict separation between state and religion. The idea that the “good” elements in secularism can be distinguished from its “bad” sides, the latter discarded and the former refined, only serves to further reinforce the blackmail that one is either for or against secularism. (It reminds me of a similar dilemma thrust upon critics of modernity at an earlier moment to which Michel Foucault responded astutely in his essay “What is Enlightenment?“)

Apart from the fact that the “good” and the “bad” cannot so easily be distinguished much less purified, the crucial problem with this kind of thinking is its assumption that a secular worldview is the opposite of a religious one, each indebted to a distinct epistemology irreconcilable with the other. (Charles Taylor’s recent post to this thread provides an intellectual genealogy of this position.) As must be obvious to readers of my work, I do not agree with this understanding of secularism. As a number of scholars have shown recently, the emergence of the modern category of the secular (to be distinguished from the pre-modern use of the Latin term saeculum) is constitutively related to the rise of the modern concept of religion wherein it is impossible to track the history of one without simultaneously tracking the history of the other. Furthermore, secularism, as a principle of liberal state governance, has entailed not so much the abandonment of religion but its ongoing regulation through a variety of state and civic institutions. Through this process has emerged a modular conception of religiosity and a concomitant religious subject that animates various kinds of secular discourses—including juridical, cultural, ethical, and political.

Since this argument is quite well known, I do not want to rehearse it here other than to say that this way of thinking challenges the simplistic assumption that secularism is empty of any theological arguments; that if any trace of theology is found in secular discourse, then it is clearly a “bad” development that sullies the true essence of secularism (hence the mission to “detranscendentalize the secular“). For Gourgouris, the fact that I read the theological agenda of the U.S. (in my “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” piece) within the terms of the secular is a gross error insomuch as the two are supposedly mutually exclusive. Not only is this understanding of secularism historically inaccurate, I am suggesting, but it remains blind to the enormous impetus to religious reform that is internal to different varieties of secularism (benign or otherwise).

My article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” is an inquiry into how some of the constitutive assumptions of secularism—particularly those that enable the distinction between enlightened religiosity and its more backward/dangerous forms—underwrite the current U.S. government’s attempts to intervene politically and strategically in the Muslim world. (Apart from the Rand Corporation report, my article focuses on the notorious “Muslim World Outreach” program established by the White House National Security Council with a funding of $1.3 billion dollars.) I treat these attempts as historically contingent, enabled by specific events and geo-political developments, and not in any way evidence of a necessary or essential relationship between imperialism and secularism. Obviously, as any student of colonialism and imperialism knows, the history of these two projects is diverse and the role of religious missions within them highly variegated. This variegated history, however, cannot simply be told in terms of a clash between “religious” and “secular” interests for reasons that I have already stated.

It seems that I have upset some people by showing that many of the heroes of the progressive left—self-identified liberal Muslim reformers such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Abdel Karim Soroush—share secular assumptions about enlightened religiosity with the U.S. State Department. The charge is that in doing so, I have construed them as pawns of an imperial master, reducing their voices to an “echo of the enemy think tank” when presumably they are far more sincere and original in their engagements with Islam. I am not so sure about the originality of their arguments, but, as I noted in my article, these reformers are indeed opposed to U.S. geopolitical interests in the region and do not see themselves as serving this agenda. My object of analysis, however, is not their motivations and intentions but the discursive assumptions (about knowledge, history, language) that underpin their methods and programs of reform. Do we have to prescribe to a full fledged theory of shared interests and motivations to be able to see the common set of discursive presuppositions that cut across political projects? Could one be politically opposed and still share a set of epistemological and conceptual truths? Could one analyze this convergence critically without being accused of “belittling” the heroes of our stories?

