HISTORIA RELIGIONUM, 2, 2010, 115-33.
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL RESOURCES FOR BREAKING OPEN THE
SECULAR AND EXPLORING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN RELIGION AND NONRELIGION
KIM KNOTT
“Eurosecularity” constitutes the exceptional case in a world where religious belief and practice is
generally thought to be and represented as the norm1. The secular condition, secularism and the
associated non-religious ideological categories of humanism, agnosticism and atheism have
particular significance in contemporary Europe. Given that these concepts and their associated
fields of belief, practice and organization represent what might be called a ‘counter-field’ of
interest for scholars of religion, as well as an increasingly important arena in the politics of
religion, we ignore them at our peril. Interrogating their position vis-à-vis the state, the public
realm, the category of ‘religion’, European Christianity, the presence of other religions and new
forms of religiosity and spirituality will help scholars make sense of historical and contemporary
discourses about religion, debates about church-state settlement and the location of religion in
public life, and the nature and range of beliefs and values held by people in Europe. In this paper
I present some resources from the study of religion for the investigation of this counter-field, with
reference to examples of religious/secular conflict, in particular The Satanic Verses controversy
in the late 1980s. I examine what happens around the boundary between the religious and the
secular and make a case for a reconstitution of the object of our studies to include non-religion as
well as religion.
A major contemporary issue facing politicians, public servants and intellectuals in European
secular states is the relationship between secularity and religion. What place do religious
organizations have in the secular state, and what rights are afforded to their members? To what
extent should space be made for religion in state and other public affairs, in relation to law,
education, health and matters of governance and citizenship, or should it remain a private matter?
And which religions should be recognized or tolerated? Are some more conducive – whether
GRACE DAVIE, Europe: The exceptional case. Parameters of faith in the modern world, London, Darton, Longman
and Todd 2002; PETER BERGER, EFFIE FOKAS, GRACE DAVIE, Religious America, Secular Europe? A theme and
variations, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008.
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historically or ideologically – to secular political and legal contexts and therefore more
acceptable? Such questions have risen to prominence in contemporary Europe. Furthermore, as
articles and editorials in the European mass media show, many intellectuals and public
commentators express concern about what they perceive to be the “re-emergence of religion” and
the “crisis of secularism” and their implications for politics, culture and the public sphere.
Behind these questions and anxieties lies the nature of the relationship between secularity and
religion. From one perspective this is an historical matter that has been traced back to early
Christian concepts of spiritual and worldly time and vocation, and later elaborated in seventeenth
and eighteenth century European philosophical texts and political settlements2. From another, it is
a sociological one, in which the relationship between the religious and secular has been theorized
with reference to modernity and increasing social differentiation3. But it also concerns the
development and deployment of concepts of the “religious” and the “secular”, what they connote
and how they are related4. Are they separate and mutually exclusive categories, or interrelated?
To what extent are they informed by one another, and how far do the interests, values and beliefs
associated with each overlap?
The historical and philosophical contours and varieties of the relationship between religion and
secularism/s, and the rise and fall of one or the other have been given serious and detailed
consideration in recent years5. I shall not rehearse these discussions here, except to make the
point that contemporary secularisms, whilst often presented as ideologically counter or
antagonistic to religion (particularly by European commentators), in differing national contexts
CHARLES TAYLOR, Modes of secularism, in Secularism and its critics, edited by R. Bhargava, New Delhi, Oxford
University Press, 1998, pp. 31-53; TALAL ASAD, Formations of the secular. Christianity, Islam, modernity, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 2003; TIMOTHY FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity. A critical history of
religion and related categories, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2007.
3
JOSÉ CASANOVA, Public religions in the modern world, second edition, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994;
The desecularization of the world. The resurgence of religion in world politics, edited by Peter Berger, Grand
Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999; BERGER, FOKAS, DAVIE, Religious America, Secular Europe?; STEVE BRUCE, God is dead.
Secularization in the West, Oxford and Malden MA, Blackwell, 2002; DAVID MARTIN, On secularization. Towards a
revised general theory, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005.
4
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD, Encompassing religion, privatized religions and the invention of modern politics, in
Religion and the secular. Historical and colonial formations, edited by Timothy Fitzgerald, London and Oakville
CT, Equinox, 2007, pp. 211-240.
5
CASANOVA, Public religions in the modern world; Secularism and its critics; The desecularization of the world;
CHARLES TAYLOR, A secular age, Cambridge MA and London, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007; Religion
and the secular. Historical and colonial formations, edited by Timothy Fitzgerald, London and Oakville CT,
Equinox, 2007; Secularism, Religion and Multiculturalism, edited by Levey Geoffrey Brahm, Tariq Modood,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008; Secularisms, edited by Janet R. Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Durham
NC, Duke University Press, 2008; Varieties of secularism in a secular age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan
Vanantwerpen, Graig Calhoun, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2010.
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are seen as either struggling with or making space for – even serving – religion. It seems clear
that, in the US and Indian contexts, religious secularists dominate, whereas those whose
secularism is characterized by atheist or liberal humanist beliefs are dominant in Europe. My aim
here is not to examine the niceties of these complex, varied and important relationships, but to
consider rather the conceptual and categorical relationship between the “religious” and the
“secular”, the boundary which separates them, and key resources in the study of religion that are
available for examining their relationship. In particular, I shall refer to four approaches:
historical/conceptual (Fitzgerald), spatial/discursive (Knott), cognitive/cultural (Anttonen) and
naturalistic (Taves). These are all tools for understanding more about how we see imagine,
define, classify and represent religion and its other (whether we call that non-religion or the
secular), tools that, once employed, might challenge the categories we use and the anxieties they
induce. They do not treat religious and secular phenomena per se; and certainly they do not help
us to evaluate whether religion is actually re-emerging or secularism in crisis. They deal instead
with concepts, discourse and representations, but before I consider them directly it is imperative
to mention – before setting it aside – perhaps the most well known and influential instrument of
all for explaining the relationship between the religious and the secular, the secularization thesis.
