THE SECULARISM DEBATE

Between Revision and Critique in Habermas, Taylor, Asad, and Brown

A Dissertation
Presented to the Graduate Research School of
Western Sydney University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

by
Usman Badar

School of Humanities and Communication Arts

Western Sydney University

July 2022
 Acknowledgments
Alhamdulillahi wa al-salatu wa al-salamu ala rasulillah…

I acknowledge the Indigenous people—the Darug, Tharawal, Eora and Wiradjuri nations—as
the traditional inhabitants of the land on which this dissertation was written. They were
brutalised and unjustly dispossessed of the land to make way for institutions such as ours that
made the claim to advance civility and civilisation, with no sense of irony. We are all embroiled
in the injustices that were, and continue to be, carried out, and bear their heavy burdens.

I express my sincere gratitude to my principal supervisor, Dr. Charles Barbour, whose support
and direction throughout my PhD journey has been invaluable. He has always been generous
with his time and assistance beyond measure. I am grateful to Prof. Dennis Schmidt too, whose
supervisory guidance and encouragement were very helpful. Not to mention the various
wonderful seminars of his I was fortunate enough to partake in as student or auditor. These
were always intellectually stimulating and enjoyable at once. I ought to blame him, nevertheless,
and Prof. Jennifer Mensch—whose seminars were likewise excellent—for starting my training
in philosophy on so much Kant as to leave an indelible mark, quite apparent in my verbose
prose, methodically boring presentation, and (naïve) will-to-comprehensiveness, as in my
frequent turns to ‘transcendental’ conditions of possibility.

I would like to thank also the magnanimous friends who kindly volunteered to proofread parts
of the manuscript—Abida Aura, Shafiul Huq, Faraz Amin Nomani, and my brother, Sufyan
Badar. The final version is much stronger because of them. With similar generosity, Drs. Ovamir
Anjum, Basit Iqbal, Andrew March, and SherAli Tareen all read the Introduction and offered
valuable feedback.

Sailing the wild seas of the PhD is never done alone. The support of my family was crucial. I
express my gratitude and love to my parents, Ghulam Badar and Shamim Afzal Badar, who have
always been instrumental to my education, and in particular to my wife, Hira Naeem, who
supported and assisted patiently throughout my PhD. Likewise, to my four children who made
the journey harder and easier at once, as only children can: Muhammad, Hadiya, Abu Bakr, and
little Yahya, born smack bang in the middle of my PhD years and at the height of COVID.

Finally, before all else and after, I thank and praise Allah, the Exalted, whose favours on this
lowly creature can be encompassed neither in expression nor in payment.
 Statement of Authentication

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and
belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that
I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree
at this or any other institution.
 Contents

Abstract ................................................................................................................ iv

Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1
Standard, Revised, and Critical Secularism.................................................................................... 7
Dissertation Contours .................................................................................................................... 12
The Polysemy of the ‘Post-secular’................................................................................................ 18
Habermas, Taylor, Asad, Brown .................................................................................................... 23
Dissertation Outline and Argument ............................................................................................. 30

Chapter One ........................................................................................................ 36

Saint Augustine and the Two Cities.............................................................................................. 39
Imperial-Papal Relations, Doctrines, Conflicts ........................................................................... 43
Saint Aquinas: Reconfiguring the Faith-Reason Nexus .............................................................. 48
The Rise and Consolidation of the Modern State ....................................................................... 55
Luther and the Protestant Reformation ....................................................................................... 57
Locke and the Birth of Modern Secularism ................................................................................. 63
The ‘Secular Turn’ of Enlightenment: Rousseau and Kant......................................................... 67
A Fresh Secular Start in the ‘New World’..................................................................................... 71
The Birth Pangs of Secularism ....................................................................................................... 73
Secularism by Other Means: Hegel and Marx ............................................................................. 75
Secularism Dominant ..................................................................................................................... 77

Chapter Two ........................................................................................................ 79

Linguistic-Conceptual Significations ............................................................................................ 80
Secularisation Theory: the Rise and Fall of a Paradigm ............................................................. 84
Genealogies of the Secular ............................................................................................................. 95
Habermas: Secularisation as the Overcoming of Metaphysical Thought ....................................97
Taylor: Secularisation as Transformation, not Subtraction .........................................................102
Secularism as Christianity Reborn ..................................................................................................108
Political Theology and the German Secularisation Debates ........................................................112
Asadian Non-Essentialist, Grammarian Genealogies ...................................................................118

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 Brown: Re-reading Marx on Religion and Secularisation ............................................................126

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 131

Chapter Three .................................................................................................... 134

Habermas: Secularity as ‘Post-Metaphysical’ Subjectivity ....................................................... 135
Taylor: Secularity as a Background Frame of Immanence ....................................................... 141
Asad: Anthropological Excavation of Secularity as a Unique Formation ............................... 149
The Modern (Re-)Construction of Religion ............................................................................... 155
Brown: Secularity as Pragmatic Engagement of World (Minus Secularist Hubris) .................... 162
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 167

Chapter Four ...................................................................................................... 172

The Four Goods of (Late) Modern Secularism .......................................................................... 175
Habermasian Procedural-Constitutional Secularism ............................................................... 179
Communicative Reason and Discourse Ethics ..............................................................................183
‘Translation’ and the Symmetry of Cognitive Burdens.................................................................187

Taylorian Substantive-Republican Secularism .......................................................................... 191

Strong Evaluation and (necessary) Pictures of the Good .............................................................196
The Deficits of Proceduralism .........................................................................................................200
A Necessary Substantive-yet-Neutral Secularism? .......................................................................203

Bhargavian ‘Contextual’ Secularism............................................................................................ 208

Asadian Constructive-Normative Secularism ............................................................................ 214
(Impossible) Translation as Transformation .................................................................................216
Complimentary Critiques ................................................................................................................220

Brownian Secularism as Governmentality by Other (Still-Religious) Means ........................ 222

Unmasking Secular Tolerance ........................................................................................................224

Secularist ‘Separation’ as (Mandatory) Transformation ........................................................... 230

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 235
Secularism as Antidote to Religious Violence?.......................................................................... 238
Finding Religion in the ‘Wars of Religion’ .....................................................................................241
The Shifting Axes of (Secular?) Violence .......................................................................................244

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Chapter Five ....................................................................................................... 247
Neutrality: Secularism’s Elusive Punctum Archimedes ............................................................. 248
Rawlsian Merely ‘Political’ Liberalism............................................................................................250
Dissecting Neutralities: Procedure, Aim, Effect, Justification .....................................................256
Habermasian Procedural Neutrality...............................................................................................259
Bilgrami: From Archimedean to ‘Emergent’ Secularism ..............................................................265

The Historicity and Ideologicality of Secularism ..........................................................................269

Public Reason: a Universal Human Reason? ............................................................................. 275

Whence Commonality in Diversity? ..............................................................................................286
Epistemic Hierarchies of the Ordinary and Extraordinary ..........................................................291

An Imposing Secular Triad: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ........................................................ 297

Which Liberty? Whose Equality? ...................................................................................................298
The ‘Thick’, Exclusionary Liberal Public Sphere ...........................................................................301
(Mis)Representing Minorities, Privileging the Majority ..............................................................307
Fraternity, Shared Values, and Citizen Formation .......................................................................313

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 321

Revised Secularism: Habermas, Taylor....................................................................................... 325
Critical Secularism: Asad, Brown ................................................................................................ 330
Superordinate Secularity, Subordinate Religion ....................................................................... 337
The Legitimacy of Modern Secularism ....................................................................................... 344
Implications for Collective Political Futures ............................................................................. 353

References .......................................................................................................... 357

iii
 Abstract
The controversial advent of a late modern ‘post-secular’ moment has pushed political
philosophers and theorists back to the drawing board on the question of the place of religion in
a secular age, and from there to more fundamental questions about the religious and the secular.
Various revisions and critiques of mainstream secular liberal models have unsettled long-held
assumptions about secularism. This dissertation examines and echoes these critiques in terms
of the conception and legitimation of secularism. The most basic question it targets is: if the
secular is not what it was thought to be, as is increasingly apparent, then what is it? And what
implications does any reconceptualisation carry for the legitimation of secularism as the
prevailing hegemonic discourse and political practice? In considering these questions, this
dissertation undertakes a thorough study of secularisation as a historical process, secularity as
an epistemic category, and secularism as a political doctrine—each first considered separately,
for analytical clarity and scopal feasibility, then together, which is their actual discursive and
historical condition. It does this in conversation primarily with the relevant work of Jürgen
Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Wendy Brown. It argues that the conception of
secularity as a rational-critical subjectivity or a mere this-worldliness, and of secularism as
neutral, freedom-maximising governance uniquely fit for managing the diverse populations that
mark modern society—in specific contrast to religion as ideological, controversial, and
oppressive if given authoritative roles in governance and public life—is untenable. The claims
to epistemic universality and political neutrality that discursively undergird standard models of
liberal secularism, such as Rawls, and remain crucial for revised models, like those of Habermas
and Taylor, are difficult to substantiate. Building on Asad, Brown and others, this dissertation
contends that whatever else modern secularism may be, it always entails the inevitably non-
neutral subordination, disciplining, and governing of religion. Secularism is as ideological and
controversial as any religion or worldview, and, therefore—on its own logic and undercutting
its own legitimation—in principle as oppressive. This reconception of secularism shows that its
legitimation in mainstream liberal thought and culture needs a thorough rethink. It also allows
for a leveller playing field of comparative political theory and philosophy—the prevailing
assumption of which remains that secularism is the only way to imagine governance and politics
in modernity—and the imagining of fairer global political futures.

Word count: 114850 (excl. footnotes and references)

iv
 Introduction

The Secularism Debate, the ‘Post-Secular’ Question

The twenty-first century is proving to be a difficult time—a critical time, a time of crisis—for

secularism as a worldview and political practice, even as it remains hegemonic globally. Its

promise of making purportedly disruptive religious difference irrelevant or marginal to public

life, in favour of secular rationalities, has not borne fruit. Instead, across the Euro-American

‘West’ and beyond, authoritative majoritarian religious norms stand in stark juxtaposition to

the precarious socio-political existence of religious minorities. Where the ‘Jewish Question’

disconcerted Europe throughout the long nineteenth century—coterminous with the caesarean

birth of secularism on the Old Continent—and well into the twentieth, the late twentieth

century sees an in many ways analogous ‘Muslim Question’ that continues to perturb (now

thoroughly) secular liberal democracies the world over. The structure of the alleged problem,

then and now, and the proposed solution seems the same (if expressed more bluntly in the past):

the state becoming more secular, religious minorities becoming less religious. Part of the

conundrum is that secularism’s offer of freedom for religious minorities comes at the expense

of their state-compelled ‘freedom’ from important aspects of their religions. Far from a road to

emancipation, this reads like a recipe for continued tension and conflict, which has duly

delivered. Such socio-political crises that face late modern secular states are complemented,

perhaps caused, by a more fundamental identity crisis.

‘What is secularism?’ Rajeev Bhargava begins his pioneering edited anthology, Secularism

and its Critics (1998), with this rather awkward question. ‘It is not entirely clear what is meant

by secularism’, writes Charles Taylor, in a similar vein, in the opening of his contribution to that

volume. The anthology was pioneering because it ran ahead, in lean company, of a literature

defined by its taking as central a serious and long overdue critique of secularism that only found

its feet well into the first decade of the new millennium. The question was awkward because by

1
that time some three centuries had passed since the advent of the idea of secularism in Europe,

and some two centuries had passed since the ‘Western’ world more broadly had very assuredly

entered a brave new secular age. It was late in the piece to be asking the ‘what’ question. Or was

it? The ‘backstory’ here, as always, is important.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a dominant consensus within social

and political theory and philosophy framed the discourse on secularity and religion with certain

standard positions. The ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ were taken to be fixed, universal categories

and simple opposites. The secular had the upper hand in the normative dimension of this dyad.

As a legacy of the Enlightenment, secularity was considered a necessity for peace and progress in

pluralist societies, and a means to restrain religious passion and what it breeds of intolerance,

delusion and conflict. Further, modernisation would see the slow but eventual decline and end—

or at least thorough privatisation—of religion, as per the ‘secularisation thesis’. As such, scholars

could largely ignore religion as a remnant of pre-modern times that did not properly belong in

modernity. Where it did garner their attention, this was due to its historical transitional role, or

as an obstacle to progress, or because some of the instrumental social roles it played—as a ‘social

glue’ for instance—called for modern substitutes.

By the later part of the twentieth century, sedimented aspects of this discursive

topography were disturbed. First, the secularisation thesis was seriously challenged. The simple

narrative of humanity progressing in a confident march from a religious past to a secular future

was no longer seen as tenable. Religion, as manifest in individual belief and practice, persisted

amongst millions of people around the world. In turn, as a guiding force for so many people, its

influence naturally extended into matters of social and political debate and policy—a dimension

more emphasised since the 1970s and characterised as the ‘return of religion’. The post-WWII

period also saw the explosion onto the world scene of what has been branded as religious

‘fundamentalism’. Second, following the so-called linguistic and cultural turns, and the

associated move away from positivist epistemological approaches, the very principles on which

2
the Enlightenment critique of religion and the epistemically self-assured adoption of secularism

rested—autonomous, universal rationality at their fore—had also been summoned to the dock

of interrogation wherefrom they could not leave unscathed. Developments in the social

sciences—the anthropological encounter with non-European cultures and later psychological

studies of human reasoning in particular—and the philosophy of science—revealing the theory-

dependence of scientific discovery of ‘truth’—led to the ‘fragmentation of reason’ (Stich 1990).

The ‘triumphalist’ view of a disenchanted modernity throwing off primitive forms of

religious/mythical thought and practice for new and superior forms grounded in reason and

science was increasingly seen to have overshot the mark. The apparent success of

Enlightenment secularisation seems to have foundered on an unexpected realisation of its own

parochialism and the belated acknowledgment of the continuing public presence and force of

religion (De Vries and Sullivan 2006, ix). In the poetic rendition of Caputo (2001, 37):

contemporary philosophers have grown increasingly weary with the “old” Enlightenment. Their tendency
has been more and more to unmask the modernist unmaskers, to criticize the modernist critiques, to
grow disenchanted with the disenchanters, to question modernity’s prejudice against prejudice, and to
look around for a new Enlightenment, one that is enlightened about the (old) Enlightenment. That has
inevitably led to a break within their own ranks on the hot topic of religion, where even otherwise “secular”
intellectuals have become suspicious of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion.

These realisations and suspicions, as disturbances to what was taken for granted, paved the way

by the 1990s for a serious review and critique of secularism.1 The last three decades have seen a

‘remarkable rise in public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national

as well as civilizational frameworks’ (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2012, 876). The ‘critical study

of secularism’ (Scherer 2011) and the inquiry into whether we might inhabit a ‘post-secular’ age

(Habermas 2009) became, from the turn of the millennium, and remain, a major trend in

1
The earliest publications in this contemporary critique of secularism include: Chatterjee P 1994,
‘Secularism and Tolerance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(28), pp. 1768-1777; Asad T 1999, ‘Religion,
Nation-State, Secularism’ in Van der Veer P and Lehmann H (eds.), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on
Europe and Asia, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; Connolly W, Why I Am Not a Secularist,
University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis; and Bhargava’s above-mentioned anthology.

3
political, social, and cultural theory (March 2015, 110). This comprised not only a reopening of the

question about the space for religion in the public sphere but also, more fundamentally, a critique

of the very categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ and their mutual relation. An increasingly

sophisticated series of intellectual interventions, in the midst of a widespread resurgence of

political and academic interest in the public importance of religion and the notion of the ‘post-

secular’, have challenged us to reconsider our most basic categories of research, analysis, and

critique: ‘[T]he very categories of the religious and the secular—and of secularism and religion—

are being revisited, reworked, and rethought’ (Mendieta and Vanantwerpen 2011, 1).2 Notably, the

debate is not simply about politics—secularism as a political doctrine—but equally, perhaps

more importantly, about ‘the secular’ or ‘secularity’ as an epistemic-ontological category, and

also ‘secularisation’ as a historical process of transformation.

Jürgen Habermas popularised the concept of the ‘post-secular’ society, by which he sought

to describe ‘the new public consciousness in Europe which requires a self-adjustment to the

continued existence of religious communities in an increasingly secularized environment’

(2009, 63).3 In such societies, ‘religion retains a certain public influence and relevance, while the

2
As an indicator of the remarkable magnitude of intellectual interest and output in this area and of its
very contemporaneous nature, the last decade alone has seen at least twenty edited volumes published.
See notes 11 and 18 below for some of these. Further, Boy (2011) notes on The Immanent Frame—an
academic blog founded in 2007 for ‘interdisciplinary perspectives on religion, secularism, and the public
sphere’, itself a testament as one of the most popular online academic forums—that the more specific
concept of the ‘post-secular’ has appeared in the titles of about forty books in English and German in the
last five years. Come 2022, it would be no exaggeration to say that it has featured in well over a hundred
academic titles in the last decade alone across philosophy, political theory, social theory, sociology,
cultural and literary studies, theology, postcolonial and feminist thought.
3
It is pertinent to note that ‘post-secular’ as used in the literature does not signify the advent of a new era or
the overcoming of the secular age, as might be implied by the ‘post’. It rather refers to the relatively more
moderate idea that there is, or ought to be, a space for religion in the public sphere, contra the older position
that saw secularism as requiring of religion to largely or entirely evacuate the public sphere, as in the earlier
Rawls (1971) for instance. If there is any overcoming or new understanding, it is only of one aspect of
secularism, namely, the idea that the proper place of religion is the private sphere (Molendijk 2015, 101). While
this is true, however, of the likes of Habermas and Taylor, it is not entirely accurate with regard to others.
The critiques of Asad (2003), Connolly (1999), Brown (2014), and Mahmoud (2015), among others, go much
further than to simply correct one aspect of the secularisation thesis. Interestingly, ironically perhaps, these
more radical critiques choose not to adopt the more pronounced language of ‘post’-secularity.

4
secularistic certainty that religion will disappear everywhere in the world as modernization

accelerates is losing ground’ (65).4 In other words, ‘post-secular’ society is that which tries to, or

ought to, come to terms with the overdetermination of the secularisation thesis. The description

of religious communities as having a ‘continued’ existence speaks to the prior expectation that

they were going to fade away. In this sense, the ‘post-secular’ problematic directs a sort of

correction, adjustment, or revision of the secularisation paradigm. It is a recognition that the

belief that secular progress would cause religion to wither away did not quite hit the mark. It is

also the question that, given this, where to from here? What does the persistence of religion

mean for the self-understanding and critique of secular modernity? How can pluralist societies

with diverse religious and secular forms of life be organised politically in a just way? What place

can religion be given in a secular age? These questions presuppose and anticipate yet others:

What is ‘religion’ and what is ‘the secular’? How do the two relate to each other? What does it

mean to live in a secular world? What exactly makes ours a secular age? And how does this

secular age relate to the putatively non-secular age whence it developed? This web of questions

forms what we may call the broader contemporary ‘post-secular’ question or problem-space.5

This is one framing of the problematic where others are possible. For Agrama (2012), the

contemporary problem-space of secularism is that historical ensemble of questions anchored in

drawing the line between religion and politics and setting the limits of religion in society, and

4
Citations with only a page number/s, such as here, refer to the previously cited text. This method of
citation is followed throughout the dissertation in order to minimise the clutter of in-text citations.
5
The concept of a ‘problem-space’ was introduced by David Scott (1999, 2004) as ‘an ensemble of
questions and answers’ around which a horizon of identifiable (conceptual, ideological-political) stakes
hangs, in order to demarcate a discursive context of argument and intervention marked by historically
particular problems and questions (7-9; 4). Scott develops this concept on the back of R. G. Collingwood’s
(1939) ‘logic of question and answer’, the idea that any body of knowledge comprises propositions and
the questions they intend to answer; and Skinner’s (1988) adaptation of this thought for intellectual
history, whereby the history of thought is not a series of attempts to answer a canonical set of perennial
questions, but a sequence of episodes in which the questions also change across time (Scott 1999, 5-6).
Critical to any ‘problem-space’, in turn, is its historicity or temporality, that is, the particularity of the
concepts, problems, questions, and answers to the historical time and conditions in which they gain
salience; as their epistemic-ideological conditions of existence change, so do the problem-spaces.

5
the attached stakes of rights and liberties typically identified with liberalism, such as equality,

tolerance, and freedom of belief (27-29, 226). Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2012) frame the

(currently-operational) ‘multiple secularities’ research project through four specific ideal-

typical societal ‘reference’ problems associated to the formation of modern societies: securing

individual freedom in the context of dominant social units (communities, the state); managing

religious heterogeneity in a way that avoids actual conflict; securing social or national

integration and development; and (or while) facilitating the independent development of

institutional domains (887).6

It is important to note that these questions and problems are by no means natural or neutral

with respect to the secular-religious dichotomy. They do not arise in a vacuum but are embedded

in particular social and political conditions that mark a particular historical moment—broadly,

the early twenty-first century ‘Western’ or ‘Euro-American’ world.7 In this historical moment,

liberal secularism bears hegemonic force, and these questions arise in the context of mere

adjustments to it. They privilege the secular in assigning to it the task of determining the role of

religion—a role that, by the very nature of the questions, can arguably only be a limited and

subordinate one. The ‘postsecular turn’ seeks to provide a counter-discourse to a previously

dominant narrative on secularism (Braidotti et al. 2014, 1). However, the accent of the ‘counter’ in

these alternative discourses varies significantly. For some, the ‘turn’ is manoeuvred on the

presupposition that secularism is in need of mere revisions, of smoothing out some rough edges.

It is not that secularism itself is subject to a fundamental critique or re-consideration. This is

particularly true if we take the likes of Habermas, who explicitly upholds the Enlightenment

project, and Charles Taylor, who does likewise if in a more cautionary manner, as the leading cast

6
An analogue to Eisenstadt’s (2000) provincialising notion of ‘multiple modernities’—that diverse
development paths in different regions comprise the rise of an otherwise minimally common modernity—
‘multiple secularities’ mark diverse forms of distinction between religious and other (non-religious) social
domains that are institutionalised and legitimised through various norms in different cultural regions.
7
All references to the ‘West’, ‘Western World’, or ‘Western’ refer broadly to ‘Euro-America’, that is
America, Europe, and its settler-colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand).

6
of this debate. However, this is where the contemporary debate begins, or, alternatively, it is one

entry point therein. Thinkers like Talal Asad and Wendy Brown move the debate closer to a more

fundamental interrogation of secularity and secularism itself, which is where the debate logically

leads, or, alternatively, this is an equally valid entry point. On this framing, we may cast the

‘secularism debate’ as taking place between the three poles of those who favour revisions to a

standard narrative and those who take a more critical stance towards it.

Standard, Revised, and Critical Secularism

A schematic rendition of what we may call the ‘standard’ secular liberal narrative—of the sort

paradigmatically, and influentially, found in John Rawls (1996), the ‘dean of modern liberal

political theory’ (Vallier 2014, 10)—may be articulated as follows.8 Modernity brought us

hitherto unprecedented pluralist societies in which people of different religions and

denominations, and of no religion, live together. This makes it untenable that any one religion

dominates as the reference point for the socio-political organisation of society, as was the case

in Medieval Europe. Such a model would entail imposition and lead to conflict, disharmony,

and violence—as seen in the early modern European Wars of Religion, the large scale bloodshed

over theological disputes of which was only brought to an end by the rise of a tolerant, rational

secular politics. This birth of secularism was secured intellectually by modern science and

Enlightenment philosophy and politically by the French and American revolutions, which

8
The focus on liberalism is motivated by the fact that it remains a dominant force in the academy and the
dominant force in the politics and practice of late modern secular Western society. While illiberal or
authoritarian states can also be secular, by excluding religion from public and political life or by
institutional separation, liberal states are necessarily secular in so far as some form of state neutrality or
distance from religion is seen as essential to the facilitation of individual autonomy. Instructively,
secularism and liberalism have fit hand-in-glove since their early modern inception in Europe, with
thinkers like John Locke commonly sighted as a founding figure for both. Within liberal political theory,
no monolith by any means, our focus is on the dominant strand, again in thought and practice, of ‘political’
or ‘public reason’ liberalism. In this dissertation, we sometimes speak of ‘liberal secularism’, to refer to the
mode of secularism currently applied in liberal states, and sometimes of ‘secular liberalism’, to stress the
secularity of liberalism.

7
separated religion from matters of state. When mixed with politics and state, religion is

particularly is prone to conflict and violence, as people engage in disputes based on unverifiable

metaphysical assertions and are driven by passion as opposed to rational reflection. Religious

reason is also epistemically weaker given its particular, inaccessible, and controversial nature,

relative to universal secular reason. Hence, religion must be made a private affair, evacuating

the public sphere. As private citizens, people are free to adopt and practice whatever religious

belief or unbelief they wish, because freedom of belief and practice are fundamental values, but

in the public sphere all these beliefs are equally irrelevant. The state, as ideologically-neutral

manager of the public sphere, maintains an equal distance and a position of impartiality from

all religions. Universal, secular rationality alone, in the form of public reason, is to be the guiding

force of social and political debate and policy, and the basis of the shared values that undergird

a common political life. Religious citizens can, indeed should, partake in public discourse, but

must present or translate their arguments and concerns in accessible, secular language.9

Prominent thinkers have contested this narrative and offered diverse answers to the above-

contoured ‘post-secular’ problematic. The contributions, inter alia, of Habermas (2009, 2017),

Charles Taylor (2007, 2011), Talal Asad (2003, 2018), and Wendy Brown (2006, 2014) have forced a

reconsideration of the previously sedimented positions it articulates.10 Much Western thought,

according to Brown (2014), suffers today from a ‘secular prejudice’—a variation on Nietzsche’s

‘democratic prejudice’—fostered by a nest of flawed assumptions about the religious and secular,

9
On our reading, this ‘standard’ narrative still defines, and is ubiquitous in, popular discourse in the
West, in particular in mainstream political discourse. It has relatively less, but still considerable, traction
in academic discourse. Recent academic defences, with internal variations, can be found in Berlinerblau
(2022), Copson (2017), and Kettel (2016). We return to a thorough and more nuanced engagement with
Rawls (1996) in Chapter Five, pp. 250-258.
10
Another indication of the immense contemporary scholarly attention attracted by secularism is that Talal
Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003) and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)—two central texts—have,
according to Google Scholar, over 8800 and 12300 citations respectively (as at July 2022)—a remarkable 460
and 820 citations annually on average. When this introduction was first drafted in 2018, these latter figures
were 300 and 500 respectively, indicating that the frequency of citation is considerably on the rise.

8
headed by a belief in their putative opposition, because of which we misapprehend how the

religious and the secular were conceived in modernity and, in turn, misdiagnose contemporary

predicaments of secularism and religion (111). This prejudice is, however, breaking up under

critical scrutiny from scholars—such as Asad (2003), Connolly (1999), Mahmood (2006), Taylor

(2007), Sullivan (2005), Masuzawa (2005), and De Vries (2008)11—who have shown that modern

secularism, far from being a mere church-state or religion-politics separation, or the maintenance

of an a-religious public sphere and order of thinking, takes shape as a form of governmentality

and subject production from which a number of crucial implications follow.

Such interventions have emphasised, in different ways, the need to move beyond classic

negative conceptions of the secular as the mere opposite of religion, arguing that it should be

positively understood as a normative modern force in its own right (Asad 2003)—one that does

not necessitate the elimination or even privatisation of religion in absolute terms but rather its

reconstruction and delimiting on normative (secular liberal) terms. The secular is neither the

11
Anthologies and monographs that contribute to the critique of secularism are now numerous. Significant
contributions, on top of those mentioned by Brown here, include: Scott D and Hirschkind C (eds.) 2006,
Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors, Stanford University Press: Standford;
Jakobsen JR and Pelligrini A (eds.) 2008, Secularisms, Duke University Press: Durham, NC; Hurd ES 2008,
The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; Cady L and
Hurd ES (eds.) 2010, Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, Palgrave Macmillan: New York; Warner M,
VanAntwerpen J, and Calhoun C (eds.) 2010, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Harvard University
Press: Cambridge, MA; Calhoun C, Juergensmeyer M, and VanAntwerpen J (eds.) 2011, Rethinking
Secularism, Oxford University Press: Oxford; Dressler M and Mandair AP (eds.) 2011, Secularism and
Religion-Making, Oxford University Press: Oxford; Mendieta E and Vanantwerpen J (eds.) 2011, The Power
of Religion in the Public Sphere, Columbia University Press: New York; Agrama HA 2012, Questioning
Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, University of Chicago Press: Chicago;
Berg-Sørensen A (ed.) 2013, Contesting Secularism: Comparative Perspectives, Ashgate: Farnham; Asad T,
Brown W, Butler J, and Mahmood S 2013, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, Fordham
University Press: New York; Ranjan Ghosh (ed.) 2013, Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from
Europe to Asia, Routledge: London; Burchardt M, Wohlrab-Sahr M, and Middell M (eds.) 2015, Multiple
Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age, De Gruyter: Boston; Mahmood S
2015, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; Asad
T 2018, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason, Columbia University Press:
New York; Scott JW 2017, Sex and Secularism, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; Chandhoke N 2019,
Rethinking Pluralism, Secularism, and Tolerance: Anxieties of Coexistence, SAGE: New Delhi; Martínez-Ariño
J 2020, Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe, Routledge: London; and Medovoi L and
Bentley E (eds.) 2021, Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging, Duke University Press: Durham. For
contributions that take a more explicit ‘post-secular’ framing, see note 18 below.

9
natural bedrock from which religion emerges nor simply what remains when religion is

(hypothetically) subtracted from the world. It is rather itself a historical formation with specific

epistemological, political, and moral entailments (Mahmood 2015). The domains of the religious

and the secular are not given and separate, but rather, are mutually constitutive of each other

in often tense and contradictory ways, like Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s famous lithograph of two

hands mutually drawing each other into existence (Agrama 2012, 1). Putative conceptions of the

secular as rational, scientific, and critical and the religious as irrational, superstitious and

dogmatic are no longer seen as tenable (Asad et al. 2013).

Further, the secular and religious relate in complex ways: the secular transforms the

religious, curtailing some forms thereof but also giving rise to new ones, and even fostering and

securing certain types of religion (Taylor 2007). Moreover, secularism does not merely organise

the place of religion in modern nation-states, it also stipulates and enforces what religion is and

ought to be. Correspondingly, it does not simply sequester religion; it disseminates the ethos,

ethics, cosmology, and quotidian practices of hegemonic religious (Christian, mostly

Protestant) traditions across secular societies (Brown 2013; Mahmood 2015). Alternatively put,

secularism is not primarily about a separation of religion and politics, and secular norms are not

natural, universal, or self-evident. Rather, secularism is about fashioning or constructing

religion, based on norms that are the determinations of power connected to control and

constraint, as an object of continual management, and the shaping of religious life and

sensibility to fit the presuppositions and interests of liberal governance (Agrama 2012, 24, 26).

This is in regard to the conception of the secular and secularism. As to the liberal

justification of political secularism, it mostly rests on the secular projecting itself as neutral, in

some relevant sense, and the modern condition as uniquely diverse or pluralist with respect to

the worldviews adopted by its citizens (Habermas and Taylor 2011).12 In turn, it lays claim to

12
This precise meaning is intended whenever ‘diverse democracies’, ‘diverse societies’, or ‘pluralistic
societies’ are mentioned, that is, diverse with respect to the worldviews people within them adopt. As for

10
possess the distinctive, salvific ability to manage our modern predicament in an equitable way—

to lead the way, as it were, to the promised land of immanent/worldly human flourishing. This

claim to neutrality relies on the assertion that secular reason and discourse are especially

universal and common, and secular politics is distinct in its ability to establish a foundational

political ethic that is not partial to any normative worldview—the classic model being Rawls

(1996). This model, with some adjustments, is upheld by Habermas (2011) and Taylor (2011).

Others argue that these claims do not hold water on scrutiny (Asad 2003; Brown 2014; Connolly

2009, Mahmood 2015). On this alternative account, secular reason, discourse, and politics are

as particular, normative, and controversial as any other forms of these.

The three poles of the academic debate on secularism, then, can be structured as follows.

The standard narrative takes centre stage in the background, serving the purpose of a signpost

in relation to which we can locate other positions. We come to see that Habermas and, to a

relatively greater extent, Taylor present revisions of this narrative based on critiques of some of

what ‘worldviews’ is trying to grasp for, the literature is awash with different terms—cultures, traditions,
ways/forms of life, interpretations of world and self, ideologies, doctrines—based on the preferences of
different authors and signifying a web of related concepts with a family resemblance. By ‘worldview’, we
mean the holistic conception through which one, mostly pre-reflectively, views and interprets the world
or, in phenomenological terms, experiences the world. Worldviews define historical communities and
can be classified along multiple lines. Perhaps the one with greatest currency in the relevant literature is
religious (Christian, Islamic, Hindu) and non-religious/secular worldviews (Marxist, Liberal, Kantian).
Further, a worldview can be said to comprise i) a fundamental conception/sense/image of what is
asserted/experienced as the ‘reality’ of the world; and ii) a normative framework about how individuals
ought to live in the world, including how communal and social life ought to be organised. The former has
been referred to as a ‘comprehensive doctrine of truth’ (Rawls), ‘comprehensive worldview’ and ‘strong
tradition’ (Habermas), ‘metaphysical perspective/orientation’ (Connolly), and ‘Weltanschauung’ (from
which the English ‘worldview’ originally derives) and ‘basic belief’ (Taylor). The latter, variously marked
as a ‘comprehensive doctrine/view of the good’, ‘conception of the good’ (Rawls) and ‘deep commitments’
(Taylor), is more specifically relevant to political philosophy and has been further divided into
‘background’ or ‘deeper’ reasons and ‘foreground principles’, where the former are the fundamental
normative premises (man being created in the image of God or the maximisation of human joy) and the
latter are the specific moral positions (human rights, such as the right to life). In this dissertation, we
encounter most of these terms. Unless quoting or paraphrasing others, our preference is for the simpler
‘worldview’ or ‘normative worldview’. This is more on count of the word, understood in the meaning
noted above, sufficing our purpose. Otherwise, ‘worldview’ has a complex philological and philosophical
history from the seventeenth century to the present day. For a detailed outline, see Naugle DK 2002,
Worldview: The History of a Concept, Eerdmans: Michigan.

11
its boundaries. Theirs is a smoothing out of what they find to be rough edges. They want to

make greater room to accommodate religion and to show that the religious and secular are

mutually complimentary, not mutually opposed. This ‘revised’ secularism seeks to dent the

‘conceit of the secular’ as sole carrier of reason and truth, to differing degrees, whilst retaining

its prime place as front and centre in politics as a matter of necessity for diverse societies. Asad

and Brown go much further in critiquing some of the more fundamental premises of the

narrative. Their ‘critical secularism’ aims to show that many of the pillars of both the standard

and revised accounts are bearing more weight than they can carry. The interrogation of

secularity and secularism here is more thorough and more detrimental to their standing.

Dissertation Contours

This dissertation aims at a clear, detailed account and critical analysis of the interventions of

leading scholars as they elucidate, justify, critique, and interrogate secularism. It does so with

reference to the specific questions of its conception and legitimation. First, what is secularity—

and, in turn, secularism and secularisation—and how are these conceived? Second, how is

secularism as a political doctrine or worldview legitimated in liberal political philosophy, and

how does this legitimation stand up to interrogation? These two questions, the conceptual and

the normative, are related because secularism is in part what justifies it (Bhargava 1998, 5). As

such, we also endeavour to reflect on the nexus of these two questions and their answers, within

the broader context of the post-secular problem-space outlined above.

To crystallise these questions somewhat, it is worth noting that the secular and its

cognates—secularity, secularisation, secularism—are categorised in various ways by different

scholars. Largely following Asad (2003) and Mahmood (2015), this dissertation treats

secularisation as a historical process that is constitutive of modernity; secularity as an epistemic

category that marks the set of background assumptions, concepts, norms, sensibilities, and

dispositions characteristic of secular societies and subjectivities; and secularism as a political

12
doctrine pertaining to the state’s relationship with religion, and the associated worldview that

undergirds this doctrine. We also take for granted, with Scherer (2013), that all three are closely

related: secularism is dialectically both a cause and effect of historical processes of

secularisation, and it both depends upon and secures and reproduces secularity (10).

In engaging this problem-space in the aforedescribed manner, this dissertation seeks to

do three things. First, to contribute to this very contemporary and burgeoning area of research

through a relatively comprehensive, critical review of current scholarship on the topic. Second,

to echo the insights of leading scholars critical of secularism that are still under-appreciated

both in academic discourse and, much more so, in popular discourse. Third, to ascertain, or to

make a case for, what these critiques of secularism amount to. What do they tell us about the

secular? If the secular is not what it was previously thought to be, then what is it? How can we

conceptualise secularity, secularisation, and secularism in a coherent and insightful manner?

And what are the implications of, and what is at stake in, any such reconceptualisation for the

normative liberal legitimation of secularism. Indeed, one of the unique aspects of this inquiry is

that it seeks to bring the implications of recent critical interventions on the secular to bear on

the question of the legitimation of secularism in liberal political theory. Thus far that gap has

not, to our knowledge, explicitly been bridged.