Now the question of how liberalism and secularism are related, not just conceptually but practically through mechanisms of governance, is one that needs far more scholarly attention than has been given so far. In my article, I tried to lay out the unique character of liberal secularism in terms of its forceful commitment to the principle of religious freedom/freedom of conscience (this seems to have clearly escaped Gourgouris’s attention). As I pointed out, while totalitarian states (such as China, Syria, the former Soviet Union) abide by the separation of religion and state, they also regularly abrogate religious freedoms. Liberal secular states, while they regulate religious life, must constantly counterbalance this regulation with an individual’s right to practice his/her religion freely without coercion and state intervention. Insomuch as liberal political philosophy consists in setting limits to and enabling the exercise of freedoms, often conceptualized in individualist terms, the calculus of freedom and coercion also informs the practice of liberal secularism.

Individual freedom (as enshrined in the principle of religious freedom) is as central to liberal secularism as it is to political liberalism; in fact, one cannot imagine the latter without the former. But this character of liberal secularism cannot, in my view, be analyzed simply in terms of its merits and failures or its moral necessity. It needs to be analyzed, on one hand, as an exercise of the state’s sovereign power to regulate religious subjectivities, practices, and forms of life, and on the other, as a means by which religious minorities and majorities appeal to institutions of juridical and state power to curtail and/or extend their ability to practice their religion freely. Insomuch as the principle of religious freedom marks the ground upon which the proper limits of state jurisdiction over religious life are argued, contested, and settled in secular liberal societies, then it is crucial that we interrogate the shifting and contested operations of state and juridical power. Such a task would require not simply holding up the morality of the principle of religious freedom but to track when and how it emerges as a strategy of political rule and claims to citizenship.

Finally, and yet again, some brief remarks about the veil. Gourgouris excoriates me for taking seriously the claim, made by a large number of Muslim women, that the veil is a doctrinal command, and for failing to recognize the real significance of the veil as a symbolic element within identity formation. Let me clarify. While interpretations of the veil abound, two main views prevail among its practitioners and critics: one understands the veil to be a divine command and the second regards it to be a symbolic marker, no different than a variety of other practices (religious and non-religious) that represents a Muslim woman’s identity. In my work I do not endorse one of these interpretations over the other since it is not the veracity of these claims that interests me. Instead, as readers of my work know, my attempt has been to analyze both these understandings of the veil as speech acts that perform very different kinds of work in the making of the religious subject.

As I have argued, to understand a bodily practice (such as veiling) as a symbolic act presumes a very different relationship between the subject’s exteriority and interiority than an understanding in which a bodily act is both an expression of, and a means to, the realization of the subject. In other words, my point is not to dismiss semiotic processes (as Gourgouris mistakenly suggests), but to inquire into practices whose assumptions about semiosis do not map onto the model of signs standing for meaning or identity. To say this is to simply note that many dimensions of practice, both linguistic and non-linguistic, cannot be grasped in terms of a theory of representation. Here one only needs to recall the work of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, C. S. Peirce, and J. L. Austin who, in their different ways, have made us think of semiotic practices in registers other than those of meaning, communication, and symbolic signification. (For similar reasons, I treat the claim that the Quran is a historical text as a performative speech act that enables very different relations of power and truth than one that regards the Quran as a divine text.)

Finally, let me close by reminding readers of the questions that prompted the symposium “Is Critique Secular?” at UC Berkeley. These questions, as I suggested earlier, require a commitment to put some of our most cherished assumptions to scrutiny. This in turn depends upon making a distinction between the labor entailed in the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own political commitments and preferences. The tension between the two is a productive one for the exercise of critique insomuch as it suspends the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways. The academy, I continue to believe, remains perhaps one of the few places where such tensions can be explored.

Precisely because this debate offers such a crucial opportunity, I want to point out what I see as two important points of neglect in this burgeoning discussion: The first is the tendency to ignore the political-sociological understanding of secularism as movements that engage in concrete political struggles to advocate certain social identities and interests. Historical struggles in the name of secularism are often not simply contestations between different visions of experiencing transcendence or between alternative political principles that claim to offer the best solution to the question of harmonious social coexistence. For the most part, they are political movements carried by actors with specific social identities and interests, who often seek to exclude or assimilate certain social groups. Secondly, the debate thus far has not substantially contributed to a long-needed widening in our understanding of secularism that can only be achieved by incorporating non-Christian religions and non-Western regions into a comparative framework along with Christian and Western cases.