In crude summary, this thesis – among whose classical exponents were Wilson and Bruce6, with
Martin, Berger and Casanova as engaged critics – states that, in modernity, we have witnessed
the structural separation of religion from western society’s other significant institutions (politics,
the economy, science, education etc). We have seen its privatisation and decline, in terms of
social significance7. Martin refers to the dominance of this sociological account as «the
undisputed paradigm of secularization», in which modernity was characterized «as a scenario in
which mankind shifted from the religious mode to the secular»8. It is against the backdrop of this
widely accepted paradigm that religion is now held by some to be re-emerging or becoming more
visible, and the political doctrine that informed public institutions during this period of
separation, privatisation and decline – secularism – is now thought to be in crisis. This rise and
fall account of the fate of religion in western society has been repeatedly rehearsed, by
sociologists, social commentators and even theologians, as incontrovertible fact. Such has been
BRYAN WILSON, Contemporary transformations in religion, London, Oxford University Press, 1976; ID., Religion
in sociological perspective, London, Oxford University Press, 1982.
7
See Martin on the «standard model» of secularization: MARTIN, On secularization, pp. 124-128.
8
Ibi, p. 18.
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the dominance of the thesis that even dissenting views have had to be expressed in relation to it,
and within its terms.
Sociologists, historians, political philosophers and anthropologists writing about religion and
modernity have, of course, held varying views about the changing relationship between the
religious and the secular, between religion and society, and religion and politics; irrespective of
the nature of their views, they have nevertheless found expression against the backdrop of
secularization’s undisputed paradigm. Whilst some would no doubt agree with the idea that
religion is re-emerging or becoming more visible, others would query assumptions about the
extent of pre-modern religiosity, progressive rationalization and/or the extent or reach of
secularization. Generally, though, these scholars have accepted and worked with substantive
notions of religion, its secular other, and secularization, applying these to empirical groups and
institutions, events and historical processes, and thus reinforcing the boundary between them 9.
Whilst I do not want to disown this perspective as such, I want to distinguish here between this
type of approach, which treats the religious and the secular substantively as above, and a second
type, which treats them nominally, focusing instead on how the concepts “religious” and
“secular” have been developed and deployed as a entry point for understanding more about
social, political and cultural beliefs, values, practices and organization. This second type of
approach does not treat discourse for its own sake but for what it suggests about deeper
movements, patterns and anxieties.
Many scholars from beyond sociology (and indeed some social theorists within it10) would
challenge this substantive starting point, stressing that “religion” is not a natural or primary
concept, but rather a second-order concept, a socially and discursively constructed category
which evolved from early Christian origins and acquired much of its contemporary character in
the crucible of political philosophy in seventeenth century Europe11. It was at this time that the
Although see Brown (Callum Brown The death of Christian Britain. Understanding secularization 1800-2000,
London and New York, Routledge, 2001) on the history of British Christianity, and Pecora (Vincent P. Pecora,
Secularization and cultural criticism. Religion, nation, and modernity, Chicago and London, Chicago of University
Press, 2006) on secularization and cultural criticism, both of whom examine narratives of secularization.
10
JAMES A. BECKFORD, The politics of defining religion in secular society. From a taken-for-granted institution to a
contested resource, in «Studies in the History of Religions», LXXXIV, 1999, pp. 23-40.
11
JOHN BOSSY, Some elementary forms of Durkheim, «Past and Present », XCV, 1982, pp. 3-18; PETER HARRISON,
“Religion” and the religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; RUSSELL
T. MCCUTCHEON, Manufacturing religion. The discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia,
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1997; TIMOTHY FITZGERALD, The Ideology of Religious Studies,
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2000; ID., Discourses on civility and barbarity.
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possibility arose of designating an institutional sphere of belief, practice, tradition and experience
separate from the state and its political doctrine, of distinguishing “religion” from other domains,
and, indeed of differentiating different conceptions of the world both within and beyond
Christianity (hence “religions”). It is to this approach to the formation of categories at the heart of
the study of religion that I now turn, moving away from the paradigm of social differentiation,
privatization and decline towards an examination of conceptual, cognitive, spatial and naturalistic
boundaries and distinctions.
1. The formation and relationship of the “religious” and the “secular”: A historical/conceptual
approach
Among scholars writing on the religious and the secular we find a variety of models of the
religious/secular relationship, some showing the progressive decline in social significance of one
with the rise of the other (see above), and others their historical imbrication from early
Christianity to today12. Some scholars have presented religions and secularisms as distinctive
ideological equivalents within a liberal modernist context13. Bossy and Fitzgerald identify
“religion” and “the secular” as mutually-conditioned, oppositional concepts which emerge, with
others such as “economics” and “politics”, in the context of western Enlightenment and
colonialist discourse14, and it is to this approach in particular that I now turn.
Writing of the transformation of manners in medieval and early modern Europe, Jorge Arditi
suggested that, «the lines separating religion from other spheres of practice whose boundaries
today we take for granted did not exist, and therefore the fusion between the religious and those
other spheres was complete»15. Even where there was an apparent difference, for example
RICHARD WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy. Liberalism, censorship and “The satanic verses”, Southwold,
Orwell Press, 1990; Secularism and its critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, New Delhi, Oxford University Press,
1998; CASANOVA, Public religions in the modern world; GRACE M. JANTZEN, Becoming divine. Towards a feminist
philosophy of religion, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998; TAYLOR, Modes of secularism; ID., A
secular age;
13
D.O. CONKLE, Secular fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and the search for truth in contemporary
America, in «Journal of law and religion», XII, 1995-1996, 2, pp. 337-370; TALAL ASAD, Formations of the secular.
Cf. Powers of the secular modern. Talal Asad and his interlocutors, edited by Scott David, Charles Hirschkind,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006.
14
BOSSY, Some elementary forms of Durkheim; FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity; ID,
Encompassing religion.
15
JORGE ARDITI, A geneaology of manners. Transformations of social relations in France and England from the
fourteenth to the eighteenth century, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 29.
12
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between religion and magic, there was in fact epistemological congruence16. More recently,
Charles Taylor has suggested that confessional and ideological acts of separation only became
possible with what he refers to as the «great disembedding» of the modern social imaginary17:
«[I]n earlier societies this inability to imagine the self outside of a particular context extended to
membership of our society in its essential order. That this is no longer so with us… is a measure
of our disembedding»18. This process has allowed us to imagine other social and religious
possibilities, and to ask «What if…?» questions. Conceiving of a separate sphere of non-religion,
for example, or an alternative religious confession, or an individual spiritual trajectory beyond the
dominant religious order became possible in a way that it had not been previously.
With a concern for categories and their historical emergence rather than the changing nature of
the religious landscape per se, Timothy Fitzgerald in his book and edited collection, both from
2007, also refers to this shift from an undifferentiated socio-religious worldview to separate and
bounded conceptual domains of “religion” and the “secular”19. In his examination of the
seventeenth century contributions of John Locke and William Penn, he stresses the importance of
what he refers to as «a profound reconfiguration of the dominant world-view of what I call
encompassing religion», the idea that «nothing exists or could exist» outside «Christian Truth»20.