Having outlined the questions this dissertation takes upon itself the burden of considering

and the background that confers upon them salience, a word on methodology is in order. This

project is critical, conceptual, and comparative. It comprises a comparative study that seeks to

outline and critically assess the answers to the above-mentioned questions as given by four main

thinkers: Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, and Wendy Brown. These four will be

our primary interlocutors cast alongside a host of supporting scholars. Our conversation takes

the form of a conceptual analysis of each thinker considered both separately and in engagement

with the others. The main texts to be examined—supplemented with their and others’ relevant

works—are Taylor (2007, 2011), Habermas (2008, 2010, 2017), Asad (2003, 2018) and Brown

13
(2006, 2010, 2014). This comparative work, which forms the core of the thesis, will be preceded

by a history of secularism which seeks to outline in some detail the major historical moments

and thinkers in the Western tradition that bear influence on our understanding and practice of

modern secularity. This historical outline serves the purpose of sketching the background

against which our contemporary discourse inevitably takes place.

The choice of our main conversation partners is contingent but not arbitrary. While other

candidates could have been chosen—José Casanova, Rajeev Bhargava, Saba Mahmood, Hussain

Agrama, Craig Calhoun, William Connolly, Judith Butler, Peter Berger, Luca Mavelli, Eduardo

Mendieta, James Vanantwerpen, Tariq Modood, Matthew Scherer, David Scott, Charles

Hirschkind, Miguel Vatter, to name but some who have significant contributions in this field

and whose work we benefit from and refer to in this dissertation—these four stand out for our

purposes. They not only have substantial rumination in this area but have been influential in

setting the terms of debate and leading the conversation. Habermas has almost single-handedly

brought the ‘post-secular’ problematic to bear across various disciplines, not least in political

philosophy and theory. Taylor and Asad have published works that have become authoritative

and indispensable for anyone researching in these topics. Brown brings a unique critical

perspective that compliments that of Asad in interrogating Habermas and Taylor. These four

theorists also operate from diverse philosophical/theoretical paradigms, allowing for a

consideration of secularity and secularism from different angles. Habermas adopts a neo-

Kantian philosophical lens; Taylor, a neo-Hegelian philosophical approach; Asad, a Foucauldian

anthropological-genealogical critique; and Brown, a neo-Marxian-Foucauldian critique. Our

general slant is to utilise the latter two critiques against the former two, while seeking out the

insights of all four as an aid to answering our questions.

To the extent that critique is a salient feature of this dissertation, it is worth pointing out

that critique here is intended in the Kantian sense—an explication and assessment of the

grounds, presuppositions, conditions of possibility, constituents, tensions, and antinomies of a

14
particular formation; in this case, secularism. Or in the Wittgensteinian sense—following Asad

but minus the anthropological bent—of an assessment of discursive/conceptual grammar. The

objective is an immanent critique, examining secularism as a modern formation on its own terms

and principles, as explicated in the arguments of its advocates—as opposed to a normative

critique based on the terms and principles of some opposing worldview. This is generally the

approach taken by Asad and Brown, among others, which we echo, expand, and build upon. In

doing so, this dissertation responds to the contemporary vocation of political philosophy, to

‘rethink its basic categories of analysis and to dismantle its methodological Eurocentrism and

conceptual colonialism’ (Mendieta 2015, 220), self-consciously contributing to political

philosophy/theory’s ‘main agenda’ of provincialising and historicising the West, to the end of

epistemological, conceptual, and theoretical decolonisation (213).

Two additional distinguishing features of this dissertation are worth highlighting. It

recognises that on the specific question of secularisation and genealogies of the secular, the

contemporary discourse is preceded by an equally formidable engagement in the German

secularisation debates of the post-war period between Hans Blumenberg (1985), Karl Löwith

(1949), Carl Schmitt (2005), and others. Notwithstanding structural parallels, recent studies do not

engage in substantive discussion with this earlier discourse (Styfhals and Symons 2019, 15-16). This

dissertation bucks that trend by engaging that earlier discourse within the folds of contemporary

work. Further, it also brings into the fray scholarly reflections from a non-Western socio-political

context that are still very much connected to debates on secularism situated within the Western

tradition, but are able to consider the same problems from within this different context. Given the

different dynamics of secularism in India, in particular its greater contestability—perhaps tied to

its historical reality as colonial export—some of the work from Indian scholars is deeper and richer

in both defence and critique of secularism. In recognising this, we consider at some length the

contributions in relevant places of Bhargava (1998) and Bilgrami (1998), and, from an earlier debate

on secularism in India, Smith (1963) and Galanter (1965).

15
 Where there are distinctions, there are also deficiencies. Two limitations of this

dissertation are notable. First, while acknowledging that the study of modern Western

secularism as a particular, historical formation is a legitimate and worthy exercise—and one this

dissertation attempts—it also accepts the criticism that Western conceptions and formations

cannot be fully grasped in isolation from their historical and present encounters with other

cultures. Although it mentions this criticism in relevant places and accounts for it somewhat,13

the dissertation is not able to overcome it and remains largely working within the naively self-

enclosed Western frame of reference followed by Taylor (2007) and Habermas (2009), but also

not quite overcome by Asad (2003) and Brown (2006), although the latter acknowledge the

problem. This is a shortcoming we hope to address in future work. Second, although it covers

much of the recent literature that seeks to reassess the discourse of religion and the secular, this

dissertation cannot and does not claim to have encompassed all worthy contributions.14

This inquiry is both timely and pertinent. The debate on the place of religion in a secular

world is increasingly relevant in political philosophy at a time when dominant political models

seem lost for answers in how to deal with a ‘resurgent’ religion that does not always fit well with,

and sometimes provides serious challenges to, established secular political models—based

inherently on its side-lining to one degree or another—and the secular moral-political notions

of human rights, equality and freedom that are central to these models. Among the strongest

indications of this is the fact that a thinker as influential, and systematically comprehensive, as

Jürgen Habermas was forced at the turn of the century to take religion seriously in his

philosophical and political thought after decades of treating it as a peripheral matter that could

13
For instance, see pp. 56-57, 141 (note 109), and the discussion on the role of Europe’s Others in its
constitution in Chapter Five, pp. 304-307.
14
Significant omissions include: Abeysekara A 2008, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular
Futures, Columbia University Press: New York; Anidjar G 2008, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford
University Press: Stanford; Mandair AP 2009, Religion and the Specter of the West, Columbia University Press:
New York; and Modern JL 2011, Secularism in Antebellum America, University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

16
safely be ignored. Indeed, his most recent and perhaps last major work, Auch eine Geschichte

der Philosophie (2019), takes religion as a central concern.15

The apparently remarkable ‘return of religion’ on the global public stage has raised

important and difficult questions that leading thinkers are grappling with. These questions have

been prompted not only by the resurgence—more likely, persistence—of religion but also,

perhaps more fundamentally, by the failures of a secular modernity that promised much more

than it could deliver and delivered contrary to what it promised. In this sense, the ‘post-secular’

relates also to the ‘exhaustion of secular modernity’ in terms of its failures to order social,

cultural, or political life based principally from ‘rationalities ensconced in frames of immanence’

(Pasha 2012, 1047). Further, given that secularity is a central epistemic and political pillar of the

regnant liberal worldview—the episteme or zeitgeist of the age—a critique thereof puts much

at stake for how the world is structured and experienced under the hegemony of a secular liberal

discourse and politics. At the same time, it carries the potential for paving the way for much

needed original thinking and perspectives that may reveal new ways of approaching the

problems we face and potential new answers to them. It is not, however, within the scope of

this dissertation to indicate or construct such alternatives—a formidable task in itself. The

objective of the dissertation is negative: to highlight the aporias of liberal secularism in order to

emphasise a problem not yet sufficiently apprehended. The interesting question in the

prevailing moment is not ‘what is the alternative to secularism’—an often reactionary question

designed to close debate—but ‘what alternative conceptions of secularism help us better

understand the present’. The latter is a pragmatically and philosophically more interesting

problem, and one oriented towards more careful thinking about prevailing challenges and

better formulation of the questions these raise.

15
Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (This Too Another Philosophy of History) is published in two
volumes comprising over 1700 pages: Die okzidentale Konstellation von Glauben und Wissen (The
Occidental Constellation of Faith and Knowledge); and Vernünftige Freiheit. Spuren des Diskurses über
Glauben und Wissenis (Rational Liberty. Traces of the Discourse on Faith and Knowledge).

17
 The remainder of this introduction reviews the broader literature that relates to this

inquiry—using the concept of the ‘post-secular’ as a heuristic compass to provide some direction

in an otherwise sinuous discourse of multiple strands criss-crossing across diverse disciplines—

before turning to an outline of the views of our selected thinkers, and some previous

comparative studies in the secondary literature. We end with an outline of the chapters that

form the main body of this work and of the principal conclusions reached.

The Polysemy of the ‘Post-secular’

Extensive scholarly interest in the ‘post-secular’—popularised at the turn of the century by

Habermas16—as a term and concept began only in the late 1990s, with its usages becoming more

complex and variegated in the twenty-first century (Beckford 2012, 2).17 At a broad level, post-

secularism is an umbrella concept sheltering a constellation of positions that rethink secularism

16
Habermas’s first use of the term is in his 2001 Peace Prize acceptance speech entitled ‘Faith and
Knowledge’, later published under the same name as a postscript to his The Future of Human Nature (2003).
As such, he was certainly not the first to use the term in this broad meaning, which occurs at least two
decades prior. For instance, Robert Wuthnow in an article on ‘Science and the Sacred’ published in a volume
edited by Phillip Hammond in 1985 writes: ‘the evidence on religion and science, one of the areas in which
the processes of advancing secularization should be most evident, points largely to the survival of religion
in the postsecular era’ (199). Notably, he is the only one out of 23 contributors—reputable sociologists of
religion—to the volume to use the term, indicating that it had not gained currency at the time.
17
Beckford traces the earliest usage of the term ‘postsecular’ to a 1966 article by Andrew Greeley entitled
‘After Secularity: The Neo-Gemeinschaft Society: A Post-Christian Postscript’, which argues that although
the Catholic Church was becoming secularised and rationalised in the 1960s, there were still opportunities
for ‘postsecular’ Gemeinschaft-like communities within the Church: ‘small, subparochial, or
transparochial fellowships of believers which will give new depth and meaning to the collegial and
functional Church resulting from the Vatican Council’ (Beckford 2012, 2). This is plainly a very different
use of the term to the ones that interest us. If we broaden the scope of Beckford’s search beyond
sociology—to contribute nominally to research on the history of the term, which seems yet to be written
in any thorough form—we note its usage long before the 1960s. For instance, an article by Edward Moxon
in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1846) describes periodicals as ‘post-secular’ (66); Sir John Forbes’s
Memorandums Made in Ireland (1853) argues that the Protestant religion more harmoniously combines
secular and post-secular things, as compared with Catholicism (409); and Joseph Tunison’s Dramatic
Traditions of the Dark Ages (1907) describes Shakespeare’s Hamlet as one of those ‘post-secular censures’
which in a new age reflect and criticise the customs of the past (188).

18
by responding to some version of the secularisation thesis (Cassatella 2014, 2943).18 The concept

has been employed in two related but different ways (Mavelli and Petito 2012). First, in a

descriptive-analytical fashion, it is used to mark the return or resilience of religious traditions in

modern life and, from this departure point, to develop conceptual frameworks that might

account for this and new models of politics that make room for these religious traditions. Second,

in a critical fashion, it has emerged as a form of radical theorising and critique motivated by the

idea that such values as democracy, freedom, equality, and justice may not necessarily be best

pursued within an exclusively secular framework (931). From a different angle, Losonczi and

Singh (2010) detect three layers of meaning in the overall application of the term: the multiform

manifestations of the phenomena pertaining to the permanent presence of religious influence

within the contemporary cultural and socio-political context; the questions related to these

occurrences; and the discourses constituted by this situation on a wide scale of disciplines (11).

At a more granular level, Beckford (2012) classifies the usages of ‘post-secularity’ into six

broad clusters (3-12). These are helpful in providing an overview of how the concept is used in

the literature, and of the various scholarly interests and approaches taken in contemporary

rumination on religion and the secular. The first usage is by ‘secularisation deniers and doubters’

who find the secularisation paradigm defective, in part or whole—mistakenly or mischievously

on part of its proponents—and adopt the notion of post-secularity as a replacement. Hadden

(1987) and, in less extreme form of doubt, Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2008), who argue that

18
The recent literature on post-secularity is also vast. Significant contributions include: De Vries H and
Sullivan LE (eds.) 2006, Political theologies: Public religions in a Post-Secular World, Fordham University
Press: New York; Losonczi P and Singh A (eds.) 2010, Discoursing the Post-Secular: Essays on the Habermasian
Post-Secular Turn, LIT Verlag: Munster; Gorski P, Kim DK, Torpey J, and VanAntwerpen J (eds.) 2012, The
Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society, NYU Press: New York; Stoeckl K and Rosati M
(eds.) 2012, Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies, Ashgate: Farnham; Nynäs P, Lassander M, and
Utriainen T (eds.) 2012, Post-secular Society, Transaction Publishers: New Jersey; Rectenwald M, Almeida R
and Levine G (eds.) 2015, Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age, De Gruyter: Berlin; Mapril J, Blanes R,
Giumbelli E, and Wilson EK (eds.) 2017, Secularisms in a Postsecular Age?: Religiosities and Subjectivities in
Comparative Perspective, Palgrave MacMillan: Cham; and Staudigl M and Alvis JW 2018, Phenomenology and
the Post-Secular Turn: Contemporary Debates on the Return of Religion, Taylor & Francis.

19
secularisation as a theory about the future of human society seems increasingly out of touch

with realities on the ground, are examples of this usage.

A second usage conceives post-secularity not as a corrective to the failures of

secularisation theories but a progressive development that builds on the achievements of both

religion and secularism to form a distinctive new outlook. Knott (2010), for example, argues that

the post-secular takes secular values—such as the importance of the self, human flourishing,

and freedom—seriously and envisages a field of knowledge-power relations where religious,

secular, and post-secular positions are co-produced and contested. Similarly, philosopher John

Caputo (2001) sees the post-secular arising as an iteration of the Enlightenment, a continuation

of the Enlightenment by different means. On this view, the ‘post’ in ‘post-secular’ does not mean

‘over and done with’ but rather ‘after having passed through’ modernity (60-61). Another

prominent example is Braidotti (2008) for whom the feminist response to the post-secular turn

is represented in a political subjectivity that can be conveyed through and supported by

religious piety and may involve significant amounts of spirituality.

A third usage concerns the re-enchantment of culture and art or the revaluation of the

spiritual in art. Here post-secularity revolves around the idea that creative and artistic

sensibilities are moving away from secular themes to explore a realm of enchantment.19 This

cluster might be seen as combination of the first two, corrective and progressive development,

applied to the specific domain of culture and art.

A fourth usage is with respect to the ‘public resurgence of religion’ such as the renewed

role of faith-based organisations in welfare states. Here the focus is not on any re-enchantment

19
For instance, John McLure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007)
gives the following reasons for labelling a body of fiction as ‘postsecular’: ‘because the stories it tells trace
the turn of secular-minded characters back toward the religious; because its ontological signature is a
religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real; and because its ideological signature is
the rearticulation of a dramatically ‘weakened’ religiosity with secular, progressive values and projects (3).

20
or the putative failure of secularisation theories but on the novel opportunities for religion to re-

enter the public sphere on the back of the changed socioeconomic conditions of neoliberalism.

A fifth usage is related to a cluster of widely differing ideas about the intersections

between politics, philosophy, and theology. This is the highest-profile cluster at the centre of

which is the work of Habermas, who argues for a qualified inclusion of religion in the public

sphere. Others go further in arguing for a greater role for religion to one extent or another.

The sixth and final cluster, for Beckford, is of critical and negative views of the ‘post-secular’

notion, ranging from those who reject the concept based on lack of secure roots in empirical and

historical data (Martin 2011), to those who argue that the alleged post-secular turn is actually

about exploring ways of thinking and acting that are more inclusively and moderately secular

(McLennan 2010), to the Žižek’s (1999) excoriation of ‘postsecular crap’ that relies on a vague,

mysterious Otherness that the postmodern continental ‘return of religion’—the reference being

to Derrida, Levinas, Vattimo et al.—erects in the place of the extinct ontological god (17).

To these six clusters, we can add a seventh, with Molendijk (2015), of those who are

radically critical of secular or secularist approaches and seek for these to be fully overcome,

namely, the proponents of ‘radical orthodoxy’ such as Milbank (1990) and Blond (1998) (106).20

Beckford’s mapping provides a helpful overview of a large subset of the literature, allowing

us to bracket the terrain of our work more precisely. We are concerned largely with the fifth

cluster alone, along with some basic comment on the first in our discussion on the secularisation

thesis. Nevertheless, we agree with Molendijk (2015) that Beckford’s division is not really

convincing from a systematic point of view; indeed, it seems rather arbitrary in its categorisation

(106). Further, since Beckford’s mapping seeks out the explicit usage of ‘post-secular’, it misses

20
This is one type of ‘political theology’—distinct from the type referred to in the following note—
undertaken by Christian theologians, defined variously as ‘the analysis and criticism of political
arrangements…from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world’ (Cavanaugh
and Scott 2004, 1); ‘an inquiry carried out by Christian theologians in relation to the political…[or] the
various ways in which humans order common life’ (Hovey and Phillips 2015, xi-xii); and ‘theology of or
about the political, more specifically, theology of or about the state’ (Wolterstorff 2012, 2).

21
important contributions which speak to the underlying problematic but choose not to use the

label of ‘post-secular’. These include the contributions of Charles Taylor, who finds nominal

mention, and the likes of Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and William Connolly, who are entirely

absent. If we examine the literature from the lens of what some have termed ‘secular studies’

(Bielo 2015) or the ‘critical study of secularism’ (Scherer 2011), our mapping of the literature

attains greater comprehensiveness.21

From this perspective too, the literature is vast. In reviewing three prominent anthologies,

Bielo (2015) counts that they represent at least six different ‘end games’ or purposes attracting

scholarly attention: mapping intellectual and ideological trajectories of religion-secular

entanglement as a historical matter; empirically documenting the complexities of particular

religion-secular entanglements in particular socio-cultural locations; reflecting on how political

actors might best engage the religious and the secular in acts of governance and international

relations; discerning a theoretical conceptual agenda for the ongoing study of religion-secular

entanglements; chasing the philosophical existential consequences of secularity; and seeking to

name what a good, productive religion-secular entanglement ought to look like from a

normative perspective (121).22 The last three of these are of greater relevance to our work. Bielo

also notes the organising interests across the volumes, which are more broadly representative

of the major questions in the literature at large: first, the definition of secularity and a secular

21
Another area that is relevant to our topic in some of its strands is that of ‘political theology’. Two good
introductions to contemporary work in this area are De Vries and Sullivan (2006, 1-88) and Vatter (2011, 1-
25). In the later modern period, the term is most closely associated with the name of Carl Schmitt, for
whom it marks the exposition of the theological dimension within the political. We address this form of
political theology, given its relevance to debates on secularisation, in Chapter Two, pp. 112-118.
22
All three edited volumes explore the nature of the secular, its relation with the religious, and the status
and role of religion in our secular world. Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun’s Varieties of Secularism
in a Secular Age (2010) brings together twelve diverse direct engagements, primarily theoretical, with
Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). Calhoun, Juergensymeyer, and VanAntwerpen’s Rethinking Secularism
(2011) is relatively more empirically oriented on questions of the religious and secular generally. Mendieta
and VanAntwerpen’s The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011) is based on a public engagement on
these questions between Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler and Cornel West.

22
age, to what extent we live in one, and what this means for everyday subjectivity; second, the

nature of the secular as active, contingent, and plural; and three, the instability of any discrete

religion-secular binary (122-124).

Finally, Dressler and Mandair (2011) suggest a neater—but still comprehensive and in

some ways closer to our framing above—categorisation of post-secular scholarship into three

strands: the socio-political philosophy of liberal secularism (represented by the likes of Taylor,

Rawls, and Habermas); the ‘postmodernist’ critiques of ‘ontotheological’ metaphysics by radical

theologians and Continental Philosophers that has revived the discourse of ‘political theology’;

and Foucauldian-Saidian forms of discourse analysis focusing on genealogies of power,

represented by the likes of Asad (4). From this perspective, this dissertation can be said to be

working specifically with the first and third of these strands, while bracketing the second.

Having laid out the broad contours of the literature, we now zoom in to outline the views

of our chosen interlocutors on our selected questions. These views are developed in detail

gradually in the body of the dissertation. Since we treat secularisation, secularity, and secularism

separately, the complete picture of each thinker’s position emerges gradually in Chapters Two

to Five, and is then reconstructed in the Conclusion.

Habermas, Taylor, Asad, Brown

Secularity, for Habermas, is marked by a ‘post-metaphysical’ subjectivity and (ideal) social

practice that is reflexive, self-consciously fallible, open to plurality, and radically self-critical. It

takes science as authoritative and morality as profane. It considers religion epistemically inferior

because of its dogmatic nature, and politically inferior because of its imposing and thus

destructive potential, but also politically and socially useful because of a restorative potential.

Given religion’s genealogical relation to secularity, it can play a part in salvaging the ‘unfinished’

(and now ‘faltering’) project of modernity. The challenge is to salvage the moral intuitions and

inspiring power of religion by divulging their profane truth contents expressed in profane

23
language. ‘Translation’, therefore, is critical to Habermas’s conception of secularism as a

political doctrine. That conception sees secularism as a procedural form of political

organisation—the state is neutral with respect to competing religious worldviews and public

political discourse is conducted in the neutral language of ‘public reason’. It is justified simply

as a necessity of pluralistic society. Neutrality is the internal connection, for Habermas, between

freedom and pluralism. Secularism, on this view, is an essential requirement to politically

organise societies that are diverse with respect to the worldviews adopted by its citizens.

For Taylor, secularity is primarily, if not exclusively, to be considered in terms of a

background frame within which people think and act, and more specifically, pursue their

(religious or secular) ‘spiritual’ lives. As detailed at length in A Secular Age (2007), secularity is

a background frame of immanence within which people at large experience the world. This

immanent frame is defined by a social imaginary that sees the world as a constellation of

differentiated, self-sufficient orders: a ‘natural’ cosmic order fully open to our understanding by

science; a moral order that is exclusively humanist and accepts no final goals other than human

flourishing; and a social order that is fully open to human construction and reconstruction. This

frame eclipses transcendence as the dominant social imaginary but is not closed to

transcendence at the level of the individual. Indeed, the secular age fosters and secures new

forms of religion. Secularity is not inimical to religion. Believers can fully pursue their religious

forms of life if they so choose, just as non-believers can pursue secular forms of life. It is the role

of secularism to facilitate this freedom of choice. Secularism, as a political framework, however,

needs to be redefined, turned away from its fixation on religion to being understood and

practiced in terms of the goods it seeks: political freedom and equality. Secularism is not about

the relation of the state with religion per se, but rather has to do with the correct response of

the democratic state to diversity. With this adjustment, secularism, for Taylor, is justified, as

with Habermas, because it is required to fairly manage diverse societies. It is not simply needed

or preferable but inescapable, in virtue of the requirements of democratic legitimacy.

24
 According to Asad, secularity is the domain of sensibilities, experiences, and embodied

concepts which orient people’s sensorium and guide public understandings of truth. It’s

development through historical processes of secularisation comprise tectonic ontological and

epistemological shifts, not mere political reconfiguration. Humans become the self-conscious

makers of History and the foundation of universally valid knowledge about nature and society.

Along with its twin concept of religion, the secular is critical to modernity as a new way of living

in the world. However, their distinction is not one of rational-irrational or even sacred-profane,

transcendent-immanent. Secularity does not eliminate the sacred or transcendent, it relocates

these on its own terms. These terms are authorised by historically-specific powers in historically-

specific ways. Asad is thus focused on carefully reading the formation of these categories and their

terms of authorisation within their historical contexts, to the end of showing modern secularism

as the construction of a new normative power. It is not, as Habermas and Taylor would have it,

merely a matter of fairly organising diverse societies. Modern secularism is a process of

establishing a new form of normative power over the modern subject, to which end it distinctively

presupposes new concepts of religion, politics, state, ethics, and new imperatives and rationalities

associated with them. It represents a very particular mediated experience of the world.

For Brown, secularity, as an analytical-descriptive category, is the eschewing of imaginary

ideals and engagement with pragmatic realities as they are. This is on the view, leaning on Marx,

that religion is a modality of escape from pragmatic realities into the realm of imaginary ideals.

Religion is based in specific social arrangements of unfreedom, whereby man’s alienated powers

are attributed to sovereign Others. However, secularity is the always ongoing and fallible human

attempt to engage pragmatic realities as they are, without the claim to direct access of ‘reality’ as

it is. Secularism, however, is ideology that claims neutrality and masks normativity to extend its

power. Brown pursues the conceits of secularism that arise precisely from its lack of religious

neutrality. It is not, she argues, equally available to all religions; it is not culturally neutral; and

it does not generate tolerance, mutual respect, or gender freedom and equality. She goes further

25
in excavating a Marxian account of modern secularism as a tool in the capitalist order. Capitalism

profanes/secularises the world only to lay bare a different historical order of unfreedom, one that

violates holiness and humanism at once. And it does so while exercising a ‘religious’ power of

projection. Capital merely displaces religious modalities of consciousness into secular forms:

money, the commodity, the state.

This is a bare-bones outline of the positions taken by our selected thinkers on the questions

of our inquiry. Even as broad outlines, they are sufficient to show that the work of these theorists

provides fertile ground for a rich conversation on the identified problem-space. The body of the

dissertation aims at a much deeper exegetical, critical, and comparative account that reveals and

grounds this outline in all its high-definition resolution by providing all the relevant topographical

features of their work. Chapters Two to Four in particular elaborate, compare, and contrast their

views on secularisation, secularity, and secularism respectively.

A stronger appreciation of these views requires some sense of the contrast in the

methodological approaches. The analyses of Taylor and Habermas are philosophical and

intellectual. Brown prefers a discourse analysis approach with a greater focus on the function of

power. Asad is also sensitive to the role of power in his anthropological analysis. Notably, for

Asad, anthropology is not, as popularly thought, simply a method of ‘thick description’ or

‘fieldwork’ (2003, 17). He prefers and practises an anthropology of systematic inquiry into

cultural concepts, bringing his work a little closer to the type undertaken by Taylor, Habermas,

and Brown.23 His interest is less hermeneutic than that of the anthropologist-grammarian (De

Vries 2006, 69). Although conceptual analysis is as old as philosophy, what is distinctive about

modern anthropology, for Asad, is ‘the comparison of embedded concepts (representations)

between societies differently located in time or space’ (2003, 17). The anthropological

23
Contra Polat (2012) who argues that there exists an unbridgeable gap between Taylor’s pragmatic, goal-
oriented, philosophical inquiry and Asad’s critical anthropology grounded in space and time (229). This
might be missing the point that although Asad is examining specific phenomena, he is doing so as part
of a rumination on the concepts they articulate and the conceptual grammar they are articulated by.

26
perspective is the attempt to see a given event/s as the articulation of a number of organising

categories typical of a particular culture (2006, 497). An important aspect of this is to explore

the conceptual structure of a practice, tradition, or discipline—including, reflexively, the

discipline of anthropology itself24—and the relation of this structure to the conditions of power

in which the practice, tradition, or discipline realises itself as authoritative (Scott and

Hirschkind 2006, 2).

Further, in examining the secular, Asad and Brown favour a genealogical approach over

that of historical narrative, where genealogy is ‘a way of working back from our present to the

contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties’ (Asad 2003, 16). Asad’s

anthropology of the secular can be seen as a deconstruction of secularity and secularism that

reveals their contingency and historicity (Cannell 2010, 90). The influence of Foucault is evident

in Asad’s and Brown’s particular attention to the constraining and productive powers of practice

and ideology. Taylor also seeks to deconstruct the secular but with the premise that there may

be something like a universal human search for religious experience—the search for ‘fullness’

(95). Although Taylor does not follow Weber’s careful avoidance of truth claims about, or

definition of, religion, his project reads as an extended meditation on the Weberian concept of

disenchantment in its interest in accounting for the phenomenology of the modern Western

experience of religion and secularity (96). Taylor wishes to demonstrate, on the back of his

historical narrative in which medieval Christian theology plays a crucial part in the development

of modern secularity, that Christianity and atheistic/secularist humanism are philosophical

cousins, not irreconcilable opposites, and thus to restore the possibility that Christian thought

contributes to modern debate on equal terms. His historical narrative of secularity is central to

his prescription that both are under pressure and should reconfigure themselves. Habermas

likewise wants to reconnect secularity to religion genealogically, via an elaborate genealogy of

24
Asad T (ed.) 1973, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Ithaca Press: London.

27
the discourse on faith and knowledge, to make a similar argument, while still maintaining a

stronger epistemic distinction between the two.

Given the significance of this area of scholarly reflection, it comes as no surprise that some

comparative studies have already been undertaken.25 These assess different positions or

approaches taken by some combination of our selected thinkers on the question of secularity and

secularism. Spohn (2015) compares the ‘post-secular’ models of Habermas and Taylor on how

religion is to be accommodated in the public sphere, honing in on their disagreement about the

epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons. This disagreement, he argues,

reflects a deeper schism on how the two understand modernity, in terms of its cultural or acultural

status. Scherer (2011) favourably reviews and compares Asad and Connolly in how their major texts

on secularity—Formations of the Secular (2003) and Why I am Not a Secularist (1999)

respectively—trace the constitution of modern secularism and establish profoundly original

perspectives from which to critique it. In different ways, both texts sound out the layered

sensibilities, obscured histories, and dense conceptual and practical networks that produce and

sustain different forms of secularism (622-624).

Cassatella (2014) presents an overview of the literature on post-secularism—understood

as an emerging body of reflection in political thought about the ways to respond to cultural and

religious diversity—by outlining, but not comparing and contrasting, the contributions of

Habermas, Taylor and Asad. He goes further to note that positions in this area differ in terms

of philosophical methods, orientations, and objectives and, in this respect, casts the three

thinkers as operating with a ‘postmetaphysical’, ‘phenomenological’, and ‘genealogical’

approach respectively. Beyond noting this, however, it is not discussed any further given the

limited scope of the article. Polat (2012) has more to say in her comparative study of the

‘critically different approaches’ to secularity taken by Taylor and Asad. She argues that there

25
There are of course many studies that are not comparative but focus on one of our selected thinkers.
We refer to many of these where relevant in the body of the dissertation.

28
exists an unbridgeable gap between Taylor’s pragmatic, goal-oriented, philosophical inquiry and

Asad’s critical anthropology. Within a broader argument about the opportunity and need for

anthropologists to contribute new ethnographies in the discourse on the secular, en route to

the development of a genuine comparative anthropology of secularisms, Cannell (2010)

compares Asad and Taylor as two paradigms—identified as deconstructivism and Hegelian

revisionism respectively—which have heavily shaped this discourse.

Mozumder (2011) undertakes a comparative analysis of the ‘theories of secularism’ by

Habermas, Taylor and Asad in which he positions the first two broadly in the same camp and

has Asad problematising positions such as theirs foremostly for its ‘essentialising’ the religious

and the secular. He places the work of all three in a broader context in which ‘post-

secularisation’ theses offer alternative ways of approaching secularisation in the contemporary

world and where post-secularism represents a paradigm shift from the age of the predominance

of scientific and non-metaphysical rationality to a new metaphysical or post-metaphysical

rationality, where neither metaphysics nor non-metaphysical rationality reigns alone. On the

back of Asad, Mozumder argues that what our post-secular condition calls for is not to push the

essential and universal separation between religion and the secular public sphere a little bit

further, or to imagine a utopian neutral state that hosts non-biased discussions among

competing views—as he sees Habermas and Taylor doing. Rather, we need to recognise the

essential heterogeneity, diversity, and instability of religious and secular concepts, meanings,

and discourses, all of which are socially and politically constructed (66-67).

This dissertation incorporates the insights of these comparative studies, referring to them

where relevant. It stands as distinct from them, however, in several ways. First, in the selection

of thinkers: no study compares the four we have selected. Second, in the comprehensiveness of

the study. Most of the above are article-length treatments. Mozumder (2011) is the exception

but still does not come close to the depth of our treatment. Third, in the specific questions we

seek to address. And fourth, in the conclusions we arrive at—sketched out in the next section.

29
Dissertation Outline and Argument

This dissertation is structured in the form of five chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter

provides historical background that is germane to the substantive discussions that follow. The

second chapter looks at the concept of secularisation. It considers the linguistic-conceptual

significations of ‘the secular’ and its cognates and their historical development from theological

Christian contexts to our modern secular contexts. It also deliberates on various genealogies of

the secular that struggle to specify the historical relation of modern secularity with its religious

forebears, and provides a typology by which to organise these. Part of this is Schmitt’s famous

‘political theology’ thesis—that secularisation is theology by other means—and influential

replies to it. This older German secularisation debate from the Post-War period—led by

Schmitt, Blumenberg and Löwith—serves as an insightful prologue to contemporary debates.

The third chapter takes secularity as its subject matter: what is the secular? It explores

Habermas’s ‘post-metaphysical’ secularity, Taylor’s influential thesis on secularity as conditions

of belief, Asad’s ‘anthropology of the secular’, and Brown’s Marxian reading of secularity. A key

discussion here is of religion as a modern construct vis-à-vis its pre-modern conception.

Secularity cannot do without its twin concept of religion (and vice versa) but neither have

universal transhistorical essences. Both are embedded across time in different historical

contexts and discursive worlds. The fourth chapter turns to secularism as a worldview and

political doctrine. It sketches liberal justifications of secularism as the preferred form of political

organisation, categorising these into four broad types. These justifications appeal to the

necessity of some neutral mode of politics—premised on some neutral mode of reason and

language—for pluralist societies and find this necessary apparatus in different models of

secularism. The fifth chapter then zooms in on what is at the core of all justifications of

secularism: its claimed political and epistemic neutrality. We critically examine this claim at

great length to show that it is not met, and that by positioning itself as neutral secular liberalism

privileges itself only by masking its normativity.

30
 The ‘standard’ liberal narrative on secularism, sketched above, rests on four pivotal

premises. One, that the religious is a normative particular whereas the secular is a normatively-

neutral universal. Two, that since the secular is a neutral universal it can best serve the role of

mediator between different religious (and non-religious) particulars—specific worldviews—in

the public sphere. Three, religious discourse is epistemically weak and suspect in its truth

claims, relative to secular discourse, because of its dogmatic nature. Four, religion is relatively

more predisposed to intractable argument, conflict, and violence, and is therefore unfit as the

basis of politics, which requires a surer footing. This dissertation takes a critical look at all of

these, showing that each is open to cogent critique and that, in turn, the narrative they uphold

stands on tenuous grounds. This is done predominantly using the arguments of Asad and

Brown, to critique the standard narrative, as in Rawls, and its revised articulations as presented

by Habermas and Taylor.

Building on this, the dissertation offers alternative conceptions of secularity and

secularism and considers the implications of secularism’s legitimation failing to stand up to

scrutiny. What emerges is a strong contrast between a secular liberal imaginary of secularism

and its critical deconstruction. According to the prevailing liberal imaginary, secularity is a

rational, reflective, scientific subjectivity, and secularism is the mere separation of religion from

state that serves as the means to equitably manage diversity by backgrounding or privatising

controversial worldviews and foregrounding putatively neutral epistemology (‘public reason’)

and rational politics. This subjectivity and politics emerge historically through processes of

secularisation understood as contingent ‘learning processes’ (Habermas) or reform internal to

Christianity (Taylor). According to the critical rendition, secularity marks ideological

subjectivity presented as merely rational, and secularism is the subordination of religion to

secular/worldly concerns that emerges instrumentally with, and for, the modern nation state’s

consolidation of power, establishing a normative, ideological (non-neutral) force of its own.

While largely following the now well-established Asadian critique of secularism as the liberal

31
state’s sovereign power to reorder and reorganise ‘religion’ and religious life, we are also building

on it—by explicating and emphasising the notion of ‘subordination’ that remains implicit in

Asad; moving away from it slightly—by suggesting that we can conceive of the ‘religious’ and

‘secular’ as having (cultural, historical) ‘essences’ tied to the notions of transcendence and

immanence respectively; and adding to it, by relating the implications of the critique to liberal

legitimations of secularism via a thorough engagement with the latter.

This dissertation argues, then, that the modern secular is best conceived as pertaining to

the worldly or the immanent in the specific sense that renders religion—conceived as pertaining

in some sense to the otherworldly or transcendent—subordinate, secondary, or vestigial. The

key notion here is of subordination, as opposed to simple negation or neutrality. The secular

and religious—as hegemonic modern Western categories, not as transcultural or transhistorical

universals—are not simple opposites such that the former negates the latter or that the

hegemony of the former leads to the extinction of the latter. Nor is the secular simply neutral

with respect to religion such that it has no bearing on it. Rather, there is an active relationship

of subordination and hierarchy. Modern secularity, at its core, maintains a hierarchical

relationship between the superordinate secular and subordinate religious—between itself and

what it determines to be ‘religious’—with the latter taking its place at the lower rungs well below

the former. Subordination and hierarchy here are not about negation or extermination. They

are primarily about the ability to define, manage, govern, legitimate (and de-legitimate) that

which is subordinated, which is precisely what modern secularity does with religion (and what

most pre-modern Christianity did with secularity: worldly concerns were governed by religious

authority and determinations). According to this governance of ‘religion’ by the ideological

(hence, non-neutral) predicates of liberal secularism, specific kinds of ‘good’ or ‘liberal’ religion

are commendable, proper, even socially useful, while other kinds of ‘bad’ or ‘illiberal’ religion

are condemnable, fundamentalist, and socially disruptive. The former are valorised, promoted,

32
and allowed to proliferate; the latter are denounced, controlled, and managed through coercive

state power.