In a recent conference on Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age at Yale University, the last panel before Charles Taylor’s keynote address stood out among others in one important respect. In this final session of the conference, Nilüfer Göle for the first time introduced the relationship between Islam and secularism into the discussion in a central way. She made the important observation that reflections and studies on Muslims and secularism had the inescapable fate of being perceived as accounts from the perspective of a specific culture, rather than as endeavors in the mainstream philosophical and social scientific discourse on secularism. Göle further argued that we cannot properly understand secularism in the contemporary West if we do not closely examine the complex interactions between Europe and Muslims—who both as immigrants and through Turkey’s candidacy to the EU constitute Europe’s “internal other”.

This intervention was followed by an equally important one by Seyla Benhabib, whose work has always been closely attentive to Muslims in Europe, whether from the perspective of the accommodation of cultural differences in liberal democracies or that of immigrant rights. She followed on the path opened by Göle by laying out some of the crucial issues involving European Muslims, Turkey, and secularism.

Crucially, Benhabib then brought into the discussion the history of the European Jews, a topic that had been virtually absent from the various debates at the conference up to that point. And she did this through an incisive, if alarming, comparison between the situation faced by the European Muslims today and that encountered by the European Jews in the past. Both religions are strongly characterized by orthopraxis, Benhabib pointed out, and this allowed for the stigmatization of these groups’ publicly visible rituals, religious dress, and places of prayer, exerting on them strong pressures for assimilation. She noted that Muslim immigrant activists in Europe make explicit references to the similarities between their situation today and that of the European Jews in the past, as when they carried a banner that read: “We are not the Jews of tomorrow!”

The reference by Muslim immigrant activists to the history of European Jews is understandable because of its effectiveness in getting the point across. Contemporary German public culture has been deeply marked by the guilt-laden memory of the Holocaust, and this comparison offers the best means for migrant and pro-migrant activists to dramatically remind European publics the dangerous implications of the stigmatization of religious minorities, as well as of calls for their assimilation.

Benhabib’s intervention at the conference, as I understood it, thus had a double agenda: introducing the history of European Jews into the discussion on the history of European secularism; and pointing out the normative urgency of coming to terms with exclusionary European attitudes towards Islam. It was a reminder to all conference participants that refusing to assign these issues a central place in the recently burgeoning intellectual discourse on secularism and belief would amount to a crucial failure, if this discourse is to have a normative-political thrust for our times.

Benhabib’s comparison of the attitudes facing today’s European Muslims and yesterday’s European Jews made me think of another striking historical similarity between two widespread European discourses: the contemporary anti-Islamic discourse and the anti-Catholic discourse of late nineteenth century. Among scholars of religion and secularism, José Casanova has noted this similarity on a global scale. However, in Germany at least, this comparison is not as frequently encountered in the public sphere as the Islamophobia/anti-Semitism comparison, probably because the anti-Catholic rhetoric and legislation of the late nineteenth century have not left nearly as deep a mark on German collective memory as anti-Semitism and its atrocious culmination in the Holocaust. But when German journalists refer to current controversies about headscarves or the construction of new mosques, they sometimes use the term Kulturkampf in a manner similar to the American term “culture wars.” What is often not reminded to the readers is the original context in which this term was coined: a series of discriminatory laws and policies implemented by the Prussian and Imperial German states and targeting the Roman Catholic Church, enthusiastically supported by Liberals as a “struggle for civilization.”

Historians of nineteenth century Germany with a culturally perceptive lens, such as Helmut Walser Smith, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, and Michael Gross, have extensively documented the contours of the “anti-Catholic imagination” based on political pamphlets, newspaper and journal articles and illustrations, and literary pieces from this period. Some of its major elements are the following:

• Catholicism, based on the notion of absolute obedience both in its theology and its religious hierarchy, is not compatible with enlightenment, reason, and progress.
• Catholicism is a religion of popular superstition.
• Catholicism is not compatible with the ideals of modern democracy. Catholic clergy manipulate their ignorant flock to vote for candidates supported by the Church.
• Catholicism is the religion of the poor peasants and the working classes; it hampers industrial activity and economic efficiency.
• Catholics are nationally unreliable, as their primary allegiance is to Rome rather than to Berlin.

