This first piece is the introduction to the issue:
Does Religious Pluralism Require Secularism?
Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 12.3 (Fall 2010). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.
Despite predictions to the contrary, religion is not disappearing. By now many proponents of the secularization thesis—the argument that with modernity the world is becoming less and less religious on a path to a religion-free world—have admitted their error and acknowledged that religion is well and thriving in contemporary life. The rapidly increasing and deepening religious pluralism in many places around the world raises the problem of how people of radically different faiths can live together.
The essays gathered here suggest that secularism might be part of the answer. Secularism, they argue, is not anti-religious or simply the absence of religion; rather it involves the attempt to create a public realm shaped by respect for others and concern for their rights—a place in which deep differences can coexist. For a secular state is (ideally) one that enforces no one religion; treats people of all religions with equal respect; and preserves a public space for the free exercise and expression of religions. Secularism, in these pages, is thus construed as the friend of all religions, and the foe or champion of none.
What emerges from these pages is actually not one secularism, but rather a range of secularisms—French, American, Indian, and others—that can be compared, evaluated, and improved upon. Just as religious pluralization means that we need to think more deeply about particular religions, rather than in the generic category of “religion,” so we need to think about secularisms—actual ways in which states manage the religious diversity in their midst. How can we live together with our deepest differences? How can we live in common purpose with those of different faiths and no faith, building a common world together? These are crucial questions for humanity in the twenty-first century, ones that we avoid at our peril. Unless we arrive at better models of religious pluralism, we will face more and more conflict and violence. The essays gathered here ask us to consider the proposal that religious pluralism requires secularism. —JLG
The following three articles are part of the main issue.
Read the whole article.Rethinking Secularism
Craig Calhoun
Secularism is often treated as a sort of absence. It’s what is left if religion fades. It’s the exclusion of religion from the public sphere but somehow in itself neutral. This is misleading. We need to see secularism as a presence, as something, and therefore in need of elaboration and understanding. Whether we see it as an ideology, a worldview, a stance toward religion, a constitutional approach, or simply an aspect of some other project—of science or a philosophical system—secularism is something we need to think through, rather than merely the absence of religion.
Secularism is not simply a creature of treaties to end religious wars, the rise of science, or the Enlightenment. It is informed by a long history of engagements with the temporal world and purposes that imply no transcendence of immanent conditions. It needs direct attention in contemporary discussions of religion and public life. Moreover, I shall contend that working within a sharp binary of secularism versus religion is problematic. Not least, it obscures (a) the important ways in which religious people engage this-worldly, temporal life; (b) the important senses in which religion is established as a category not so much from within as from “secular” perspectives like that of the state; and (c) the ways in which there may be a secular orientation to the sacred or transcendent.
The Immanent Frame
Secularism is clearly a contemporary public issue. France proclaims secularism—laïcité—not simply as a policy choice but as part of its national identity. It is, however, a “Catholaïcité” shaped, like French identity, not just by general Christian history but by Catholic culture, its struggle against and ascendancy over Protestantism, and then the challenge brought by revolutionary and republican assertions of the primacy of citizenship over devotion. There remains a cross atop the Pantheon, a sign of its history as a church before it became a monument to the heroes of the secular state but also of the compromises between religion and laïcité that shape France today. These are informed by a specific history of anti-clericalism, itself shaped not just by a long history of priestly involvement in politics, education, and other dimensions of social life but also by a strong reactionary effort to intensify that involvement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus secularism shapes the French response to Islamic immigrants, but hardly as a neutral category unrelated to its own religious history.
The Meaning of Secularism
Charles Taylor
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It is generally agreed that modern democracies have to be “secular.” There is perhaps a problem, a certain ethnocentricity, involved in this term. But even in the Western context the term is not limpid and may in fact be misleading. What in fact does it mean? There are at least two models of what constitutes a secular regime. Both involve some kind of separation of church and state. The state can’t be officially linked to some religious confession, except in a vestigial and largely symbolic sense, as in England or Scandinavia. But secularism requires more than this. The pluralism of society requires that there be some kind of neutrality, or “principled distance,” to use Rajeev Bhargava’s term.
