Secularisms:
José Casanova
“The fundamental question is how
the boundaries are drawn and by
whom.”
Recap
• ‘The secular’ has been conceived in three
ways across its historical development
• This development is contingent on the
historical processes of western Europe
• A secular world is a particular way of
experiencing and conceiving of the universe
and the self
– Disenchantment
– The ‘buffered’ vs. the ‘porous’ self
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The Emergence of the Secular
(Taylor)
• Early religion sanctified the social order, such that it could be impossible to
conceive of oneself outside the social matrix, accepted the order of things.
– Embedded in both society and the cosmos
• Durkheim & Eliade
• It was celebrated by and for the community, and asked for wellbeing and
worldly flourishing
• Weber
– “Pagan” emphasis on human flourishing has much in common with modern
exclusive humanism
• Postaxial religions (esp. Buddhism and Christianity) reject the world in the
name of a higher truth
– The order of things is called into question and delegitimized
– Strong emphasis on individual thought and practice relative to preaxial religion
– But the forms of preaxial religion (communal rituals, identities, etc.) remained,
in tension with the implicit individualism of postaxial faiths (44-47)
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The Emergence of the Secular
(Taylor)
• In the long reforming process that took place in Latin Christendom,
individual practice was emphasized at the expense of ritual, which
was disregarded as “magical”
– “The ‘world’ itself would come to be seen as constituted by
individuals.”
– Efficacy of ritual comes to be inner: it doesn’t transform the world, it
leaves the participant with a changed inner state
• “Social life was to be purged of its connection to an enchanted
cosmos and all vestiges removed of the old complementaries
between spiritual and temporal, between a life devoted to God and
life in the ‘world,’ between order and the chaos on which it draws.”
– Social institutions come to be seen not as divinely ordained, but as
human constructs enacted by free actors (47-49)
– Secular good order comes to be viewed as the function of religion,
meaning that it becomes possible to imagine a purely nonreligious
world
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The Emergence of the Secular
(Taylor)
• Multiple interacting vectors: personal commitment and
disenchantment, reform and disembedding (individualism)
• “The crucial change here could be described as the
possibility of living within a purely immanent order; that is,
the possibility of really conceiving of, or imagining,
ourselves within such an order, one that could be
accounted for on its own terms, which thus leaves belief in
the transcendent as a kind of ‘optional extra’—something it
had never been before in any human society.”
– For this to happen, “there had to develop a social order,
sustained by a social imaginary that had a purely immanent
character, which we see arising, for instance, in the modern
forms of the public sphere, market economy, and citizen state.”
(50-51)
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The Secular, Secularization,
Secularism (Casanova)
• The secular
– “A central modern epistemic category”
– Differentiated from “the religious” and so mutually
constituted with it
• Secularization
– “actual or alleged empirical-historical patterns of
transformation and differentiation” of the religious
and secular spheres
• Secularism
– A range of views and ideologies, may become political
projects (54-55)
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Secularities
• “One may distinguish three different ways of being
secular:
– A) that of mere secularity, that is, the phenomenological
experience of living in a secular world and in a secular age,
where being religious may be a normal, viable option
– B) That of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, that is,
the phenomenological experience of living without religion
is a normal, taken fore granted condition, and
– C) That of secularist secularity, that is, the
phenomenological experience of not only being passively
free but also of actually having been liberated from
‘religion’ as a condition for human autonomy and human
flourishing.” (60)
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The Secular
• A residual category, what’s left when religion is subtracted
– But theories that posit this as a universal destiny attempt to
universalize the particular Western European experience
• Two kinds of Christian secularization:
– The first “aims to spiritualize the temporal and to bring the religious
life of perfection out of the monasteries into the secular world, so that
eveyone may become ‘a secular religious monk.’” and transcending
the secular/religious dichotomy by blurring the boundaries
• Typical of Reformation, especially the Puritans
– The second, almost opposite approach rigidly maintains the
dichotomy, but aims to push the religious “into the margins, aiming to
contain, privatize, and marginalize everything religious, while
excluding it from any visible presence in the secular public sphere”,
aiming to emancipate all secular spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical
control.”
• Typical of the French-Latin-Catholic cultural area, laicization and laïcité, the
basic subtraction narrative (56-57)
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But “secular” may more narrowly
mean “devoid of religion”
• Will modernity lead to universal irreligion as a default condition?
– There are the US & South Korea, “which are fully secular in the sense that they
function within the same immanent frame” yet their populations are also at
the same time conspicuously religious
– Modernization in non-Western societies is often accompanied by religious
revival. Thus, secularization, in the sense of “devoid of religion” is hardly an
inevitable or linear historical process
• So it is Western Europe that appears to be the exception. Why?
– According to Casanova, as a legacy of the specific political and social changes
of the Enlightenment, Europeans developed a “stadial consciousness”, “which
understands [the] anthropocentric change in the conditions of belief as a
process of maturation and growth, as a ‘coming of age’ and as progressive
emancipation.”