Similar themes can of course be found in anti-Catholic discourses circulating elsewhere and in other times, not least in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States in the context of the influx of Catholic immigrants from Europe. In nineteenth-century Germany, anti-Catholicism was carried mainly by politicians belonging to the National Liberal and Progressive parties; Liberal newspapers and magazines; prominent Protestant academics and intellectuals; Old Catholics who had established their own church following the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870; and last but not least, the Protestant League, which was established in 1886 to continue the fight against the forces of Roman Catholicism on German soil.

Many anti-Catholic actors sought to evoke a passionate reaction from the public through imaginative narratives bordering on hysteria and fantasy. “Convent atrocity stories” about defenseless women punished in cruel ways by priests and nuns and about sexual orgies taking place behind the closed doors of the monasteries were popular narratives in the Liberal press of the period. One may be tempted to underplay the significance of these stories as the ordinary stuff of the populist press, but their dangerous potential was revealed clearly in the incident known as the Moabiterklustersturm. Fueled by the anti-monastic atmosphere created by these stories, in August 1869, hundreds of Berlin residents gathered outside of a Dominican chapel and Franciscan orphanage in Moabit—depicted in the press as a monastery—and vandalized the buildings at night while the monks fled for their lives. For German Catholics, this event was a dramatic crystallization of the rise of anti-Catholic sentiments in Germany, a perception that provided one of the major motivations for the organization of political Catholicism.

The anti-clerical laws and policies of the Bismarckian state in Prussia and in the Empire realized the worst fears of the German Catholic Church. The Kulturkampf started with the disbandment of the Catholic Department of the Prussian Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education in 1871. Legislation passed in the following decade and a half banned religious orders from German territory, severely limited the autonomy of the Catholic Church in its internal affairs, subjected the clergy to a long list of strict requirements and regulations, and led to the arrest of clergymen who did not comply.

Two pieces of legislation particularly reveal the most disturbing tendencies of the Kulturkampf: The Expatriation Law passed in the Reichstag in 1875 gave the German state the right to confine a priest to a specific region or expel him from German territory and take away his citizenship, if he continued his clerical work after having been deposed by a court. Similarly, the Jesuit law passed two years earlier included a clause that gave the police the right to remove German Jesuits from a certain district or confine them to a certain district in Germany. Kulturkampf policies gave rise to widespread popular resistance among German Catholics. While the Catholic clergy and population widely suffered—many priests were imprisoned and left without financial support, as pulpits remained vacant over long periods—these policies proved largely ineffective and were gradually dropped around the mid-1880s.

The reasons for the striking salience of German anti-Catholicism in this period, as well as the adoption of anti-clericalism as state policy during the decade and a half following the foundation of the Second Empire are complex, and I will not attempt an explanation here. What seems striking, however, is the structural similarities between this discourse and the anti-Islamic discourse widely circulating in the German public sphere today. We can outline some of the major elements of the anti-Islamic discourse as the following:

• Islam is a backward religion that is incompatible with modernity. In this, it differs from Christianity and Judaism which are reformed, privatized, and tolerant towards critique.
• Muslim culture is based on absolute obedience to authority. It does not recognize individuality and subordinates the individual to family, community, and God.
• Muslim practices violate human rights, as well as the “fundamental values” of the German Constitution that are based on Western norms.
• Muslim culture oppresses women, does not allow their participation in public life, and promotes the absolute domination of men over women.
• The religion and culture of Islam are responsible for the fact that the integration of Muslim immigrants to European host societies has failed.
• Muslims exploit discourses of tolerance, multiculturalism, and religious freedom in Western societies. Afraid of being labeled xenophobic, liberals in European countries exhibit a “false tolerance” towards Muslim groups.