In turn, secularity—the abstract noun that labels an epistemic-ontological category—is

better conceived as pertaining to ‘worldly’ phenomena (objects, concepts, practices, people,

doctrines, ideals, sensibilities, dispositions, desires, aspirations) that make a secondary

reference to religion at best. Secularisation, in abstract conceptual terms, is the process by which

something becomes worldly in this sense, and, in more concrete historical terms, labels the

transformation of Europe to its modern secular age where precisely this takes place.

Secularisation marks the transformation of religion in a way that it can be, and is, subordinated,

which, in turn, results in the ‘declining social significance of religion’ (Wilson 1966), if not its

significance for individuals. It is constructed anew and becomes the object of discipline and

management. It is transformed to become ‘liberal’ religion: a mostly private, interior concern,

essentially about belief and conscience, and specifically not about, or separated from, politics,

science, education, and art. This figuration of ‘proper’ religion has normative force in the West,

even if there are strong contestations on the boundaries of some of these aspects. Claims to

religion that oppose these contours are improper, ‘fundamentalist’, religion, for which the

secular age has little room—without diminishing its claim of facilitating freedom and autonomy

for all in a non-ideological manner.

Finally, secularism is the modern immanentising worldview, comprising concomitant

social and political organisation, that discursively creates and politically authorises the

‘religious’ and the ‘political’ (along with attendant categories) as differentiated spheres in order

to hierarchise them, that is, to subject the authority and reason of the former to that of the

latter. Alternatively, it is the worldview, or, more narrowly, the political doctrine thereof, that

advocates for and gives effect to the predomination of the worldly through the subordination of

religion, that is, of otherworldly concerns and their worldly footprints. Again, the key notions

here are of subordination, hierarchy, and ideological-normative construction, as opposed to

33
notions of neutrality and mere separation, on the one hand, and those of simple negation or

opposition, on the other.

There is on this view, to be sure, opposition between the secular and religious, albeit not a

simple opposition. Modern secularity does not necessitate theoretically nor lead in practice to

the negation or extinction of religion. However, it does necessitate the remaking of (pre-modern)

religion such that it must take on a modern, secular liberal form. This form is ‘secular’ because

the changes required of religion are determined, ultimately if not exclusively, by secular liberal

thought and power. It is motivated by modern secularity’s view of religion as epistemically and

politically unfit, suspect, or weak—a view developed in the Enlightenment that subsequently

becomes hegemonic—and this is the root of the opposition or tension between secularity and

religion. Secularity requires that religious/theological epistemic regimes give way, in the public

realm, to secular epistemic regimes grounded in naturalism and science, and that religious

politics (‘theocracy’) give way to secular politics grounded in a putatively independent, neutral,

or profane morality, rationality, and language. This requirement is non-negotiable. Without it,

we do not get modern secularity as we know it. In turn, at this level at least, there is a mutual

contrariety that is zero-sum: either religious epistemology and politics predominate, or its secular

counterparts do. However, this means neither that religion cannot exist in a secular age nor even

that the grounds of tension—epistemological-ontological and political—are not mutually-

informed or constituted. Indeed, secular and religious categories have imbricated, sinuous

histories, and religion may not only survive in a secular age, it can also flourish—as it presently

does in many parts of the world. However, this is a particular form of liberalised religion that has

undergone secularisation, to the exclusion of other forms; it is domesticated, custom-made, as it

were, to fit in a secular age. The forms and implications of this domestication for how we

understand secularism is what this dissertation seeks to account for.

As to the question of legitimation, in liberal theory secularism as statecraft, sometimes as

a worldview, is legitimated through appeals to secularism’s unique ability to uphold approaches

34
to knowledge and politics that are in some significant sense neutral to all worldviews. We argue

that these appeals fall short on interrogation: modern secularism, far from being neutral or

universal, is a particular normative worldview that is as controversial and contestable as any

other. It subordinates religion—just as, in principle, pre-modern religion subordinated the

(theologically-defined) secular—as a function of its ‘thick’ normativity that determines its

conceptions of the just and the good, not as a function of any self-evident universal principles.

If all of this is true, we are left in search of more theoretically coherent and practically just ‘post-

secular’ forms of political organisation.

This approach, we argue, covers the failings of standard narratives and incorporates the

insights of recent critical interventions. First, because the notion that secularism is the mere

separation or independence of religion from politics—and attendant separations of ethics from

law, public from private, state from church—affords these categories an unwarranted natural

status instead of making explicit that they do not even exist, in the form secular thought and

power remakes them, prior to any putative separation. Second, by speaking of subjecting the

religious to the political we get to the core of the matter, avoiding the prioritising of how much

separation or integration/entanglement actually occurs—and catering for the various modes

and models of secularism (French, American, Indian, Turkish). Third, it more explicitly deprives

secularism of unwarranted claims to neutrality. Fourth, it provides an explanation for why some

forms of religion flourish in a secular age while others find little to no room.

We elaborate on these conclusions and supporting points in the final chapter of this

dissertation. The journey that takes us to them, of course, is more important than the destination

itself. Having opened and outlined our map, tools, and pathway in this introduction, let us embark

on that journey, starting from as logical a departure point as any, the historical background.

35
 Chapter One

A History of Secularism

God has therefore ordained two regiment(s): the spiritual which by the Holy Spirit produces
Christians and pious folk under Christ, and the secular which restrains un-Christian and
evil folk, so that they are obliged to keep outward peace, albeit by no merit of their own.
— Martin Luther, On Secular Authority, 1523

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1787

Religion and politics have been enmeshed in both theory and practice for most of human history.

Human efforts to organise communally and socially have been embedded within ontological

images of the world as deeply connected with something beyond its own spatial-temporal limits.

Modern secularism is an exception in this respect; one that, nevertheless, does not arise out of

the proverbial blue. It arrives gradually and organically from what precedes it in late Medieval

Europe, with presumably even deeper historical roots. The words ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ with

their prevailing significations are decidedly modern terminologies. This has led many historians

and scholars to start with, or just before, the modern period when expounding histories of

secularism.26 This is a narrow approach, arguably, given that a new concept need not speak to an

entirely novel reality. It may echo a more pronounced manifestation or a variant modality of

older phenomena. Even when the phenomenon is significantly novel—as modern secularism is—

it is bound to have roots that stretch deeper into history. In turn, histories of secularism that

assess these roots give the topic a more deserving treatment.27 In this chapter, we attempt to

provide an outline of this ‘deeper’ history of secularism.

26
‘I have found no general history of secularism that reaches back to the origins of Western civilisation
and forward to our time. Most histories treat the phenomenon as exclusively contemporary’ (Kennedy
2006, 9). Examples of histories focusing on the modern period exclusively or primarily include Graeme
Smith’s A Short History of Secularism (2007) and the historical account that comprises the bulk of Charles
Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007).
27
Emmet Kennedy’s Secularism and its Opponents: From Augustine to Solzhenitsyn (2006) is the sole
instance of this we found, and on which therefore we rely heavily in this chapter. Sidney Ehler’s Twenty
Centuries of Church and State (1957) and Ehler and Morrall’s Church and State through the Centuries

36
 There is, of course, no definitive history of secularism—any more than there is of anything

else. There are only contested histories of secularism. The aim of this chapter is not to assess

this difficult historical terrain in order to argue for the best account or contribute to historical

research. This is a dissertation in political philosophy and theory, not history. Rather, the more

modest objective of this chapter is only to provide historical background, to develop an

historical vocabulary, that will provide a set of conceptual coordinates for the theoretical and

comparative work that follows.28 Debates around secularity, secularism, and in particular,

secularisation, inevitably refer to important historical moments: figures, ideas, events. In turn,

familiarity with the history of secularism is important. For this reason too, the history presented

here will be complemented and complicated in the chapters to come where the accounts of

other thinkers are brought in. To the extent that we are particularly invested in a relatively

thorough examination of secularisation, as a historical process that gives rise to our modern

secular age, we will return to the question of the ‘genealogies of the secular’, and consider

various accounts of these at some length in Chapter Two. For now, our focus is on historical

background for the purpose of acquiring sufficient familiarity. As a broad historical background,

the mode we adopt is to focus on some key moments in the form of representative influential

thinkers and pivotal events.29 The selection of these is by no means exhaustive or definitive. If a

genealogical account is implied even in this background, that is a function of all historical

accounts to tell some story, but no positive attempt is made to provide any such explicit,

comprehensive account.

(1954)—the later a collection of primary historical documents with brief commentary—although not
histories of secularism as such cover some of the same ground.
28
Accordingly, no claim to original scholarship is made in this chapter. We rely on the work of select
historians, most prominently those cited in the preceding note.
29
Secularity is a, arguably the, defining feature of modernity, and as such it would not be a stretch to
suggest that most, if not all, significant thinkers of the last five or six centuries have had something to say
about it, directly or indirectly. For a broad outline, this inevitably means having to select some to stand
in for others, while leaving some important voices and occurrences out entirely.

37
 According to one standard account, Western history progresses relentlessly and linearly

from a crude Greek and Roman anthropomorphism of antiquity, through a more sophisticated

monotheism with the advent of Christianity, before a shift towards humanism in the

Renaissance leads on to the triumph of the Enlightenment (Smith 2007, 89). On such accounts,

secularism conceived broadly as a way of thinking about the world without reference to the

‘supernatural’ has someone like Anaxagoras (c. 500 BCE) as its founding father, on account of

his seeking material causes for ‘natural’ phenomena (22).30 We begin instead, following Kennedy

(2006), in the early Christian period—circa the fifth century CE—with Augustine. The relevant

theories and practices whose development we trace relate to two broad strains—the epistemic

and the political—that can be articulated in the form of two questions: how revelation/faith

relates to reason/knowledge; and how the Church or spiritual kingdom relates to the Imperial

or earthly kingdom, or, in the modern rendition, how religion relates to public life.

The story that emerges identifies Augustine and Aquinas as setting the terms of debate

between Christian and non-Christian (Greco-Roman) ‘Western’ culture. In discussing the

problems concerning the relationship of reason to faith, and church to empire, and in situating

this relationship in a particular bifurcatory, tension-ridden way, they sow the seeds that later

medieval and modern thinkers tend and water, in more actively developing secular

epistemological and political theories. Renaissance thinkers—represented here sketchily by

Dante and Machiavelli—take one step towards secularity with their ‘humanist’ this-worldly

emphasis, if still backward-looking at this stage. The rise of the ‘new science’—with Bacon,

Descartes, Galileo, Newton—arguably facilitated by the nominalist turn in Christian theology

30
Against the prevailing Athenian belief of his time that the sun was the god Helios making a daily
pilgrimage across the sky, Anaxagoras taught that it was in fact a red-hot burning stone, and that the
moon was made of earth and reflected the sun’s light. According to Smith (2007), this is one of our earliest
known teachings that reflect the core of the ‘secular’ attitude, namely, that ‘[t]he world, and our life upon
it, are to be examined, reflected upon and studied without reference to anything beyond what can be
known by human beings here and now’ (22). This narrative suffers from an element of hasty anachronism,
however, in its marking of ancient phenomena with early modern concepts such as ‘natural’,
‘supernatural’, and ‘secular’.

38
but also deleterious to the latter’s epistemic standing—paves the ways for an alternative

epistemic foundation for the ‘rational’ organisation of public life. Medieval Church decadence,

division, and corruption leave a strong desire and push for reform across the board. The chaos

left in Europe in the wake of Luther’s reform provides the context for early modern thinkers—

Locke, Rousseau, Kant, et al.—to take a more definitive step of bracketing religion from politics,

through the discursive reconstruction of both as properly relevant to mutually-autonomous,

private and public, domains of life. All these ideational developments, however, are insufficient

and indeterminate on their own. It is the material socio-political developments that determine

which ideas get taken up and when.31 Persistent imperial-papal conflicts over division of power

and influence are only conclusively settled with the rise and consolidation of the modern state

and its subordination of the Catholic Church in particular, and religion in general. Indeed, the

rise of the modern state is a, perhaps the, decisive element in the uptake of the ideas that lead

to the rise of secularism.

Saint Augustine and the Two Cities

‘Early religion’ is a social and socially embedded phenomenon: it is a way in which the collective

(tribe, clan, village) relate to spiritual forces that animate all aspects of social life (Taylor 2011,

44; Gauchet 1997). Neither is ‘religion’ a thing that can be conceived as a distinct, identifiable

part of the social experience, nor is there an individual aspect to it standing alone from its social

context. It is inextricably embedded in that experience; ‘religion’ and social life are inseparable.

With the advent of the ‘higher’ religions of the ‘Axial Age’—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism,

Zoroastrianism—there is a relative disembedding of the individual from the collective, and later

31
We assume, with Taylor (2007), that ideas and material conditions affect history in a dialectical
relationship. Material conditions are critical in determining which ideas get taken up for social or political
purposes, thus becoming influential. For a basic discussion on this historiographical question, see
Chapter Three, pp. 164-167.

39
of (early modern) ‘religion’ as a distinct aspect of human life from broader social life.32 Roman

religiō, however, remains socially embedded: it is as much as family relations and loyalty to the

emperor as it is about rituals directed at the gods.33 In this sense, there is no ‘secular’ or ‘religion’

as moderns would come to conceive of them (McGowan 2010, 263). With the advent of

Christianity, and in particular following the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire,

there is the first clearer distinctions drawn between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ realms, for which

Augustine is influential.

Saint Augustine (354-430 CE) writes The City of God in the aftermath of the sack of Rome

by the Visigoths in 410 CE.34 It is an elucidation and defence of Christianity in the context its

adherents being blamed for the destruction of the city because they had Christianised the

Roman Empire and abandoned the pagan religiō that had protected Rome for centuries

(Weithman 2001, 235). Augustine argues that, in fact, Christianity has helped the Roman Empire

over the years, and that, more importantly in principle, Christianity’s focus is on spiritual

matters foremostly; worldly/imperial concerns are of secondary importance. In the context of

the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, and arguably motivated by that context, this

response of explaining the deteriorating political situation and Christian suffering within it by

relegating worldly concerns to secondary status is understandable. The specifics of the proffered

narrative, given their abiding influence, are important.

32
The ‘Axial Age’ (Achsenzeit) is Karl Jasper’s designation of the period roughly from the 8 th to the 3rd
century BCE, which he sees as the ‘axis of world history’ given its remarkable parallel yet independent
development of significant changes in religious and philosophical thought across Europe and Asia with
the advent of influential figures like Confucius, Homer, Zarathustra, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.
In this period, following the preceding ‘Mythical Age’, man becomes conscious of Being, adopts logos
against mythos, and becomes reflective as thinking becomes its own object. See Jaspers K 2009, The Origin
and Goal of History, Bullock M (trans.), Routledge: London. German original: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der
Geschichte, Zurich: Artemis, 1949.
33
Ernst Feil’s (1986) four-volume study of the history of the term religiō—Religio: Die Geschichte eines
neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom Früchristentum bis zur Reformation, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht— concludes that it remains distinct from the modern sense of ‘religion’ (Abbasi 2021, 13).
34
For simplicity, the ‘CE’ notation is dropped from here on in; all years are in relation to the ‘Common Era’.

40
 Augustine contends that despite the great diversity of human cultures, the most

fundamental cleavage in humanity is between those who love God and comprise civitas Dei and

those who love only themselves and form civitas terrena (235).35 He identifies the saeculum and

its adjective saeculare—the etymological roots of ‘secular’—with the temporal world, wherein

men forge their ultimate destinies in one of these two cities. The pre-Christian Roman use of

the saeculum connotes a normatively neutral period of time, often linked with Roman arcadian

games (Kennedy 2006, 15).36 In the singular it is synonymous with mundus, ‘the world’, while

the plural, saecula, could designate a span of many centuries. The early Christian use of the

word had pejorative connotations, designating a hostile, corrupt environment (16). For early

Christian authors such as Tertullian (d. 230) and St. Cyprian (d. 258), saeculum signifies a pagan

world inimical to Christian values. While Augustine too adopts this usage in some of his

writings, by and large he endorses and adapts the neutral Roman usage.

For Augustine, the saeculum has neither positive nor negative value; it is not profane or in

any clash with religious life. It is simply the unbaptized, unredeemed world that is neither an end

in itself nor, like the Aristotelian polis, the ultimate site of human self-fulfilment (Kennedy 2006,

17). His outlook on the it reflects the Gospel of St. John: one must be in the world but not of it.

One is not to withdraw from the world like a desert monk but to live in it and contribute to it.

Man inhabits the (temporal) world, partaking in every legitimate worldly pursuit, but he belongs

to another (spiritual) world. Augustine uses saeculare (‘secular’, worldly) to describe public life—

the forum, the stage, sex, games, pagan literature (15-16). It is a neutral space in which Christians

and pagans live together, each in their own ways. A Christian can be a citizen of both cities without

35
Augustine refers to these variously as the City of God, the heavenly city, the eternal city and the City of
Man, the earthly or terrestrial city respectively. It is important to note that these ‘cities’ represent two
groups of people; they do not identify with any political or territorial society. As such, the ‘citizens’ of
these cities are temporally and spatially dispersed. Further, the loves that define each city are fundamental
orientations, way of being in the world, not transient emotions.
36
For more on the Latin saeculum and its Roman usage, see the section ‘Linguistic-Conceptual
Significations’ in Chapter Two, pp. 80-84.

41
contradiction or disharmony. The ‘City of Man’ belongs on Earth and is mortal/temporal, whilst

the ‘City of God’ is eternal and its proper place is Heaven. The former does not have to be

transformed into the latter, at least for the (indefinite) period of time until the return of Christ. In

the meantime, people of both cities comprise the Church as well any political society like Rome.

It is in this sense that saeculum signifies both a worldly space and a worldly time.

Nevertheless, there is a dual ‘citizenship’—elaborated in Books XIV and XIX of The City of

God—and split loyalties based on two loves (17). Love of the self (caro) or the flesh, which leads

to contempt of God, and love of God, which leads to contempt of self. The Christian lives in the

world but does not find fulfilment therein, since he is a citizen of heaven. It is not that the

saeculum is inherently evil—this is a Manichean tenet which Augustine refutes—but that the

terrestrial existence is transitory and wracked with injustice. Any peace found therein is

extremely fragile. An important qualification to this bipolar juxtaposition is Augustine’s notion

of coexistence (permixtio) whereby citizens of the two cities mix and live in the city to which they

do not properly belong (17). Christians are not excused from the duties demanded by the Roman

authorities. As per biblical injunctions, Christians should obey the emperor and civil authorities.

In a letter to an imperial commissioner, Augustine (2001) repudiates accusations that the two

cities are incompatible and that the doctrine is adverse to the empire’s well-being (39):

So let those who say that the teaching of Christ is opposed to the commonwealth give us an army
composed of the sort of soldiers that the teaching of Christ would require. Let them give us
provincials, husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, kings, judges, and
finally even tax-payers and tax-collectors, of the sort that the teaching of Christ demands. Then let
them dare to say that this teaching is opposed to the commonwealth!

Notwithstanding these qualifications, there is a tension—if not an incompatibility—between

the two cities, and the Christian existence in the terrestrial city has a palpable unease about it.

Contribution to the empire is a matter of obligation rather than ownership, and the sense of

apathy in working to shape a better society—as opposed to being mere recipients of whatever

prevails—is clear: ‘As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days' course, what does it matter

42
under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to

impious and wicked acts?’ (18) There is a distance from the political. In this distance, and in the

tension of the two cities—indeed in their very conception—we may locate a proto-‘secularism’:

an early and weak form of secularism that sets up a strain between the worldly and the

otherworldly, the immanent and the transcendent, the secular and religious, and defines the

terms of debate around the secular to be had ever since in Europe and, in more recent (post-

colonial) times, beyond. Augustine’s clear choice in preferencing the City of God inspires

Europe’s course for the next millennium—but not without persistent conflict between the

spiritual and temporal realms and their respective institutional heads—until the High Middle

Ages when the state begins to eclipse the Church (19-20).

Imperial-Papal Relations, Doctrines, Conflicts

Conflicts between Church and Empire are a defining and persisting feature of Christendom.

They begin in the wake of the Christianisation of Rome and continue through to the modern

era. While there are periods of relative calm and cooperation, these are modi vivendi sandwiched

between periods of conflict of varying degree. Both institutions persist in vying for power,

superiority, and relative independence. Papal authorities do so on the claim of presiding over

the ‘higher’ spiritual realm and holding the keys to heaven bestowed on it uniquely by God.

Since salvation is a concern for everyone, including temporal rulers, they too ultimately fall

under papal authority, which is itself accountable to none but God. Imperial authorities, on

their part, do so on the appeal to holding divinely ordained authority over the temporal realm

that is therefore accountable to none but God. This encounter persists for centuries, with

different accents of ferocity and various outcomes in practice. It is arguably, in part, a power

struggle for which various theological and political arguments are marshalled. It only comes to

an end when one side thoroughly subordinates the other.

43
 As early as 325, Emperor Constantine (r. 306-337) summons the Council of Nicaea to resolve

doctrinal disputes. Constantine’s alleged bequeathing of parts of the empire to the pope envenoms

Church-Empire relations (Kennedy 2006, 46). The ‘donation’, whether fact or forgery, is used to

justify the possession and defence of these lands and the diplomacy, intrigue and wars undertaken

to this end. With Pope Gelasius I (r. 492-496), the distinction between temporal and spiritual

power is clearly drawn, along Augustinian lines, with the latter being superior because of the

higher realm (eternity) over which it presides. In a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I,

Gelasius (1954, 11) enunciates what later becomes known as the ‘Doctrine of the Two Swords’:

There are indeed, most august Emperor, two powers by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred
authority of the Popes and the royal power. Of these the priestly power is much more important,
because it has to render account for the kings of men themselves at the Divine tribunal. For you
know, our very clement son, that although you have the chief place in dignity over the human race,
yet you must submit yourself faithfully to those who have charge of Divine things, and look to them
for the means of your salvation.

There is an apparent sense here of the separation of sacerdotal and regal powers, or in Gelasius’s

terms, between the ‘sacred authority of pontiffs’ (auctoritas sacrata pontificum) and the ‘royal

power’ (regalis potestas), with each responsible for a different domain of life. The priest presides

over the spiritual kingdom while the prince takes care of lay or administrative affairs. The two

realms are not entirely independent, however, and divine mandate is claimed as the ultimate

authority over both. This ‘Gelasian theory’ formulates a dualism of authority and remains the

standard position for the next 600 years (Ehler and Morrall 1954, 3).

Following the ‘barbarian’ invasions and the fall of the Western Roman Empire,

Charlemagne plays a key role in restoring imperial dignity in the form of the Frankish Empire

some four centuries later. In the ninth century, he is crowned by the pope as the first head of

the Holy Roman Empire, but in refusing subordination, he crowns his son as successor himself.

For Charlemagne, imperial authority is the ultimate authority. In a letter to Pope Leo III, he

ascribes to himself the duty not only to ‘defend by armed strength the Holy Church of Christ

everywhere from the outward onslaught of the pagans’ but also ‘to strengthen within it the

44
knowledge of the Catholic Faith’. The pope’s role is relegated to ‘help our armies with your

hands lifted up to God’ (12). This model of subordinating spiritual to imperial authority—later

dubbed ‘caesaropapism’ by Weber (1922)—prevails in the Eastern Roman Empire but is not the

norm in the West. The continued interference in Church affairs by emperors also pushes the

Papacy to secure its own political independence in the form of territorial states owned by the

Church from the middle of the eighth century. The acquisition and preservation of these

territories becomes a mainstay of papal policy for the next millennium or so until their loss in

1870 (Ehler and Morrall 1954, 3).

In the eleventh century, the Investiture Conflict arises over the role of imperial rulers in

the selection and appointment of bishops. The Gregorian Reform (c. 1050-80), with its slogan of

libertas ecclesiae, succeeds in freeing Church affairs from imperial influence in many aspects,

but the issue of bishop appointments becomes a sticking point and a site for one of the most

bitter struggles between the Church and imperial authorities. In this context, Pope Gregory VII

(r. 1073-85) develops the old Gelasian theory further. Since the spiritual power is superior, he

announces, it may judge, condemn, and punish the temporal power as necessary (Ehler 1957,

26). Effectively, the pope could sit in judgment over the emperor. He uses this to great effect in

first applying the ecclesiastical penalty of anathema (excommunication) to the King of

Germany, Henry IV, and then, going even further with a political penalty, dethroning him in

1076. This is the first instance of a pope standing in confident and open judgment of an emperor.

This did not resolve the Investiture Conflict—only settled later by compromise from both sides

in the Concordat of Worms in 1122—but it made this conflict the origin of the ‘hierocratic’

jurisdiction of the papacy in so far as the institutional superiority of the papacy is explicitly

45
claimed and utilised. Many a later pope exercises this authority to depose the regnant emperor

or king of the time.37

Imperial rulers, on their part, do not accept this subordination, insisting that their

authority is derived directly from God, to whom alone they are accountable. They too employ a

more aggressive stance in seeking an expansion of their jurisdictions, utilising adages of the

Roman law uncovered in schools like Bologna such as ‘law is what pleases the king’ (lex est quod

principui placuit) and ‘the king is not bound by laws’ (rex est legibus solutus) (Kennedy 2006,

32). On the other hand, ecclesiastical lawyers (‘Decretalists’) push the Church’s advantage in

everything from benefices and tithes to marriage taxes—on the principle of papal power. St.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) develops this theory further still in the twelfth century.

According to him, God bestowed both swords on the Church, entrusting her with all the power

in the world. However, while she exercises spiritual power directly, she should abstain from

direct use of the temporal sword because it is necessarily stained with human blood (Ehler 1957,

33). This theory is used by the polemicists of the Church to justify its hierocratic jurisdiction

since she lends the exercise of temporal power to the kings and, as such, retains the right to

supervise its exercise and to intervene if there is abuse.

The Church all but emancipates itself from feudal investitures in the eleventh century but

becomes enmeshed in other temporal interests in the thirteenth, particularly under Innocent

III (r. 1178-1216) and Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1313). She not only clashes with the empire over

material interests but also lays claim to universal, comprehensive otherworldliness. Building on

St. Bernard’s theory, Innocent III in the thirteenth century gives the most explicit ecclesiastical

expression of absolute papal authority in terms of ‘plenitudo potestatis’, the plenitude/fullness

of papal power, whereby the pope holds all power, delegating (the temporal) part of it, subject

37
Prominently, Pope Alexander III used it against Frederick I in 1160, Innocent III against King John of
England in 1212, Gregory IX and Innocent IV both against Frederick II in 1228 and 1245 respectively,
Boniface VIII against King Phillip IV of France in 1303, and Pius V against Elizabeth I in 1570.

46
to his general supervision and intervention as needed (35). In his Unam Sanctam (1302), one of

the most significant papal enunciations, written against the pretensions of King Philip IV,

Boniface writes boldly that there is only one fold and one shepherd and that the two swords

(spiritual and temporal) are in the power of the Church and hence: ‘if the temporal power errs,

it will be judged by the spiritual power…but if the highest spiritual power errs, it cannot be

judged by men, but by God alone.’ (46) This is the culmination of the ‘hierocratic’ theory and

the climax of medieval Church supremacy, from where it begins to decline.

With all these imperial-papal conflicts, it is worth noting that the dispute is about

institutional jurisdiction and hierarchy of authority. It is about the role of the papacy and the

empire in terms of temporal and spiritual affairs and vis-à-vis each other, and about which of

the two ultimately presides over the other. Or, we might say, it is a power play between two

dominant institutions being engaged on, or behind, this theological-political terrain. It is not,

it must be emphasised, about the ‘proper’ spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ per se, as theorised

by modern secularism. No argument is made by either side that the proper place of religion is

the interior conscience or private life, away from politics, or that the proper place of politics is

the procedural organisation of human interests, separated from otherworldly concerns and

metaphysical disputes. On the contrary, the empire lays as much claim and takes as much pride

in upholding and propagating Christianity as the papacy does. Indeed, the papacy calls on the

empire to play this role. What comes much later to be marked as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, here

go hand-in-hand. Everyone agrees that power derives from God. All sides reference the

authority of the Gospels to substantiate their positions and claim their own authority on the

basis of divine endowment. Thus, while there is a separation made between spiritual and

temporal spheres, affairs and institutions, this separation is of a very different inflection and is

embedded in a very different conceptual grammar to that of modern secularism, which does not

arrive on the scene for a few centuries yet.

47
 The persistent conflict between the spiritual and temporal authorities of Western Europe

continues well beyond the fourteenth century. It only comes to some decisive resolution with

the rise of the modern state and its thorough subordination of the Church. Before that, however,

some other intellectual developments in the High Middle Ages are worthy of mention, namely

Renaissance era theology, culture, and political theory—each here represented by one

prominent figure in Aquinas, Dante, and Machiavelli.

Saint Aquinas: Reconfiguring the Faith-Reason Nexus

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) takes an important position in the development of secularism.

Unlike Augustine, however, whose contribution is arguably more influential in the political

realm, Aquinas has a greater influence in the epistemic sphere. He is the first in the Christian

tradition to draw a pronounced distinction between faith and reason, or between what is known

by revelation and what is known by reason (Kennedy 2006, 23). The scales of this division shift

in the clear favour of reason in later centuries that define the beginning of the modern era.

However, the distinction itself—one that is critical to the subsequent advent of philosophy as

distinct from theology, likewise the secular spheres of politics and society vis-à-vis church and

clergy—is originally made concrete by Aquinas (23).

From an epistemological angle, Augustine held faith as superior to reason, indeed as the

very ground of reason. Thus the Augustinian maxim ‘fidens quaerens intellectum’: faith seeking

understanding—one must believe in order to know. As late as the eleventh century, the

Augustinian prioritisation of faith over reason persists. St. Anselm expresses it as credo ut

intelligam: I believe that I may understand. It is with the onset of the High Middle Ages (1100-

1300) that elements of modern rationalism begin to stir (3). The latter part of this period sees

the birth pangs of modernity: the revival of towns and trade, growth of population and

prosperity, the birth of universities and medieval scholasticism, the rediscovery of the

Hellenistic tradition (11-12). The revived Aristotle in particular poses a problem to Christian

48
thinkers. Aquinas rises to the challenge to assimilate this pre-Christian thought in his two

summae. His work instils confidence in human nature, reason and in the terrestrial city (12).

Aquinas plays a significant role in the reworking of the faith-reason calculus by making a

more explicit distinction between reason and revelation. He recognises two spheres of the

human intellect: one for sensorily perceivable things, for which divine aid is not necessary, and

the other for non-sensory matter, such as knowledge of God. This distinction is reflected in his

two major systematic treatises: the Summa contra Gentiles, a treatise of reason relying mostly

on classical, pre-Christian sources; and the Summa Theologica, a summation of Christian

theology based more on theological sources, albeit with heavy reliance on Aristotelian

metaphysics and ethics in some sections. The former is an apologia of faith aimed at converting

the Spanish Gentiles (Muslims and Jews) by showing the compatibility of Aristotle with

Christianity (28). It references Aristotle much more than it does medieval theologians. In this

work, Aquinas presents his famous proofs for the existence of God, which are based on reason

and reflect the Thomist position that God is an object of reason, and not, as per the fideist

position, an object of faith. Aquinas thus breaks with the standard Augustinian tradition by

extricating reason from revelation and by giving it a higher place, albeit in relative and nuanced

terms. Theology based on revelation is still considered superior to reason alone; its feasibility,

however, is grounded in reason. Reason leads to faith in the first instance, with the latter taking

over when reason has reached its limits. Faith is thus privileged by its greater scope, but reason

is the fundamental ground: without its rational foundation, faith is deficient. Thus, where for

Augustine faith leads to reason, for Aquinas, reason leads to faith.

This is a critical turn in the long trajectory towards secularity. The two distinct epistemic

pathways Aquinas opens up and the expanded role of reason paves the way for more secular

treatments of the relationship between reason and revelation. A mere three centuries later, for

instance, Descartes uses the same distinction but brackets revelation as inoperable within

philosophy, while accepting its contents. From this respectful Cartesian suspension, we later get

49
the mainstreaming of the markedly secular segregation of religion from philosophy and rational

thought more broadly (Kennedy 2006, 4).

Some of the significant changes in society and politics that had occurred by the time of

Aquinas are also worthy of mention. Where the Augustinian City of God comprised of two

intertwined loves, Aquinas finds a Europe in which secular and clerical vocations are

distinguished by dress, dwelling and canonical status (32). It is a time in which the always

precarious relationship and power-sharing between Emperor or King and Pope is in conflict, as

described above. In this vein, Aquinas is representative of medieval Christian political theory,

which held temporal power as subject to spiritual power, ‘even as the body is subject to the soul’

(34). Imperial/monarchical authority is in origin to be obeyed but not if it is unjust. Further, the

ultimate check on royal excess is the Pontiff; kings are, in the final analysis, subject to priests.

Aquinas sought harmony among laws: eternal law—the law of God in the universe in its most

general form; natural law—the moral law known to man through his conscience; divine law—the

Ten Commandments; and human or positive law—the laws of kingdoms and cities enacted by

‘secular’ authorities (36). His affirmation of ‘natural’ law—later to become quite significant in

medieval and modern moral thought—is another privileging of ‘independent’ reason, since natural

law is the moral law arrived at by reason, without the need for revelation. Reason, here again, is the

fundamental ground, as the revealed divine law comes to affirm and reinforce the natural law. As

we shall come to see in Chapters Four and Five, the notion of an ‘independent’, ‘neutral’, or ‘public’

reason becomes critical to modern secular epistemology and politics.

Between Aquinas’s scholastic synthesis and modern secularity, however, there occurs a

‘protracted battle’ in Christian theology between nature and grace (Dupre 2008, 27). The

medieval synthesis is undone by the ‘nominalist’ turn in Medieval Christian theology—gaining

steam soon after Aquinas with Ockham in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and

becoming influential in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—instituting in its stead a sharp

50
distinction between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’.38 The tendency in modern thought from

here is for nature to become more and more disenchanted, despiritualised, and for the spiritual

realm to grow further and further distant from everyday social life.

The ‘Renaissance’: Humanist Affirmation of World

The Early Italian Renaissance continues to express the prevalent medieval worldview but in a

different, more worldly and world-affirming, less theological, manner and language (Kennedy

2006, 39). The same Christian faith bore a different incarnation. Writers like Dante Alighieri

(1265-1321) and later Niccolò Machiavelli (1460-1527), in different ways, re-evaluate temporal

power at the expense of the church. Both write at a time when the church’s plenitudo potestatis,

both temporal and spiritual, is under intellectual and political fire. Dante, inspired by ancient

Rome, medieval troubadour poetry, and the Latin scholastic theology of Aquinas, attempts to

make imperial and ecclesiastical authorities separate and equal. Machiavelli makes a more

radical leap over medieval theology and philosophy to create a political theory based on

personal observation and classical example (39).

Where the elite poetry of his time is that of clerics writing praise of God in ecclesiastical

language, Dante is a layman who wrote in a vernacular language in praise of a woman, Beatrice

(41). He also sets himself apart from medieval theology and philosophy by materialising,

individualising, and historicising his characters, preferring the concrete and material over the

abstract and ideal. Dante is of course a Catholic who believes in the fundamentals of the

Christian creed, in particular the Christian schema of the afterworld—heaven, hell, purgatory—

that is so vividly depicted in The Divine Comedy. However, he is also a critic of prevailing

38
On some accounts, nominalism is critical for the rise of the ‘new science’ and, in turn, secular
modernity. For a detailed discussion of the context and outline of nominalist thought in Medieval
Christian theology, see Chapter One of Gillespie (2008), pp. 19-43. We outline the role of nominalism in
Blumenberg and Gillespie’s genealogies of secular modernity in Chapter Two, pp. 115-117.

51
orthodoxies. Hence, we find him relegating popes, no less, to unexpected circles of hell, while

praising ‘pagan’ philosophers and expressing surprise at not finding them in paradise.

In the relentless imperial-papal conflicts of his time, Dante consistently sides with the

former. In the Commedia, he assigns both Boniface and Philip to hell. It is not that he is against

the Church or the Pope per se, but that he deems—in proto-Hobbesian vein—one

comprehensive authority necessary for smooth and effective politics; that being the temporal

monarchy. He takes the word ‘monarchy’ literally: the rule of one, a seamless robe (47). Nothing

should be outside the monarch’s reach, including the temporal rights of the papacy. This caters,

in his view, for the problem of greed and conflict—nothing remains for the monarch to want,

or for others to pursue—and it unites the good of all. Further, the source of imperial legitimacy

is nothing less than the divine will. The papacy too is legitimate and of the same source, but it

is in no way superior to the former. We are left with two irreducible powers differentiated by

function: the empire rules comprehensively over the temporal world while the papacy is

restricted to the spiritual realm. Temporal authority is not of the church and hence not

bestowed by the church. In fact, Dante wants the church to renounce the temporal kingdom by

following Christ’s judgment that his kingdom is not of this world.

Dante is representative of those late medieval thinkers who, at the beginning of a

millennial readjustment of the relationship of temporal-spiritual authority, push the envelope

in the direction of secularism by sacralising temporal power in making it immediately linked to

God, undercutting the authority of the spiritual power over the temporal realm and negating

any claims of it to a universal jurisdiction (49). ‘A sovereignty of this kind’, notes historian W.H.

Reade, ‘was, in fact, no more than a prelude to the invention of the secular state’ (cited in

Kennedy 2006, 49). It is no small qualification, however, that in modern secularity temporal

power is entirely decoupled from any notion of the sacred or divine. Dante’s work is a medieval

poet’s Christian celebration of profane love, pagan learning, and imperial authority in the

52
context of Christian redemption (55). He seeks the appreciation of the ‘secular’ on its own terms.

His ‘secularism’ is thus not modern, if prone in that direction.