This reconfiguration constituted an alternative privatised piety that made space for the idea of a
secular domain21, necessary for the establishment of a polity suitable for the conduct of global
trade, colonial development, and political and religious toleration. Following the earlier work of
John Bossy22, Fitzgerald writes,
The conceptualization of “religion” and “religions” in the modern sense of private faith, or the related sense of
personal adherence to a soteriological doctrine of God, was needed for the representation of the world as a secular,
neutral, factual, comprehensively quantifiable realm whose natural laws can be discovered by scientific rationality,
and whose central human activity is a distinct “non-religious” sphere or domain called “politics” or “political
economy”. By “non-religious” I do not necessarily mean ‘hostile to religion’, but, more often, neutral towards
religion, tolerant of religion […] The crucial logic is separation into two essentially different domains 23.
Ibi, p. 31.
TAYLOR, A secular age, pp. 147-158.
18
Ibi, p. 149.
19
FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity; ID., Introduction, in Religion and the secular. Historical and
colonial formations, edited by Timothy Fitzgerald, London and Oakville, CT, Equinox, 2007, pp. 1-24; ID.,
Encompassing religion.
20
FITZGERALD, Encompassing religion, pp. 218-219; ID., Discourses on civility and barbarity.
21
FITZGERALD, Encompassing religion, p. 234.
22
BOSSY, Some elementary forms of Durkheim.
23
FITZGERALD, Introduction, p. 6.
16
17
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The distinction between the two is unstable, in so far as it changes as the meanings of “religion”
and the “secular” are repeatedly contested24. Of the early nineteenth century, for example,
Fitzgerald writes that older Christian uses of “religious” and “secular” run alongside and compete
with the more recently emerging ideological construction of the “non-religious” secular25. What
is clear, however, is that the two spheres are co-produced. The ‘invention’ of one leads to the coinvention of the other26.
The now taken-for-granted boundaries – between “religion” and “non-religion”, “religion” and
the “secular”, and “religion” and “politics” – the discursive formation of which Fitzgerald
interrogates, continue to be repeatedly reproduced today in controversies about religious and
secular matters (as my later example will show), and, in the process, the concepts of “religion”,
“non-religion” and the “secular”, and their ostensible form and content, are continually reinstated
and reworked. This is evident, for example, in public – particularly legal – cases involving
religious organisations and spiritual matters27. Studies of such cases have tended to focus to date
on how ‘religion’ is defined, presented and limited by secular officials with little discussion so far
of the consequent production of the non-religious “secular”. That such a space is produced is not
in question, but its definition and contents in current discourse need more thorough investigation.
Through his reading of “religion” and the “secular”, but also “society”, “politics” and the
“economy” in early modern political, philosophical and pietistic writings, Fitzgerald provides us
with an analytical strategy to chart the more recent historical development of these concepts, their
usage and relationship, the discursive development and isolation of “religion” as a particular
cultural, social and political formation and of its other. Such an analysis reveals how, in different
periods, in the context of changing political and religious formations, religion’s other – the
category of non-religion – metamorphosed, appearing discursively in the guises of “superstition”,
the “profane”, the “secular”, and “secularism”.
2. The formation and relationship of the “religious” and the “secular”: A spatial/discursive
approach
Ibi, pp. 7-8.
Ibi, p. 8.
26
FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity, p. 99.
27
BECKFORD, The politics of defining religion in secular society; MALORY NYE, Multiculturalism and minority
religions in Britain. Krishna Consciousness, religious freedom, and the politics of location, Richmond, Curzon,
2001; RICHARD LEE, Custody disputes and alternative religions in the courts of England and Wales, in «Journal of
contemporary religion», XXIII, 2008, 1, pp. 63-76.
24
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Fitzgerald’s aim in the body of work discussed above was to show the way in which those who
have focused on “religion” without reference to its discursive co-construction with other terms
have produced an inaccurate and bounded conceptualization which has limited our understanding
of western culture and had a wider impact through the process of colonialization. By «retelling
the story of the modern category of generic religion»28, he has sought to re-engage religious
studies with other disciplines and the study of “religion” with that of other domains, such as
“politics” and “economics”. Moving now to the second resource for breaking open the secular, I
turn to the example of my own work. Seeking to develop a methodological framework for
exploring the location of religion in ostensibly secular contexts, in my 2005 book, in addition to
developing a spatial approach, I proposed a dialectical field of religious and secular knowledgepower relations29. In drawing up this field I argued for the discursive co-relationship and
engagement between positions (“religious”, “secular” and “postsecular”) that are generally
presented as antithetical or oppositional, and often as constitutionally different.
Secular
Religious
undecided, agnostic,
those wishing to bring
opposing positions
together
Post-secular
Struggles between camps
Struggles within camps
Figure 1: The religious/secular field and its force relationships
FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity, p. 5.
KIM KNOTT, The location of religion. A spatial analysis, London and Oakville CT, Equinox, 2005, pp. 71-77 and
124-126; cf. EAD., The case of the left hand. The location of religion in an everyday text, in Reading religion in text
and context. Reflections of faith and practice in religious materials, edited by E. Arweck, P. Collins, Aldershot,
Ashgate, 2006, pp. 169-184; EAD., Cutting through the postsecular city. A spatial interrogation, in Exploring the
postsecular. The religious, the political, the urban, edited by J. Beaumont, A. L. Molendijk, C. Jedan, Leiden, Brill,
in press.
28
29
8
I suggested the field to be a site of struggle in which “religious”, “secular” and what I referred to
as “post-secular” positions were contested. Within it were included not only confessional
exponents, e.g. ardent theists or secularists, but also those in the middle ground (undecided or
deliberately agnostic) as well as those who comment upon the field and its relations (such as
secularization theorists). There is no disinterested, external position, no “bird’s eye view”.
The academy and its representatives, like those in the media and other professions, indeed like confessors of all
kinds, are situated within the field, both historically and in terms of the contemporary cultural order. The field of the
“religious” and “secular” is one in which knowledge-power is expressed and contested, and in which controversies
between positions (either within a single camp or across different camps) reveal some of the deeply held views and
values which constitute the field and mark out the territorial areas and lines of engagement within it. Investigating
such controversies helps to uncover some of the unspoken norms of late-modernity regarding the “religious” and
“secular”30.