One comes across the anti-Islamic discourse in many venues in contemporary Germany, including newspapers articles, television broadcasts, politicians’ public speeches, and pamphlets published by anti-mosque “citizen initiatives.” It is, however, most expansively articulated in an emergent popular European genre characterized by the fusion of autobiographical accounts of self-liberation with the critique of Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s De maagdenkooi is of course the prototype for this genre. The German translation of Hirsi Ali’s book was published in 2004—with the title Ich klage an—and became an instant bestseller in Germany. Following its success, a number of Muslim immigrant female authors published similar accounts. Necla Kelek’s Die fremde Braut (The Foreign Bride) has been the most successful of these German versions. It became a bestseller, while making its author, a trained sociologist, a well-known actor in German debates on Islam and immigrants.

Like anti-Catholicism, the anti-Islamic imagination is often articulated through imaginative visual metaphors and historical fantasies that seek to evoke strong sentiments among European publics. Let me provide just one example: Carriers of the anti-Islamic discourse often conceive women’s status in Muslim culture as a form of slavery, and Kelek devotes an entire chapter to the institution of slavery in Islamic history to make the point. Similarly, Hirsi Ali’s foremost imagery for describing women’s situation in Muslim communities—as attested by the English title of her book, The Caged Virgin—is that of captivity: “The enclosed women and girls are located in the internal cage. This women’s cage is surrounded by an even larger cage in which the entire Islamic culture is locked up.” The headscarf, according to Kelek, is an irrefutable visual proof of the oppression of women in Islam: “the headscarf is the sign of the reduction of the women to her sexuality [. . . .] She is exclusively a sexual being that must be excluded from the public sphere for her own protection.” Evaluating this theme in light of her central motif, Hirsi Ali imaginatively compares Muslim women who say they wear their headscarves voluntarily to kidnap victims who develop an attachment to their captors.

The anti-Islamic discourse is by no means uncontested. On the contrary, many immigrant and pro-migrant intellectuals and activists have advanced powerful critiques of this exclusionary discourse. The carriers of the anti-Islamic imagination are deeply frustrated with these liberal and multiculturalist voices who, according to Kelek, “practice false tolerance against those who despise our laws and use them only in order to extend their religious influence and to further their reactionary praxis in the name of freedom.”

Hirsi Ali’s and Kelek’s bestsellers exemplify the anti-Islamic imagination in an especially crystallized form. However, one can say with some confidence that the mainstream discourse on Islam in Germany often draws upon similar themes, sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly. It is worth noting that Necla Kelek has been invited to the Islam Conference—the beginnings of an intermediary consultation between the Muslim community and the German state—by the German Ministry of the Interior since its first meetings in 2006. It is indeed worth thinking about why Kelek and Hirsi Ali are welcomed passionately by many Europeans as authentic “liberal” Muslim voices.

This brief, if schematic, comparison suggests that the anti-Catholic discourse prevalent in late nineteenth-century Germany and today’s anti-Islamic discourse bear striking similarities. Imaginative stories about young women punished inhumanly by nuns and popular fantasies about sexual orgies behind the closed doors of the convents are replaced today by the imagery of enslaved Muslim virgins locked in cages and popular fantasies about Muslim men given free sexual reign in their individual harems. What remains the same is the negative stereotyping of a minority religion as fundamentalist, oppressive, and backward. In consequence, it is increasingly difficult to make reasonable and justified critiques of problems in Muslim immigrant communities without feeding the bottomless appetite of the anti-Islamic imagination, or without evoking anger and resentment in immigrant communities, as these have been forced into a constant defensive posture.

There are obviously important differences in the political contexts of late nineteenth century and early twenty-first century Germany. Moreover, in terms of a distinction emphasized by Will Kymlicka, Catholics in the Second Empire were a national minority, while Muslims in contemporary Germany constitute a minority with a recent immigration background. And yet, these two groups have been subjected to very similar kinds of exclusionary discourses by social actors who saw (and in the case of Muslims see) themselves as advocates of secularism. Given the established position of the Christian Democratic Party, a party built in the post-World War II era on the foundations of the pre-war Catholic Zentrumspartei, Muslim immigrant activists in Germany may do well by using the slogan: “We are not the Catholics of tomorrow!”