Niccolò Machiavelli is perhaps best known for his disconnecting power from Christian

morality and natural law and, as such, for the invention of secular politics: treating political life

as it is, not as it ought to be through the lens of a (theological Christian, in his milieu)

conception of the good. Machiavelli’s role is key in propelling a view of politics as autonomous

and subject to an endogenous logic of its own. Prior to Machiavelli, the dominant Aristotelian

conception of politics as regulated by morality prevailed in its Christian form. Medieval

corporatism was commonplace: the body politic as organic, with the king as head, senators as

the heart, and peasants as the feet. The duty of the medieval king was to obey the church,

administer justice, and keep the peace, with war justified only for defence or to bring people to

the faith (61). Renaissance humanism, well in vogue by Machiavelli’s time, does not comport

with such a conception. It abjures subordination and draws more from classical Greco-Roman

than Christian sources. Nevertheless, it still largely stresses the moral dimension of politics.

Most Renaissance authors do not posit the secular and sacred as mutually exclusive or substitute

human history for Christian salvation (61). Rather, theirs is a tilt towards the ‘secular’ through

greater emphasis on what they consider more authentically ‘human’. This manifests in a greater

reliance on the pre-Christian classical; on cultivating an active lifestyle (vita activa) by those

engaged in commerce, entrepreneurship, and political life (and associated deprecation of

monastic submission); and in a move away from metaphysics to knowledge of the self.

Machiavelli is both a reflection of this Renaissance tilt and a force who pushes it further.

Where Dante and Petrarch had spoken of virtù in Aristotelian-Thomist terms of goodness, for

Machiavelli virtù is a matter of strength: power and skill to achieve a political objective (63).

Machiavelli’s prince is a person of virtù, in the above terms, who must come to terms with

managing men who are more prone to evil than good. As such, he cannot be constricted by

religious or moral standards (63). Politics here is the pure and simple struggle for power (71).

53
Hence, the prince must act strictly with political objectives in mind, survival and maintenance

of power foremost among these. If this requires the commission of what is considered immoral,

so be it: ‘when the deed accuses him, the effect excuses him’ (Machiavelli 1996: I, 9, 2). It is not

that Machiavelli deems the immoral to be moral, that is, justified morally. It is that he deems it

justified politically: public opinion will not reproach a man who achieves a beneficial result.

Herein lies his point: the political is to be assessed politically, as a function of political

considerations: dominance, security, objectives, strength, public opinion; it is not to be assessed

morally. The political is untethered from the moral—an extremely influential move for what

later is unmistakably marked as secular politics, and, from the perspective of scholarship, as

(secular) social science, which seeks to observe, classify, and understand what is, untethered to

any conceptions of what ought to be.

Religious principles still have a role to play here, to be sure. Machiavelli is not for any

strict separation of these from politics. In the political space, however, religion (as with anything

else) is to be considered only in political terms. The church has a role but only as a political

entity engaging with other political entities. On this view, religion has an instrumental function.

If it can help in achieving political objectives—waging a war, motivating soldiers to sacrifice,

maintaining a bond between citizens—then by all means it should be harnessed. This too is a

quintessential secular move whereby religion is instrumentalised for secular ends. From one

perspective, Machiavelli sees the problem in the same light as Augustine: there is some level of

incompatibility between the ‘city of God’ and the ‘terrestrial city’ (the moral and the political,

for Machiavelli). However, his solution is an inversion of Augustine: to embrace and elevate the

political (71)—a strong indication of how far the Western Christian tradition had come in the

intervening millennium.

54
The Rise and Consolidation of the Modern State

The decline in Church power that is apparent by the fifteenth century is, in part, self-inflicted

and, in arguably larger part, a result of imperial/monarchical power pushing back to secure and

consolidate itself. The monarchical push-back first gains momentum in France. Using new

methods of governance, the French monarchy gathers strength throughout the thirteenth

century, particularly under Philip Augustus (r. 1180-1223) and Louis the Saint (r. 1226-1270), and

culminating in Philip the Fair’s (r. 1285-1314) face off with Boniface VIII (which occasions the

Unam Sanctam Bull cited above) (Ehler 1957, 39). The basis of the dispute is France unilaterally

increasing taxes on Church benefices in France, reinforcing its own sovereignty but only by

undermining that of the Pope. The result is a prolonged and heated conflict and an eventual

papal dismissal of the French King that could not, however, be executed because the Pope found

no allies willing to make a move against a strong Paris. To the contrary, Philip finds allies in

Rome and moves against the Pope at Anagni in 1303. Not stopping with the death of Boniface,

Philip forces the selection of a favourable (French) pope, Clement V (r. 1305-1314), and a move

of the papacy from Rome to Avignon, where it remains for some 70 years.

The self-inflicted harm of the Church comes in the form of corruption, division, and

disintegration. The attempt to keep the papacy back in Rome leads to a major schism that sees

the election of two popes, the division of the papacy and Church, and in turn, the division of

Europe with monarchs having to decide which pope to recognise. This ‘Western Schism’

formally lasts some 40 years but its effects echo much longer. The scandal of multiple popes

excommunicating each other (and all their followers to boot) and appointing their own

nominees to bishoprics and benefices, who then fight against each other at the local level, would

have a lasting impact to the detriment of the Church. And to the benefit of secular rulers who

could consolidate their power vis-à-vis the now-divided Church much more easily. Corruption

within the church took many forms: abuses in nominations and appointments within the

55
church; rising taxation to the benefit of the papal curia; the selling of indulgences; and legal

corruption with extensive possibilities of appealing directly to the pope from any stage of

ecclesiastical legal proceedings (Ehler and Morall 1954, 96). The lasting legacy of this internal

division and corruption is a strong desire for reform. Such reform is attempted in two main

forms: a ‘conciliarism’ that saw general councils try to enforce changes and lay claim to stand

higher than even the pope;39 and break-away reformers, like Martin Luther, who, after a period

of pursuing internal reform, find the Catholic Church unsalvageable. As history would have it,

moves for reform only lead to further disintegration and loss of power.

Shrewd monarchs, of course, make the most of this situation, also in the name of reform.

In 1438, King Charles VII of France issues the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, whereby all papal

nominations of clergy in France are prohibited and pontifical taxation of French clergy is

drastically reduced (Ehler 1957, 47). In England, under Edward III (r. 1327-1377) and Richard II (r.

1377-1399), Parliamentary acts aimed at reclaiming local right of appointment to Church

benefices (and forbidding appeals to Rome against such changes) are passed. Other European

princes follow suit with similar measures. Monarchs on the move force the Church to make

compromises—even in ecclesiastical matters such as the nomination of clergy—in the form of

‘concordats’. Prominent examples include the Concordat of Vienna (1448) with Emperor Frederic

III of Germany—which is favourable for the Church but leaves a lingering resentment in

Germany—and the Concordat of Bologna (1516) with France—which is favourable to France and

paves the way for a stronger alliance between monarchy and Church in the following centuries.

The period roughly from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle the sixteenth

is crucial to the rise of secularism. It sees multiple significant moments: the fall of

Constantinople to the ‘Turks’ (1453); the invasion (‘discovery’) of Africa and America and their

subsequent colonisation, resulting in the end of Christian geographical compactness within

39
Prominent general councils held as attempts at Conciliar reform include the Councils of Pisa (1409),
Constance (1414-1418), and Basel (1431-1449).

56
Europe; the Protestant Reformation, resulting in the end of the Western Church’s spiritual

unity; and ensuing wars on a grand scale that become the occasion for rise of the modern state

and concomitant birth of modern secularism. The encroaching Muslim threat and the colonial

encounter are significant in terms of how the non-European becomes the (not-so-rational,

zealous, exotic, unsophisticated in religion) Other in relation to whom modern (rational,

refined, sophisticated in religion-cum-secular) European identity develops.40 The Reformation

has more immediate and far-reaching impacts, not least with respect to the rise and

consolidation of the modern state.

Luther and the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) importance as a major historical moment for the development of

secularism is more a matter of the consequences resulting from his Protest against the Catholic

Church, many of them unintended and unforeseen. Luther’s own concern, as far as we can tell,

is for an intra-Christian battle over different conceptions of orthodoxy, salvation, and

spirituality. He is a religious reformer engaged in a theological conflict for the heart of

Christianity. The Lutheran thrust is to emphasise inwardness and divine grace, as against

outward ‘works’. He ties personal salvation to scripture (sola scriptura) and faith (sola fides)

rather than to church authority or good works. In turn, Catholic conceptions of priesthood,

celibacy, monasticism, papal authority, and inerrancy all come under attack.

At the heart of the conflict is the question of authority: who interprets scripture and

determines the correct theological position on any matter? Rome maintained that it held that

authority, given to it by scripture. Luther contends that even papal decree is subject to judgment

by scripture, which meant effectively that no one’s interpretation is any more authoritative than

40
The role of Europe’s others in its constitution and self-image comes up for discussion in Chapter Five,
pp. 304-307. See also note 109, p. 141.

57
anyone else’s; every person can interpret the scripture for themselves. Further, the clergy have

no superiority over the laity; all Christians are consecrated priests by virtue of their baptism.

Luther does not stop at undermining the religious authority of Rome over believers. He goes

further—perhaps more significantly for the development of secularism—to undermine any

authority it claimed over temporal power as well. Any church is to restrict itself to spiritual

matters and to be subordinate and responsible to the temporal authority of king or emperor.

Christianity is not to rule the world; not because this is undesirable per se, but because it

required sufficient ‘true believers’ who did not and could not exist since most men are evil and

belong to the devil’s kingdom. As such, there needs to be a secular government separate to the

kingdom of God on earth, à la Augustine, and the Christian submits to this rule of the sword for

the sake of the world (Kennedy 2006, 83).

This separation of the worldly and the spiritual, distinguished by the exterior/outward

domain of the former and interior/inward domain of the latter, as well as by being subject to

different authorities, goes to the extent that the temporal authority has no role in maintaining

Christian orthodoxy by the sword or suppressing heresy—except when it comes to dealing with

the ‘Turks’ in defence of Christendom (83). At the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529, Luther

counsels Christians to cooperate with Charles V, not as the head of Christendom waging a

crusade, but as a secular ruler (85). Further, the prince can and must do things that are not

properly Christian in order to achieve political ends, principally warfare and defence. In all of

this, the Christian subject must maintain obedience to the ruler, even when he is evil. Even if

he acts contrary to all of God’s commandments, he remains sovereign and must be obeyed (84).

Luther’s theological revolt against Rome leads to the disintegration of Christendom. He

breaks with the Catholic Church; his followers and imitators break with him and each other.41

41
The major strands of the Reformation took different pathways and brought different results. In
Germany, Lutheran Protestantism arose as a mass movement given succour by princes upon whom it
became dependent and to whom subordinate. In England, the Anglican strand arose top-down with
Henry VIII pushing through the ‘reforms’ himself and to the favour of his rule. In Geneva, Calvinism was

58
The Papacy loses both dominion over Christian doctrine (scripture and councils) as well as over

the church itself as a single, universal church gives way to multiple national churches, each

responsible to local secular authorities instead of Rome (75-76). The Protestant Reformation,

then, is a major backdrop to modern secularism because it results in a thorough splintering, and

concomitant weakening, of Christendom, and in the prevailing of a religiously plural Europe

(and contemporaneously ‘discovered’ America). It also brings to the fore a form of religion more

amenable to subordination by the state because of its focus on interiority and eschewing of

politics. Its deep impact on European politics and the European psyche cannot be understated.

Unlike the Renaissance which mostly affected the elite and intellectual classes, the Reformation

penetrates deep into lay society and has a profound impact on the European peasantry (40).

The splintering of Christendom has multiple impacts of significance to the development

of epistemic secularity and political secularism. At the epistemic level, the ever-multiplying and

mutually contradictory claims to what is correct Christian theological doctrine facilitate the rise

of a sceptical attitude among the laity and the learned.42 With multiple reformers and counter-

reformers contradicting the Church and each other, all on the basis of the same scripture, people

are left questioning if any of it is true at all. At the same time, the counter-reformation ‘fideist’

manoeuvre has significant repercussions. Prominent thinkers such as Erasmus and Montaigne

seek to defend Catholicism against Protestant critique by drawing a clear separation between

faith and reason. Any human rational attempt to ground religion, they argue, is too weak a

support for divine knowledge: religion is held up by faith alone. This manoeuvre draws a clean

break between philosophy and theology, removing religion from the discourse of reason,

more of movement like Lutheranism, but it was able to establish greater influence on the state. This,
however, was the exception to the rule, which was that everywhere temporal rulers were consolidating
power within their lands and wresting control of their respective churches from Rome.
42
This is one among multiple factors that leads to the rise of Scepticism in Europe in the seventeenth
century. For one account, see Chapters 1 and 2 of Popkin R 2003, History of Scepticism: From Savonarola
to Bayle, Oxford University Press: Oxford.

59
rendering religion extra-rational and reason secular. From here, the stage is set for the likes of

Descartes, working in the wake of these conditions, to build a new (and influential) philosophy

from which theology is bracketed out entirely. This ‘Cartesian parenthesis’ only takes the

exclusion of religion from rational discourse to its logical conclusion.

At the political level, the violent episodes of the Catholic-Protestant conflict, most

significantly the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) fought across multiple regions, cause a major

problem for Europe begging for a solution.43 This solution would eventually be to relegate

religion to individual conscience as advocated by thinkers like John Locke, following Luther. In

effect, the way in which the problem is conceived (‘wars of religion’) has an abiding impact on

the European psyche as to the dangers of religion, and the solution meant that Protestant

conceptions of religion as a private and interior matter between man and God are enunciated

by modern secular states and conceived by modern secular subjectivity as religion proper.

Two agreements reached in seeking a resolution to these persistent conflicts in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are worthy of mention. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) is

reached in the German Estates at the behest of Emperor Charles V (r. 1519-1556) in the wake of

long years of civil war between Catholics and Lutherans. Peace is achieved at the price of

concessions to the latter and, of course, what this entailed of their formal recognition by the

Holy Roman Empire—to which the Catholic Church protests vehemently, but only to deaf ears.

This agreement enunciates the very significant principle of cuius regio, eius religio (lit. whose

realm, their religion): each German prince would be left to decide the religion of his estate and

43
Major episodes of wars in the wake of the Reformation that have come to be classified as the ‘European
Wars of Religion’ include the Knights’ Revolt (1522-1523) in the German Estates; the German Peasants’
War (1524-1526); the Tudor conquest of Ireland (1529-1535); the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598); the
Eighty Years’ Dutch War of Independence against Habsburg Spain (1566-1648); and the Thirty Years’ War
(1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire, which drew in the Habsburg Monarchy, Bohemia, France,
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. That these were wars of ‘religion’ is contested. For a counter-argument,
see Cavanaugh (2009), who we discuss in Chapter Four below, pp. 241-242.

60
his subjects. Catholicism and Lutheranism are the only two recognised confessions. Those

subjects not willing to convert to the chosen confession could migrate elsewhere.

A century later, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) sees an agreement reached between the

Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France in Münster and, separately, the King of Sweden

in Osnabrück. It ends the Thirty Years’ War which started as a dispute over the throne of

Bohemia but developed into a struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism in Germany,

only to spread beyond with the interventions of France and Sweden on the side of the

Protestants (Ehler and Morall 1954, 189). These agreements extend the Augsburg principle

across Europe, now amended to include Calvinists as well, and to allow people to remain on

their own confessions if they so choose. It rejects in advance protests against the peace by the

Church, which come through as vehemently as expected. The upshot is the emergence of the

silhouette of a new order built on quasi-state sovereignty, (limited) tolerance of confessional

plurality, and the relative backgrounding of the Church and religious considerations. Tolerance

is limited in the sense that it applies only to specific major confessions and mostly between

states.44 Within states, rulers are still inclined to prefer and support their favoured confession

over others to one extent or another. What is decisive in Westphalia, nonetheless, is the official

legitimacy conferred on a ‘civil’ space that does not make reference to a single confession alone,

and therefore needs to refer instead to what is minimally common to the major Christian

44
On the genealogy of early modern toleration—a crucial piece in the rise of modern secularism and the
state—there are various explanations, prominently defined by the contrast between ‘explanations of
toleration based on ideological changes and the more utilitarian models of strategic necessity’ (Barkey 2014,
207). Per the ideological reading, an internal germination of tolerance developed in the thought of Christian
humanists, like John Locke, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and spread across society to allow
for possibility of peaceful pluralism. According to the ‘materialist’ or ‘realist’ reading, social, political, and
economic exigencies led emerging states to political compromise and strategy and groups to find ways to
live together. For an example of the former, see Zagorin P 2003, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came
to the West, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ; for the latter, Grell OP and Scribner B (eds.) 1996,
Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

61
confessions or is independent of them all. The latter would eventually become the standard

conception of a secular ‘civil space’ or ‘public sphere’ across Euro-America.45

The general trend across Europe post-Westphalia sees states seek consolidation and

centralisation of power, which means disempowering potentially competing institutions,

prominently established churches. This takes the form of absolutist monarchies in the

seventeenth century, such as those of Henry IV (r. 1589-1610) and Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) in

France and James I (r. 1603–1625) and Charles I (r. 1625-1649) in England. Such monarchs make

recourse to the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’, which albeit an old idea finds its accentuated

form, and most successful application, in this post-Reformation period (Ehler 1957, 73). The idea

is that they have a God-given mandate to rule and, therefore, their authority is comprehensive

and not answerable to any other authority. Resistance to the autocratic excesses of this time,

both intellectual (Enlightenment ideas) and socio-political (advocacy for civil liberties, the

‘rights of Man’) are crucial for the rise of modern secularism. The period roughly between the

middle of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also sees the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the

emergence of modern science, with significant developments in most of the natural sciences.46

These were to become influential in propelling science as the epistemological ground of

secularism vis-à-vis the old epistemology of theology. This is also the period of influential early

modern thinkers like John Locke who first theorise key tenets of modern secularism.

45
For more on the ‘common’ vis-à-vis ‘independent’ strategies see Chapter Two, p. 104. For a recent
comprehensive review of the Peace of Westphalia, see Croxton D 2013, Westphalia: The Last Christian
Peace, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, UK.
46
Key moments in the ‘Scientific Revolution’ include the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543, Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems in 1632, and Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687.

62
Locke and the Birth of Modern Secularism

John Locke (1632-1704) inherits a religiously divided Europe rife with conflict in the wake of the

Reformation. In his native England, he lives through the English civil wars (1640-1660) as a young

man studying at Oxford and later as a mature thinker through the (Catholic) Stuart Restoration

(1660-1689) that sends him into exile. As in the rest of Europe, in England he finds the Protestant

ruling dynasties suppressing Catholics or vice-versa. The major question he grapples with in all

of this, the problematic that animates the background of his thought, is how to achieve a civic

peace. Given rife religious conflict, central to this question for Locke is the question of what can

be proven true and imposed by religious or temporal authorities as binding on all.

Unlike Descartes, Locke prefers empiricism to ruminate about doubt and truth, and does

subject religion and politics to rational assessment, if only to conclude that Christianity is

reasonable but not demonstrable (except only for the existence of God). The earlier Locke, as

found in his Two Tracts on Government (1660), is ‘latitudinarian’; he seeks a lower common

denominator in theology and religious practice in the hope of finding some consensus among

thoughtful (protestant) believers (Kennedy 2006, 95). He also looks to temporal authority—the

‘magistrate’—to adjudicate matters of ceremony and ritual, concerning which various

denominations squabble. These ‘indifferent’ yet inflammatory matters should be left to the

magistrate’s final ‘infallible’ word for the sake of peace (96). However, by the late 1660s, when

he publishes An Essay on Toleration and the Essay on Infallibility, he has already moved towards

his mature position that affords more to people in determining their religious belief and practice

and less to the magistrate. Indeed, he deprives the magistrate of any pastoral role on grounds

that the latter has nothing to do with the good of men’s souls. The role of the temporal authority

is restricted to the civil well-being of its subjects (104).

The pillars of Locke’s thought are two: theologically, the primacy of scripture within a

‘natural religion’; and politically, ‘toleration’. The theological primacy of scripture is qualified

63
by the epistemic authority of natural science. The result is a ‘natural religion’ or ‘religion of

natural science’, which deemphasises revelation and scripture. In The Reasonableness of

Christianity (1695), one of his last works, Locke proposes that even this reduced Christian creed

is to be measured against natural religion on the grounds that the works of God as manifest in

the created universe—the domain of natural science—take primacy over his words. God’s words

are confined to scriptures written in dead languages and subject to various interpretations,

whereas the testimony of his works is universal and scientific.

As for political toleration, Locke falls back on Luther to maintain that since only the

scripture is inerrant, no interpretation thereof can be proven definitively and thus claim

infallibility to be held binding on all. If none are binding, then all must be allowed and tolerated:

ergo, every church is orthodox to itself. This is qualified by still affording the magistrate (now

fallible) authority to interfere and impose what he deems necessary in order to maintain civic

order. This role, Locke is clear, is civic, not pastoral; political, not religious. As such, Lockean

toleration is not absolute. Catholics are excluded because their oath to the pope—who

challenges the supremacy of the state over the church—as sole and infallible interpreter of the

Bible and head of a foreign state is both intolerant and subversive of civic authority (Kennedy

2006, 99). Muslims are likewise excluded because of their oath to a foreign authority, the caliph

in Constantinople. Atheists are also excluded because the existence of God can be demonstrated

by reason and thus its affirmation is expected of everyone. Since atheists undermine all religion

and covenants have no hold on them, Locke argues, tolerance does not extend to them (105).

What reveals itself here is Locke’s epistemic decentering of scripture vis-à-vis reason, and

political centring of the individual—moves that only become clearer and more emphatic in the

last spate of his writings. He writes his Two Treatises on Government and A Letter Concerning

Toleration in the late 1680s while in exile in Holland, having locked horns with (the Catholic)

James II who becomes King in 1685. In these works, the individual’s right to consent comes forth

as the cornerstone of his political and social theory. He dismisses monarchical absolutism as

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illegitimate. Neither government nor church have the right to command an individual’s obedience

without his consent. The consensual, ‘ascending’ form of social contract takes the place of the

‘descending’ principle of authority and legitimation as previously manifest in the divine right of a

king or the apostolic Episcopal succession of a church (103). Further, if the government has no

such consent from the ruled, or acts against their interests, it can be overthrown through

rebellion. With this, Locke enunciates the core principles of early modern liberalism.

Locke may well have been one of the inspiring forces of the political resistance to

seventeenth century European autocracy noted above. The resistance begins in England in the

context of the English Parliament’s conflict with the Stuart monarchy. The latter seek to

establish absolutist authority; the former want to restrain this authority. The Petition of Right is

passed in 1628, the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679, and finally, following the overthrow of the Stuart

Monarchy in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights in 1689. All of these aim at

establishing parliamentary consent as a check on, and securing individual rights and liberties

against encroachment by, monarchical authority. These rights are cast as ‘natural rights’

bestowed by God. The spirit of the English Bill of Rights, in particular the notion of sacrosanct

natural ‘rights of Man’, finds it way a century later into the US Bill of Rights (1789) and the

French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). These natural rights include the right to life,

liberty, and, variously, property, the pursuit of happiness, safety, and resistance against

oppression. The English Bill figures a short and selective list of rights, is still subject to some

confessional discrimination, and is embedded within the old monarchy-church system (albeit

now a parliamentary constitutional monarchy). Its American and French successors are more

comprehensive, without confessional reference, and embedded in wholesale change in the

direction of liberal democracy. Thus, while liberal thought and practice takes its first baby steps

in England, being the home of the first modern revolution (Pincus 2009), it is in America and

France that it manages to first stand more firmly on its own feet.

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 Significantly, Locke’s securing of individual rights comes at the expense of a thoroughly

individualised, autonomised, and privatised religion, which, in effect, must evacuate the public

sphere. His A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) in particular, in view of irreconcilable religious

difference (‘every church is orthodox to itself’), argues for the necessity of creating some

epistemic ground independent of the churches to decide matters of the commonwealth (Scherer

2013, 81). Toleration is thus to be secured by purportedly impartial government, after

distinguishing and setting the ‘just bounds’ between the business of civil government and that

of religion. Since religion sits on uncertain foundations, it is set apart from civil affairs, which

are implicitly assumed to be governable by a more certain rationality of their own. As such,

Locke is arguably the first thinker to expound the core concepts of modern secularism: a

distinction and separation between religious and political/civil realms, with the former

underwritten by a distinction between (core, interior) belief and (peripheral, exterior) action,

and the latter given the task of policing the boundary between the two realms. Notably, Locke’s

boundary management between religion and civil government, while presented as merely

setting just bounds between them, is much more a matter of transforming and redefining both

in a way that makes them autonomous. Further, here begins the explicit philosophical critique

of ‘public religion’—indeed the very notions of a private vis-à-vis public religion and the

conditions of possibility in which they make sense—through which, as with many of his other

ideas, Locke serves as an intermediary between the Reformation and the Enlightenment

(Kennedy 2006, 95).

The predominant trend of the Enlightenment, notwithstanding considerable diversity

among its major thinkers, is unmistakably secular, with its accents on: human autonomy;

‘reason-alone’ and science as the ultimate epistemic ground of knowledge of the world;

separation of church and state; and ‘natural’ law, morality, and religion, understood (in

Protestant terms) as essentially interior and private with little more than a peripheral or purely

functional role in public life. It also sees a more extreme ‘rationalist’ streak, centred around the

66
French philosophes—the likes of Diderot and Voltaire—that is anti-religion and proffers what

comes to be known as the ‘Enlightenment critique of religion’,47 as well as a reactionary push

back in the form of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion, art,

nature, and religion. Romantic religion too, nevertheless, takes on a new, albeit different,

secular form that sees the divine in the world, in nature and is mostly about private/individual

experience and expression.48 The predominant secular trend noted above, however, is not

intended or understood as much as a break from Christianity, as it later becomes. Major thinkers

like Rousseau and Kant (as with Locke before them) were producing new ideas to cope with the

prevailing political and intellectual problems as devout Christians (Pannenberg 1996, 30). In

moving from theological to ‘natural’ foundations of law, morality, and politics, they see

themselves as setting up the basis for a new social order that is still Christian, not one that is to

emancipate them from Christianity, as the philosophes did.

The ‘Secular Turn’ of Enlightenment: Rousseau and Kant

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a quintessential Enlightenment thinker who erects an

elaborate social and political theory in which religion plays no more than an instrumental role.

It is a thoroughly human-centred philosophy, in which God has a peripheral place, and

revelation and miracles have none. Rousseau is not unique in doing so; he runs with the

anthropocentric impulse of his time, whereby establishing the autonomy of ‘man’ is paramount.

Two things, however, make Rousseau stand out. First, he becomes extremely influential,

particularly after his death. Second, unlike the overtly anti-religion philosophes of

Enlightenment France, who are as equally interested in establishing human autonomy,

Rousseau takes a middle position—between reactionary clergy and enlightened philosophe—

47
For an outline and assessment on the Enlightenment critique of religion, see Chapter Two, pp. 88-90.
48
For a study on religion in Romanticism, see Reardon B 1985, Religion in the Age of Romanticism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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that is overtly sympathetic to religion. This makes him more palatable to a still largely religious

population of eighteenth century France and, more broadly, Europe.

In the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), Rousseau makes the case that the

cultivation of the sciences and fine arts has made humanity feeble and indolent. Civilisation has

led to moral regression, exemplified by amour propre—self-love that breeds vanity and conceit.

In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), he argues that the onset of society itself is the

cause of human evil, manifest in inequality and oppressive social hierarchies precipitated by the

division of labour and enclosure of property. In The Social Contract (1758), perhaps his most

influential work, Rousseau recreates the entire political, social, moral, and religious world

through a social covenant that people join voluntarily and in doing so attain true freedom, since

freedom is about obedience to one’s own, self-willed law. Finally, in Emile (1762), Rousseau

brings to light his social-political philosophy in novel form where the central message again is,

the presciently modern and quintessentially secular impulse, that one should follow their own

way, be oneself, and obey only oneself.

In all these works, Rousseau speaks to and about civilisation in purely secular terms

(Kennedy 2006). Unlike Voltaire or Diderot, he does not critique religion as a source of

problems, but equally, unlike Pufendorf or Locke, he does not build his theory on religion—

such as by grounding man’s dignity and rights in his relationship to God. He merely asserts that

man is born free, that he is inclined to good, that equality is desirable, and then proceeds to

describe and prescribe in material or ‘naturalist’ terms. The description is that society as we find

it is the problem. The prescription is to either retreat therefrom, or to bring it under the control

of the ‘general will’ through a social contract that allows everyone to be subject, supposedly,

only to themselves (117).

The Rousseauean general will is the will of the citizens of any polity considered as a

collective whole. It a priori inclines to the common good and is the ultimate arbiter of justice

and the source of laws. It must be followed by the ruler and obeyed by the ruled. The uncanny

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resemblance of what is in the end effectively an omniscient (it gathers the knowledge of all

citizens), omnibenevolent (it always inclines to the good), sovereign will of a metaphysical body,

to the will of God is no coincidence. Rousseau takes his cue from the theological ‘general will’

of God of Arnauld, Pascal, Malebranche, and other seventeenth century French theologians

(Riley 2015). In doing so, Rousseau’s move with the general will is an attempted

immanentisation of sovereignty: an attempt to ground the political in the exclusively secular,

human realm—but one that succeeds, arguably, only in replacing one metaphysical grounding

of the political with another.

Rousseau does not reject religion; he rejects the regnant form of Christian orthodoxy in his

time. In fact, he detests the philosophes precisely because of their materialism and outright

rejection of religion and God, and for their locating the cause of every clerical excess in religion

itself. Instead, Rousseau reworks and reforms religion in such a way as to fit his political and social

theory, based as it is on the social contract and individual autonomy. We end up with a thoroughly

private religion whose only public role is instrumental to the smooth functioning of the state. In

Book IV of Emile, The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau gives form to his ideal

concept of religion (‘true Christianity’) as ‘natural religion’, the God of which is benevolent and

rational and discovered through sentiment and conscience. It is the religion of nature and reason,

wherein reason trumps revelation and whereby ‘theodicy’—previously the support of revealed,

‘dogmatic’ theology—now takes its place (Kennedy 2006, 129). In the Social Contract, he calls it

‘civil religion’, the ‘religion of man’, and ‘natural divine law’, and describes it as the pure and simple

religion of the Gospel. It is without temples, altars, or rites and is limited to the purely internal

devotion to God and to moral duties (Rousseau 2011, 246). The fundamental problem with

historical (Roman Catholic) Christianity is that it gives rise to perpetual jurisdictional conflict by

allowing for two separate authorities (spiritual and temporal), which undermines the unity and

cohesion of any polity (245). However, even the ‘religion of man’ has a defect to the extent that

Christianity is a completely spiritual religion concerned only with otherworldly things. What is

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needed is a religion that causes the citizen to act morally and to love his civic duties. Herein lies

the instrumental indispensability of religion for the proper functioning of the state: it exists to

fulfil the political needs of the community. As such, in a remarkably radical move the raison d’etre

for religion is conceived as a secular good (Kennedy 2006, 129).

Rousseau’s solution, in turn, is that the sovereign adopt a minimalist faith (of deistic form)

not as dogmas of religion but as sentiments of sociability. While he cannot force these on

anyone, he can banish those who do not subscribe to them, again, not for being impious but for

being unsociable (Rousseau 2011, 250). Beyond that, people are free to opine as they wish, since

the sovereign only concerns himself with opinions of significance to the civil community,

otherworldly matters being outside his province (249). Rousseau’s work anticipates the French

late eighteenth century revolutionary quest for self-determination, just as it redirects the

spirituality of millions from church and God to forest, stream, and self, and announces a new

sexuality liberated from the strictures of church and community (Kennedy 2006, 122). While he

advocates for a Roman republican religion for the state on grounds of political utility, individual

spirituality is made thoroughly atomic.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is significant for secular thought due to a different sort of

dualism by which he answers a pressing philosophical problem of his time: the chasm between

rationalist and empiricist epistemology. Kant takes up a middle position, concluding, against the

rationalists, that we can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, or of things

beyond our experience, but also, against the empiricists that we can know a priori of objects of

experience. Kant’s solution denies religion any rigorous rational grounding, while still endorsing

it as necessary, if only on functionalist or ‘regulative’ grounds. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

argues that God’s existence, an afterlife, and free will cannot be proven on the basis of reason.

They cannot be established as objective knowledge, as claimed by the ‘dogmatists’ (Leibniz and

Wolff); attempts to do so only lead to the ‘antinomies of pure reason’, namely, mutually

contradictory propositions seeming correct. His Critique of Practical Reason (1788) argues that

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these same beliefs are required, nevertheless, to live a moral life, making a case for them to be

affirmed on ‘regulative’ grounds as practical subjective knowledge, which is how he defines ‘belief’

and ‘faith’. Further, morality or the moral law, expressed in the form of categorical imperatives, is

grounded in pure reason, needing no appeal to any transcendent will of God or revelation. Belief

in God and free will are only needed for moral accountability to be reasonable and effective.

The Kantian solution is Cartesian in its duality, if much more systematic and influential.

It further sunders the unity of inherited philosophical thought by setting up an epistemic

hierarchy in which faith is of unmistakably lower rank than knowledge. It also naturally follows

that religion, given its subjective grounding, cannot have any central place in the public sphere,

which requires more objective foundations. It is easy to see how for many people seeking

intellectual contentment of the sort valorised in Enlightenment Europe, the conclusions of the

First Critique are much more appealing than what would come across as belated appeals to

practicality of the Second Critique. In his later Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793),

Kant proffers a critique of revelation and various aspects of traditional Christianity, or what he

calls ‘historical faith’, tying its credibility and legitimacy, much like Rousseau, to reason.

A Fresh Secular Start in the ‘New World’

Across the Atlantic, a different set of conditions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

give rise to a similar trajectory en route to the adoption of secularism. There are no ‘wars of

religion’, as in Europe, but there is nonetheless serious and prolonged inter-colony religious

conflict and disharmony. At the onset, close church-state relations in the British colonies of

America are transplanted from Europe on the pattern of confessional uniformity, or lack of

tolerance, within colonies, along with considerable diversity across colonies (Smith 1965, 15).

Most colonies have an established confession enforced by state, to the extent that members of

other confessions are subject to legal disabilities and persecution, if not disallowed entry

completely. As in Europe, the American colonies of this period come to be divided roughly into

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a Catholic South and a Protestant North, with intolerance prevailing across the board. No

Protestants are admitted to the Catholic sphere of South and Central America, while in the

North, the violent ‘anti-popish’ bias of Anglicans, Calvinists, and Lutherans alike means strong

discrimination of Catholics (Ehler 1957, 87).

The few colonies that choose not to have an established religion become the first places

to enact secular principles. Rhode Island, for instance, is founded by Roger Williams upon being

banished from Massachusetts in 1636 for promulgating ‘new and dangerous opinions’ (Smith

1965, 15-16). Among these is his opinion of separating church and state. In a famous pamphlet,

The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), Williams declares that ‘an

enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and

religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility’. The Rhode Island Royal Charter

(1663) decrees that no person ‘shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called in

question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion’.49 William Penn plays a similar

role in Pennsylvania, which he founds as a business venture and advertises as a safe haven for

people of all religions. Many persecuted dissenters from other colonies duly oblige.

By the late eighteenth century and as the colonies move to unification, following a long

struggle for independence from the British Crown, the principle of church-state separation

receives widespread acceptance on account of multiple factors (Smith 1965, 16). First, no one

church is representative of the multiplicity of sects scattered across the American colonies.

Second, the success of colonies with no established church, like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania,

presents an attractive model. Third, Locke’s ideas, and Enlightenment rationalism and

49
The 1663 Rhode Island Charter is likely the first legal adoption of a principle of full freedom of religion in
Euro-America, albeit instituted by a monarch. The first law by a popular assembly is the 1786 Virginia Statute
of Religious Liberty: ‘Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support
any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened
in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men
shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same
shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities’ (Virginia Code, Annotated, § 57-1 Act for
religious freedom, https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title57/chapter1/section57-1/, accessed 05/03/2022).

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scepticism imported from France more broadly, curry favour in the period of the American

Revolution. Fourth, some confessions (Baptists, Presbyterians, Deists, Unitarians) are

themselves against any establishment and agitate for separation, as in the prominent examples

of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Their efforts bear fruit in Virginia by 1786 and at the

Federal Constitutional level with the First Amendment in 1791.

The Birth Pangs of Secularism

With the uptake of Enlightenment ideas in Europe by the eighteenth century, some of the

absolutist monarchies become ‘enlightened’ monarchies. These ideas see both theocracy and

religious intolerance as prejudices of the past that hamper progress and ought to be discarded

in favour of a purely utilitarian approach to religion (Ehler 1957, 80). Frederic II (r. 1740-1786) in

Prussia adopts a deliberate policy of tolerating Catholics so long as they completely integrate

politically. Joseph II (r. 1765-1780) in Austria passes the Toleration Act, ending two hundred

years of monopoly for Catholicism in the Habsburg dominions, while also seeking to reduce

Catholicism (his own confession) to a mere (moral) branch of the state (82). These represent

examples of the eighteenth century ‘enlightened’ monarch, labelled such because they adopt

Enlightenment principles, even if their rule and means of applying these are extremely

autocratic. Joseph II is a good example of this: in trying (and succeeding) to subordinate the

Catholic Church, he makes the Regium Placet (civil permission for any papal decree) a

condition; secularises half the monasteries; obstructs the communications of the Church

hierarchy with Rome; holds all Church property to be a part of a ‘Religious Fund’ administered

by lay authorities; founds state seminaries for the education of the clergy under governmental

supervision; transforms schools run by ecclesiastics into state schools; and enacts a series of

petty regulations that go so far as to prescribe the style and length of sermons (Ehler 1957, 83).