Modelling religious and secular positions and their relations in this way not only built on their
historical and discursive inter-relationship31, but reflected the representation of struggle and
warfare repeatedly reiterated in religious and secularist tracts, and in academic and media
commentary on such positions. Furthermore, the model expressed relations between the religious
and secular in terms of knowledge-power32. Foucault, for example, referred to, «… a strategy of
struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not
finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of
possible reversal»33.
Representing this relationship as a strategy of struggle has the effect of setting the religious and
the secular apart from one another, thus resisting the view voiced by some commentators that the
latter is merely a part of or subsumed within the former, or that it is just an historical
development of it, but rather that the concepts – or “forces” – are linked in a categorical and
dialectical relationship.
It has the virtue of presenting the boundaries between the various
positions, which are discursively constructed, negotiated and policed by those on different sides
KNOTT, The location of religion, p. 125.
TAYLOR, Modes of secularism; FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity.
32
Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-77, by Michel Foucault, edited by Gordon Colin,
Hemel Hempstead, Herts, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980; MICHEL FOUCAULT, The subject and power, in Michel
Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H.L. Dreyfus, P. Rabinow, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 208-226; Religion and culture. Michel Foucault, edited by Jeremy R. Carrette, New York,
Routledge, 1999; JEREMY R. CARRETTE, Foucault and religion. Spiritual corporality and political spirituality,
London and New York, Routledge, 2000.
33
FOUCAULT, The subject and power, p. 225.
30
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(and transgressed, for example, by those of a post-secular religious persuasion), as spaces which
then become available for interrogation. Chimerical as such boundaries are – to people of some
persuasions appearing substantial and impenetrable, to others, porous and insubstantial – these
boundaries come into focus and present themselves for investigation on the occasion of public
controversies such as recent debates and legal cases in the Netherlands, France and the UK on
liberal and religious rights, the Danish cartoons crisis of 2006 or The Satanic Verses controversy
of 1989/9034.
This knowledge-power field is a scholarly model of the relationship between the religious and the
secular, an etic model. However, on the ground (within the field), where actual interactions
occur, other emic or vernacular models are at work, represented and expounded by those who
occupy particular field positions. Some religious people, for example, discursively construct and
police an impenetrable boundary between their own kind and secular outsiders. A similarly hard
boundary, containing religion and separating it from the world around it is often drawn by
secularists – such as those who support the UK’s National Secular Society35 or subscribe to the
views expressed on the website “Secular Sites”36 – who firmly believe that religion should be
confined to the private domain and set apart from affairs of state, education and the law.
Those of a more moderate or progressive religious or secularist persuasion model the boundary as
porous and capable of being crossed, with those neighbours on the other side to be engaged in
matters of mutual interest37. Reform Jews provide one example of a group espousing such a view:
«We welcome. We count people in. We solve problems rather than create them. We seek to open
doors, not to erect barriers»38. Many liberal Anglicans in the UK (“Changing Attitude”39) and
those in the British Humanist Association40 also hold such views. These boundaries are subject to
change, often lying dormant until a situation arises that brings insider/outsider relationships into
question (such as the “Atheist bus” advertising campaign in the UK, in January 2009).
See below; see also BECKFORD, The politics of defining religion in secular society; NYE, Multiculturalism and
minority religions in Britain; LEE, Custody disputes; KNOTT, Cutting through the postsecular city.
35
National Secular Society, http://www.secularism.org.uk/about.html, accessed 20 April 2010.
36
Secular Sites, http://www.secularsites.freeuk.com/, accessed 20 April 2010.
37
See GORDON LYNCH, New spirituality. An introduction to belief beyond religion, London, I. B. Tauris, 2007, pp.
82-97.
38
TONY BAYFIELD, Our beliefs. The movement for Reform Judaism, 2006, http://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/aboutus.html, accessed 29 February 2008.
39
Changing Attitude, http://www.changingattitude.org.uk/home/home.asp, accessed 20 April 2010.
40
British Humanist Association, http://www.humanism.org.uk/about, accessed 20 April 2010.
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This spatial/discursive model for denoting relations between “religious”, “secular” and
“postsecular” positions, and for examining the volatile boundaries between them and the
occasions when such boundaries become live and dangerous41, in addition to building on
Fitzgerald’s historical/categorical approach to the co-construction of “religion” and “nonreligion” (in its various guises), proposes that “religion”/the “religious” is not a domain that is
separable from other ideological territories, despite appearances to that effect. I shall return to
this issue after presenting two additional and related resources that can be used to break open the
secular and interrogate the religion/non-religion boundary.
3. The “sacred” and the religion/non-religion boundary: A cognitive/cultural approach
Whilst
the
spatial/discursive
model
separates
different
camps
strategically
(religious/secular/postsecular) in order to understand their discursive formation, the
cultural/cognitive one could be said to offer a tool for re-aggregating them, for making us
reconsider the boundary between them.
In his essay on the concept “sacred”, Veikko Anttonen42 notes that the notion of the “sacred”
does not respect the religion/non-religion boundary43, but distinguishes instead on the basis of
negotiability:
The sacred is a special quality in individual and collective systems of meaning. In religious thinking it
has been used as an attribute of situations and circumstances which have some reference to the culturespecific conception of the category of God, or, in non-theological contexts, to some supreme principle
of life such as love, freedom, equality or justice. Sacrality is employed as a category-boundary to set
things with non-negotiable value apart from things whose value is based on continuous transactions…
People participate in sacred-making activities and processes of signification according to paradigms
given by the belief systems to which they are committed, whether they be religious, national or
ideological44.
KNOTT, The location of religion; EAD., The case of the left hand. The location of religion in an everyday text;
EAD., Cutting through the postsecular city.
42
VEIKKO ANTTONEN, Sacred, in Guide to the study of religion, edited by W. Braun, R.T. McCutcheon, London,
Cassell, 2000, pp. 271- 282.
43
ÉMILE DURKHEIM [1912], The Elementary forms of the religious life, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1976, pp.
36-37; cf. WILLIAM PADEN, Before “the sacred” became theological. Rereading the Durkheimian legacy, in
«Method and theory in the study of religion», III, 1991, 10, pp. 10-23; ID., Interpreting the sacred. Ways of viewing
religion, Boston, Beacon Press, 1992; TERENCE THOMAS, “The sacred” as a viable concept in the contemporary
study of religions, in Religion. Empirical studies, edited by S. Sutcliffe, Aldershot and Burlington VT, Ashgate,
2004, pp. 47-66.