If we examine it further, secularism involves in fact a complex requirement. There is more than one good sought here. We can single out three, which we can classify in the categories of the French Revolution trinity: liberty, equality, fraternity. First, no one must be forced in the domain of religion, or basic belief. This is what is often defined as religious liberty, including of course, the freedom not to believe. This is what is also described as the “free exercise” of religion, in the terms of the U.S. First Amendment. Second, there must be equality between people of different faiths or basic beliefs; no religious outlook or (religious or areligious) Weltanschauung can enjoy a privileged status, let alone be adopted as the official view of the state. Third, all spiritual families must be heard, included in the ongoing process of determining what the society is about (its political identity) and how it is going to realize these goals (the exact regime of rights and privileges). This (stretching the point a little) is what corresponds to “fraternity.”
These goals can, of course, conflict; sometimes we have to balance the goods involved. Moreover, we might add a fourth goal: that we try as much as possible to maintain relations of harmony and comity between the supporters of different religions and Weltanschauungen. (Maybe this is what really deserves to be called “fraternity,” but I am still attached to the neatness of the above schema, with only the three traditional goods.)
Sometimes the claim seems to be made, on behalf of one or another definition of secularism, that it can resolve the question of how to realize these goals in the domain of timeless principles, and that no further input or negotiation is required to define them for our society now. The basis for these principles can be found in reason alone, or in some outlook which is itself free from religion, purely laïque. Jacobins are on this wavelength, as was the early John Rawls.
The problem with this is that there is no such set of timeless principles that can be determined, at least in the detail they must be for a given political system, by pure reason alone, and situations differ very much and require different kinds of concrete realization of agreed general principles, so that some degree of working out is necessary in each situation. It follows that dictating the principles from some supposedly higher authority above the fray violates the good of fraternity, that is, the idea that all spiritual families must be heard. It deprives certain spiritual families of a voice in this working out. And, therefore, this leaves us very often with difficult conflicts and dilemmas between our basic goals.
Read the whole article.
Read the whole article.Secularism: A Bibliographic Essay
Slavica Jakelić
Secularism has origins in the West but has long ceased to be its property. It is a global phenomenon with an equally global crisis. For theoretical and empirical purposes, therefore, secularism should be thought of in the plural rather than in the singular. Similarly, while secularism has been a source of marginalization and sometimes even a hostile negation of religions, it cannot be reduced to antireligiousness. It is also a moral orientation toward the world and in the world, often guided by a vision of a just society for all or developed as a strategy that should mitigate the challenges of religious pluralism. Secularism may indicate a worldview, an ideology, a political doctrine, a form of political governance, a type of moral philosophy, or a belief that the scientific method is sufficient to understanding the world in which we live.
Defining “secularism” is additionally complicated because of its proximity to the notion of “secularization.” While these terms have distinct analytic meanings and purposes, they are also closely related. “Secularization” refers to processes that accompany modernization—the gradual decline of religious contents and institutions or their sudden (and sometimes state-imposed) removal from the political, educational, or economic realms. Secularization is therefore not some neutral, natural, and unavoidable progression toward less religious societies. It involves the intellectual and social history that brings together variables and actors as diverse as the unintended consequences of the Medieval religious reforms and the Protestant Reformation, the birth of the modern nation-state, Enlightenment philosophy, and agents whose goal was to institutionalize secularity and the ideas of secularism in law, education, politics, and economics.
The Origins of (Western) Secularism
According to a view that has long dominated academic and popular discourse, the history of secularism in the West is a battle of reason, progress, and modernity against religion, conservatism, and tradition. The real story is, as usual, much more complex. The increased focus on life here and now did not result from the victory of, for example, science over religion. Its origins can be traced back to what Charles Taylor identifies as the “drive to Reform” in the late Middle Ages—the democratization of the virtuous life that intended to draw the laity closer to the life of religious elites but inaugurated a vision of human agency as able to construct and reconstruct their societies. In The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie proposes that modernity’s goal was to redefine, not to abolish, the place of religion in the context of a novel but still theologically shaped understanding of the world.
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