In England, persecution of Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters slowly gives way to

notions of equal citizenship and freedom of religion through the works of figures like Jeremy

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Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The Church of England (and the monarchy) remains established

but is reduced to a ceremonial or symbolic status. It is in France, however, where the autocratic

monarchy—with whom the Church is seen as co-responsible, hand-in-glove, for persistent

corruption and stagnation—is most stubborn in resistance to Enlightenment reforms, even as the

attacks by the philosophes are most intense. Here it takes a revolution to overthrow the ancien

régime of monarchy and church, which only dies fighting through a short-lived ‘Restoration’ (1815-

1830). The radical means of the revolution match its radical break with the old system. A new

liberal order is announced with great fervour, and instituted with great violence.

Notably, the two major modern states where secular liberalism first appears adopt very

different forms of secularism. In the United States, secularism sees the disestablishment of state

churches and governments adopting a ‘neutral’ stance with respect to religion. No confession is

to be explicitly privileged or harmed by state policy. Churches and religious organisations are

otherwise left free to run themselves as they see fit, and religion is mostly seen as a positive force

in society (so long as it remains within its newly defined jurisdiction). In France, the character

of secularism is much more anti-religion and actively interventionist. The state sees it fit not

only to keep the Church out of politics but also to confiscate all ecclesiastical property and

wealth, and to directly regulate all aspects of how the Church operates.50 It took another century

before the separation of church and state is formally adopted in 1905, which takes the most

radical form across the Western world, with a certain hostility to religion not found elsewhere.

The general trend in nineteenth century Europe sees the consolidation of secular

liberalism, albeit through much struggle and a tug of war between defenders and detractors of

the ancien régime. This consolidation is helped on its way by the fruits of the industrial

50
This was done primarily through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) law, according to which all
Church dignitaries are to be elected by local citizens, paid by the state, and to swear an oath of allegiance
to the new regime (Ehler 1957, 92). Later, the Law on the Separation of the Churches and State (1905)
ceases all state payments to clergy, declares ecclesiastical property state-owned, and effectively disbands
the Church into local associations (105).

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revolution, the revolutions across Europe in 1848, and the insistence of the Church, particularly

in France, of siding with the patently corrupt, autocratic regimes. This period also sees the

coining of the term ‘secularism’—in 1851 by George Jacob Holyoake—as part of a rationalist

movement of protest in England.51 By the end of the nineteenth century, secularism is well

established, to the extent that both major socio-political forces active in Europe—liberalism and

socialism—in their various trends are largely secular (in the sense of accepting the relegation of

religion to the margins of state power). Indeed, socialism, in its influential Marxist variety at

least, arguably has less time or space for religion, in matters of state and politics, than even

liberalism does.

Secularism by Other Means: Hegel and Marx

Back on the world of thought, the influential GWF Hegel (1770-1831) pushes back on the

atomism and interiority of the Enlightenment in favour of the importance of community, state,

externality, and objectification. He transfigures the Kantian antinomies into a dialectic: an idea

conflicting with its antithesis does not lead to an impasse, as per Kant, but rather rises up to a

new level closer to truth or ‘spirit’. Man’s fulfilment is achieved not only through the

institutional objectification of spirit but also through a growth of self-consciousness at each

step. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), the church is morally and institutionally subsumed

by the state, exceeding even Lutheran subordination of the church to the state.

Hegel’s philosophy of history is a significant part of his influence on secularisation and his

being seen as an ‘early secularisation theorist’ (Asad 2003, 192). This is because he sees the

movement of world history culminating in the Truth and Freedom of ‘the modern period’. He

sees in the ‘painful struggles of History’—from the Reformation to Enlightenment and

Revolution—the emergence of a harmony between the objective and subjective conditions of

51
For more on Holyoake’s usage of secularism, see p. 248.

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human life, a harmony based on ‘the recognition of the Secular as capable of being an

embodiment of Truth; whereas it had been formerly regarded as evil only, as incapable of

Good—the latter being essentially ultramundane’ (Hegel 1991, 422, cited in Asad 2003, 192).

However, Hegel is vague enough on God’s ontological existence to leave in his wake vastly

conflictual readings. The ‘Hegelian Right’ (Hermann Hinrichs, Heinrich Leo, Leopold von

Henning, et al.) seek a reading of Hegel consistent with Christian theology. The ‘Hegelian Left’

(‘Young Hegelians’: Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Stiner, David Strauss, et al.) adopt an

atheistic and anti-religion position. Strauss argues in Life of Jesus (1835) that the Gospel accounts

of Christ’s life are ancient Jewish myths, not reliable history. Feuerbach proffers in Essence of

Christianity (1841), building on the strong immanentist vibe in Hegel, that God is but a

projection of man’s mind: everything that men are to be in ideal form is ‘alienated’ onto powers

over and apart from them. In turn, morality and religion are human projections.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) grows up in the wake of Hegel’s towering influence on philosophical

thought in Germany. He starts off as a Young Hegelian, influenced in particular by Feuerbach

and Bauer. He adopts the Feuerbachian view that God is a mere human projection. His own

unique and extremely influential contribution is the inversion of the Hegelian idealist/spiritual

dialectic into a materialist one. He shifts the emphasis from spirit and ideas to the material

conditions of human society, locating the real cause of human alienation and misery in social

factors, pre-eminently class conflict. In On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx’s solution to the

problem of Europe’s centuries-long oppression of Jews is not merely the secularisation of the

state in the form of no longer being a Christian state—as Bauer would have it—but the

abolishment of religion altogether. For Marx, the Christian state upheld an unjust, hierarchical

social order, consoled by religion. He seeks the dissolution of this state by denying

transcendence and hierarchy and affirming immanence and equality (Kennedy 2006, 171). Marx

accepts as a starting point the secular principle that ‘the state must be built on the basis of free

reason, and not of religion’ (Engels 1975, 1: 201) but goes much further in conceiving of the ideal

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(communist) society as one in which religion is left behind entirely and people relate on the

basis of ‘species being’.

Marx makes a crucial distinction between ‘political emancipation’—the granting of

political equality and liberal rights—and ‘human emancipation’. He offers the example of the

United States as proof that the existence of religion sits comfortably with political

emancipation.52 However, this does not mean human emancipation, and can in fact be a barrier

thereto since liberal rights presuppose that human beings need protection from one another;

they are rights of separation. For Marx, real freedom is based on relations with others, in

community, not individuation. Religion is also a barrier to human emancipation because it

segregates humanity into denominations, instead of uniting it on the basis of ‘species being’,

and thus alienates the individual from humanity. However, Marx parts ways here with Bauer in

locating the defect of religion in the nature of the liberal state itself and as a ‘manifestation of

secular narrowness’. It is the overcoming of this secular narrowness that will lead to overcoming

the narrowness of religion, not the other way around (Marx 1978).

Secularism Dominant

By the start of the twentieth century, secularism is not only the order of the day in Euro-

America, but has also, through colonialist export, taken root in various modes across Asia and

Africa—with a degree of local influence in the different forms it takes in various regions. And

by the middle of the century—the post-war period—it is consolidated the world over. It is

simply taken for granted now that secularism is an inevitable feature of modern political life.

The proto-secular early modern ‘natural’ rights now take the more familiar secular late modern

52
“If we find in the country which has attained full political emancipation, that religion not only continues
to exist, but is fresh and vigorous, this is proof that the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the
perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion is the existence of a defect, the source of this
defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself.” (Marx 1978, 31, italics in original)

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form of ‘human’ rights (Jones 1994, 81). They no longer bear any theological reference, and find

universal expression in international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights (1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (1950).

The Catholic Church too, after intellectual resistance against secular liberal fundamentals

for two centuries following its subordination, comes to terms with the hegemonic ideals of the

day in the rapprochement of the 1960s.53 With a ‘bringing up to date’ (aggiornamento) in the

Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church reconciles with the spirit of the age, supplanting

its medieval slogan of libertas ecclesiae for the modern slogan of libertas personae.54 In Dignitatis

Humane (‘Declaration on Religious Freedom’, 1965), the Council declares fundamental secular

liberal norms like freedom of religion, personal freedom, and constitutionalism—reworked, or

re-grounded, as arising from human dignity bestowed by God—to be not only ‘greatly in accord

with truth and justice’ but also having a basis in Christian doctrine.55

This post-war period is the time in which secularism is perhaps at its strongest, but it is

also the period in which the first scholarly critiques of secularisation arise in the secular

disciplines of the academy. And it is not long from here before the now ubiquitous and well-

established secularism will have its own critical ethos and apparatus turned back onto itself.

53
This political subordination does not take place all at once or without long struggle throughout the
nineteenth century. By the early twentieth, it too is well consolidated. In France, this takes the form of
the 1905 law; in Italy, the Treaty of Lateran (1929) sees the Vatican secure freedom of worship and
ecclesiastical jurisdiction at the expense of agreeing to stay clear of international politics; in Germany, a
concordat signed in 1933 likewise secures freedom of preaching and association at the expense of being
excluded from trying to influence politics. All of these are still in effect.
54
For a thorough account and analysis of the Second Vatican Council, see O’Malley JW 2008, What
Happened at Vatican II, Belknap Press (Harvard University Press): Cambridge, MA.
55
Dignitatis Humane, Vatican, Dec 7 1965, accessed 21 Jul 2022, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/
ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html

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 Chapter Two

Secularisation, or Genealogies of the Secular

That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost being, even if he will
not admit it to himself.
— Max Weber, Science as Vocation, 1919

If there is one truth that history has incontrovertibly settled it is that religion extends
over an ever-diminishing area of social life.
— Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, 1893

We must seek, in the very heart of religious conceptions, those moral realities that are, as
it were, lost and dissimulated in it. We must disengage them, find out what they consist
of, determine their proper nature, and express them in rational language.
— Émile Durkheim, Moral Education, 1925

Philosophical discourse on the secular is concerned primarily with secularity as an epistemic-

ontological category and secularism as a political category, less with secularisation as a historical

process, which is the principal focus of sociological inquiry. Nevertheless, there is an inextricable

link between the two. Indeed, it was the apparent negation of the secularisation thesis—the idea

that as the world modernises religion falls by the wayside—in the later part of the twentieth

century that led to a reopening of critical inquiry on secularity and secularism. Moreover, it is

difficult to separate the question of what secularity is from how it comes to be. Indeed, the

genealogy of the secular has much to say about what the secular is. Having painted a broad

historical backdrop, our inquiry therefore begins with secularisation as a historical process by

which we arrive at our secular age. This chapter first considers the linguistic-conceptual

significations of the ‘secular’, which are relevant for this and following chapters. It then discusses

secularisation theory and outlines various conceptions of secularisation, or ‘genealogies of the

secular’. Here we introduce a new typology that is helpful in grasping the complex and crowded

ground of debate on genealogies of the secular. This section also includes a discussion on

‘political theology’, which connects contemporary debates on the secular to old debates on a

similar terrain in mid-twentieth century German thought. Finally, it engages our interlocutors

on their positions on the problematic of secularisation before drawing some conclusions.

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Linguistic-Conceptual Significations

The etymological traces of the English term ‘secular’ take us, via the Middle English

seculer/seculere, the Old French seculer, and Late Latin saeculāris (pertaining to a generation

or age), to the Classical Latin term saeculum, referring to the period of a man’s life, a generation,

or of a hundred years (Klein 1966, 1409; Skeat 1888, 588).56 In the context of ancient Roman life,

starting in the Republic, the prior Roman Latin saeculum also articulated a conception of time

(comparable to the classical Greek notion of ‘aeon’).57 Originally a more generic reference to a

generation or lifetime, the Roman concept of saeculum became the longest fixed time period of

100 or 110 years when it took on a greater, and more political, significance through its association

with politically enunciated moments, such as the Ludi Saeculares (‘Games of the Age’), which

marked the advent of a new age in Rome (Bilynskyj Dunning 2017). Formerly a series of

sacrificial and theatrical rites repeated roughly every hundred years, the Ludi Tarentini became

the Ludi Saeculares when Ateius Capito and Augustus applied the concept of the saeculum to

the chronology of their performances. From here, and with succeeding Emperors, they came to

relate to the creation and legitimisation of imperial dynasty and authority, with new Emperors

declaring their advent as a new age of peace and prosperity.

Following the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, the medieval Latin saeculum is

appropriated within a Christian theological frame. It retained its reference to a long or indefinite

56
Both Skeat and Klein suggest that saeculum relates to the Indo-European base sē(i)-, to sow—from
where we get ‘seed’—in consideration of the Gothic mana-sēþs, ‘mankind, world’, lit. ‘seed of men’.
Partridge (2006) makes this connection more explicitly, placing ‘secular’ under the entry ‘seed’ (2949).
De Vann (2008) proposes that it relates to the Proto-Italic sai-, to bind, with an eye to the Welsh hoedl,
‘lifespan, age’. The idea being that successive generations bind together as links in the chain of life (533).
57
The outline of the Roman Latin significations that follow are from Bilynskyj Dunning (2017) and Hasse
and Rüpke (2006), both of whom note that the primary historical source for this information is limited
to Marcus Varro—who is thought to have authored a text on the topic, De Saeculis—through Censorinus,
who takes up ancient theories on saeculum in Chapter 17 of his De Die Natali (238).

80
period of time—as in ‘in saecula saeculorum’ (I Tim. 1:17)58: ‘unto the age of ages’, that is,

forever—but also, given the word’s prior close association with political power—came to signify

the present age of the temporal world, in specific contrast to eternity. It also came to possess a

dual temporal-spatial connotation of both secular age and secular realm. ‘Secular’ as in worldly,

of this temporal world, between the present and the eschatological Parousia, the second coming

of Christ. The secular/religious dichotomy distinguished two dimensions of existence identified

by a particular type of time essential to each. Secular time is profane time, contrasted with

eternal or sacred time. Certain times, places, persons, actions, and institutions—such as the

Church—were seen as closely related to the sacred or higher time, and others—such as imperial

government—were seen as pertaining more to profane time (Taylor 2011, 32, 34). People who

were in the saeculum were embedded in ordinary time, as against those who had turned away

from this in order to live closer to eternity (Taylor 2007, 55).

For early writers like Augustine, the spatial secular realm is not profane in the sense of

being in clash with the religious realm. It is rather a neutral space in which Christians and

pagans live together in a way that does not demand the conquest of the secular space—

Christianity need not subjugate pagan beliefs and practices (Casanova 2013, 29). The ‘City of

Man’ on Earth does not have to be transformed into a ‘City of God’, whose proper place is

Heaven, at least for the (indefinite) period of time until the return of Christ. It is in this sense

that saeculum signified both a worldly space and a worldly time. With the consolidation of

Christendom and the domination of the Church, however, ‘secular’ becomes one of the

mutually-constituted terms of a dyad, religious/secular, that structured the medieval Christian

universe through a pair of dualisms: one bifurcation between ‘this world’ (the City of Man) and

‘the other world’ (the City of God) and another within ‘this world’ between a religious-spiritual-

58
To the point about the comparability of the Latin saeculum to the Greek aeon, the Latin biblical phrase
‘saecula saeculorum’ as it occurs here and elsewhere in the Bible is a direct translation from the Koine Greek
‘αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων’ (‘aionas ton aiṓnōn’), rendered in most English translations as ‘for ever and ever’.

81
sacred realm and a secular-temporal-profane realm (Casanova 2015, 383). The sacred-profane

and religion-secular binaries became superimposed. The Church belonged to both worlds and

is therefore able to mediate sacramentally between the two. The Late Latin differentiation

between the cloistered/secluded regular clergy (regularis), who withdraw from the world into

the monasteries to lead a life of Christian perfection, and the ‘secular’ clergy (saecularis), who

lived in the world along with the laity, is one of the many manifestations of this binary.

The term ‘secularisation’ emerged from this theological conception with the meaning of

a transfer from the religious to the secular sphere (Casanova 2013, 30).59 That is, to secularise is

to make worldly. It is first used in canon law to refer to the process whereby a ‘religious’ monk

left the cloister of a religious order to serve people ‘out there’ in a worldly parish and thus

become a ‘secular’ priest. With the onset of the Protestant Reformation, ‘secularisation’ took on

an additional juridical meaning, starting first in France, signifying the lay expropriation of

monasteries, landholdings, and the mortmain wealth of the Church.60 Thereafter, it came to

designate any transfer of persons, things, meanings from religious/ecclesiastical to civil/lay use,

possession, or control. The application of the term to abstract meanings and ideals operates as

a metaphor with respect to the original canonical and juridical usages. As a descriptive-analytic

term used in twentieth century social science and theory, and the sociology of religion in

59
Secularisation derives from the Latin saecularisatio. Notably, in German we get two terms,
Säkularisierung and Verweltlichung, the latter with a more direct denotation of ‘to make worldly’, with
no equivalent in English. For an outline of the genealogy of the concept of ‘secularisation’ in English and
corresponding words in French and German, see Bremmer (2008).
60
The entry on ‘sécularisation’ in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert (1765) refers only to this
meaning, indicating its primacy in eighteenth century France. The first popular usage of the term is this
sense occurs a couple of centuries earlier in the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia. In May 1646 the
leaders of the French delegation at the negotiation in Münster, Henri II d’Orléans, suggest with respect
to the vexed question of Catholic ‘spiritual goods’ (Geistlicher Güter) in Protestant estates that these being
taken away from the Catholic Church without the consent of the Pope was unthinkable (Bremmar 2008,
433). Bearing a neutral and descriptive connotation at this point, by the eighteenth century it took on
strong normative colour, with the rise of claims that all ecclesiastical property should be under the control
of the state and, by the time of the French Revolution, this principle was expanded to all areas of life.
(Shiner 1967, 208 citing Stallmann M 1960, Was ist Säkularisierung?, Tübingen: JCB Mohr, Chap. 1.) For
the context of Westphalia, see Chapter One, pp. 60-61.

82
particular, where it is used in this latter broad meaning, the term ‘secularisation’ is given to us

by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and picked up by his

friend and associate Ernst Troeltsch in Protestantism and Progress (1912) (Swatos and Christiano

1999, 209-10).61 From here it is picked up by historians (Shiner 1967, 208) and, of course, other

social scientists and theorists. Writ large to the history of ideas, secularisation comes to take on

the meaning of world-historical or epochal process in early modern Europe whereby the dualist

bifurcation of religious and secular spheres within this world is sought to be bridged, eliminated,

or transcended. That is, the world or society at large becomes ‘secularised’.

This occurs in two different, virtually opposite, ways (Casanova 2013). One is the dynamic

of internal Christian (Protestant) secularisation which aims to spiritualise the worldly, to bring

the religious life of perfection out of the monasteries into the secular world—what Weber

conceptualised as a general reorientation of religion from an other-worldly to an inner-worldly

direction in The Protestant Ethic. This dynamic transcends the dualism by blurring the

boundaries between the religious and secular through mutual infusion. Salvation and religious

perfection are no longer to be found in withdrawal from the world but amid worldly secular

activities. The other is the dynamic of laicisation which, working in the other direction, aims to

61
The Protestant Ethic was published in the original German in 1904/5 (as a two-part essay) and in English
translation in 1930. Its basic thesis is that a Protestant ethic (Puritan ascetism) in secularised form plays
a crucial role in the spirit of capitalism. In it, Weber speaks of the secularisation of ‘ideals’ (7), of concepts
(120, 158), the ‘secularizing influence of wealth’ (118), and the ‘secularization of American life’ (173). In a
later supplementary essay, The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism (1946), Weber generalises this
metaphorical meaning of secularisation as the characteristic process “to which in modern times all
phenomena that originated in religious conceptions succumb” (307). Protestantism and Progress was
published in the original German in 1906 and in English translation in 1912. Troeltsch refers in it to the
secularisation of ‘the Church as an Institution’ (48), of religious emotions (96), of the State (108), and to
‘secularised Capitalism’ (141). The term ‘secularisation’ in German and English, then, is a product of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The concept it articulates, whereby the older juridical usage
pertaining to concrete things is extended to abstract matters and meanings, stretches back to the mid-
nineteenth century at least. In its sociological ‘secularisation theory’ form, the concept (of social religious
decline/death), not marked by the word, is perhaps first proffered by August Comte in Cours de
Philosophie Positive (1830-1841) in the form of his well-known ‘law of the three stages’, itself a development
on his one-time teacher Saint-Simon’s similar but provisional evolutionary social theory. As such,
secularisation theory is coterminous with the advent of modern sociology itself, which goes some way to
explain why it had paradigmatic status for over a century.

83
make worldly the spiritual, to ‘emancipate’ the secular spheres from ecclesiastic control, as done

with force in post-revolution France while achieved more amicably in post-revolution America.

Here the boundaries between religion and the secular are rigidly accentuated and the former is

sought to be privatised and contained by the latter. In both cases, the medieval dualism is

overcome and gives way to a modern age in which there is only one single ‘this world,’ an

immanent secular world in which religion has to find its own place, or rather has its place

delimited from outside (30-31).

Secularity, in this broad sense, thus refers to particular type of (secular) world—a

desacralised, disenchanted, immanentenised world but one which is still open, for those who want

it, to transcendence, if only as a personal, private experience.62 As such, ‘the secular’ undergoes a

remarkable, paradoxical, inversion. It goes from being a residual theological category in pre-

modern Christian Europe to becoming a central category in modern Liberal Euro-America that

appears as reality tout court, while ‘the religious’ takes the place of residual category.

Secularisation Theory: The Rise and Fall of a Paradigm

The historical process of secularisation is to be distinguished from the secularisation

thesis/theory. The latter is one story about the former that held currency in sociology for a

period but is now widely discredited for its ‘nomothetic hubris’ (Erdozain 2010, 199), that is, for

its conferring a law-like authority on a historical phenomenon that it sought only to

sociologically describe and examine. ‘Ever fewer sociologists’, writes Habermas, ‘support the

long unchallenged hypothesis that there is close connection between social modernization and

the secularization of the population’ (2009, 60). In his 1986 Presidential address to the Southern

62
Chapter Three expands on and complicates this notion, focusing as it does on secularity as an epistemic-
ontological category.

84
Sociological Society, Jeffrey Hadden (1987, 598) summarised the secularisation theory in three

short sentences:

Once the world was filled with the sacred—in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the
Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and
secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course,
the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.63

According to Bryan Wilson’s (1966) influential definition, secularisation marks the declining

social significance of religion. The ‘secularisation thesis’ held that decline in the relevance of

religion was a natural product of ‘the forces of modernisation’, such phenomena as

industrialisation, urbanisation, the functional differentiation of the secular spheres,

bureaucratic rationalisation, instrumental rationality, the rise of science and technology, and

greater social and geographic mobility. This theory is marked by the distinction that it was

arguably the lone theory in the social sciences that attained the status of a paradigm from the

mid-nineteenth century well in the twentieth (Casanova 1994, 17; Hadden 1987, 588). Shared, to

varying accents, by virtually all the pre-eminent social scientists of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century—Comte, Mill, Marx, Spencer, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Mead, Freud—it

was taken for granted to be an accurate reflection of the trajectory of religion in the modern,

industrialised world.64 Comte’s historical evolutionary progress from religious myth via

metaphysical speculation to ‘positive’ science; Durkheim’s distinction between ritually imposed

‘mechanical’ solidarity and socially self-generated ‘organic’ solidarity; Weber’s disenchanted

iron cage of modernity; and many other reputed classical social science theories spoke,

descriptively if not always normatively—and sometimes with a sense of nostalgia or of

63
This summary has been mistakenly attributed to C. Wright Mills—even Talcott Parsons—in much of
the literature. It is actually Hadden’s, who merely prefaces it by noting that Mills once translated Talcott
Parsons’ tome, The Social System (1955), into four short paragraphs, indicating that he was following in
the same vein of rendering a much larger theory in crisp, concise terms.
64
Notable exceptions are Tocqueville, Pareto and William James (Casanova 1994, 17).

85
secularisation as felix culpa, a necessary fall for our redemption as enlightened subjects (Lyons

2014, 874)—to this conventional wisdom about the ‘death of religion’.

A product of the early social sciences’ commitment to positivism, their givenness to

progressive historiographies and the Enlightenment critique of religion, this view that religion

would meet an inevitable death was widespread. ‘The most illustrious figures in sociology,

anthropology, and psychology’, note Stark and Bainbridge (1985, 1), ‘have unanimously

expressed that their children, or surely their grandchildren, would live to see the dawn of a new

era in which, to paraphrase Freud, the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown’.

Moreover, the secularisation theory was regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry,

ranking alongside bureaucratisation, rationalisation, and urbanisation as a key historical

revolution transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations (Norris and

Inglehart 2011, 3; Hadden 1987, 588). Although the consensus was so strong that it was virtually

uncontested for over a century, the theory was, remarkably, neither systematically formulated

nor rigorously examined. Only as late as the 1960s did we see the first attempts to develop more

systematic and empirically grounded formulations of the theory which brought to light the first

discernible flaws in it and gave rise to the first systematic critiques.65 These critiques did not

bear impact, however, given how entrenched the theory was.66 It took another two decades

65
The first major critiques are by Lenski (1961), Schiner (1967), Martin (1969), Greeley (1972) and Glock
and Stark (1965), who found ‘nothing in the literature that would constitute a serious and systematic
defense of the secularization hypothesis’ (83). Notably, Martin (1965) and Schiner (1967) went as far as to
argue for the abandonment of the term secularisation entirely, which Hadden (1987) concurred with.
Casanova (1994) agrees with the critique of the thesis but prefers revision instead of abandonment,
whereby the ‘mythical’ account of a universal process of secularization is substituted by comparative
sociological analyses of historical processes of secularisation, if and when they take place (17). This is in
part because for him the theory of secularisation is so intrinsically interwoven with all the theories of the
modern world and with the self-understanding of modernity that ‘one cannot simply discard the theory
of secularization without putting into question the entire web, including much of the self-understanding
of the social sciences.’ (18)
66
Thus, even as late as 1985 we find Phillip Hammond says on the opening page of a volume on ‘The
Sacred in a Secular Age’, ‘Even today, scholars do not—and probably cannot—doubt the essential truth
of the [secularisation] thesis’ (Hammond 1985, 1).

86
before more influential ones came to the fore (Swatos and Christiano 1999, 210), perhaps in no

small part due to the fact that the 1970s and 1980s brought the ‘resurgence of religion’ into view

in a more prominent way with the rise of religious movements across the world and iconoclastic

events such as the Iranian revolution.67

Hadden (1987) proffers an early explicit and thorough critique of secularisation theory,

arguing that it was a ‘hodgepodge of loosely employed ideas’ that had not been subjected to

systematic scrutiny, empirical or theoretical, because it was effectively a ‘sacralised’ doctrine

more than a theory, a taken-for-granted ideology that served as a general orienting concept.68

For Hadden, the theory of secularisation was a product of the social and cultural milieu from

which it emerged (607). It fit well the evolutionary model of modernisation which sought to

account for the transition of human societies from simple to complex forms. Neglect and the

absence of a proper study of religion, given its presumed expiration, rather than a body of

confirming evidence kept the theory intact.

Operating as a sort of Kuhnian paradigm (Kuhn 1970), the theory lived much longer than

it should have because even strong critiques were not taken seriously, until they accumulated

and were no longer ignorable. Further critiques in the nineties finally allowed the separation of

the theory from its ideological origins and the recognition that the theory had multiple sub-

67
Swatos and Christiano’s allusion is to Hadden (1987). Preceding Hadden in the eighties, however,
influential works were published seeking to reassess and/or redefine the place of religion in light of its
persistence and to scrutinise the secularisation thesis more carefully. Phillip Hammond’s edited volume,
The Sacred in a Secular Age (1985) and Harvey Cox’s Religion in the Secular City (1985) are two prominent
works in this respect. As noted by Dallmayr (1999, 719), these works proffer a revision of the secularisation
thesis that came to be known as the ‘transformation thesis’ according to which religion does not vanish
in modernity but rather evolves and adapts in novel ways. Other more explicit formulations of this
revision include Crippen (1988), Lechner (1991), and Yamane (1997).
68
Even beyond the theory of secularisation, Hadden (1987, 595) notes that the sociology of religion more
broadly was ‘neither a theoretically robust nor empirically worthy area of inquiry’ to the extent that ‘so
rare were empirical studies that the likes of Gordon Allport, Joseph Fichter, and J. Milton Yinger wrote
lengthy introductions or appendices defending the proposition that religion could be studied empirically’.
This was in no small part because sociology was born amid profound tension between religion and liberal
culture in Europe, a clash in which it saw itself firmly on the side of the latter (589-90).

87
theses which were best considered on their own terms. José Casanova’s Public Religions in the

Modern World (1994) was influential in this respect. Casanova concurs that the secularisation

paradigm stood more on ideology than empirical study. It was propelled by the Enlightenment

critique of religion which provided the social sciences with a putatively convincing explanation

for why religion would inevitably decline (29). In fact, it became a self-fulling prophecy and an

independent carrier of processes of functional differentiation wherever the established churches

became obstacles in the path of this secularisation (30).

The Enlightenment critique of religion had multiple prongs. First, it targeted those

religious worldviews which stood in the way of the legitimation and institutionalisation of

modern scientific methods (30-31). Needing to establish autonomy and legitimacy, the natural,

and later, social sciences inflated their own absolute claims to superiority and ability to provide

total and exclusive explanations of reality. Reduced to pre-scientific and pre-logical status, the

‘darkness’ of religious thought and practice was bound, in the eyes of this scientific episteme, to

wither away when exposed to the lights of reason and the ever-progressive advancement of

knowledge.69 Not stopping there once free to proceed ‘as if’ God did not exist, science turned,

expectedly perhaps, to religion and God, making them objects of its own assessment, with early

‘scientific’ explanations reducing religion to primitive physics (naturism), primitive psychology

(animism), or primitive sociology (totetism), all of which were well beyond their use-by date.

The second prong of the critique was directed against the ideological functions of religious

institutions (30-31). In their struggle against the absolute alliance of throne and altar, the

philosophes attacked religion as a grand historical conspiracy between priests and rulers to keep

people ignorant and oppressed. The radical Enlightenment revelled in exposing sacred texts as

69
Notably, this critique was more effective wherever the church was still committed to the medieval
Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis and much less relevant where religion had established new ties with modern
science (such as the Newtonian synthesis in England and Scottish commonsense realism in America) or had
abandoned the external world altogether in giving absolute priority to the interior subjective world (such
as the various forms of pietist and romantic religion across Europe) (Casanova 1994, 31)

88
forgeries, sacred practices as contagious pathologies, religious founders as imposters, and

priests as slothful hypocrites, imbeciles or perverts. All branches of the Enlightenment agreed

that the Roman church and all established churches—what Rousseau termed ‘the religion of the

priest’—was bound to disappear with the fall of the ancien régime and the establishment of

political liberties.70 A third prong of Enlightenment critique is based in the ‘anthropocentric

turn’—first developed by the Left Hegelians, Feuerbach in particular, and taken in three

different directions by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—whereby religion is a projection of the

human essence onto heaven and a means of self-alienation (33-34). This projection was the

secret of divine omnipotence and human impotence; in turn, it was time to reclaim the human

essence and cease sensual renunciation and self-denial in all its forms.

It was this multi-pronged critique, helped along the way by the resistance of established

churches, that propelled the secularisation thesis, not evidence-backed analysis. Durkheim and

Weber’s work, serving as the foundation of later theories of secularisation, offer scant empirical

analysis (Casanova 1994, 18). Even after freeing themselves from some of the positivist prejudices

about religion, they still share the main intellectual assumptions of the age about the future of

religion. For Durkheim, the old gods and dysfunctional historical religions would not be able to

compete with the new functional gods and secular moralities modern societies would generate.

For Weber, intellectual rationalisation (Rationalität)—the form of social change that enabled

and dominated the modern world—had ended in the complete disenchantment of the world

and the old integrative monotheism, displaced by the functional differentiation of the secular

spheres, had been replaced by the modern polytheism of values. The old churches now

70
There was no consensus, however, on whether the decline of religion more generally was a good thing.
The radical materialists, alone following the logical consequences of their atheism, saw no need for
religion either at all (Holbachian) or once class society was done away with (Marxian). The liberal
tradition saw in religion a political use, so long as it was properly disestablished from the state and
separated from the economy. Another current, later to culminate in Durkheimian sociology, saw the need
for a new secular civil religion to play the societal, normative-integrative function performed by the old
religions. (Casanova 1994, 32-33)

89
remained only as a refuge for those, to recall Weber’s (1946) memorable phrase, ‘who cannot

bear the fate of the times like a man’ (155). The secularisation thesis was, until this point, largely

viewed as a single theory. Casanova (1994) seeks to demonstrate that the main fallacy in the

theory was the confusion of historical processes with the alleged and anticipated consequences

those processes were supposed to have on religion (19). He suggests the need to distinguish

between three related but distinct connotations: secularisation as the decline of religious belief

and practice; the privatisation of religion; and the differentiation of the secular spheres (20). On

this view, the theory is comprised of a core differentiation thesis, which is accurate, and the two

sub-theses of privatisation and religious decline, which are mistaken. Elsewhere, Casanova

(2006) suggests that the first of these three connotations—that of religious decline—also has a

double sense: a broader traditional sense of decline in institutional power and a narrower sense

of decline in individual belief and practice (16).

The functional differentiation of (what came to be understood as) the ‘secular’ spheres—

the state, economy, science, culture/arts—from religious institutions was first highlighted and

theorised in detail by Weber (1946, 327-357). Weber’s theory of differentiation is a theory of

secularisation precisely because it views this differentiation from the perspective of the radical

clash of these spheres in following ‘their internal and lawful autonomy (Eigengesetzlichkeit)’ (328)

with the religious ethics of brotherliness or the organic social ethics of the church (Casanova 1994,

20). The ‘spirit’ or ethic of modernity crowds out the religious ethic of the medieval world.

Differentiation, in this sense, goes hand-in-glove with another of Weber’s influential notions, the

‘disenchantment of the world’ (Entzauberung der Welt).71 For Weber, intellectual rationalisation

effectively pushes out mystery and magic, belief in spirits and demons, and all that was previously

enchanted about the world. It renders religion irrational.72 Entzauberung literally refers to de-

71
Weber’s is perhaps the most influential disenchantment story but not the only one. For others, see the
detailed accounts provided in Chapter 4 of Bennett (2001), pp. 56-90.
72
‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational,
empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its

90
‘magication’ even if its referent—understood to have come from Schiller’s reference to the un-

godding or de-divinization of nature (‘Die entgötterte Natur’) in his poem ‘Die Götter

Griechenlands’ (The Gods of Greece) (Lyons 2014, 879)—extends beyond magic to all forms of

mystery and enchantment. This aspect of the theory is still largely upheld—as in Taylor’s

distinction between the ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’ self73—with the world considered to be less

mysterious or ‘spirited’ than it was before, even if religion and religious belief persists, which

therefore means that while they persist, they do not necessarily persist in the same modalities.74

Secularisation in this sense of functional differentiation of various spheres of life thus

refers to the transformation of medieval (European) society from one which views itself entirely

through the lens of the religious and in which the saeculum or temporal world is an

undifferentiated whole viewed from a theologically given outside to one in which it is both

distinguished from the religious sphere and internally divided into distinct spheres: politics,

economics, law, science, art, etc.75 Each of these spheres, now ‘emancipated’ from religion and

transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate
that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. In
principle, the empirical as well as the mathematically oriented view of the world develops refutations of
every intellectual approach which in any way asks for a ‘meaning’ of inner-worldly occurrences. Every
increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the
irrational realm.’ (Weber 1946, 350-351)
73
This distinction is outlined in Chapter Three, p. 146, note 114.
74
Disenchantment too has come under strong critique in recent times, most famously with Josephson-
Storm (2017), who argues that it is a myth by listing plentiful examples of continued belief in magic, the
paranormal, spirits, and the like throughout modernity, and particularly with those with whom it is least
expected: scientists, philosophers, even positivists. As Sikemma’s (2018) critical review suggests, however,
listing instances of belief in spirits as evidence of continued enchantment misses the point about how
they are now believed compared with before, that is, it misses the changed background conditions in
which disenchantment is encoded. Just as the persistence of religion does not negate secularisation
entirely, likewise the persistence of belief in spirits and magic does not negate disenchantment as an
overarching social imaginary.
75
This process is pushed by four related and parallel developments according to Casanova (1994, 21-24):
the Protestant Reformation, which irreversibly undermines Western Christendom and serves as the
religious superstructure of the new order; the rise of the modern state, which monopolised the means of
violence and coercion in its territory; the rise of modern capitalism and the capitalist market, which was
most unsusceptible to moral regulation and radically contradicted the communitarian ethics of
traditional ‘moral economies’; and modern science, which marked out its own epistemic territory

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its meta-narrative which held them together, follows its own internal logic, whilst the religious

sphere loses its centrality and universality and, in turn, suffers a significant loss in power and

influence. Weber’s claim is that appeals to divine authority have lost credibility relative to the

past as providing sure knowledge for social action, and that, at most, the religious point of view

is treated as one among many competing claims to authority (Swatos and Christiano 1999, 212).

The privatisation sub-thesis broadly referred to two different things (Casanova 1994, 35-

36). First, that as a means to secure freedom of conscience, religion becomes a private affair of

the individual without interference or imposition by political (state) or religious (church)

institutions. Equally, modern religion has become subjective and withdrawn to the private

sphere of the self.76 Second, that religion shrivels into the private sphere, slowly but surely losing

all influence and relevance in the public sphere. The first sense of privatisation is a corollary of

the thesis of differentiation: religious disestablishment entails its privatisation. Freedom of

conscience entails the right to privacy which serves as the very foundation of modern liberalism.