44
ANTTONEN, Sacred, pp. 280-281.
41
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As he suggests, «[the sacred] is not a uniquely religious category, although its religious meanings
and the history of its use dominate popular as well as scholarly discourse»45. As Anttonen
employs it, “sacred” is a cognitive category which both separates and binds, and, indeed, from his
historical perspective Fitzgerald agrees: «There is a historically valid understanding of the
sacred-profane dichotomy […] which cuts across the modern religion-secular dichotomy and
consequently subverts it»46. Sacred-making activity, whatever its ideological origin, is that
which sets things apart, creating a place for those things of supreme value and separating them
out from profane or impure things that are negotiable or may contaminate. The process of
representing and experiencing the force of that which is set apart is a collective one47 engaged in
by people of both religious and non-religious persuasions, and from time to time uniting
individuals across the religion/non-religion boundary on matters of ultimate significance
(ironically, in English, we refer to such liaisons as “unholy alliances”).
If we now represent the religious/secular dialectical field to which I referred earlier with
reference to the “sacred” as conceptualised by Anttonen, the diagram (fig. 2) conveys the idea
that “sacred” attributions are made irrespective of conventional discursive boundaries, and thus
that data for an examination of that which is held to be sacred and of the process of sacralization
can be found anywhere in the field (though with specific reference to things set apart).
Secular
Religious
“sacred”
attributions
Post-secular
Figure 2: The religious/secular field and attributions of the “sacred”
Ibi, p. 274.
FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity, p. 108.
47
DURKHEIM [1912], The Elementary forms of the religious life, pp. 45-47 and 172.
45
46
12
Whilst attributions of the “sacred” do not respect the religious/secular boundary – in so far as
they appear on either side of it – they are indeed constituted by other boundaries, those of a
categorical nature, particularly related to gender and sexuality, life/death, human/animal. The
category boundaries that become the focus of sacred-making activities and discourse have the
potential to erupt as sites of struggle but, like the religion/secular boundary we have just
considered, for much of the time lie dormant and, as such, invisible. Routinely taken-for-granted,
they have the potential to shock us with their capacity to become the focus of deep-seated
principles and interests and with their power to divide opinion. We can no doubt all think of
recent instances in our own national contexts where this is the case, ethical and political debates
for example – to which I’ll return later.
According to Anttonen – and here we come on to the cultural aspect of this cognitive/cultural
resource – key terms and figures of speech, as well as the semantic memory referenced in the
landscape, provide clues to people’s cognitive responses to the apprehension of significant
boundaries.
Terms denoting the “sacred” in various languages can be viewed as linguistic indices, the semantic
scope of which has varied in time according to the systems of meanings whereby distinctions between
persons, animals, things, objects, phenomena, topographical points in the landscape, events,
experiences and so forth are made48.
In his work on the Baltic sea region49, it was the terms pyhä and hiisi that provided a rich seam of
data for examining the changing territory of the ‘sacred’ in prehistoric folk and early Christian
contexts.
More recently, Gordon Lynch, in his account of the «new spirituality»50, refers to contemporary
ideological fractures between a variety of religious groups. He notes, for example, the deepening
of liberal and conservative Christian differences «as a result of contentious debates focusing on
the ordination of women and… same-sex relationships»51, thus identifying two categorical
boundaries (associated with gender and sexuality) which have recently become sites of sacred
ANTTONEN, Sacred, p. 280.
VEIKKO ANTTONEN, Rethinking the sacred. The notions of “human body” and “territory” in conceptualizing
religion, in The sacred and its scholars. Comparative religious methodologies for the study of primary religious
data, edited by T.A. Idinopulos, E.A. Yonan, Leiden, Brill, 1996, pp. 36-64.
50
LYNCH, New spirituality.
51
Ibi, p. 18.
48
49
13
concern within Christian circles52. Later Lynch signals a different set of problematic boundary
relations, this time between the advocates of progressive spirituality and their ‘others’ –
patriarchal religion and arid secularism – both of which are considered to be authoritarian and
exploitative53. Gender and the sacrality of nature constitute the pressure points at issue here.
Although Lynch does not refer explicitly to attributions of the “sacred”, he does draw attention to
controversies and debates between opponents on matters of principle (see Taves on “specialness”
below). As I suggested earlier, it is in such contests that non-negotiable values and interests are
fought out and where, on many occasions, we see evidence of the language of the sacred.
Lynch’s references are to religious positions of various kinds, to which we are accustomed to link
discourse and practice associated with the sacred. In recent years, I have begun to examine
explicitly non-religious positions in which matters of sacred significance are exposed, in relation
to health, education and media, all priorities of the secular modernist agenda of the nation state.
In addition to breaking open and fleshing out the nature of contemporary secularity, the aim has
been to identify controversies in which matters of principle and value are “at stake”, for example
– in the case of medical practice – in the doctor-patient relationship and complementary and
alternative medicine54. Here we find that it is not only the term “sacred” but the wider vocabulary
of religious terms that is evoked, often metaphorically, to signal those things that are sacrosanct
and set apart55. In current research on media portrayals of religion, we have coined the term
“secular sacred” to refer to non-negotiable matters of belief and value that do not derive from
formally religious sources but that occur within the domain of “non-religion”.
4. Specialness: A naturalistic “building blocks” approach
This “wider vocabulary” does, however, raise the question of the adequacy of the term ‘sacred’
for capturing the natural language used with reference to that which is “set apart” and held to be
non-negotiable, and thus for re-engaging the territories on either side of the religion/non-religion
boundary. The trouble with the term “sacred” (and related terms in other languages) is that it is
ANTTONEN, Sacred, p. 277.
LYNCH, New spirituality, pp. 63-64.
54
KIM KNOTT, MYFANWY FRANKS, Secular values and the location of religion. A spatial analysis of an English
medical centre, in «Health and place», XIII, 2007, 1, pp. 224-237; KIM KNOTT, Religion, values and knowledgepower in contemporary secular spaces, in Exercising Power. The Role of Religions in Concord and Conflict, edited
by T. Ahlbäck, Åbo, Donner Institute, 2007, pp. 160-181.
55
KNOTT, FRANKS, Secular values and the location of religion, p. 231; KNOTT, Religion, values and knowledgepower, pp. 161-162; KNOTT, The location of religion, pp. 155-163.
