Conversations about secularism's limits have multiplied since the publication of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007). Across disciplines, scholars interested in understanding the complex formations of “religion” have looked to the construction of religion's purported opposite, the “secular.” This anthology deepens and extends current interdisciplinary conversations about secularisms. Not all pieces are of a consistent quality and there is considerable redundancy, yet the collection is valuable in its interpretations of some urgent contemporary political considerations. The interdisciplinary contributors are compelled in different ways by the evaporating distinction between the secular and the religious, such that “secularism” is unstable as a comparative category and condition of public life.
Unlike books motivated largely by the religious dimensions of recent social conflict, this collection of nuanced essays is equally interested in the cultural history of the religious/secular distinction and the political obsession with locating the “proper” place for religion. The essays provide terminological clarifications, crisply defining the multiple dimensions of secularisms in ways that extend frameworks like those of Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. More importantly, together they constitute a much-needed application of these debates outside of cultural theory and intellectual history. This is the anthology's greatest contribution, though for readers unfamiliar with the conversation, it will also serve as a useful, provocative introduction.
Three synthetic essays anchor the volume. Taylor's “Western Secularity” historicizes secularism as a development within Latin Christendom, which “prepared the ground for the ‘declaration of independence’ of the immanent” (p. 33). The conditions of belief and nonbelief have changed amidst “a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion” (p. 37), and modernity's “porous selves” can experience only a fragile faith. Taylor establishes a framework within which the particularities of modern religions and secularisms may be understood. However, he does not make clear forcefully enough how disbelief and belief need each other, nor how the vigorous, at times violent, reassertion of religions is itself a product of secularism.
José Casanova usefully distinguishes among “ ‘the secular’ as a central modern epistemic category, ‘secularization’ as an analytical conceptualization of modern world-historical processes, and ‘secularism’ as a worldview and ideology” (p. 54). In one of the finest contributions, Casanova explains how these distinctions are produced, institutionalized, and seen as given.
Craig Calhoun surveys the interaction of conceptions of discursive rationalism (primarily political liberalism and Habermasian theory) as these affect religion's prospects in public life. Calhoun not only notes the contingent character of the religion/secular distinction but also puzzles through some of the available possibilities for “translating” across different conceptions of public speech and rationality. While he settles few questions, he helpfully delineates possibilities for reasoned communication amidst the “polyphonic complexity of public voices” (p. 82).
Several pieces seek to locate stable models of secularism or to identify shared norms and practices that can ground political religions. Rajeev Bhargava notes that several “implementations” of secularism exist globally and that secularism “works” only when adaptable. He suggests that refashioning “normative practices and constitutional articles” will in turn refashion secular ideals (p. 93). Bhargava is helpful in distinguishing between different models of secular states, emphasizing the successes of India's “principled distance,” which “accepts a disconnection between state and religion at the levels of ends and institutions but does not make a fetish of it at the third level of policy and law” (p. 105). Yet the practical implications of these normative priorities are sometimes muddled.
This same shortcoming occurs in Alfred Stepan's focus on the way in which civil societies generate the “toleration that democracy needs to receive or induce from religion” (p. 116). Stepan does not explain clearly his understanding of civil society and is breezy when stipulating that religious citizens may “advance their values in civil society” as long as this “does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens or violate democracy and the law” (p. 117). This is the hard part, and he does not sufficiently explore the specific implications or requirements.
Surer formulations are found in Peter Katzenstein's attempt to locate “cultural commensurabilities” between religions and secularisms, Richard Madsen's exploration of Asian institutional and governmental relations with religious belief, and Peter van der Veer's fine comparison of Indian and Chinese projects.
Another contribution comes from pieces that harvest theoretical insights into the religion/secular debates from particular social locations. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd seeks to “politicize” the “secular/religious binary” by focusing on the discursive production of the category “religion.” While Hurd is not always clear enough about what “politicization” means methodologically, she writes compellingly about academic work on these problems and how it “reinforces particular kinds of limits on political practice” (p. 168). Cecilia Lynch's study of the challenges of religious humanitarianism to extant categories is similarly compelling in documenting how the religious and the secular “rework each other constantly” in ways that elude conventional formulations (p. 205).
One of the most powerful yet frustrating pieces is Mark Juergensmeyer's “Rethinking the Secular and Religious Aspects of Violence.” Juergensmeyer notes that violent activists are “parts of communities that perceive themselves to be fragile, vulnerable, and under siege from a hostile secular world” (p. 185). One wishes that he would theorize the modalities of perception themselves, as this seems integral to his subsequent and excellent point that “religion” is not necessarily the cause of religious violence so much as “the way that activists and their foes have come to think about religion” (p. 186). R. Scott Appleby's “Rethinking Fundamentalism in a Secular Age” pursues the related notion that fundamentalists are opposed not to modernity as such but to the perceived marginalization of religion (p. 230); to him, fundamentalism is “a mode of late-modern religiosity informed, decisively, by secularity” (p. 244).
Talal Asad clarifies some of the broader implications of the collection. Examining blasphemy claims that uncover the modes by which public discourse about religious freedom circulates, he deftly shows how understandings of citizenship and state power partly contribute to constructions of “religion” that pull in different directions, just as religions contribute to forms of political power that undermine them. Thus, Asad sees in debates about political religions an ambivalence about politics itself and “a pathological sense of danger whose final elimination is never possible” (p. 294). His coupling of affective intensities and religious defenses against secular critique is suggestive, and seems to gesture toward a next phase of conversation about the secular: the study of technologies of circulation and their emotional impact.
These essays explain and historicize the fuzzy religion/secular distinction, but more valuably engage in comparative studies that challenge conventional thinking about these key terms. Alongside important work being done in religious studies, history, and comparative law, Rethinking Secularism challenges readers to think in fresh ways about the interpretive “work” that taken-for-granted categories do (in shaping assumptions about religion and public life) and how these categories fit poorly in our attempts to make sense of secularism's challenges. While there is an occasional imprecision about the scope and quality of the political, beyond being simply an indeterminate context for these debates, this collection is essential for anyone interested in these and related subjects.