As such, privatisation in this sense is essential to modern liberal democracies and a normative

precondition thereof. The second sense of privatisation is related to the decline thesis and

assumes that modern religion would become so subjective and private that it turns invisible

with respect to public life. It also has a normative corollary: that the proper place of religion is

the private sphere where it should be restricted without transgressing beyond and influencing

the public sphere. These theses have an obvious bias for Protestant subjective forms of religion

and for liberal conceptions of politics and the ‘public sphere’ (39).

The third sub-thesis of secularisation theory, that of the decline of religious belief and

practice, is its most recent yet most widespread connotation (Casanova 1994, 26). Often

independent of the Church, enthroning the ‘Book of Nature’ as a legitimate epistemological way to God,
equal to the Book of Revelation.
76
Luckmann (1967) first formulated this thesis, arguing that self-expression and self-realisation had
become of the ‘invisible religion’ of modernity.

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postulated as a universal, human developmental process, the theory of secularisation in these

terms incorporated Enlightenment beliefs of progress and above-outlined critiques of religion

and became embedded in a philosophy of history that saw history as the progressive evolution

of humanity from superstition to reason, belief to unbelief and religion to science. It is this part

of the theory that has been proven to require significant revision at best and be manifestly

mistaken at worst.77

It is important to note also that the secularisation dynamic has been far from uniform. It

has been markedly different in different areas as shown by Casanova (2006a, 11). The Latin-

Catholic cultural area saw a protracted clash between religion and the differentiated—at the

time differentiating—secular spheres, that is, between Catholic Christianity and modern

science, capitalism, and the nation-state. In turn, the Enlightenment critique of religion found

resonance here and secularisation was conceived of in terms of emancipation from religion, with

the latter being pushed into the private sphere. The Anglo-Protestant cultural area on the other

hand saw no such clash. On the contrary, it saw collusion between religion and the

differentiated secular spheres. There is little evidence of any tension between American

Protestantism and capitalism or science (prior to the Darwinian crisis of the late nineteenth

century). In turn, the American Enlightenment did not have any significant anti-religious

component. Even the institutional separation codified in the First Amendment sought as much

to ensure the free exercise of religion as it did to ensure the state did not adopt or impose a state

religion. Likewise, most ‘progressive’ social movements in Europe since the French revolution

77
Peter Berger (1998) was perhaps the most explicit on this: ‘In the course of my career as a sociologist of
religion I made one big mistake…which I shared with almost everyone who worked in this area in the
1950s and ‘60s, [which] was to believe that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion’ (782), and
(1999, 2): ‘The world today, with some exceptions…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some
places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists
loosely labelled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken’. See also Harvey’s Cox dramatically titled
‘The Myth of Twentieth Century: The Rise and Fall of “Secularization”’ (1999). The idea that the thesis
was clearly mistaken is not, of course, universal. For defences of the thesis, see Bruce (2011) and
Dobbelaere (2002). For various perspectives on the debate, see Bruce (1992).

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have been informed by secularism whereas American movements (until very recently) and the

discourse of US presidents have appealed much more to the Gospel and Christian values.

The point worth noting from this comparison is that whilst both America and Continental

Europe are undeniably secular, in the former the triumph of the secular came aided by and fused

with religion, where in the latter it came at the expense of religion and its marginalisation. For

Casanova (2009, 1055) the ‘secularist stadial consciousness’ is a crucial explanatory factor in this

disparity. Europeans tend to experience their widespread decline of religious beliefs and

practices as a natural consequence of their modernisation. To be secular is not experienced as

an existential choice, but rather as a natural outcome of becoming modern. As such, the theory

of secularisation mediated through this historical stadial consciousness tends to function as a

self-fulfilling prophecy. In places where such a consciousness is absent, as in the United States

and most of Asia and Africa, processes of modernisation are unlikely to be accompanied by

religious decline, and, in fact, may be accompanied by processes of religious revival.

All of this is significant in terms of understanding how secularity and religion relate to

each other, which we shall turn to in the next chapter. It also highlights the very historical and

contextual nature of these developments. As Casanova (2006a, 12) concludes on this point, as

an analytical conceptualisation of a historical process, secularisation is a category ‘that makes

sense within the context of the particular internal and external dynamics of the transformation

of Western European Christianity from the Middle Ages to the present’, but it becomes

problematic if generalised as a universal process of societal development and/or if transferred

to other world religions and civilisational areas ‘with very different dynamics of structuration of

the relations and tensions between religion and world, or between cosmological transcendence

and worldly immanence’.

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Genealogies of the Secular

Philosophy of history is…entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the

theological concept of history as a history of fulfilment and salvation.
— Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949

Secularisation as a historical process that gives rise to a secular age in Europe from a previously

theocentric age has another, much-debated, dimension that relates to the question of the

relation of secularity and religion. This is the genealogical dimension, namely, what is the

genealogical relation of the secular descendant to its religious antecedent in this historical

process of transformation?78 Stated differently, what is modern secularism’s relation to medieval

Christianity from which it precedes? Here, it is helpful to consider this genealogical question,

with (Scherer 2011, 624), across the axis of two broad approaches: a ‘Kantian’ reading that sees

secularism as the detachment of secular reason from religious discourse and thus a break from

medieval Christianity; and a ‘Hegelian’ reading of continuity in which Christianity itself paves

the way for secular reason such that the latter is but a different form of the former, the essence

of which persists.79 Break and continuity, however, require further qualification to better

capture the different positions that can and have been taken by various thinkers.

78
The genealogical relation we focus on here is descriptive-analytical, not evaluative, although in some
cases the latter is more or less implied. The explicitly evaluative relation, not considered here, also occurs
between two contrasting poles. On one ‘progressivist’ reading, secularisation is the successful taming of
clerical authority whereby religious thought and forms of life are replaced by rational, superior,
equivalents. On the other ‘decline’ narrative, secularisation is unlawful appropriation and modern
thought and forms of life are the illegitimate goods of an unsheltered modernity (Habermas 2003, 104).
79
Kant famously draws a wedge between faith and knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to
ground the latter on secure epistemological footing while preserving the former. Hegel, conversely,
famously declares in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that in our time, the last stage in history,
secular life is the embodiment of the spiritual kingdom. Hunter (2011) also subscribes to this break-
continuation framing of rival master narratives of secularisation. He suggests that Taylor’s genealogy is a
Catholic, neo-Thomist rendition of secularisation, as the theological disembedding of rational
subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community, and cosmos, can been seen as
opposing a Protestant rendition of secularisation—given prominently in Kant’s Religion within the Bounds
of Reason Alone—as the progressive winnowing of the chaff of historical religious belief from the kernel
of the morally self-governing rational subject (621-622).

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 Secularisation can of course be conceived as a break from Christianity to something new

and distinct from it. On this view, Christianity declines or loses its dominance in giving way to

a significantly different form of organising society. This is the position of the classical

sociological theories of secularisation and is also commonly taken by advocates of secularism

who see in it some epistemic and normative advance on theocentric forms of social life.

Habermas (2019), Connolly (1999), Blumenberg (1985), and of course Weber (1946) are instances

of this view.80 An opposing assessment sees modern secularism as a continuation of Christianity

via an internal, or at least internally acceptable, transformation. According to this view, there

occurs a significant change in the form modern Christianity takes, as compared with its

medieval form, but this transformation in fact entails the realisation of some essence in

Christianity that now takes a different form. Taylor (2007) and Smith (2007) proffer theses of

this type.81 So too does Gauchet (1997), except that for him the continuity takes us towards the

extinction, not preservation, of religion.82 A third approach sees in modern secularism a

dissemination of core Christian ideals or practices but in a way that is problematic, either as an

unacknowledged or illegitimate appropriation or as a proliferation of conditions of unfreedom.

This displacement view of secularisation is articulated in Schmitt (1925), Löwith (1949) and Marx

(1978).83 These last two positions—continuation and displacement—undertake ‘theological

genealogies’ (Agamben 2011) albeit to radically distinct effects. A fourth approach, taken by Asad

(1993, 2003), focuses on genealogies of the secular (and of religion) in considering it a distinct

80
Blumenberg still sees a continuity, as we shall see, but one of questions or problems, the answers to
which are entirely new and thus constitute a fundamental break.
81
Agamben (2011) describes this approach thus: ‘[S]ecularization can also be understood…as a specific
performance of Christian faith that, for the first time, opens the world to man in its worldliness and
historicity. The theological signature operates here as a sort of trompe l'oeil in which the very
secularization of the world becomes the mark that identifies it as belonging to a divine oikonomia’ (4).
82
This can also be read as a break but one that is internally generated.
83
Two recent Schmittian accounts are Lefort (2006) and Agamben (2011).

96
formation to be understood in its unique historical, discursive world, and hence without trying

to relate them genealogically in terms of a break or continuation.

In what follows, we consider in some depth an instance of each of these approaches set next

to each other. Starting with Habermas, then Taylor (and Smith as an alternative account of the

same approach), we take a detour into Schmittian political theology to discuss the ‘displacement’

approach to secularisation but also to connect the contemporary debate to an important

forerunner in twentieth century German thought, before finishing with Asad and Brown.

Habermas: Secularisation as the Overcoming of Metaphysical Thought

Habermas presents an elaborate, vindicatory genealogy of secular, ‘post-metaphysical’ reason in

his most recent major work, Auch eine Geschichte Der Philosophie (2019).84 He does this by

tracing the historical development of the discourse on faith (Glauben) and knowledge (Wissen)

in the Western tradition. Habermas’s genealogy takes us from religious-metaphysical

worldviews to ‘post-metaphysical’ focus on the communicative lifeworld—a change instigated

by religious cognitive forces unleashed in the Axial Age, propelled by theological developments

in the nominalist revolution of the thirteenth century that were consolidated by the

Reformation in the sixteenth, and secured by Enlightenment thought in the eighteenth. With

this longue durée approach, Habermas seeks to emphasise the affinities of the religious and

secular and the role of the former in the genesis of the latter, on the one hand, and, on the other,

that all these changes were the results of successive ‘learning processes’ (Lernprozess),

instigated by two types of problems: those created by the increase in dissonant ‘mundane’

knowledge, and those generated by crises of social integration (Habermas 2021, 5). Nonetheless,

84
This two-volume tome has yet translated into English. By most accounts, it compiles and elaborates on
Habermas’s previously published views on the genealogy of secular modernity—with new accents but no
significant breaks. These latter, particular post-2001 works, are the principle sources for our investigation.
For helpful reviews of Auch eine Geschichte Der Philosophie, see Habermas (2021), Forst (2021), Mendieta
(2021, 2022), and Bloch (2020).

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Habermas’s genealogy is a story of secularisation as a break from, and emancipatory overcoming

of, religious-metaphysical thought by a (non-reductive) postmetaphysical thought that leaves

the former with no role in establishing publicly-relevant knowledge save the optional,

instrumental provision of semantic content.

Philosophy and religion, according to Habermas, have a shared origin in the cognitive

advance of the Axial revolution, around the middle of the first millennium BCE (Habermas

2017).85 Pre-Axial ‘mythical’ narratives have a monistic structure with only one level of

phenomena but nothing ‘in itself’ underlying them. They assimilate all events to communicative

relations between people, and also between people and animals, spirits, supra-personal powers

and gods, and make no distinction between appearance and essence (22). These narratives give

rise to a network of ‘correspondences’ in which ritualised actions are embedded. They remain

tightly interwoven with everyday practices so as to not acquire the self-sufficiency of a

theoretical image of the world as a whole (24).

The religious-metaphysical ‘worldviews’ of the Axial Age—Zoroastrianism, Buddhism,

Confucianism, Judaism, and Greek philosophy—exhibit a cognitive advance in reflection in

multiple dimensions (2017, 24-26, 78; 2008, 141-143). First, the ‘world religions’ make the

‘cognitive leap’, mirroring that of philosophy, from a mythos that narrativises a plurality of

surface phenomena to a logos that differentiates between essence and appearance and

constructs a ‘world’ as a whole conceived in theological or theoretical terms. With the

conception of a single God beyond the world or concepts of a law-governed cosmic order

(nomos, Nirvana, eternal being), they open perspectives that grasp the world as an objectified

whole. Reference to this fixed transcendent standpoint allows for the distinction between the

contingent and changeable events (mere appearances) that take place within the world from the

world as such, in itself, the essence. Second, this ‘theoretical’ interpretation of the world is not

85
For an outline of the notion of the ‘Axial Age’, review note 32 in Chapter One, p. 40.

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a value-neutral description of facts; it is fused with normative precepts of the practical conduct

of life and evaluative principles tied to exemplary models in prophets, mystics, and

philosophers. In turn, social relations can be grasped as a whole and judged in light of

universalistic moral principles from a transcendent viewpoint. Morality sheds its particularistic

form and concretistic mode of validity by addressing all human beings without distinction.

Third, historical consciousness develops with the rise of doctrine traced back to founding

figures, and the consciousness of personal responsibility develops because individual fates

become separate from those of the collective.

Beyond a shared origin, philosophy and religion also have a long history of mutual

fertilisation and learning in the ‘productive conflation’ of Pauline Christianity and Greek

metaphysics into the dual shape of Hellenised Christianity and theologically founded Platonism

(Habermas 2017, 26). A process of ‘semantic osmosis’ occurred between biblical teachings and

Greek philosophy that gave rise to theology and prominent theological constructs, such as

rational natural law and morality, as well as to basic philosophical conceptual frameworks, such

as that of natural science and empiricist ethical theories (Habermas 2021, 6). Since the Council

of Nicaea, philosophy assimilated many motifs and concepts from monotheistic traditions in the

course of a Hellenization of Christianity. Greek concepts such as ‘autonomy’ and ‘individuality’

and Roman concepts such as ‘emancipation’ and ‘solidarity’ have long been invested with

meanings of ‘Judeo-Christian’ origin, as have many other philosophical concepts: responsibility;

justification; history and memory; beginning anew, innovation, and return; externalisation,

internalisation, and embodiment (Habermas 2008, 141-143; 2006, 258). Philosophy has time and

again learned through its encounters with religious traditions that it receives innovative impulses

when it is able to free cognitive contents from their dogmatic encapsulation and place them in

the crucible of rational, secular discourse. Kant and Hegel are influential examples of this, as is

the engagement of many twentieth-century philosophers with the likes of Kierkegaard. Faith and

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knowledge, together with their traditions based respectively in Jerusalem and Athens, belong to

the history of the origins of secular reason (Habermas 2010, 17).

The polarising discourse on faith and knowledge develops early in Roman Christianity but

only gains its explosive power with the reception of Aristotle through Arab mediation in the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries, wherein they sharpen their respective profiles in mutual

contrast (Habermas 2017, 26). The Augustinian-Thomist synthesis provides faith and knowledge

with a shared rational basis as the pinnacle of the religious-metaphysical worldview, but only

on the (naïve) assumption that lifeworld certainties can serve as metaphysical categories for the

objective world. This synthesis falls to pieces with the rise of scholastic nominalism and natural

philosophy-cum-science. Duns Scotus and Willian Ockham initiate the break with the

metaphysical model, regarding nature as a contingent order for which we must develop

categories through empirical research, only, however, at the expense of creating an

unbridgeable gap between faith and knowledge (Habermas 2019, I: 763). Nominalism lays the

groundwork—to be built on by Luther—for an empirical view of nature, and ultimately for

nomological empirical science for which the ‘book of nature’ no longer bears a divine signature,

as well as for a theory of knowledge which correlates ‘nature’ with the human mind. With these

developments, natural theology loses its ability to connect up with theology, which still sought

to account for contemporary science within its own worldview.

Modern science thus compelled a self-critical philosophical reason to break with

metaphysical constructions of the totality of nature and history, in turn bringing nature and

history under its preserve with this ‘advance in reflection’ (Habermas 2010, 16). It replaced the

‘essences’ underlying sensory phenomena with law-governed movements of causally interacting

bodies. Modern philosophy assimilated the Greek heritage but discarded theology: while it

acknowledges metaphysics as part of the prehistory of its emergence, it treats revelation and

religion as something alien (17). Post-metaphysical philosophy decentres the concept of the

world as the totality of physically describable states and events, separates theoretical from

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practical reason, and adopts a fallibilistic understanding of theoretical knowledge (2017, 26-27).

Prior to the modern historical moment, prophetic teachings were also world religions in the

sense that they operated and expanded within the cognitive horizons of ancient empires

perceived from within as universal worlds whose peripheries seemed to ‘blur beyond their

boundaries’ (Habermas et al. 2003, 31). Against the backdrop of such a horizon, world religions

made the claim to exclusive truth. Such a claim can no longer be naively maintained in modern

conditions of accelerated growth in complexity.

In Europe, the confessional schism and secularisation have compelled religious belief to

reflect on its non-exclusive place within a universal discourse shared with other religions and

limited by scientifically generated secular knowledge. This ‘double relativisation’ of one’s own

position does not imply a relativisation of one’s beliefs, which can still be held as truth, but only

reflexively. This cognitive thrust made religious tolerance and separation of state and church

possible for the first time. The secularisation of state power came as the appropriate response

to the confessional wars of the early modern period in Europe (Habermas 2009, 66). Religious

minorities progressively acquired more rights: first, the right to private practice, then

expression, and finally equal rights to exercise religion in public. This was a ‘valuable

achievement of extending inclusive religious freedom to all citizens alike’ (67). The result,

however, was a modus vivendi: a situation in which the state authority had to take a neutral

stance—even if still intertwined with the dominant religion—and ensure amicable social

relations between hostile confessions. This precarious coexistence of antagonistic subcultures,

estranged from one another, proved inadequate for the new political order born of the late

eighteenth century’s convulsions in Europe. Constitutional revolutions subjected secularised

states to the rule of law and the democratic will of the people. The new setup necessitated that

all subcultures, religious and secular, loosen their hold on members so that the latter can

recognise each other reciprocally as citizens, as members of the one and same political

community, and not as members of opposing communities (68).

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 This is Habermas’s account of secularisation, as against the sociological secularisation

thesis, which he finds problematic. It rests on three considerations—the scientifically

enlightened mind not being easily reconciled with metaphysical worldviews; the functional

differentiation of social subsystems and concomitant loss of religious institutions control over

these; and the higher levels of welfare of industrial and post-industrial societies diminishing the

need of faith in a higher power as a coping mechanism for uncontrolled contingencies—that

are plausible ‘at first sight’, but suffering, on further inspection, from certain rash inferences,

‘which betray an imprecise use of the concepts of “secularisation” and “modernisation”’

(Habermas 2009, 60-63). For instance, the loss of function for religious institutions and the

trend towards individualisation do not necessarily lead to a loss in the influence and relevance

of religion, either in the public arena or personal conduct, since faith and its practices can take

on more personal or subjective forms. Likewise, the secularisation thesis does not pay due

attention to the affinities of the religious and secular in the genesis of postmetaphysical secular

reason and politics, which the later Habermas is keen to highlight. These will be fortuitous for

the sort of ‘post-secular’ cooperation between religion and secularism he seek.

Taylor: Secularisation as Transformation, not Subtraction

‘Early’ (‘pre-Axial’) religion, according to Taylor—much like Habermas—is deeply embedded

socially, cosmically, and in terms of its goods. It is (various) modes in which firstly, the collective

relate to some notion of a spiritual realm of immaterial powers, forces, and spirits; which,

secondly, are intricated in the world; and whom people seek aid from, thirdly, for worldly

flourishing (health, long life, fertility) (2007, 147-150). The ‘great disembedding’, implicit in the

Axial revolution, reaches its high point in medieval Latin Christianity, whereby the ‘drive to

reform’ enunciates the individual as the locus of religion, disenchants the cosmos, and

prioritises otherworldly goods (146). The drive to reform is a long, ascending series of

attempts—of which the Reformation is a key phase—that seek to ‘reform’ older modes of post-

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Axial Christianity in which certain ‘pagan’ or ‘superstitious’ ritual forms of earlier religions

coexisted uneasily with the demands of individual devotion as understood from ‘higher’

revelations (Taylor 2011, 48-49). The result is to draw a cleaner distinction between social life in

the temporal world from an enchanted cosmos. This drive to reform disembeds the individual

from the social, nudging the moral and social imaginary in the direction of modern

individualism, and giving rise to the possibility to conceiving of the world in purely immanent

terms.86 Where Habermas emphasises the Axial differentiation of appearance from essence,

Taylor is focused on its ‘disembedding thrust’ (2007, 752).

According to Taylor’s historical account, the advent of our secular age has been

coterminous with the rise, as a widely available option for the first time in history, of such a world

in the form of a ‘self-sufficient humanism’.87 Self-sufficient or ‘exclusive’ humanism accepts no

final goals beyond human flourishing (2007, 18).88 The path for this exclusive humanism was

paved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of a new science, which took the

86
Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1997) presents a
starker version of this idea that secularism is the result of attributes specific to Christianity. He argues
that primeval (pre-political) religion was thoroughly pantheistic, with the gods animating all aspects of
the world and life. With the advent of the state (the political), the desire to experience the divine leads
to analysis and investigation but results in discovery of natural laws instead. Preserving the sacred results
in making it transcendent. Judeo-Christian monotheism in particular focuses all that is sacred in a
transcendent God, marking the exit of humans from paradise and their entry into history. This ‘alienation’
of the sacred is the source of all dualistic religious (natural/supernatural; body/soul) and philosophical
(Platonic forms) constructs. In modernity, the sacred returns only as invisible spirit within individual
conscience. Science grows out of disenchanted reverence, politics out of disenchanted cultic life. In this
sense, Christianity is the religion of ‘the departing from religion’ (la sortie de la religion). Secularisation
here equates to disenchantment and the monotheistic religions accelerate this process.
87
This account takes up the bulk—fourteen chapters spanning some 500 pages—of A Secular Age (2007).
The account is detailed and extremely nuanced. It is not a straight casual account of historical developments
but rather ‘a zig-zag account’ full of unintended consequences (95). Our outline of it here fails to capture
this. It is a concise outline because our concern is not so much with the historical account itself as with what
it implies about how Taylor understands the advent of secularity and its relation to religion.
88
This is not to say that human flourishing was not important in pre-modern times. It was important but
only as a means to higher ends or in a way where the reverence of higher beings is an integral part of
human flourishing. Thus, we can speak of pre-modern humanisms, but not of a ‘self-sufficing humanism’,
which is uniquely modern. Epicureanism, perhaps the only exception, was ‘exclusively humanist’ in this
sense but only ever espoused by a small minority (19).

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universe as a manipulable object of observation and analysis, brought with it a new sense of self

as disengaged from the world (113). An epochal shift occurs from our ‘finding our place in the

cosmos to constructing an order within the universe’ (114) along with a new understanding of

that order, one which ‘gave an essential place to the willed constructive effort in the remaking of

human life’ (125). This is all facilitated by other factors: the natural law tradition; the rise of neo-

Stoicism; the contract-law tradition of Locke and Grotius; the Cartesian revolution, with its view

of society as a malleable substance fashionable by human endeavour; and the reform movement

in Christianity, which sought to close the gap between elite and popular piety (130).

Politically, the origin point and motivation of modern Western secularism was the search

in battle-fatigue and horror for a way out of the ‘Wars of Religion’ (Taylor 1998, 32). The need

for a ground of coexistence for Christians of different confessions meant in practice that the

public domain had to be regulated by norms independent of confessional allegiance. Rules of

peace, even with heretics, and of obedience to legitimate authority had to be beyond revocation

by this or that version of orthodoxy. On Taylor’s reading, there were two ways in which this

could be done—two approaches that turn out to be ancestral to different understandings of

secularism today (33-34). One possible approach was the ‘common ground strategy’ which,

grounded in versions of Natural Law of the sort offered by Pufendorf and Locke, aimed at an

ethic of peaceful coexistence and political order based on norms and doctrines common to all

Christians or theists. Its crucial step was to hold that the common political injunctions take

precedence over the demands of any particular confessional allegiance. The other approach,

explored by Grotius and Hobbes, aimed at an independent political ethic that abstracts from all

confessions instead of seeking what is common between them. The crucial move in such an

ethic is to appeal to features of the human condition that allow us to deduce certain

exceptionless norms, which we have reasons to accept as human regardless of what else we

believe about life and God—they apply etsi Deus non daretur, even if God didn’t exist. It is the

former approach that is initially taken but with an inclination over time towards the latter.

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 While the path for exclusive humanism is cleared in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, it only begins to emerge in the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, and

comes of age in the nineteenth century, propelled by developments within orthodox Christianity

that give rise to a ‘Providential Deism’. Providential Deism is the result of an ‘anthropocentric

shift’ towards God as a mere designer of the world, the primacy of impersonal order, and the

idea of natural religion (Taylor 2007, 221). The ‘anthropocentric shift’ entails four developments:

the eclipse of any sense of further purpose, any sense of serving God, except (through) the

achievement of our own good; the eclipse of grace by reason’s ability to comprehend everything

in the world; the fading of any sense of mystery; and the eclipse of the idea that any

transformation from our current human condition awaits us in an afterlife (222-4). With this

shift, God’s Providence is emptied: it is nothing more than his plan for us, which we understand.

This type of Providential Deism makes God almost dispensable and circumscribes man’s

vocation in human flourishing (242-3). In doing so, it serves as the intermediate stage to

exclusive humanism, which invokes a moral order whose ‘ontic component’ is wholly intra-

human and entirely immanent (256).89

Following the rise of an exclusive humanist alternative to Christianity by the eighteenth

century, there is a proliferation (‘the nova effect’) of new moral-spiritual positions caused by

the cross-polemics between orthodox religion, Deism, and the new humanism, among other

factors (2007, 299-300). This ‘fractured culture of the nova’ then becomes generalised

throughout society, moving beyond the elites, resulting by the late twentieth century in a

‘spiritual super-nova’ with radically numerous worldviews hitting up against one another to

the effect of ‘mutual fragilization’ (303).

Further, importantly, our understanding of ourselves as secular is defined by a historical

sense that we arrived here by overcoming and rising out of earlier modes of belief (268). We

89
By ‘moral order’, Taylor wants to signify not just norms or ideals, but also, and in fact more significantly,
a picture/imaginary of what makes these norms appropriate and possible of realisation (256).

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have advanced, come of age, to grasp our predicament through earlier, more primitive stages of

society and self-understanding. Taylor labels this the ‘stadial consciousness’: an understanding

of human society as developing over history through a series of primitive to more advanced

(‘modern’) stages. This stadial consciousness is, Taylor avers, ‘the ratchet at the end of the

anthropocentric shift, which makes it (near) impossible to go back on it’ (289). According to

Taylor, Habermasian post-metaphysical thought, that comes as an irrevocable advance on

metaphysical thought, and Weberian differentiation are examples of such a view.90

This is a basic outline of Taylor’s account of secularisation. Classical secularisation

theories are unconvincing, for him, because they are premised on a simple global notion of

‘religion’, a definition of secularity as the absence of religion, and the assumption that

modernisation would inevitably undermine religion (2007a). They are also predicated on what

he calls ‘subtraction stories’: narratives about modernity in general and secularity in particular

‘which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from

certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge’ (2007, 22). 91

According to such stories, modern civilisation cannot but bring about a ‘death of God’ as

underlying perennial features of human nature come to the fore, having previously been

impeded by what is set aside or subtracted. On this view, the secular is the natural substratum

that is left behind and revealed when the anthropologically superfluous and super-structural

thing called ‘religion’ gives way as it was bound to (Casanova 2009, 1057).

90
Weber’s theory of differentiation is discussed above on pp. 90-91. For Habermas’s notion of post-
metaphysical thought see below, pp. 138-139.
91
Blumenberg precedes Taylor in problematising such ‘subtraction’ versions of secularisation. In
commenting on Arendt’s notion of modern secularity leading not to worldliness but world alienation (1958,
320), he notes: The point is that ‘the world’ is not a constant whose reliability guarantees that in the historical
process an original constitutive substance must come back to light, undisguised, as soon as the
superimposed elements of theological derivation and specificity are cleared away. This unhistorical
interpretation displaces the authenticity of the modern age, making it a remainder, a pagan substratum,
which is simply left over after the retreat of religion into autarkic independence from the world.’ (1985, 8-9)

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 Taylor’s own story, outlined above, sees the modern secular age as a result not of subtraction

but of construction, formation, and transformation. It is the fruit of innovation, newly constructed

understandings, and related practices, of self and its place in society, in space and time (2007, 22,

573). The salient feature of Western societies, argues Taylor, is not a decline of religious faith and

practice, though this has occurred, but a mutual fragilisation—caused by cross pressures between

narratives of closed immanence on the one side and their inadequacy on the other—of different

religious and non-religious positions (595). Paradoxically, religion can be secured from, and even

by, secularism. Older forms of religion are destabilised but they are also transformed and

‘recomposed’ into new forms (2007, 437). Taylor also reads these developments as a

transformation from within Christianity itself. Modern secularism is not externally imposed but,

at least in part, internally motivated. For him, the oppositions that existed in medieval

Christendom of secular/religious, spiritual/temporal reflected something fundamental about

Christendom, a requirement of distance, of non-coincidence between the Church and the world

(1998, 32). Despite persistent medieval conflict, and overlap, between church and state, it was

always, and from both sides, axiomatic that there must be a separation of spheres. This was

understood as important for the integrity of the political function, and even more fundamentally

for the theological function: the need for distance, for a less than full embedding in the secular,

was understood as essential to the vocation of the Church. There was always, Taylor argues, a

theological motivation in Christianity for defining a space of the secular and this continues to be

the case today, on which modern secularisms build but also transform. Secularism need not be

seen, thus, an antithetical to Christianity. In fact, it can be seen as favourable, or at least

acceptable, transformation of Christianity, if not as simply Christianity reborn.

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Secularism as Christianity Reborn

Graeme Smith, unlike Taylor, presents a more explicit genealogy of secularism as Christianity

reborn. In A Short History of Secularism (2007), Smith proffers a reinterpretation of secularism

and an argument against the standard theory of secularisation which posits secularism as

opposed to religion and leading to its decline. He argues that we should rather view secularism

as the latest expression of the Christian religion, as ‘Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine’: it is

the ongoing commitment to do good, understood in traditional Christian terms, without a

concern for the technicalities of Church creed and teachings (2).

Smith notes that the history or story of secularism has been told from two perspectives (20).

The more common one is a ‘social history’ whereby secularism emerged in conjunction with

modernity, whose conditions—urbanisation, pluralism, social fragmentation, breakdown of

community, rationalisation—mitigated against religion’s survival. Christianity fell away because

of its inability to subsist in modern life. The other perspective focuses on the epistemic aspect,

asserting that secularism won the battle of ideas because of its intellectual superiority to

Christianity. Science was able to make Christian theology look feeble and irrational and provide

much more convincing accounts of how the world and humanity originated and functioned.

Smith calls into question these traditional accounts of religious decline on two main counts (31).

First, Christianity has not gone away. It remains an enduring force and indeed an influential one

in places like the United States, in spite of its being one of the most modern and scientifically

advanced nations. Second, despite the apparent intellectual superiority of secular ideas and the

rise of the natural and social sciences, intelligent people still remain and even become Christians.

These two factors mean, for Smith, that traditional accounts of secularism are too simplistic and

call for revision. Likewise, instead of the decline narrative, Smith prefers a model of peaks and

troughs—rising and falling levels of religiosity (89-90). In such a model, we see periods of intense

religiosity—the Victorian period, the Reformation—sandwiched between periods of ‘equilibrium’

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or ‘calm’, which are a ‘reversion to normality when humans conduct their affairs in a typical

manner’. The late medieval period and contemporary society falls in the latter.

In presenting his own view of how secularism should be understood as a manifestation of

Christianity, Smith posits four main claims (7). First, Christianity has, and always had, a fluid,

evolving identity. It has not had an essential, unchanging core. As Christianity spread

historically, it was changed by the social and cultural settings it encountered. Second, medieval

Christianity functioned in similar ways to contemporary Christianity with regard to such things

as the importance of the supernatural in everyday life, the extent of belief, and church

attendance. Smith argues that human beings are essentially religious and the expression of that

religiosity in minority activism and majority tacit support is similar across time, with lower or

higher levels of expression being the anomaly. Third, the Victorian era was an exceptional

period of high religious activity that should not be used as a benchmark. It is only when it is

taken as a benchmark that the theory of religious decline makes sense. Fourth, the major

intellectual and cultural event of the Enlightenment was not the decline of religion and

concomitant rise of secularism and atheism. Rather, it was the separation of Christian ethics

from Christian doctrine. The standard account of the Enlightenment as the rise of reason

revealing religion as irrational superstition is belied, according to Smith, by the fact that atheism

never won anything but minority support in the West and Christianity was never removed from

or even made uninfluential in the public sphere. Rather, the Enlightenment saw ‘the public

transformation of Christianity from a religion of doctrinal orthodoxy to a religion of ethics’ (14).

Another major change precipitated by the Enlightenment was science replacing religion

as the technology of Western society (38). Smith argues that an important role religion played

in ancient and medieval society was technological, that is, it would provide the framework and

means whereby explanations of the workings of nature and human life were sought (41). In other

words, religion provided the basis for both empirical and ethical inquiry and practice. Smith

highlights health care and medicine as a major empirical area in which religion was the most

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important source. With the rise of science in modernity, it has thoroughly replaced religion in

the realm of empirical inquiry: science is the new technology. At the same time, however,

science is unable to provide a new ethics because it cannot in itself answer ethical questions.

Thus, ‘Western society now had to find new ways of dealing with ethical questions in light of

the technological dominance of science. Or it had to revise the old ways, namely Christianity’

(40). This is where the hold of religion remains strong.

For Smith, the consequence of science becoming the new technology was the emergence

of ethics as the most important and controversial discussion topic in the West: ‘Ethics was the

main dilemma facing a society which had broken the shackles of religious technology’ (40).

Smith reads the US ‘culture wars’ in this light:

They are US society battling out the territory occupied by ethics. On the one side is the social
conservatism associated with Christian ethics; on the other is a secular liberalism which is pro
same-sex marriage, pro a woman’s right to choose and pro-science. Both sides of the argument are
a version of Christian ethics, albeit versions that have followed very different trajectories. What
makes the fighting so vicious is that it is an internal theological dispute – a Christian civil war…the
US culture wars are a further illustration of how science is unable to remove religion from its role
as ethical arbitrator and guide.

The consequence of these historical processes is what Smith calls the ‘ethics society’: a society

with ongoing religious identity, a distinctive sympathy with the idea of God conceived in

Christian terms, and an overriding concern with ethical issues (8). It is a society in which science

dominates the empirical but religion maintains a strong hold, albeit in reconfigured form, on

ethics, which becomes the main battleground of public concern and opinion.

Fundamental to this thesis is the premise that contemporary Western (secular) ethics

have their roots in Christian theology. For Smith, liberalism is the most important ethical

ideology in the contemporary West, and it has its roots in Christianity: liberal ethics are our

Christian identity (153). In turn, liberalism is an expression of secular Christianity. It is from

Christianity that liberalism takes its core notion of the individual (154). The individual who bears

a moral will is the product of the amalgamation of Christianity with a Hellenistic concern with

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universals and the Jewish priority of conforming to God’s will. From here, Christianity

introduces the notion of radical human equality and that of humans having a personal

relationship with God. This is all fundamental to modern liberal notions of equal rights and

equal liberty. Smites cites Siedentop (2001, 210) who expands on this view:

Western distinctions between the state and civil society, public and private spheres, mere
conformity and moral conduct are themselves derived from Christian assumptions. That is, they
rest on a framework of assumptions and valuations which can be described broadly as individualist
and which correspond in crucial respects to the framework of Christian theology. The assumption
that society consists of individuals, each with an ontological ground of his or her own, is a
translation of the Christian premise of equality of souls in the eyes of God. That fundamental
equality of status which Christianity postulates became, especially through the Natural Law
tradition, the means by which Western thinkers from the Middle Ages into the modern period
drew an increasingly systematic distinction between the person as moral agent and the social roles
which such persons happened to occupy.

On top of this structural analogy, Smith follows Gray (2002) in relating some features of

liberalism to Christianity. Ideas such as the humanist belief in progress and human growth in

knowledge leading to increased power over nature are secular versions of the Christian idea that

salvation is open for everyone and rests on the Christian notion that human beings have a unique

status above other animals. There is something of an apparent tension in Smith’s two major

moves, as we read them. On the one hand, he needs to establish the premise that Christianity

has no essential core but is radically fluid in order to argue that modern secularism is its modern

form.92 On the other hand, he seeks to relate secularism and Christianity (or their respective

ethics) by showing that the former is rooted in the historical forms of the latter. But the

implication of the first move is that those historical forms are no more Christian than the secular

liberal ethics being genealogically tethered to them. They are simply Christian through a process

of acculturation. If this is so, the genealogical relation being made is between two historical forms

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The idea that Christianity is radically fluid in this way is unconvincing. If followed through logically,
modern atheism can be argued to be a new form of Christianity, to use an extreme example. We need not
say more on this, however, since defining Christianity is a theological problematic and thus beyond the
scope of this dissertation, but also because the thesis that Christianity is radically fluid doesn’t help in
understanding modern secularism.

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of Christianity, different but equally Christian, in which case it no longer carries the force Smith

requires of it. The second move, in any case, brings Smith closer to the ‘displacement’ view of

secularisation: he presents a ‘moral theology’ argument in the vein of Agamben’s ‘economic

theology’—both analogous to Schmitt’s more famous ‘political theology’ thesis.

Political Theology and the German Secularisation Debates

The term ‘political theology’ has been deployed in many ways by many thinkers over many years.