52
53
14
commonly associated with religion, even at times used interchangeably with it, thus rendering it
problematic for non-religious application. For some scholars, “sacred” is mired with explicitly
religious connotations and usages, despite its formal neutrality as a technical term within
anthropology and its etymology and definition (which differ to those of “religion”).
In her recent work, Ann Taves – whilst acknowledging Durkheim’s conception that the “sacred”
and related beliefs and rites are separable from religions56 – prefers a different term. Noting his
repeated use of the term “special”, she suggests that «Durkheim’s concept of “sacred things as
things set apart and forbidden” can be used to generate a generic second-order concept of
“specialness” if care is taken to avoid certain pitfalls»57. This concept provides «a larger, more
encompassing framework»58 of meaning-making which can incorporate those things,
experiences, beliefs and values deemed by people to be “religious”, but also those deemed
“spiritual”, “magical”, and indeed “special” in a wide variety of ways. The framework of
“specialness” provides the basis for Taves’s examination of why and how people singularize
things:
We can then identify marks of specialness (that set things apart in various ways), things that are often
considered special (ideal things and anomalous things, including anomalous beings), and the ways in
which simple ascriptions of specialness can be taken up into more complex formations59.
Adopting the more general term of “specialness”, Taves attempts to sidestep entrenched debates
about both the category “religion”60, and substantive/sui generis v. nominal/discursive first order
and second order uses of terms (including “religion” and “sacred”). The term “specialness”
requires no additional explanation or unpacking on either side of the religion/secular boundary,
provides a broad framework in which various emic terms can be situated and, importantly, can be
internally subdivided into different types, modes and methods. Furthermore,
[The term “special”] identifies a large conceptual domain in which religion-like concepts play an
important but not definitive role… Whether people consider a special thing as (say) “religious”,
“mystical”, “magical”, “superstitious”, “spiritual”, “ideological”, or “secular” will depend on the
ANN TAVES, Religious Experience Reconsidered. A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and other
special Things, Princeton-Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 26.
57
Ibi, p. 27.
58
Ibi, p. 29.
59
Ibi, p. 12.
60
Ibi, pp. 22-26 and 165.
56
15
preexisting systems of belief and practice, the web of concepts relating to specialness, and the way that
people position themselves in a given context61.
Scholars of religion clearly have no franchise on “specialness”, as Taves concedes, but the term
does have the potential to provide a bridge to other social science and humanities disciplines62.
The approaches offered by Anttonen and Taves have much in common in so far as both arise
from an engagement with Durkheim’s attempt to distinguish those things set apart and forbidden
from ordinary things; both work across the boundary – reified in the study of religions – between
religion and non-religion. In doing so, they call the boundary into question, offering tools that
enable us to revise the object of our study and reconsider what we have to offer in the wider
academy (as scholars of the “sacred” or “specialness” and the beliefs, values and practices
associated with them). The approaches discussed earlier, of Fitzgerald and Knott, which deal
explicitly with the formation of “religion” and its other/s – “non-religion” and its various guises,
including the “secular” and “postsecular” – focus intentionally on discursive struggles which
produce difference and often harden boundaries. The two types of approaches complement one
another in offering an analysis of the formation and constitution of the category of “non-religion”
which may then be reconnected to “religion” under the auspices of an encompassing framework
of either the “sacred” or “specialness” and through its associated modes of belief, practice and
values.
How then might these resources work in practice, in the analysis of actual cases, for breaking
open the secular and exploring the boundary between religion and non-religion? Arguably, a
fruitful source of examples can be found in the media where public controversies are often aired
that reveal opposing but non-negotiable values and principles. I will conclude this discussion then
with an analysis of the newspaper and magazine coverage of the infamous “Satanic Verses
Affair”, the controversy around Salman Rushdie’s novel which took place between September
1988 and the spring of 1990 in which attention was drawn repeatedly to the boundary between
the religious and the secular, and the language of the “sacred” and/or “specialness” was
61
62
Ibi, pp. 162-163.
Ibi, p. 165.
16
frequently invoked.63
As we shall see, such attributions were made on either side of the
controversy. I shall begin with a brief contextual account of the events that took place64.
Exploring the boundary between religion and non-religion: The Satanic Verses controversy
The Satanic Verses65 was published as a hardback book by Viking Press in September 1988.66
Immediately, it attracted criticism from Muslims around the world who called for its withdrawal
(and it was indeed banned in India and South Africa in October and November respectively). In
Britain, pleas were made by Muslims directly to the publisher and through the media from
October of that year, first for a UK ban and later for Viking Penguin to desist from publishing the
book in paperback. Strength of feeling was such that Muslims in various northern English cities
protested publicly, and, in Bolton and Bradford, this was accompanied by book-burnings in
October 1988 and January 1989 respectively67. Major demonstrations were held in London in
February and March, with a petition submitted to the publisher. On 14 February, Ayatollah
Khomeini, the Iranian president, issued a fatwa for the death of Salman Rushdie. The following
day, a writers’ delegation demonstrated its support for the author outside 10 Downing Street,
London. An apology was made by Rushdie, who was by then in hiding, on 18 February, but this
was rejected by Khomeini who confirmed the death sentence. Over the next year, as a result of
the book’s publication, Muslims died in demonstrations and shootings in several countries (but
not the UK), bookshops were bombed, Iran and Britain severed diplomatic ties, and community
relations were severely damaged.
This is a selective and informal qualitative exercise not a comprehensive quantitative content analysis. Newspaper
coverage of the controversy was not confined to Britain, with extensive reporting in India, Pakistan, Iran, the USA
and elsewhere, but the references made here are solely to articles and letters in newspapers and magazines published
or widely accessed in Britain (such as The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman
and the Muslim magazine, Impact International). This analysis was published in Finnish in KIM KNOTT, “Pyhä”
uskonnollisen ja maallisen välisen rajan haastavana kategoriana, in Pyhä. Raja, kielto ja arvo kansanomaisessa
uskonnossa [Sacred. Boundary, Prohibition and Value in Popular Religion], edited by T. Mahlamaäki, I. Pyysiäinen,
T. Taira, Helsinki, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura [Finnish Literature Society], 2008, pp. 164-188.
64
The Rushdie file, edited by Lisa Appignanesi, Sarah Maitland, London, Fourth Estate, 1989, pp. IX-X; CLINTON
BENNETT, Editorial. The Rushdie affair. Some underlying issues, in «Discernment. A Christian journal of interreligious encounter», IV, 1990, 2, pp. 3-11 and pp. 42-43.