• The experience the disappearance of religion as a natural consequence of modernization
• In places where this ratcheting, “stadial consciousness” is less present, “processes of
modernization are unlikely to be accompanied by processes of religious decline.” (58-60)
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Secularizations
• Secularization is talked about like it’s one thing, but it can be
disaggregated into 3 related components:
– A) Differentiation of ‘secular’ spheres (politics, economy, science, etc.) from
religious norms & institutions
– B) Theory that religious beliefs & practices decline as modernization
progresses
– C) Theory of privatization of religion as a precondition of modern secular &
democratic politics
• In Europe, these 3 things went together, so they have been presumed to
be a single, teleological process
– But the US is a paradigmatic case of A, while B & C have not occurred. Indeed,
modernization there has often been accompanied by religious revivals
• Though the separation between church & state is much stricter in the US than it is in
most European societies, this does not imply the rigid separation of religion and politics
• Understanding that Europe is not a universal paradigm of secularization &
modernization lets us understand that there can exist multiple
modernities, even within the West, and certainly in the non-West (60-61)
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Secularizations
• To make broad statements about the relationship of ‘religion’ to
modernity is problematic because it’s difficult to say even what a
religion is
– Ironically, at the moment that scholars of religious studies begin to
critique the category, “it has become an indisputable global social
fact.”
• “While the religious/secular system of classification of reality may
have become globalized, what remains hotly disputed and debated
almost everywhere in the world today is how, where, and by whom
the proper boundaries between the religious and the secular ought
to be drawn.”
– Exactly as Europe’s secularization during modernization was
historically contingent, so will non-Western modernities “also be
particular and contingent refashionings and transformations of
existing civilizational patterns and social imaginaries mixed with
modern secular ones.” (62-64)
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Secularizations
• The fundamental question for any theory of secularization is how to
account for the differences between the US and Western Europe
– There is a need to “’provincialize Europe”. It is not the US that is the
exception in the modernization story
– Even in the West, “the modern ‘secular’ is by no means synonymous
with the ‘profane,’ nor is the ‘religious’ synonymous with the modern
‘sacred.’”
• The sacred remains identical with ‘the religious’ only in Durkheimian terms
(ex: human rights)
• “What we are repeatedly observing in the ‘glocal’ media of the
global public sphere can be best understood not so much as clashes
between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ but, rather, as violent
confrontations over ‘the sacred,’ over blasphemous and sacrilegious
acts and speeches, and over the profanation of religious and secular
taboos.” (64-66)
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Secularisms
• Secularism as statecraft doctrine
– “Some principle of separation between religious and political
authority [... This] neither presupposes or needs to entail any
‘theory,’ positive or negative, of ‘religion.’”
• If it does have such a theory, it moves into the arena of ideology
• Secularism as ideology
– Type 1: Philosophical-historical: “secularist theories of religion
grounded in some progressive stadial philosophies of history
that relegate religion to a superseded age.”
• Marx
– Type 2: Political: “theories that propose that religion is either an
irrational force or a nonrational form of discourse that should be
banished from the democratic public sphere” (66-67)
• Early Rawls, early Habermas
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Ideological Secularism
• Western Europeans
– tend to embrace a stadial view of history, in which to be modern
is “to leave religion behind, to emancipate oneself from religion,
overcoming the nonrational forms of being, thinking, and
feeling associated with religion.
– “It also means growing up, becoming mature, becoming
autonomous, thinking and acting on one’s own. It is precisely
this assumption that secular people think and act on their own
and are rational autonomous free agents, while religious people
somehow are unfree, heteronomous, nonrational agents that
constitutes the foundational premise of secularist ideology.”
(68)
• Americans, less influenced by the stadial view of history,
see little conflict between religion and modernity (68)
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Political Secularism
• Does not tend to make the same set of
assumptions about religion as ideological
secularism, and may even value it as a positive
force
– “But political secularism would like to contain
religion within its own differentiated ‘religious’
sphere and would like to maintain a secular public
democratic sphere.”
– “But the fundamental question is how the
boundaries are drawn and by whom.” (69)
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Political Secularism
• “Political secularism falls easily into secularist ideology
when the political arrogates for itself absolute, sovereign,
quasi-sacred, quasi-transcendent character or when the
secular arrogates for itself the mantle of rationality and
universality, while claiming that ‘religion’ is essentially
nonrational, particularistic, and intolerant (or illiberal)” and
thus a threat to democratic politics.
– In western Europe in 1998 (pre-9/11), more than 2/3 of every
country agreed that religion is “intolerant” and “creates
conflict”
• Ahistorical: none of the ideologies that wracked western Europe in the
20th century were religious
• This idea “has the function of positively differentiating modern secular
European from ‘the religious other’” (premodern, religious Europeans,
modern non-Europeans, esp. Muslims) (69-70)
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Religion & Democracy
• The First Amendment has two clauses: “no
establishment” and “free exercise” of religion
– Both of these are necessary for a coexistence of
religion and democracy. Where there is no
established (i.e. state, compulsory) church, politics
and religion can have a friendly, rather than hostile
separation of religion from democratic governance
• “Disestablishment becomes a necessary condition for
democracy whenever an established religion claims
monopoly over a state territory, impedes the free exercise of
religion, and undermines equal rights or access to all
citizens.” (71-72)
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Religion & Democracy
• “Ultimately, the question is whether
secularism is an end in itself, an ultimate
value, or a means to some other end, be it
democracy and equal citizenship or religious
(i.e., normative) pluralism.”
– If it is not an end in itself, “then it ought to be
constructed in such a way that it maximizes the
equal participation of all citizens in democratic
politics and the free exercise of religion in society.”
(72)
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