Historically, the term dates to Marcus Varro (116-27 BCE) as discussed by St. Augustine in The

City of God (De Vries 2006, 25). Varro speaks of the Stoic tripartite division of theology into

political theology (theologia politikē) undertaken by priests, mythical theology (theologia

mythikē) by poets, and cosmological theology (theologia kosmikē) by philosophers. In Varro’s

Latin, we get theologia civilis, fabularis, and naturalis respectively. For the likes of Varro and

Scaevola (d. 82 BCE), political theology emerges as a conceptual framework that addresses the

social function of religio to the cultic practices as a means of public governance (Thiem 2014,

2807). After Varro, the term disappears but the idea continues to work on a subterranean level

over a long history of political thought, as reconstructed famously by Ernst Kantorowicz in The

King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957) (De Vries 2006, 26). Augustine

is critical of Varro’s political theology for its manipulation of theology for pagan political ends.

He supplants the Roman tripartite division of theology with a Christian duality of temporal and

spiritual powers, which is rearticulated by the Church in various forms of relation throughout

the medieval period, as outlined in the previous chapter.

In the late modern period, the term is most closely associated with the name of Carl

Schmitt, for whom it marks the elucidation of the theological within the political, or,

alternatively, points to the various continuities and identities of theology and modern politics

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(Styfhals and Symons 2019, 1).93 Political theology is an attempt to contest the view of the

political as completely independent from any transcendent theological notions, the political as

utterly immanent. ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state’, writes Schmitt

(2005, 36), referring to concepts such as sovereignty, the exception, decision, citizen and alien,

‘are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development…but also

because of their systematic structure.’ This attempt to reveal the links between the political and

the theological in Schmitt is putatively not theological but linked to sociological exposition of

the attributes of the political, in particular its grounding in the friend/enemy distinction and its

need for an absolute sovereign. For Schmitt, such a political theology serves as a crutch for a

critique of liberalism: the notion that there exist underlying common values that can inform

rational political decisions is a myth. Any government makes decisions from a position of

transcendence, from above politics proper, which is its religious character. In its historical

context—the inter-war period in Germany—Schmitt’s argument is an attempt to shore up the

sovereignty of governments (the Weimar Republic in particular) so that they can overcome their

inherent instability (Ifergan 2010, 151).

This local context eventually took a backseat, however, to a broader debate on secular

modernity’s relation with pre-modern theology and whether the ‘secularisation’ that

purportedly leads from the latter to the former is the best way to figure this relation.94 At stake

in this debate is modernity’s demand to view itself as a new historical epoch whose legitimacy

can stand on its own feet. In the context of this secularisation debate, Schmitt’s strategy is the

opposite of Weber’s (Agamben 2011, 3). Where for Weber secularisation was a part of the broader

93
This is one approach to ‘political theology’ among others. See note 20 (p. 21) above for a distinct iteration.
94
Ifergan suggests that the reason for the local context taking a backseat to the secularisation debate was
in part the history-of-ideas movement in Germany but more so the collapse of the Weimar Republic and
the rise of a totalitarian government in its stead, events which rendered the discussion on sovereignty
irrelevant and even illegitimate (given Schmitt’s involvement with the Nazi regime). Instead, the desire
to explain the deep rupture caused by the horrors of World War II spurred on the need to analyse the
ideological origins as well as question the legitimacy of modern consciousness (2010, 151).

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process of disenchantment and de-theologisation of the modern world, for Schmitt, it revealed

the continued presence and activity of theology therein. This is not, for Schmitt, to imply an

identity of substance between theology and modernity or of meaning between theological and

political concepts; rather, it concerns the ‘particular strategic relation that marks political

concepts and refers them back to their theological origin’ (Agamben 2011, 4).95 That the concept

of ‘secularisation’ can be used to mark both religious decline (Weber) and religious persistence

(Schmitt) indicates its equivocal or multivalent nature.

The Schmittian notion of secularisation as the persistence of theology in secular

modernity, or the appropriation of theology by modernity, also carries, on one reading, critical

normative force of significant import. It charges modernity as having failed, against its assertion

and self-image, to liberate itself from its theological past, and therefore to be legitimately

considered a new and radically different epoch. This argument finds fertile ground in post-War

German philosophical thought.96 In Meaning in History (1949) Löwith argues that fundamental

modern ideas are but secularised versions of medieval Christian notions. He focuses on the idea

of progress as a philosophy of history—as found in Turgot, Condorcet, Proudhon, Marx, Comte,

95
Agamben makes this comparison in articulating a case in which Schmitt’s ‘lapidary’ thesis about secularised
theological concepts needs to be supplemented with the notion of economic theology: ‘two broadly speaking
political paradigms, antinomical but functionally related to one another, derive from Christian theology:
political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic
theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent
ordering-domestic and not political in a strict sense—of both divine and human life’ (2011, 1).
96
Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922) is an early, short and
contestable articulation of this argument. Major, explicit, philosophical articulations in German thought
arrive in the post-War period. The first major work is Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History: The Theological
Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949). Other notable works in this period with a similar thesis
include Jakob Taubes’s Occidental Eschatology (1947), Rudolf Bultmann’s The Presence of Eternity (1957),
and C.F. von Weizsäcker’s The Relevance of Science (1964). Blumenberg is the first to respond to this type
of argument in a series of lectures in 1962, later expanded to form the basis of his book, published first in
1966, and again in revised form in 1973. The revised second edition includes a chapter responding to
Schmitt (Part I, Chapter 8), who had by then published Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of
any Political Theology (1970) and addressed Blumenberg’s book directly, albeit in a postscript. These form
the keys works around which the ‘German secularisation debate’ is built, and on which the secondary
literature is expectedly vast. For an excellent recent review see Styfhals & Symons (2019).

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and, most prominently, Hegel—arguing that it is but a secularised version of the Christian

eschatological pattern (a linear, future-directed history with a redemptive end that induces

hope, as opposed to the cyclical, past-revering, histories of ancient philosophy). It is a sort of

bastardised, half-Christian/Biblical, half-modern/rational, view of history that is neither here

nor there. For Löwith, this is typical of the ‘modern mind’ in general, which, as he notes in the

final paragraph of his book, is a confused mind because having ‘not made up its mind whether

it should be Christian or pagan’, it ‘sees with one eye of faith and one of reason’ (207). On this

view, secular modernity is parasitic on Christianity: it (ab)uses its frameworks—corrupting

them in the process—while illegitimately claiming them as novel ideas that define a new age.

Hans Blumenberg is the first to thoroughly contest this view in favour of establishing

modernity’s legitimacy. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985) he takes aim primarily

against Löwith but also Schmitt. The modern idea of progress, he asserts, arises not from

Christian eschatology—from which it differs in significant ways, such as the expected future

being the result of an immanent process rather than any miraculous transcendent

intervention—but from early modern developments that saw progress as possible in specific

areas (in science, through the overcoming of the authority of Aristotle; in art, through change

in the idea the classical art was the perfect form to be emulated) writ large—a hasty

generalisation, to be sure—to history. More broadly, modernity is not the secularised

transformation of Christianity at all. It is rather based in new (secular) answers/approaches—

human ‘self-assertion’, reason—to old (theological) questions.

In Blumenberg’s genealogical account, Ockhamite nominalism plays a decisive role. Its

emphasis on ‘theological absolutism’—a radically omnipotent, voluntarist God—renders the

human and natural world radically contingent, leaving little room for order, reason, or any

certain path to salvation. The existential anxiety and insecurity this leaves in Late Medieval

Christendom provides fertile ground for the alternative in which humans assert themselves in

constructing their own world as best as possible. The old problem (contingency of the world

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and uncertainty of even otherworldly salvation) is given a new solution (human self-assertion

to do the best for themselves by constructing their own world) as the old solution (hope in

otherworldly salvation) is deemed inadequate and left behind.97 It is in this context that specific

problems are addressed with new solutions, sometimes unnecessarily. The idea of inevitable

historical progress is one such alternative answer to the Christian explanation of history as

whole (with its poles of creation and eschaton).98 The need to provide such an alternative arises

from the want to show that the new way can do anything the old way could. It does not flow

naturally from the central terms of the new way, unlike, for instance, how the idea of possible

progress forged by people flows from the notion of human self-assertion.

Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008) is worth mentioning here,

as a different, recent genealogy of secularism, one that is Blumenbergian in content and

Schmittian in form. For Gillespie, like Schmitt, modernity has theological, not secular, origins—

97
For Blumenberg, the old problem has deeper roots in Western history by relating to early Gnosticism
(which asserted that an evil spirit, not God, is the creator of the cosmos). In the Platonic system, the
demiurge and the reproduction of the Ideas is supposed to guarantee that the cosmos exhausts it potential
to be as good as possible and the collision or dualism of archetype/reason and matter/necessity is bridged
by reason bringing necessity under its authority by persuasion (on the model of the political). This leaves
unresolved the question of how to explain all that is bad in the world. In Neoplatonism, the theologising
of the Idea corresponds to the demonising of matter. The world appears as the failure to equal its ideal
model because of matter, hence the existence of bad. Gnosticism radicalises this exaggerated
metaphysical distance in the form-matter dualism of the original Platonic map by working within the
Neoplatonist system but ‘reoccupying’ its positions. The demiurge becomes the principle of badness, as
opposed to the transcendent God of salvation who does not bring the world into existence at all. This
position is overcome by the Church's ‘dogmatic system’, predominantly via Augustine, in which God is
creator of everything; He creates matter and form together (concreatio) and from nothing (ex nihilo).
Whence bad, then? Bad is wrought by the hands of man who is bestowed with free will. When this answer
is overcome by late Medieval nominalism some six centuries later, the need for a ‘second overcoming of
Gnosticism’ arises and is met by modern self-assertion. See Blumenberg (1985, 126-133).
98
Other ‘reoccupying’ modern answers of this sort include the idea of self-preservation (conservatio sui) as
man’s particular, inherent, and universal quality in the world, which reoccupies the prior Christian position
that this quality is determined by divine providential teleology (143). Likewise, the reoccupation of the
absolute will of medieval nominalism by the absolute matter, or matter as ultimate/fundamental, of early
modern mechanistic epistemology (151). The new answers are not always correct (a best fit), or even
necessary. For Blumenberg, the test of correctness is that the answer accord with the fundamental structure
of the new posture, namely, human self-assertion. Some answers do this. The ones that don’t confuse our
understanding of modernity and become the faulty basis of critiques that attempt to delegitimise it.

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which it ought to acknowledge and understand, instead of thinking it has left theology behind—

even if, like Blumenberg, it constitutes different answers to older problems.99 Also like

Blumenberg, Gillespie argues that these origins lie in the late medieval theological crisis which

saw nominalism win (against scholasticism) and produce a new ontology, logic, and conception

of man, God, and nature. This gave rise to a new and decisive problematic between humanism,

reformism, and, later, modernity/enlightenment whereby one of this triad (man, God, nature

respectively) is prioritised and made the lens through which the other two are interpreted.

Modernity conceives itself as having sidestepped the conflict but in fact answered it in a

different way (prioritising nature) and is left bedevilled by the implied tensions, such as the

contradiction between the scientific view of natural/mechanical laws of necessity and the

affirmation of human free will—as debated by Erasmus and Luther, then Hobbes and Descartes,

then noted but inadequately resolved by Kant (with his third antinomy). Thus, modernity

internalises theology and God’s attributes are transferred to man and/or nature.

Returning to Blumenberg, he concedes in response to Schmitt that there is a relation

between the modern absolutist state and medieval Christian theology, however it is not one of

adopting a set of attributes in the sense of transferring them from one realm to another. It was

rather the consequence of political problems and Christian disintegration in the wake of

Reformation that gave rise to problems to which absolutist rule was seen as an appropriate or

pragmatic solution. The symmetry of the development of internal conflicts between absolute

positions and the setting up of an absolute agent is better described as an ‘inducing’ process

99
Gillespie’s account is also like Blumenberg’s in that the problem modernity seeks to address has much
deeper roots, again to do with the reconciliation of Christian theology and ‘pagan’ Greek philosophy. For
Gillespie, however, the core issue is not the need to overcome Gnosticism but the broader problematic of
how to square reason with revelation, or an eternal rational cosmos with an omnipotent God who creates ex
nihilo. Scholasticism provides the answer through its realist position on the problem of universals, one that
tied the universals that structure human reason and the cosmos to divine reason, affording necessity and
stability to the cosmos and divine action and a legibility thereof to human or natural reason. This remains
unstable, of course, to the extent that it comes as the expense of qualifying divine omnipotence, which is
crack through which the ‘nominalist revolution’ attacks and brings down the cathedral of Scholastic thought.

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rather than a transfer as per secularisation theory (90). Further, Blumenberg grants the tension

in modern political thought between an absolutist Hobbesian strain and a rationalist Lockean

‘social contract’ strain. For him, however, the latter is implied by human self-assertion and thus

authentically modern, while the former reflects the partial failure or delay of enlightenment.

That is, it is not properly part of secular modernity—and thus should not be used to delegitimise

it. For Blumenberg, then, the historical-conceptual category of ‘secularisation’ should not be

seen as a cause of the genesis of the modern age, but rather as a ‘reoccupation’ of the position

held by the preceding theological worldview whereby old problems are addressed in novel ways,

if not always correct or coherent ways. As such, modernity does comprise an authentically new

and independently legitimate epoch, one that is fundamentally based on human reason and

self-assertion, as opposed to reliance and resignation to the will of God.

Asadian Non-Essentialist, Grammarian Genealogies

Talal Asad takes a different approach to the question of the genealogy of secularism, as noted

above, one which is not interested in figuring out the genealogical relation between secularity

and religion. The secular, for Asad, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly

precedes it nor a simple break from it (2003, 25). That is, modern secularity is neither the latest

phase of a sacred origin or a transformed theology nor an opposing essence that excludes the

sacred. It is rather a different formation—a concept that gathers particular behaviours,

knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life—that ought to examined on its own terms, with

particular attention to its grammar of concepts, as distinct from preceding pre-modern

grammars. There are, on this view, breaks between premodern Christian life and modern secular

life in which words and practices were rearranged and new discursive grammars replace

previous ones. It is the implications and differential results of these shifts that needs closer

attention and deeper exploration (26). The point, for Asad, is not origins of modern secularism

but instead the forms of life that articulate it, and the powers it releases or disables (17).

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 Asad agrees, in part, with Blumenberg’s critique of Schmitt. He finds Schmitt’s suggestion

that modern political concepts are essentially or entirely Christian inadequate. In a reflection

on the related idea that modern nationalism is a secular form of religion, Asad argues that it is

not enough to point to certain parallels with what we intuitively recognise as religion—that

national political life depends on ceremonial and symbols of the sacred (Asad 2003, 189).

Notions of sacredness, spirituality, and communal solidarity are invoked to claim authority in

national politics in such forms as sovereignty, the law, national glories and sufferings, mythic

stories of quasi-sacred origin, the (sacred) rights of the citizen, and so forth. However, taking

these to be a sure sign of religion faces two problems. First, it takes as unproblematic the entire

question of defining religion and why particular elements of ‘religion’ as a concept ought to be

selected as definitive or essential. Second, the focus on corresponding forms distracts from

differential results that emerge from these forms being inextricable parts of different discursive

worlds. Asad suggests, in turn, closer attendance to the historical grammar of concepts, instead

of what are taken as signs of an essential phenomenon, and focus on different results instead of

corresponding forms in the process of secularisation.

Unlike Schmitt (or Taylor and Habermas), Asad is not interested in religion (Christianity)

as a ground for secularism but in the productive work performed on religious traditions by

secularism, since he conceives both religious tradition and secularity as distinct modes of

organising life (Scherer 2011, 625). The claim that the central values of liberalism are translated

from Christian history fails to attend to the fact that what is now taken to be ‘equality’, for

instance, and what was identified as such in medieval Christendom differ profoundly (Asad

2018, 16-17). When Habermas, for instance, suggests that the Christian concept of imago Dei,

‘Man created in the image of God’, can be translated into the political demand that all human

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beings be treated equally, he ignores a semantic rupture.100 For the imago Dei concept to be

given a worldly sense—for it to be secularised, or given a secular translation—it must first be

purged of the belief that the Fall rendered man corrupt, redeemable only by divine grace. It

must then be placed into a context of rights assumed to be universal and unconditional as an a

priori assumption with no relation whatever to otherworldliness or divine grace. This sense of

a ‘secular’ world is as incomprehensible to medieval Christians as a world of rights grounded in

a theology of grace is to secular moderns.

Likewise, it may be said that late-nineteenth century Tractarianism in England and

Ultramontanism in France helped to break the post-Reformation alliance between church and

state through the deployment of religious argument (that Christ’s church should be freed from

the constraints of earthly power). However, the historical significance of this, argues Asad, does

not lie in the essentialised (‘religious’) agency by which it was initiated. It lies in the difference

of outcome yielded, a redefinition of the essence of ‘religion’ as well as ‘national politics’ (and

the development of different moral and political disciplines such as those identified by Foucault

as governmentality) (2003, 190). By contrast, late-eighteenth century supporters of the church

in England regarded it as a representative institution reflecting popular opinion and sentiment.

It would not be right to describe this as religion being used for political purposes or even as the

English nation being influenced by religion. This is because the established church, as an

integral part of the state, made the coherence and continuity of the English national community

possible; it was, then, a necessary condition of this community (190). It would also be inaccurate

to speak of the social location of religion being different in the eighteenth century compared to

the nineteenth. Rather, in each historical moment the very essence of religion was differently

defined and different conditions of the very existence of ‘religion’ were in play. What we now

100
‘The translation of the notion of man’s likeness to God into the notion of human dignity, in which all
men partake equally and which is to be respected unconditionally, is such a saving translation.’
(Habermas 2006, 258)

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retrospectively call the social—that all-inclusive secular space set apart conceptually from

‘religion’, ‘state’, ‘economy’ and on which these latter can be constructed, reformed, and

plotted—didn’t exist prior to the nineteenth century (191).101 Notably, it was precisely the

emergence of society as an organisable secular space that serves as a condition of the possibility

for the state to redefine the competency of religion and ascribe to itself an original task: the

unceasing material and moral transformation of its entire national population.

Asad thus agrees with Blumenberg that certain continuities do not mean we have the

same thing. Where Blumenberg wants to emphasise the novelty of different answers to old

problems, Asad seeks to highlight distinct discursive grammars within which the new answers

arise. It is not enough to point out structural analogies between pre-modern theological

concepts and modern secular political ones, both considered atomistically, as Schmitt does,

because the practices these concepts facilitate and organise differ according to the historical

formations in which they occur (191). Stated differently, the persisting concepts play very

different roles, and bear different inflections, within different discursive and historical worlds.

And it is these roles in specific historical contexts, with their specific institutions and discourses,

which need to be studied. On this view, history is not a seamless web; it contains both

continuities and ruptures at the same time. Any assessment that is but a history-of-ideas is

insufficient. Thus, where Schmitt’s emphasis is on the structural continuity and function of

religion into the modern age, Asad underscores the fact that the very concept of religion in

transformed in Europe. He disagrees with Blumenberg, however, to the extent that the latter’s

genealogy (and defence) of secularism is firmly rooted in a conventional history-of-ideas

101
Asad cites Mary Poovey on this point: ‘By 1776, the phrase body politic had begun to compete with
another metaphor, the great body of the people...By the early nineteenth century, both of these phrases
were joined by the image of the social body’. (Poovey M 1995, Making A Social Body: British Cultural
Formation, University of Chicago Press, p. 7). He may well have cited Hannah Arendt who famously
theorises the ‘Rise of the Social’ in Chapter 6 of The Human Condition (1958).

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approach and displays a relative neglect of practice (Asad 2003, 191). It also treats modernity as

a totality and overplays its equation with human self-assertion and reason.

The genealogy of secularism, for Asad then, is to be traced through the concept of the

secular, to the likes of the Renaissance doctrine of humanism, the Enlightenment concept of

nature, and Hegel’s philosophy of history (Asad 2003, 192). Secularism builds on a particular

conception of the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ worlds and the problems generated by these. In the

context of early modern Europe, these problems faced by the nascent nation-state were

perceived as the need to control the increasingly mobile poor in city and countryside, to govern

mutually hostile Christian sects (in the wake of the Reformation) within a sovereign territory,

and to regulate the commercial, military, and colonising expansion of Europe overseas (192). In

the nineteenth century, long-standing habits of indifference, disbelief, or hostility among

people toward Christian rituals and authorities became entangled with projects of total social

reconstruction by means of legislation (24). The discursive move in this period from a fixed

‘human nature’ to a constituted and shifting human ‘normality’ facilitated the secular idea of

moral progress defined and directed by autonomous human agency. This shift presupposed a

new idea of society as a collective of individuals enjoying rights and immunities, endowed with

moral agency, and possessing the capacity to elect their political representatives, and comes

alongside new methods of government based on classification and calculation and new forms

of subjecthood. These are ‘secular’ principles of government in the sense that they deal solely

with worldly affairs, in contrast to the medieval concept of a social body of Christian souls at

once members of the City of God and of divinely created human society.

Asad’s genealogy of religion also reveals important aspects of his genealogy of secularity,

particularly given his emphasis of the inextricable nature of the two as modern categories. Asad

locates the construction of modern ‘religion’ as a universal category in seventeenth century

Europe in the context of the constitution of the modern state, a post-Reformation fragmented

Roman church, European principalities ravaged by ‘wars of religion’, and colonial expansion

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bringing the existence of non-Christian religions to bear upon European consciousness (1993,

40-42). These very specific, historical material realities give rise to the idea of ‘natural religion’

which Asad emphasises as a crucial step in the formation of the modern concept of religious

belief, experience, and practice. Edward Herbert’s De veritate102 was a significant step in this

definitional history. In it he sought to go beyond the approach of writers like Locke and

Cromwell of reducing the Christian creed to a bare minimum set of fundamentals by finding a

common denominator for all religions everywhere. Herbert produced a substantive definition—

in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (ordered worship), and ethics (a code of

conduct based on judgment and recompense in the afterlife)—of what later came to be

formulated as ‘natural religion’.

The emphasis on beliefs led to religion being conceived of primarily as a set of

propositions to which believers gave assent, and which in turn could be compared with other

religions and with natural science (Harrison 1990 in Asad 1993, 41). Revelation and scripture

were de-emphasised in ‘natural religion’ due mainly to the seventeenth century shift from God’s

words to God’s works which saw ‘nature’ become the primary space of divine expression, and

eventually the final authority for the truth of all sacred texts now understood to be written in

merely human language. This view can be seen in a paradigmatic and influential work such as

Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity.103 In this way, ‘natural religion’ emerges as a

universal phenomenon, demarcated from, and working in tandem with, the also newly

emerging domain of natural science. A century later Kant is able without a second thought to

produce a fully essentialised idea of religion counterposed to its phenomenal forms:

There may certainly be different historical confessions although these have nothing to do with
religion itself but only with changes in the means used to further religion, and are thus the province
of historical research. And there may be just as many religious books (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas,
the Koran, etc.). But there can only be one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus

102
De Veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso [On Truth, as it is
Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False]; first published in Paris in 1624.
103
The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures; published 1695.

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 the different confessions can scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion; these are fortuitous,
and may vary with differences in time or place. (Kant 1991, 114 in Asad 1993, 42)

The constitution of the modern state required this redefinition of religion as belief, and of religious

belief, sentiment, and identity as personal matters, proper to the emerging private, as opposed to

public, sphere (1993, 201). Religion as the source of uncontrollable passions in the individual and

strife in the commonwealth—demonstrated starkly, as it was thought to have been, in the

disorders of the Reformation—had to be marginalised for the formation of a strong, centralised

state. It could not, therefore, provide an institutional basis for a common morality, still less a

public language of rational criticism. ‘Religious toleration’ was a political means to the formation

of strong state power in the context of sectarian wars rather than the development of a benevolent

pluralism (206). Strong political power was in the interest of European princes. Thinkers too,

believers and sceptics alike, were reasoning to this logic. According to Lipsius, the prince should

follow any policy that would secure civil peace. If religious diversity could be forcibly eliminated,

so be it; and if not, then toleration should be enforced by the state. Locke’s famous argument for

toleration was also motivated by a concern for the integrity of the state—hence his exclusion of

atheists and Catholics, whose beliefs he considered dangerous to civil peace (206).

A significant historical development in this respect was the adoption by the emerging

states of Western Christendom of the ‘cuius region eius religio’ principle (‘the religion of the

ruler is the religion of his subjects’) at the end of the sixteenth century, as a way to deal with

conflict seen to be resulting from a clash of religious denominations. For Asad, it is not the

commitment to or interdiction of a particular religion that is most significant in this principle

but the installation of a single absolute and abstract power, the sovereign state (2006, 497-498).

What is salient and most novel about the secularity of the modern state is not its separation of

the religious and political but its depersonalising abstraction. Medieval Christendom too

recognised a separation between the religious and the political, albeit in very different form.

The monarchy (as temporal power) and church (as spiritual power), while distinct in theory,

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together embraced the entire realm through various mutually dependent, often conflicting,

personal relations. The modern state, by contrast, was de-Christianised and depersonalised:

political status—a new abstraction—could be separated from religious belonging. The

dominance of ‘the political’ meant ‘religion’ could be excluded or absorbed by it, in turn giving

rise to the political concern with identifying religion in order to keep it in its ‘proper place’,

which become part of the state’s performance of sovereignty. Indeed, it is here that defining

‘religion’ and its ‘proper place’ while respecting ‘freedom of conscience’ become possible and

necessary at once. Once the state became an abstract, transcendent power, independent of both

rulers and ruled—as Hobbes famously theorised it—it became possible to think about the scope

of its responsibilities toward ‘social life’ as a whole—that space in which subjects with different

beliefs and commitments live together (497-498):

It became natural for the state—now seen as an overarching function distinct from the many
particular purposes of social life, and distinct also from the national bureaucrats, parliamentary
representatives, judges, and other officials who carried out that function—to decide not only who
was deserving of (religious) tolerance in that life but what (religious) tolerance was.

According to Asad, then, what historians of modern Europe tend to consider religion gradually

being compelled to concede the domain of public power to the constitutional state and of public

truth to natural science, is in fact the construction of ‘religion’ as a new historical object:

anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private

institutions, and practices in one’s spare time (1993, 207).104 This construction of religion ensures

that it is tethered to what is inessential to all that is public and common—politics, economy,

science, morality—precisely because what comes to fore is the disruptive capacity of religion.

Stated differently, what we get in seventeenth century Europe is not merely an increase in

religious toleration (as per standard accounts) but the mutation of a concept and associated

social practices, itself part of a wider change in the modern landscape of knowledge and power,

104
We return to the question of the modern construction of religion in Chapter Three, pp. 155-161.

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including a new kind of state, science, social and political life, and a new kind of moral and legal

subject (43). The former increase-in-toleration thesis presumes the continuity of ‘religion’ and

a change merely in its public treatment or reception while the latter posits a substantive change

in the concept and practice of religion itself. The new ‘modest’ view of religion was the product

of the only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to

individual, private belief—a reflection of the historical embeddedness of the new concept (45).

Brown: Re-reading Marx on Religion and Secularisation

Religion fused with and inspiriting political movements is having a global renaissance today,

observes Wendy Brown, disrupting the common narrative that secularisation of public life—a

defining feature of Western modernity—was secure (2011, 81). Three contemporary

predicaments in particular have wreaked havoc on the modernist expectation that secularism

would strengthen and take hold the world over—giving lie to the presumptions undergirding

this expectation which forecast the consilience of reason, science, liberal democracy and the

market dethroning religious political authority and energies (2014, 109-110). First, the

phenomenon of ‘enormous planetary slums’: capitalism has created huge numbers of poor

people who find sanctuary in religion. ‘If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution’

Brown quotes Mike Davis (2004, 30), ‘he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the

developing world’. Second, a broad transnational renaissance of religion accompanies the

intensification of capitalism’s global reach in recent decades. Instead of inciting secular

revolutions and consciousness, globalisation appears to have resulted in the opposite. Religion

rebounds just as market rationality penetrates every crevice of the planet. Third, we witness a

subtle ‘de-secularisation’ as Euro-Atlantic societies reveal their own religious presuppositions

in defending their expressly Christian nature and rebuff the notion that secularism entails

religious neutrality. Many postcolonial nations too have pushed back against half a century of

secular governance for explicitly theological or hybrid forms of authority and law.

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 Brown’s analysis of secularisation takes the form of an excavation or reading of Marx’s

position on the same. For her, secularisation theory is mistaken firstly because it misreads the

trajectory of religion, seeing a decline where we empirically can see a revival or persistence. It

is also problematic in its normative dimension, in the context of liberal theory, that implicitly,

if not explicitly, ties secularisation with progress and the revelation of truth and objectivity in

the place of religious illusion and subjectivity. She is as critical as Taylor of such ‘subtraction

stories’ of secularisation and wants to show that Marx’s story is not of this sort. Her own notion

of secularisation, following Marx, is one whereby (secular) capitalism profanes the world not to

vanquish religion but in fact using the very religious power of inversion and projection in the

process. Secularism thus displaces and disseminates what is essentially religious into secular

forms while misrepresenting this displacement as the emancipation of public life from religion.

At first glance, Marx’s view that capitalism profanes all that is sacred looks very much like

the sort of ‘subtraction story’ that Taylor censures as naïve and unfounded. For Brown, however,

while Marx asserts that capitalism strips human relations of their ‘veiled religious and political

illusions’, it does so as a ‘profaning’ of the world, not as a simple revealing of man and the world

as they truly are, a revealing of the ‘real’ as against the imagined. Thus, this is no subtraction

story in which secularisation heralds an emergent truth previously obscured by religious

illusion. What capitalism lays bare is not any universal truth but a different historical,

contingent order of unfreedom; in fact, a most intensive order of oppressive social relations. It

reveals capital’s violence toward both people and the sacred, violating holiness and humanism

at once. It does so, curiously—and importantly for Brown’s reading of Marx—while exercising

a religious power, one that supplants man’s own sovereignty and displaces his essential nature

as a species and creative being. Capital is, paradoxically, a profaning force with a religious power

(Brown 2010, 94-95). It desacralises but does not bring an end to religious modalities of

consciousness; it merely displaces them into secular forms: money, the commodity, the state.

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 Money, says Marx (1978a) in a fragment of the 1844 Manuscripts, is a ‘visible divinity’ that

‘transforms all human and natural properties into their contraries’ (104). He also describes it as

the alienated ability of mankind in giving man the means to do what his essential powers

otherwise do not allow for. For Marx, money’s ‘divine’ aspect lies precisely in its power of

inversion, conversion, compounding, and fraternising of impossibilities; in its character as

men’s estranged, alienating, self-disposing species-nature (Brown 2010, 98-99). Money is man’s

own power alienated and projected that then becomes sovereign over him. These attributes of

money do not originate with capitalism but intensify in power. More fundamentally relevant

here is Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, whereby the commodity form is both

transcendent in status and active, like religious deities: it is capable of idea-generation and

world-making (Brown 2014, 116). This is because while humans transform nature into things

useful for them—like turning wood into a table—usefulness is utterly beside the point of

commodities (Marx 1978b, 320):

as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands
with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves
out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

Just as man makes God, who then becomes transcendent and active in making man, so too with

the commodity: man makes the table, which then becomes transcendent and active in its own

right holding man in its alluring grasp. The essence of the religious for Marx, following Feuerbach,

is inversion and projection (Brown 2014, 117). The ‘mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’,

to which Marx would have us make recourse in order to understand the fetishism of commodities,

are those where ‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with

life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race’ (Marx 1978b, 320).

What makes the commodity religious in nature, in this sense, is that it departs the realm of

production, wherein it comprised the social form of labour, and enters the realm of exchange,

wherein this relation is inherently buried in favour of a different one, namely, the relative

exchange value among commodities. In the words of Marx (1978b, 320-321):

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 [A] commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s
labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because
the relation of the producers to….their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing
not between themselves, but between the products of their labour….[A] definite social relation
between men assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. (M, 320-321)

For Marx then, capitalist commodity production generates a specifically religious mystification

of powers, objects, things and relations, a projection of human powers onto non-human entities,

a disavowal of the origin of power and the social nature of human production (Brown 2014, 118).

Moreover, this commodity fetishism is neither contingent nor accidental but necessary and

inherent to capitalist production.

Another crucial ‘religious’ element in capitalism, according to Marx, is the state. In On the

Jewish Question (1843), he attempts to show the religious organisation of capitalist society, arguing

that the secular state retains a theological structure, spirit, and content (Brown 2010, 95-98; 2014,

119-120). First, it represents itself as the site of freedom and the source of sovereignty—both

religious representations insofar as they attribute human things to a distant, imaginary power.

Second, it divides human existence and representation into two orders, state and economy,

mirroring the religious orders of heaven and earth, celestial and terrestrial life. Third, it relies on

a sovereign individuality (Taylor’s ‘disembedded self’) that is both fictional and isolating. Every

person is an imaginary king unto himself, a depiction that isolates him from every other person

and from cosmological relatedness. Fourth, it abstracts its ‘citizens’ from real earthly life to regard

them as free and equal, similar to the Christian image of souls in heaven. Human beings become

imaginary members of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of their real, individual life, and infused

with an unreal universality. The secular state’s representation of liberty, equality, and fraternity

represents an ideal as opposed to actual human experience in capitalist society where unfreedom

is the order of the day; freedom and sovereignty are posited in an ideal way against their material

negation. Thus, according to Brown, Marx reveals the political state as Christian and political

consciousness as religious even when both are thoroughly secularised—as such, he offers a

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Schmittian political theology of the constitutional state avant la lettre. The key point here, for

Brown (2012), is that the homology Marx figures between constitutional democracy and Christian

theology is an effect of the dissemination of religious consciousness that secularism misrepresents

as the emancipation of public life from religion (para 14).

For Marx then, on Brown’s reading, capitalism unleashes forces of profanation but does

not vanquish religion or religiosity. On the contrary, as it profanes the world it generates and

draws upon a broadly disseminated religious orientation to the world (Brown 2011, 102). Religion

persists in taking secular social and political forms, which shows the complex entwining of the

secular and religious as opposed to their putative opposition. More than an ‘opium of the people’

or a legitimating gloss, religious consciousness is in fact a condition of the existence of class-

stratified capitalist society (2011, 96). An appreciation of this allows us to better read our

contemporary ‘post-secular’ predicament in which an intensified capitalism is coextensive with

a resurgence in religion.

Brown’s reading of Marx here is insightful in some respects but also questionable in some

of its particulars. First, the idea that capital strips human relations of religion (religious illusion)

but does so via recourse to religion (a religious orientation/power) rests on an apparent

equivocation of how religion/religiosity is operating in this account. Religion is here illusion

and inversion at once. Yet while the inversion may lead to or rely on illusion it cannot be illusory

itself for then it would not be inversion at all. Or is it that the historical modalities of capitalism

facilitate some forms of religiosity while inhibiting others, such that it strips the latter while

using and extending the former? In this case, it is important to identify which religion secular

capitalism utilises and which it targets. Second, in saying that Marx’s is no subtraction story,

Brown is arguably not sufficiently considering that for Marx, full and proper ‘human

emancipation’, as opposed to mere ‘political emancipation’, does require the extinction of

traditional religion. Thus, in On the Jewish Question, he is not only analysing why religion

persists strongly in a thoroughly capitalist society such as the United States, but is doing so

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while explaining why a politically emancipated society does not equate to one which has found

human emancipation. Thus, normatively at least, if not descriptively, Marx’s account of

secularisation is a subtraction story. That it does not eventuate in capitalist society leads to the

Marxist desire to properly secularise secularism.

Conclusion

The above discussion shows that the concept of ‘secularisation’ has multiple usages, marking

out which is analytically useful. A first usage is the general sense of a process whereby something

‘religious’ is made or becomes ‘secular’. A second usage marks out the particular historical

development by which European societies move from a theocentric to anthropocentric or

humanist age in the modern period. The sociological ‘secularisation thesis’ provides a third

usage insofar as it goes beyond empirical observation and analysis of a historical process to

provide speculative sociological explanations of why this process took place and, based on such

explanations, a prognostic future trajectory of religious decline. These three usages—which we

might mark as the general, historical, and speculative sociological respectively—are, to be sure,

related. The historical is a particular instance or application of the general—one that stands out

because it speaks of epoch-defining/world-historical change. The speculative sociological usage,

in turn, provides an explanation for the historical. In doing so, however, it moves beyond an

empirical account (the social relevance/dominance of religion has declined) into speculative

explanation (modernisation/rationalisation caused this decline) and predictive assessment (the

decline will continue/complete), sometimes with a normative tinge (good riddance). These

latter aspects owe more to an ideological Enlightenment critique of religion than to rigorous

sociological analysis. The first aspect too carries the problem of an equivocal sense between the

decline of religion in institutional influence and individual practice.

A further layer of complication is added by the fact that the general sense—and from there

the other two senses—of secularisation have an equivocal genealogical valence. The transfer

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from religious to secular that it delineates can be, and is, figured in various ways. In one

figuration, the secularised outcome makes a sufficiently clean break from its religious source;

its essence is changed from religious to secular. In another, the secularised output is but a

different (secular) form in which the religious essence persists nonetheless; we get religion by

other means. The former ‘Kantian’ figuration, as in Blumenberg and Habermas, stands in

contrast to the later ‘Hegelian’ figuration, with instances in Schmitt and Taylor. A third

approach, taken by Asad, is to avoid specifying an essence to the secular or the religious and

thus to side-step the question of how they genealogically relate to each.