65
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The satanic verses, London, Viking Penguin, 1988.
66
For summaries of the book’s contents in the context of the controversy and for Rushdie’s defence, see references
to Ruthven (1990), Bennett (1990), Appignanesi and Maitland (1989) and ‘Art or literary terrorism?’ in Akhtar
(1989), Rushdie (1990a, 1990b), in preceding and following footnotes.
67
For a summary of «the causes of Muslim dissent», see SHOAIB QURESHI, JAVED KHAN, The politics of satanic
verses. Unmasking western attitudes, Leicester, Muslim Community Studies Institute, 1989 and SHABBIR AKHTAR,
Be careful with Muhammad! The Salman Rushdie affair, London, Bellew Publishing, 1989.
63
17
As events unfolded it became clear that the seeds of the controversy were firmly set, with a
majority of Muslims – particularly those from a South Asian background – shamed and outraged
at the obscene references in Rushdie’s novel to Muhammad (in the fictional figure of
“Mahound”). The tone of Muslim comment signalled that a boundary had been violated and
feelings deeply injured. The earliest collective response from Muslims in Britain was penned by
Dr Mughram al-Ghamdi on behalf of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs who wrote of
it as a blasphemous work of «sacrilege» against Islam and the prophet, and referred to the
«enormous injury to the feelings and sensibilities of the Muslim community»68, a sentiment
echoed in Impact International, a Muslim magazine, by M. Faruqi (28 October-10 November
1988)69. These views were reiterated by the Islamic Defence Council who wrote on behalf of the
British Muslim community to the publisher in January 1989 giving examples of the sacrilegious
content of the novel and requesting its withdrawal and an apology to Muslims70. The level and
nature of the offence was made clear by Zaki Badawi, a liberal Muslim leader, who told The
Guardian newspaper (27 February 1989) that «What he [Rushdie] has written is far worse to
Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter»71. Another moderate Muslim, who lectured on
the moral dilemmas of the Rushdie affair in 1989 and was widely quoted by the British press,
suggested that it was akin to a public reading of a poem about the private parts of one’s parents,
or to the comparative blasphemy of the portrayal of «the Virgin Mary as a prostitute, and Jesus as
the son of one of her sexual clients»72. The extent of the blasphemy was such that one Muslim
commentator, Shabbir Akhtar, suggested in The Guardian that «any Muslim who fails to be
offended by Rushdie’s book ceases […] to be a Muslim. The Satanic Verses has become a
litmus-paper test for distinguishing faith from rejection»73 (27 February 1989). The book itself
was seen to constitute the boundary between Muslims, however notional the practice of their
faith, and non-Muslims (and thus religion and non-religion).
68
The Rushdie file, p. 59.
M. FARUQI, Article, «Impact International», 28 October-10 November 1988.
70
Ibi, pp. 78-80.
71
MALISE RUTHVEN, A satanic affair. Salman Rushdie and the rage of islam, London, Chatto and Windus, 1990, p.
29; WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, p. 95.
72
ALI A. MAZRUI, The satanic verses or a satanic novel? Moral dilemmas of the Rushdie affair. Greenpoint NY,
Committee of Muslim Scholars and Leaders of North America, 1989, p. 13; also in The Rushdie file, pp. 220-228.
73
Cf. AKHTAR, Be careful with Muhammad!, p. 35.
69
18
Akhtar was one of the first to note the non-negotiable nature of the developing counter-position,
«the liberal inquisition», as he referred to it74. Quoting another author (Webb), he chastised
liberal media commentators for reducing the affair to «a simple neo-Victorian opposition
between our light and their darkness» (The Guardian, 27 February 198975). Noting that «Muslims
have reason to think the Crusades are not over yet», he made clear that he believed the
controversy was between two forms of fanaticism, one based on absolute faith in God and the
prophet, the other on deeply-held liberal values, particularly freedom of speech. Contesting the
view of Michael Ignatieff, a liberal intellectual commentator writing in The Observer (2 April
1989) who had claimed that freedom was «a contestable concept» rather than «a holy belief»,
Akhtar wrote that «the behaviour of apologists for liberalism during the Rushdie affair gives the
lie to the claim that they interpret freedom to be a negotiable value… Freedom is more holy to
liberals than Michael Ignatieff would have us believe»76.
His view is borne out, not only by academic writers discussing the affair77, but by the pen of
Rushdie and the liberal, often anti-religious, writers and journalists who wrote in support of his
novel. In an article in The Observer (22 January 198978), Rushdie wrote that «the art of the novel
is a thing I cherish as dearly as the bookburners of Bradford value their brand of militant Islam».
Referring to a passage in his novel («Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better
you choose which side you are on»), he noted that the «battle has now spread to Britain» and
called on people to take sides. His view of the sacred nature of his standpoint, and his willingness
to use religious metaphor to characterise it, was epitomised by the titles of two of his
contributions to the debate, «Is Nothing Sacred?» and «In Good Faith»79 (the former a public
lecture, the latter an essay published in its entirety in The Independent on Sunday). Several
literary supporters shared his understanding: Fay Weldon, whose 1989 pamphlet was entitled
Sacred Cows, and Norman Mailer, who wrote of «our frail religion whose faith happens to be the
74
Ibi, p. 37.
In The Rushdie file, p. 238.
76
AKHTAR, Be careful with Muhammad!, pp. 58-60; cf. GEORGE LAKOFF, Whose freedom? The battle over
America’s most important idea, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006; Is nothing sacred?, edited by Ben
Rogers, London and New York, Routledge, 2004.
77
WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, pp. 45-67; The Salman Rushdie controversy in interreligious perspective,
edited by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter, Edwin Mellen, 1990.
78
The Rushdie file, pp. 74-75.
79
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Is nothing sacred?, London, Granta, 1990; ID., In good faith, in The Independent on Sunday, 4
February 1990.
75
19
power of words and our willingness to suffer for them»80. The language of warfare and of
opposition between two non-negotiable positions was also taken up by other writers, for example,
the many who added their names to the statement penned by Homi Bhabha and published in New
Statesman on 3 March 1989:
We are embattled in the war between the cultural imperatives of Western liberalism, and the
fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, both of which seem to claim an abstract and universal
authority […] On the one hand there is the liberal opposition to book burning and banning based on the
important belief in the freedom of expression and the right to publish and be damned […] On the other
side, there exists what has been identified as a Muslim fundamentalist position 81.
Sensitive though they were to the problems of polarisation and stigmatisation, it is clear from the
language where their own priorities lay, and, as one moderate Muslim critic wrote, «For them,
freedom of expression has become a fetish. To them, that alone is sacred»82). A clearer reiteration
of Durkheim’s reference to things set apart and forbidden could hardly be imagined.
This deep-seated difference of opinion, which was increasingly depicted as a battle of faiths or
holy war83, was referred to by Ignatieff (The Observer, 2 April 1989) as «a ritual exchange of
ancient misunderstandings»84. In an attempt to stop short of sacralising the liberal position, and
noting the Muslim accusation that liberals «hold nothing sacred», and the liberal claim to «hold
freedom sacred», Ignatieff’s own preference was for toleration, not as «a sacred concept» but as a
commitment to listen, understand and endure offence85. Bhikhu Parekh was less sympathetic or
positive about the current face of liberalism, however, seeing it as «a rival fundamentalism» and a
corruption of «the great liberal tradition»86, and going on to note its tendency to become
«aggressive and intolerant» when nervous and under pressure.
80
WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, p. 56.
The Rushdie file, pp. 137-140.
82
El-Essawy, The Guardian, February 1989, in WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, pp. 50-51.
83
WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, p. 54.
84
The Rushdie file, p. 250.
85
Ibi, pp. 251-252; but see Akhtar above.
86
BHIKHU PAREKH, The Rushdie affair and the British press, in The Salman Rushdie controversy in interreligious
perspective, edited by D. Cohn-Sherbok, Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter, Edwin Mellen, 1990, pp. 71-96, here
p. 88.
81
20
This «shadow of the Crusades», according to Richard Webster87, had deep roots in the cultural
heritage of the West. The secular liberalism witnessed as a response to Muslim indignation in
1989 and 1990 was none other than the contemporary face of,
…a religion whose ancestry can be traced back in a direct line to the religion of John Milton, and to
Milton’s idealization of the writer’s conscience as the ultimate authority on moral questions, an
authority more sacred than that of the holy scriptures themselves 88.
To Webster, the battle was not between two radically different positions, but between «two
factions of the same religious tradition – the Judeo-Christian tradition to which, ultimately, Islam
belongs»89. Unfortunately, secularism, he believed – no less than earlier crusading forms of this
tradition – was capable of great rigidity, cruelty and contempt towards the faith of others90.
In his informed discussion of the controversy, Webster pre-empts the view articulated in more
detail in recent years91 of a mutually-imbricated social, political and ideological relationship
between secularism and its Western religious forebears (see discussion of Fitzgerald above).
They can be seen to be part of the same knowledge-power field, though their complex historical
relationship may be masked by their immediate struggle and the violence of their oppositional
language (see Knott above). Furthermore, as Webster and others suggested in comments made at
the time, claims on matters of principle and value and attributions of the ‘sacred’ were made by
liberal as well as Muslim confessors. The evidence from newspaper and magazine coverage in
1989 and 1990 supports Anttonen’s theory that such attributions occur in non-theological as well
as theological discourse; it reveals that the notion of the ‘sacred’ is not at all confined to religious
contexts. Interestingly, commentators on all sides of the controversy had no qualms about using
the term “sacred” as well as quite explicitly religious terminology (“faith”, “holy”, “religion”
etc.) to signal the deeply-held and non-negotiable nature of their beliefs and values. In this case
“specialness” is indeed indicated, though with reference to the real or metaphorical use of
religious concepts, with little recourse to secular ones (with the exception of Ignatieff), whether
“special” itself, or other non-religious terms such as “highly significant” or “profound”. Where
87
WEBSTER, A brief history of blasphemy, p. 56.
Ibi, p. 57.
89
Ibi, p. 59.
90
Ibi, p. 135.
91
ASAD, Formations of the secular; TAYLOR, A secular age; FITZGERALD, Discourses on civility and barbarity.
88
21
Taves’s theory can be put to good use, however, is in a second stage of analysis, moving from
simple attributions to more complex formations: In The Satanic Verses controversy these
formations are evidently Islamic and secularist, with hard-line and moderate configurations of
both. Often, as we saw, the very same attributions were used, but with reference to different
‘special’ things (people, books, etc).
In choosing this controversy as an example, I have shown, in addition, that the boundary between
the “religious” and the “secular” can itself become a matter of “sacred” concern, with those on
either side ready to voice the special yet non-negotiable nature of their own positions. This
boundary, as Shabbir Akhtar so clearly stated, becomes a test of faith, the marker which
differentiates one group from another, Muslims from secularists, secularists from Muslims. So,
whilst a case can clearly be made in support of the idea that there are strong genealogical and
historical links between Western Judeo-Christian traditions and later secularist developments, it
is certainly possible for boundaries to be thrown up on matters of “sacred” concern within this
knowledge-power field at particular times and places, including the very boundary which
ostensibly separates religion from its secular other.
Conclusion
In this paper I have stressed the importance of scholars of religion extending their reach into the
domain of non-religion to include an examination of the “secular” as well as the “religious”.
Resisting the dominant paradigm of secularization, I have favoured theoretical approaches that
foreground key concepts (“secular”, “sacred”, “specialness”, and “religion” itself) for examining
historical and contemporary relations across the boundary between religion and non-religion. I
have presented four resources, historical/conceptual (Fitzgerald), spatial/discursive (Knott),
cognitive/cultural (Anttonen), and naturalistic (Taves) that may be applied independently or in
collaboration.
Particularly in the context of Eurosecularity, we need to challenge and reach beyond the
boundary separating “religion” from other domains, and use our scholarly experience and
resources to examine ‘non-religion’ and its contents. We have skills for analyzing ideology,
values and practices as well as social organization and cultural formation that are relevant to
current “secular” and “postsecular” positions as well as “religious” ones. Furthermore, working
with the novel and uncontaminated framework of “specialness” (Taves), or freeing the category
22
of the “sacred” from its theological shackles (Anttonen) provides us with an opportunity to
reconsider the boundary (and thereby “religion” itself) through an examination of matters of
principle, belief and non-negotiability in the domain of “non-religion” as well as “religion”.
Challenging and reflecting on this field and its boundary and the role they have played in
demarcating our discipline will be important for future research on culture and society in Europe.
Moreover, it will help not only to reintegrate our discipline within the “secular academy”, often
suspicious of the study of religion, but will give us the opportunity to offer our theoretical,
methodological and empirical resources to new audiences.
23