The Asadian approach has its benefits but is also limiting. It can be maintained in a

primarily anthropological inquiry that restricts itself to empirical analysis of manifestations of

the religious and secular used, in turn, to critique prevailing notions of each—which Asad does

to great effect, as expounded in the following chapters. A philosophical inquiry such as ours,

however, has greater epistemic burdens requiring the definition of secularisation (likewise,

secularity and secularism) for the purposes of analytic and normative critique. This is perhaps

why Taylor and Habermas, as philosophers, take the approach they do. We follow them here,

in part, taking Taylor’s definition of secularity and religion while figuring secularisation, with

Habermas, as a break from pre-modern religion (Christianity), if not a normative advance (or

regression for that matter), complimented with a reading of secularism as a modern power and

form of (liberal) politics to be assessed, with Asad, on its own merits, and, with Brown, as an

instrument of empire.

Genealogically, the Christian notion of the saeculum and the tension it bestows on the

relation between spiritual and temporal realms may be understood as the condition of

possibility for secularisation, propelled eventually by the ‘drive to reform’. What is decisive,

however, for the rise of modern secularism—again mostly with Asad—is not any set of ideas

that precede, but have some affinity with, it (Ochkamite nominalism, Renaissance humanism,

Protestant individual/interior religion), but rather the pragmatic political decision to bracket

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religion in the wake of devastating seventeenth century wars in Europe perceived or

characterised as motivated by religion. All of this, importantly, takes place in the broader

context of a consolidation of power by the nascent modern state. It is not that the ideas are not

important, but which ones get taken up is determined by these pragmatic, political realities.

However, none of these assertions can be done justice without first engaging in depth the

notions of secularity and secularism, as we do in the following three chapters. It is simply the

case that the secular and its cognates need to be approached separately but together, given their

intricate relation noted in the Introduction. We return to elaborate on all these assertations

more fully in the conclusions after having done this. For now, we can only preliminarily assert

that secularisation is best conceptualised in its general sense as the transformation of something

from having a primarily religious sense to having a primarily secular or worldly sense, and in its

prominent historical usage as the advent of the secular age in Europe construed as a break from

its preceding theological age. But what is the secular age? How does it differ from what came

before? What is secularity? This we turn to next.

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 Chapter Three

Secularity, or What is the Secular?

Have the courage to use your own understanding! – that is the motto of enlightenment.
— Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 1784

Secular reason [is] unsettled by the opaqueness of its merely apparently clarified relation to religion.
— Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing, 2010

The persistence of religion generally and the apparently renewed prominence of public religion

in particular—as phenomena forcing a review of traditional sociological theories of

secularisation—have led not only to a questioning of what secularisation means, but also to the

conceptually prior question of what the ‘secular’ is. Previously understood only in negative terms

as the absence or opposite of religion—as the Other of religion and therefore as a residual

category—recent scholarship seeks to understand the secular in positive terms as a formation in

its own right, beyond mere worldliness. Secularity emerges as neither the simple opposite of

religion nor as just another form of religion masquerading as its own absence, but rather as a

modern formation that has its own normative force—and associated political imperatives

captured by the term secularism—which fashions distinct concepts, practices, and sensibilities.

The secular as an epistemic category can be understood as a philosophical frame—cognitive or

phenomenological—through which the world is conceived or experienced. As a distinct

philosophical frame with a distinct normative valence, it carries a specific view of religion and a

central mandate about circumscribing its legitimate place in human life and society. What marks

this frame, and what view of religion does it carry? Through a detailed and critical engagement

with the views of our selected thinkers on secularity—starting with Habermas and Taylor,

followed by Asad and Brown—this chapter argues for a particular view. It suggests that the

secular is better conceived as that which pertains to the worldly, or the immanent, in the specific

sense that renders religion—conceived as pertaining to the otherworldly or transcendent—

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subordinate and secondary. The key notion here is of subordination, not negation. Secularity, in

turn, pertains to ‘worldly’ phenomena that make a secondary reference to religion at best.

Habermas: Secularity as ‘Post-Metaphysical’ Subjectivity

Jürgen Habermas arrives at the post-secular problematic through an evolution in his thinking

about religion.105 The earlier Habermas, from the 1960s through the 1980s and typical of this

period, largely ignored religion. This was despite his being a leading and systematic thinker,

publishing influential works in philosophical anthropology, epistemology, political theory, and

sociology, all with no more than a passing attention to religion (Calhoun et al. 2013, 14). He also

held a ‘Hegelian’ view of religion as destined to be dialectically superseded in the modern world

(Habermas 2017, 143). In Legitimation Crisis (1988)—the German original of which was first

published in 1973—he speaks very matter-of-factly about ‘the development from myth, through

religion, to philosophy and ideology’, in which, ‘the demand for discursive redemption of

normative-validity claims increasingly prevails’ and which displays ‘descriptively enumerated

regularities’ such as the expansion of the secular domain vis-a-vis the sacred and increasing

reflexivity of the mode of belief seen in the sequence from myth through revealed then rational

religion and finally ideology (11-12). These are premises he takes as given and on which he builds

a theory of social evolution.

105
Habermas’s reflection on matters of religion evolves in three broad phases (Harrington 2007). In the
early 1970s he thinks of religion and theology in a Marxian framework as inferior stages in a materialist
philosophy of history oriented to the critique of ideology and human emancipation. The second phase is
signalled by his ‘linguistification of the sacred’ (Versprachlichung des Sakralen) thesis in the second
volume of his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) whereby, based on a reading of
Durkheim’s evolutionary sociology of religion, images of the sacred evolve through processes of societal
rationalisation into the secularised discursive contents of systems of universalising moral argument. In
the third and current phase, anticipated in Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988), this thesis is tempered by
a stronger consciousness of the debts of rational analysis to religious sources of cognition, representing a
significantly more sympathetic engagement with the arguments of theologians and a dramatic self-
distancing from his earlier secularist advocacy (543-4). We might add to this that the more recent
publication of Postmetaphysical Thinking II (2017) and Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (2019)
represents the mature apex of this third stage.

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 Against the backdrop of religious traditions sweeping away the thresholds hitherto upheld

between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies—or of Weber’s ‘Occidental Rationalism’ now

appearing to be the deviation instead of the norm (Habermas 2008, 116)—the more recent

Habermas affords a much more primary attention to religion, chiefly because ‘the largely

secularized societies of Europe are confronted with religious movements and forms of

fundamentalism of undiminished vitality both at home and throughout the world’ (Habermas

2017, x).106 In turn, he has revised his views about it significantly. From around the turn of the

millennium, he has addressed religion as a central concern in the form of two key questions:

how philosophy or secular reason should interpret its relation to religion; and what is the role

of religious citizens and communities in the public sphere of secular constitutional states (103).

His answer to the second (political) question—detailed in the next chapter—is naturally

influenced by the conception of secularity and religion with which he approaches the first

(epistemic) question. This approach articulates an unbridgeable disjuncture between the two

and an epistemic hierarchy of (critical, universal) secular reason positioned above (dogmatic,

particular) religious reason.

Religious knowledge and discourse are epistemically inferior—in fact of a different

epistemic mode altogether—relative to their secular counterparts, according to Habermas, given

their lack of reflexivity and openness to critical examination. Secular knowledge is self-consciously

fallible and thus open to rational criticism and examination. Religious doctrine and existential

convictions, in contrast, are based on a ‘dogmatic kernel of belief’ (Habermas 2003a, 31). They

reference the dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths, and in doing

106
Thus this greater attention to religion is driven not so much by concern over past neglect or intra-
theoretical need as it is by ‘troubling dimensions of contemporary affairs’: the potential renewal of
eugenics driven by genetics and innovations in biotechnology; the explosion of fundamentalist religious
violence, most notably the 9/11 attacks and its response in the War on Terror; the social tensions
surrounding the increased Muslim presence in Europe; the resurgence of projects of ethnic and
nationalist identity; and the neo-liberal hollowing out of the European Union and increasing fragility of
the European public sphere (Calhoun et al. 2013, 14-15).

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so evade the kind of unreserved discursive examination to which secular ethical orientations and

worldviews are exposed (Habermas 2008, 129). Theology remains dependent on articles of faith

such that it cannot expose all validity claims to criticism without reservation (Habermas 2017, 141).

This ‘discursive extraterritoriality’ of core certainties may lend religious convictions an integral

character but also deny them the reflexivity of modern secular knowledge, thus making them

epistemically inferior, tied to particular communities and languages, and closed off from universal

political relevance (2008, 130). The opaque core of religious experience remains as profoundly

alien to discursive thought as the hermetic core of aesthetic experience, and as such can only be

circumscribed by philosophy—when it reflects on the specific character of religious language and

the intrinsic meaning of faith—but not penetrated.

Secular reason treats revelation and religion as alien and extraneous: ‘the cleavage

between secular knowledge and revealed knowledge cannot be bridged’ (Habermas 2008, 17). It

can accept as reasonable only that which it can translate into its own, in principle universally

accessible, discourses (16). Given its necessary ‘methodological atheism’, it is committed to ‘a

rigorous form of discursively justified discourse that forbids the surreptitious rhetorical import

of theologoumena’ (Habermas 2017, 101). Stated differently, since religious knowledge is not

verifiable by accepted secular methods of verification, it counts not as knowledge but as mere

opinion or belief (Agrama 2012, 75). Modern forms of consciousness are set apart from pre-

modern consciousness by a form of reflexivity that enables the adoption of an external

perspective toward its own traditions in order to bring them in relation to other traditions

(Habermas 1993, 95). As such, for Habermas, the ‘epistemic situation’ of religion in modernity

is that the latter demands of it to embrace, at a cognitive level, its proper location in a pluralistic

society: religion has to face the challenge of relativising its position vis-à-vis other religions (and

secular ideologies) without relativising its dogmatic core (Habermas 2003a, 72). It must change

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not what it believes but how it believes.107 The political implications of this epistemic

adjustment, for Habermas, are significant: the renunciation of violence and refraining from state

power as a means to enforce religious claims. To insist on the exclusivity of pre-modern belief

attitudes is ‘fundamentalism’.

Religion thus also has a ‘destructive potential’ that must be contained; it must undergo

reform to be accepted as ‘reasonable’ by the liberal state (Habermas 2003, 104), as the Catholic

Church eventually did only in the Second Vatican Council of 1965 where it embraced liberalism

and democracy (Habermas 2009, 75). It must show a restraint based on a ‘triple reflection’ on

the part of believers living in a pluralist society: first, religious consciousness must come to

terms with the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of encountering other denominations and religions;

second, it must adapt to the authority of the sciences, which hold societal monopoly of secular

knowledge; third, it must accept the premises of a constitutional state grounded in a profane

morality. This is evidently a narrow, pejorative view of religion as unable in its traditional guise

to encounter plurality, as epistemically inferior to secular knowledge, and as needing to set

aside, in the public sphere at least, its own morality in favour of a profane morality.

In part, this position on the secular-religious epistemic relation leans heavily on

Habermas’s account that Western culture has irretrievably turned the page on metaphysical

thinking. Since Hegel, we are all bound to ‘post-metaphysical thinking’, a mode of thought that

emphasises the finiteness of reason, combines fallibilism with anti-sceptical conceptions of

truth, and is agnostic but non-reductionist (Habermas 2008, 140). It refrains from making

ontological pronouncements on the constitution of being as such—as metaphysical thought

would do—but without reducing our knowledge to the sum total of what is currently known

through the natural sciences—as scientism does. Likewise, it refrains from passing judgment on

107
Modern belief is thus distinguished by its mode more than its content; it represents a change in belief
attitude. Although Habermas does not explicitly theorise further on this point, it is similar to Taylor’s
notion of secularity as a different (reflective) mode of believing, which we come to shortly.

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religious truths while insisting, in non-polemical fashion, on a strict demarcation between faith

and knowledge, between the inflexible certainties of faith and publicly criticisable validity

claims. It also rejects a scientistically-truncated conception of reason and the exclusion of

religious thought from its own genealogy. Stated differently, where metaphysical thought

identifies with identity thinking, idealism, philosophical of consciousness, and a strong concept

of theory, post-metaphysical thought—in the wake of Kant and Hegel’s proceduralisation and

historisation of reason—is driven by the detranscendalisation of ideas, historisation, the

linguistic turn, the lifeworld as the locus of embodied intersubjective agency, and a deflationary

conception of philosophy and theory (Mendieta 2020, 200-201).

Since faith and knowledge—‘Jerusalem and Athens’—both belong to the history and

genesis of secular reason, however, religious discourse, even as epistemically inferior, is not bereft

of all truth and value for secular society. It comprises semantic potentials capable of exercising

an inspirational force on society as a whole once they divulge their profane truth contents

(Habermas 2008, 142). Habermas believes that the secular public sphere can learn from this

potentially ‘inspiring power’ of religion (2003, 114; 2008, 131). Religious traditions have a special

ability to articulate moral intuitions particularly with regard to vulnerable forms of communal

life. ‘Those moral feelings’, he writes, ‘which only religious language has as yet been able to give

a sufficiently differentiated expression may find universal resonance once a salvaging

formulation turns up for something almost forgotten, but implicitly missed.’ (2003, 114) Such

moral intuitions and truth contents are all the more needed to curb the excesses of a secular

modernity being overrun by instrumental and economic/market rationality. ‘Pure practical

reason’, writes Habermas (2008, 211), ‘can no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a

modernization spinning out of control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice’

because such a theory ‘lacks the creativity of linguistic world-disclosure that a normative

consciousness afflicted with accelerating decline requires in order to regenerate itself’.

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 Further, while practical reason provides normatively plausible justifications for

universalistic and egalitarian concepts of morality and law that shape individual freedom and

interpersonal relations, it does not provide a sufficient basis of citizen solidarity and collective

action (Habermas 2010, 18-19). The latter calls for more than insight into good reasons. For the

secular mind, the cultic sources of social solidarity have dried up and the normative standards

of ‘redemptive justice’—an important source of motivation which supports the otherwise weak

motivating power of good reasons alone—have lost their validity (Habermas 2021, 8).

Enlightened reason loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole—of

something akin to the Kingdom of God on Earth—as collectively binding ideals. Indeed, it is

‘embarrassed’ at being unable to find a rational explanation for the normative binding forces

originally nourished by the sacred complex (Habermas 2019, II: 347). Indeed, practical reason

fails to fulfil its own vocation when it can no longer awaken in the minds of secular subjects an

awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven. Religion, thus, has instrumental utility

in playing a role in salvaging the ‘faltering project’ of modernity.

Habermas does not explicitly define or discuss secularity (as opposed to secularism, on

which he spends a lot more time). Nevertheless, his conception of it can be borne out of his

views discussed above. Secularity, for Habermas, comprises a post-metaphysical subjectivity

that has become dominant and inexorable. This subjectivity is rational, autonomous, reflexive,

self-consciously fallible, open to plurality, and radically self-critical. This view follows a long line

of Enlightenment idioms from Descartes to Kant emphasising the qualities of a mind that dares

to think for itself, to produce original knowledge of its own authority, to criticise dogma and

tradition (Scherer 2013, 8) while also tempering the more self-assured, perhaps ironically also

dogmatic, sensibility of this idiom by a strong sense of fallibility and the need for intersubjective

relationality. Nevertheless, the post-metaphysical secular subjectivity takes science as

authoritative and morality as profane. It considers religion epistemically inferior because of its

dogmatic nature, and politically inferior because of its destructive potential. At the same time,

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given religion’s genealogical relation to secularity, it also has a restorative, instrumental

potential for secular reason and politics. It can help fill some of the gaps that the latter struggles

to do on its own. The challenge is to salvage the ‘semantic legacy of religious traditions’ but

without effacing the boundaries between the universes of faith and knowledge. Secularisation

ought to function less as a filter separating out the contents of tradition than as a transformer

redirecting its flow (Habermas 2010, 18).

Taylor: Secularity as a Background Frame of Immanence

Charles Taylor takes another route in his work on secularity. In his magnum opus, A Secular

Age (2007), Taylor speaks of us as living in an age defined most prominently by certain

‘conditions of belief’. Building on his Sources of the Self (1989), which focused on identity

formation in modernity, this later work dedicates attention more specifically to belief formation

in modernity (Ungureanu and Monti 2019, 175).108 Taylor provides a historical account of how

the Western or ‘North Atlantic’ world in particular goes from a state in which not believing in

God is virtually impossible at the head of the sixteenth century to one in the twenty-first century

in which belief in God is but one option amongst many, an embattled one at that (2007, 3, 25).109

108
Sources of the Self articulates a vindicatory history of the modern identity, understood as the ensemble
of largely unarticulated understandings in the modern West of what it is to be a human agent, in terms
of three major facets: ‘inwardness’ (our sense of being ‘selves’ with inner depths), the affirmation of
ordinary life, and the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source (Taylor 1989, ix-x).
109
Taylor geo-historically circumscribes his object of inquiry to the West in order to make it manageable
and to acknowledge that the European experience is not universal; other parts of the world have different
trajectories. However, this opens him up to the valid critique that such a delimitation does not do justice
even to understanding the European trajectory in so far as it conceives of it as self-contained, or, with
Lockman (2004, 62, cited in Hurd 2008, 490) it ‘takes for granted the West’s self-conception as a distinct
and self-generated civilisation’. Taylor’s account is ‘more provincially European, monolithic, colonial, than
it needs to be’, and makes ‘the emergence of EuroAtlantic secularism a product of tensions within
Christendom rather than, in part, a feature of Christendom’s encounter with others and especially with its
constitutive outside’ (Brown 2007). In theorisations of the secular such as these, the power of Western
Christianity is such that its history comes to stand in for the history of secularism, treating not just Islam
as alien to this history but also, more remarkably, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christianity
(Mahmood 2015, 206). It is, nonetheless, through Europe’s historical and contemporary relations with the
rest of the world that the categories, modes of order, and ways of life associated with European modernity

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He attempts to show that secularisation is not a matter of decline but of change in the

conditions of belief that give rise to an ‘immanent frame’ within which belief formation takes

place. Modern secularity is not the gradual and inevitable subtraction of religion from what is

real or rational, but the result of complex and historically-contingent transformations, in part

by and for religion. The result is not so much less faith but a qualitatively different, arguably

better self-reflective, faith.

For Taylor, secularity operates in three distinct but related senses: the adoption of certain

arrangements of institutional separation; the decline in individual religious belief and practice;

and change in conditions of belief that result in different lived experiences of how the self attains

‘fullness’.110 The first sense of secularity is in terms of public spaces having been ‘emptied of God’

or any reference to ultimate reality (2007, 2). This emptying of religion from the various public

spheres of human activity—economic, political, cultural, educational, recreational—means they

no longer refer to God or religion in their deliberations, norms, and principles. Instead, they

operate on a rationality internal to themselves—maximum gain in the economy, greatest benefit

to greatest number of people in politics, etc.—and in this sense are autonomous. They become

‘secular spheres’. This emptying was achieved and maintained by the institutional separation of

church and state, or religion and politics. Such an emptying or separation is compatible with

the vast majority of people still believing in God and practicing their religion vigorously (as is

the case in the United States, for instance). This latter phenomenon speaks to the second sense

of secularity: the falling off of religious belief and practice—people turning away from God.

have taken shape (Hurd 2008, 491). For recent works that analyse the role of Europe’s Others in its
constitution, see Gifford P and Hauswedell T (eds.) 2010, Europe and Its Others: Essays on Interperception
and Identity, Peter Lang: Oxford; Massad JA 2015, Islam in Liberalism, University of Chicago Press: Chicago;
and Mavelli L 2012, Europe's encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular, Routledge: London.
110
Taylor’s notion of ‘secularity’ is thus a broader marker of ‘the secular’, at time encompasses secularism
and secularisation, while at other times carrying a denotation distinct from them.

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 There is a further sense still, for Taylor, a third sense of secularity, which entails ‘the move

from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which

it is understood to be one option among others,’ and is to be understood with reference to

‘conditions of belief’, or the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual, that now

prevail (2007, 3). Taylor focuses on the secularity of the modern age in this sense. He seeks to

understand belief and unbelief not as rival theories or ways that people account for existence or

morality, but rather as different kinds of lived experience, or what it is like to live as a believer

or unbeliever—as ways of living our moral or spiritual lives. Lives in which we are all, albeit

through different paths, seeking a ‘wholeness’ or ‘fullness’ (5):

We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual
shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place
(activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it
should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving, as inspiring.

In this sense, Taylor wants us to appreciate secularity as a distinct way of being, knowing and

inhabiting the world, and he gives us ‘the first erudite phenomenology of secularism through a

story of the historical construction of secular subjectivity’ (Brown 2007). In certain experiences,

Taylor argues, we situate a place of fullness to which we orient ourselves morally or spiritually

because ‘they offer some sense of what they are of: the presence of God, or the voice of nature,

or the force which flows through everything, or the alignment in us of desire and the drive to

form’ (2007, 6). For believers, the account of the place of fullness requires reference to God, to

something transcendent that lies without; it is received. For unbelievers, it refers to a

potentiality of immanent human life understood naturalistically; it lies within (8).

Typical of the modern condition, notes Taylor, is the recognition of a multiplicity of

spiritual or moral paths: we are aware today that we can live the spiritual life differently, paths

that intelligent people of good will can and do disagree on (11). In turn, we traverse our own

path in a condition of doubt or uncertainty of its being the right one. This inevitable doubt

explains why people speak of ‘theories’. We should not however, Taylor urges, understand

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spiritual paths as mere theories since they are critical to our experience of life as a whole. The

difference between modern and pre-modern (or modern non-Western) life remains: where our

lived experience is one possibility, one construal, amongst others, their lives carried no

distinction between experience and construal. Where for us experience is mediated by a

construal thereof, for them, moving to fullness meant getting closer to God just as possession

and evil spirits were not theories that could be wrong but immediate objects of fear. In modern

Western civilisation we have largely eroded these forms of immediate certainty. The closest

thing we have, something analogous though weaker, is that in a given milieu one construal of

belief or unbelief shows up as the default option or the overwhelmingly more plausible one (12).

On the whole, however, Western civilisation has undergone a radical shift. It is a change

not just from a condition in which most people lived naïvely with a construal as definitive reality

to one in which people move reflectively between construals as merely possible interpretations of

reality, but also from a condition in which belief was the default option—for the naïve and

reflective alike—to one in which unbelieving construals seem for more and more people the only

plausible ones. It is change, then, both in how we believe and how it is harder to believe. This

change relates fundamentally to background frameworks of belief and unbelief, which, previously

foreclosed by their unacknowledged shape, were subsequently opened to interrogation and

inquiry by modern theorising.111 Routine distinctions made today between the immanent and

transcendent, the natural and supernatural reveal both the acknowledgment of the background

and the disruption of its earlier shape. It is this shift in background in the whole context in which

we experience and search for fullness that Taylor locates the advent of a secular age.

111
The sharp contrast between naïve pre-modern religiosity and reflective modern secularity seems
overdrawn. If reflection is the result of encountering difference, that was not entirely absent in Medieval
Europe (and definitely not in the East). Using Augustine’s Confessions as an example, Scherer (2013)
argues, against this figuration of Taylor’s, that it shows a more complex and reflective form of Christianity
and exhibits a higher degree of ‘fragilised’ provinciality and cosmopolitism than Taylor allows for prior to
our secular age (67).

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 Taylor’s tripartite classification of secularity—as institutional separation (sense one),

religious decline (sense two), and change in how belief is experienced (sense three)—allows him

to speak about it in more nuanced terms, thus capturing important differences. For instance,

the United States can be thoroughly secular in senses one and three, whilst not secular in sense

two. Likewise, the United States in comparison to Pakistan can be very similar in sense one,

with formal institutional separation, and two, with the comparison for instance of mosque and

church attendance, but very different in sense three, with belief being an embattled option

amongst others in the US but the natural path in Pakistan where belief in God is still axiomatic

for the majority of people.

Along with this three-mode conception of secularity, Taylor chooses a reading of religion

in terms of the transcendent-immanent distinction (2007, 15-16).112 He finds this sufficient to

serve the purpose of his analysis since at the core of debate in the modern West has been and is

the question of whether the place of fullness is beyond human life or within it, that is, whether

it is transcendent to human life or immanent within it. Indeed, the ‘immanent order’ of Nature,

whose workings can be understood by rational study and explained on its own terms, is an

invention of the modern West. With this notion of immanence came the negation or

problematisation of both the ‘supernatural’—whether God, gods, spirits, or the like—and of any

form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, and eventually a clean distinction and

separation of the immanent world from the transcendent, a uniquely Latin Christian

development (Taylor 2011a, 33).

112
This is not meant as an abstract universal definition that captures all religion everywhere, but one
relates to the much narrower context of the medieval to modern West, wherein ‘religion’ for all intents
and purposes means Christianity. Further, these two positions—marked by what Taylor calls ‘orthodox
religiosity’ and ‘atheistic materialism’ respectively—represent two sides of a spectrum, in between which
there are myriad other positions. This is particularly significant since secularity does not equate to
atheism and, for many secularists, transcendence is not a problem in and of itself. It is only a problem
when made the grounds of political and public life.

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 The transcendence that marks religion, its affirmation of a beyond, has three dimensions:

the sense that there is some good beyond human flourishing; belief in a higher power, a

transcendent God (who makes the higher good attainable); and the extension of our lives beyond

this worldly life (2007, 20). The eclipse of this transcendence—the Nietzschean ‘death of God’—

is a defining feature of secular modernity. Human flourishing becomes the final goal, no higher

power is needed, and our worldly lives come to circumscribe all that is relevant and important.

We may say that, on this view, the difference between the religious and the secular outlook is the

difference between experiencing the (sensible) world as partial, one part of a greater whole whose

other parts are somewhere beyond, and experiencing it as a self-enclosed whole.

The advent of our secular age has been coterminous with the rise, as a widely available

option for the first time in history, of a ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘exclusive’ humanism, which accepts

no final goals beyond human flourishing and invokes a moral order whose ‘ontic component’ is

wholly intra-human and entirely immanent (2007, 18, 256).113 The secular age, Taylor asserts, is

an age defined by the ‘immanent frame’, comprising a host of modern formations: the buffered

identity, self-discipline, individuality, a constructed social space, instrumental rationality and

secular time.114 It is a frame that constitutes a ‘natural’ order, as against a ‘supernatural’ one, an

‘immanent’ world, as opposed to a ‘transcendent’ one (542). It is the frame of the eclipse of

transcendence, within which exclusive humanism is the order of the day.115 In this frame we

113
Taylor does not argue that modern secularity is coterminous with exclusive humanism, since secularity,
as explained, is the background condition in which our experience of, and search for, fullness occurs,
hence experienced by believers and unbelievers alike. Likewise, exclusive humanisms are not the only
alternatives to religion since modernity includes non-religious anti-humanisms (such as deconstruction
and post-structuralism) and attempts to construct non-exclusive humanism on a non-religious basis
(such as deep ecology) (2007, 19).
114
Taylor contrasts the ‘buffered self’ of our disenchanted secular age—a conception of self with a much
firmer boundary between self and world—with the ‘porous self’ of the bygone enchanted age—a
conception in which the self is not separated or bounded from the world but where forces could cross a
porous boundary between self and world and shape our lives (2007, 38).
115
Whilst the frame eclipses transcendence as the dominant mode of experiencing the world, it invites or
permits closure without demanding it. That is, the immanent frame can be lived as an open frame or a
closed one (2007, 544).

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come to understand our lives as taking place within a constellation of differentiated orders—

cosmic, social, moral—all of which are impersonal, self-sufficient, and can be understood on

their own terms (543). They are purely immanent orders functioning, as per the Grotian dictum,

etsi Deus non daretur, ‘as if God did not exist’. The secular age is one in which the eclipse of all

goals beyond human flourishing falls within the range of an imaginable life of the masses of

people. Quite unlike religious turnovers of the past, where one naïve horizon replaces another

or two fuse syncretically, the secular age puts an end to the naïve acknowledgment of the

transcendent or of goals which go beyond human flourishing (21).

Building on Taylor, José Casanova (2013) presents a tripartite classification of secularity as

well: mere secularity, exclusive secularity, and secularist secularity. ‘Mere secularity’ refers to

living in the secular world, that is, experiencing the world (in the way described by Taylor’s

sense 3) as an immanent frame that is open to transcendence. Such a subjectivity considers

religion a possible and valuable option. ‘Exclusive secularity’ is to experience the world as a

purely immanent frame, that is, as closed to transcendence; religion is absent. The secular is

here constituted as a self-enclosed reality, and religion is considered superfluous to human life.

Importantly, for Casanova, exclusive secularity only becomes the ‘normal’ taken-for-granted

position if it is experienced not simply as a fact of historical contingency, but as the meaningful

result of a quasi-natural process of development. In this sense, exclusive secularity is tied to

‘secularist secularity’, which—on the back of what Taylor calls a ‘stadial consciousness’—is to

experience the world as now ‘liberated’ from religion, as humanity having come of age, matured

and progressed from lower stages of existence (28-31).

This historical self-understanding of ‘secularist’ or ‘radical’ secularity has the function of

confirming the superiority of modern secular understanding over earlier, more primitive,

religious forms of understanding (Casanova 2009, 1054). Such a stadial consciousness turns the

very idea of going back to a surpassed condition into an unthinkable regression. It also turns

the particular Western Christian historical process of secularisation into a universal teleological

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process of human development from belief to unbelief, from primitive irrational religion to

modern rational secular consciousness. Secularity, in this sense, is emancipation from religion;

it is an overcoming of the non-rational forms of being, thinking, and feeling associated with

religion (1057). It is a growing up, becoming mature, autonomous—in the Kantian sense—

thinking and acting on one’s own. This assumption—that secular people think and act freely,

autonomously, and rationally, while religious people are unfree, heteronomous, non-rational

agents—constitutes the foundational premise of secularist ideology.

Casanova’s typology borrows from Taylor the perspective of understanding secularity

phenomenologically, as a lived experience of the world. It differs from, and improves on, Taylor

in construing secularity only in terms of how the world is experienced, whilst categorising the

decline of religion and institutional arrangements under ‘secularisation’. This allows for greater

conceptual and analytical clarity since we can speak about ‘secularity’ as the underlying category

that relates to epistemology and ontology (expressed in phenomenological terms), while

‘secularisation’ relates to social-historical processes and ‘secularism’ relates to normative

ideological or political positions.116

With the above sketch, we can see that far from having universal, fixed meanings, the

‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ remain mutually-constituted but with radically different meanings

over time. Taylor (2011a) summarises these changes by noting that ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ start

as terms of a dyad distinguishing two dimensions of existence—an immanent one and a

transcendent one—identified by a particular type of temporality (34). Both sides are real and

indispensable dimensions of life. The dyad is ‘internal’: each term is impossible without the

other, like right and left or up and down. They then develop, as a dyad, such that ‘secular’ refers

116
Ideological here refers to ‘ideology’ as a worldview/tradition/form of life/interpretation of world and
self with specific philosophical (ontological, epistemological, moral) commitments, and arising from
these, specific (social, economic, political) positions—not to the Marxist sense of a false consciousness
proliferated by power for its own ends. All references to ideology in this dissertation refer to the former
sense, unless indicated clearly by the context that the latter is intended.

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to what pertains to a self-sufficient, immanent sphere, contrasted with a transcendent realm

marked by the ‘religious’. A further transformation, where the transcendent is now denied, has

the ‘secular’ referring to what is real or to institutions necessary for living in this world, and

‘religious’ to what is merely invented or to optional accessories, which often disturb the course

of worldly life. These latter two dyads are ‘external’: the two sides stand in opposition to each

other, but these, for Taylor, are mischaracterisations of the secular-religion relation.

In turn, Taylor finds Habermas’s sharp disjunction between secular and religion reason

and his demoting the latter to a lower epistemic status untenable. Taylor is not willing to grant

this privilege to secular reason. He also finds Habermas’s notion of post-metaphysical thought

to be precisely the sort of stadial secularist thinking that is problematic. Taylor is rather wont

to emphasise the affinities of the secular and religious, as an internal dyad. For him, secularity

is a background frame of immanence that, on the one hand, rises in part because of religion,

and on the other, transforms religion but is not inimical to it. Religion and religious people can

flourish in a secular age, if our conceptions of secularism are sensitive to these affinities.

Asad: Anthropological Excavation of Secularity as a Unique Formation

Talal Asad makes a more fundamental epistemological break in the debate on the secular.

Where Taylor and Habermas are engaged in revising or providing alternative accounts of

secularisation, Asad wants to critically interrogate the concept of ‘the secular’ itself, on the

premise that neither the supporters nor the critics of the secularisation thesis pay enough

attention to it (2003, 183). His basic dissatisfaction with secularisation theories is not their

linearity or lack of nuance, although he shares these criticisms, but rather that they do not

thoroughly explore what the ‘secular’ is (Polat 2012, 224). Where Taylor’s main route of inquiry

into secularity is through secularisation theory (the historical trajectories of the secular and

religious), Asad seeks to examine the secular—as an epistemological category distinct from but

related to the political doctrine of secularism—together with religion (229). His main concern

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is not to trace continuities and discontinuities, but to highlight that the constitution of religion

in the past was part of a map of myriad elements that are different today and are embodied,

authorised, and played out differently.

In Formations of the Secular (2003), Asad attempts an ‘anthropology of the secular’ which

seeks to challenge assumptions about the ‘secular’ and normative essentialist notions of its

putative other, the ‘religious’ or ‘sacred’. Anthropologists, argues Asad, have taken the study of

religion as a central concern but have paid little attention to the idea of the secular, which is

odd since the two categories are closely linked both in thought and historical emergence (21-

22). Anthropological study of religion shows a heavy reliance on such themes as myth, magic,

witchcraft, and taboo, suggesting that the religious and sacred stand in the domain of the non-

rational. Modern politics and science are sited in the domain of the secular, which, however, is

not the subject of any thorough study. Such a study is what Asad seeks to initiate, with particular

focus on examining the category of the secular itself and the ‘shifting web of concepts making

up the secular’ (23). These include the familiar binaries, inter alia, of belief and knowledge,

reason and imagination, natural and supernatural, and sacred and profane.

The ‘secular’ or ‘secularity’, for Asad, is an epistemic category: it is the domain of

sensibilities, experiences, and embodied concepts which orient people’s sensorium and guide

public understandings of truth—over time a variety of concepts, practices and sensibilities have

come together to form ‘the secular’ (Asad 2003, 16). ‘Secularism’ is a political doctrine

purportedly concerned with matters of political organisation, legal and political rights, and

institutional arrangements. The question of the connection between the conceptually prior

secular and secularism is an important departure point for any understanding of a secular age

(1).117 Asad attempts to show why the secular is not reducible to secularism since it bears on

117
Granting secularity conceptually priority over secularism, Agrama (2012) suggests that the question in
reverse is also an important point of reflection: ‘how does secularism work to support or undermine the
concepts, sensibilities, assumptions, and behaviors of the secular that it draws and depends upon?’ (2).

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rudimentary attitudes toward the human body, contributes to specific ways of training,

cultivating, and structuring the senses, and grounds operative conceptions of the human in ways

that exceed and complicate the aims articulated by secularism (Scherer 2011, 625).

Asad’s argument, on the question of how we conceive of ‘the secular’, is that it should not

be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually frees itself from the controlling

power of mythical ‘religion’, thereby achieving the latter’s relocation. It is today part of the

doctrine of secularism, which does not simply insist that religious belief and practice be

confined to a space where they cannot threaten political stability or the liberties of ‘free-

thinking’ citizens. Rather, it builds on a particular conception of the world (‘natural’ and ‘social’)

and the concrete problems that arise therefrom (191). Modern secularism is not the mere

separation of religion from the public sphere nor the mere organisation of diverse societies, but

rather it is a process of establishing a new form of normative power over the modern subject:

‘What is distinctive about “secularism” is that it presupposes new concepts of “religion,” “ethics,”

and “politics,” and new imperatives associated with them’ (2).

Importantly, the historical process of secularisation produces a remarkable ideological

inversion: from ‘the secular’ being constructed by and part of a theological discourse to, in the

discourse of modernity, presenting itself as the ground from which theological discourse was

generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in

the march to human civilisation and freedom (Asad 2003, 192-193). This transfer comprises

tectonic ontological and epistemological shifts, not mere political reconfiguration. Humans

become the self-conscious makers of History and the foundation of universally valid knowledge

about nature and society. The domain in which acts of God (‘accidents’) occur without human

responsibility is restricted. The world is disenchanted and tameable. Modernity, according to

Asad, is a way of living-in-the-world to which the constructed categories of the secular and the

religious are critical. It is with reference to these categories that ‘modern living is required to

take place, and non-modern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy’ (14). Representations

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of the secular and religious mediate people’s identities, shape their sensibilities, and guarantee

their experiences. Since the secular is so deeply part of modern life, Asad sees it best pursued—

as the object of an anthropological inquiry—not directly but through its shadows. This is done

by seeking the traces of the secular in such disparate conceptions as those of myth, agency, pain,

cruelty, human rights, religious minorities, and nationalism.

Although secular narratives posit religion as alien or inimical to the secular, the latter is

also seen, paradoxically, as generating religion (Asad, 2003, 193). It is asserted that pre-modern

secular life created superstitious and oppressive religion, and that modern secular life has

produced enlightened and tolerant religion. Thus, the insistence on a sharp separation between

the religious and secular goes hand-in-hand with the paradoxical claim that the latter

continually produces the former. It is here that Asad locates the grounds of the secularisation

thesis’s increasingly evident implausibility (200). It is not that religion has now started playing

a more vibrant part in the modern world of nations. Religion was always involved in the world

of power. Rather, if the thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the

categories of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we

thought: the concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.

For Asad, the constructed binary of ‘religion’, which stands in the domain of the non-

rational and takes the sacred as its object, and the ‘secular’, which stands in the domain of the

rational and takes the profane as its object—and where modern science and politics are sited—

breaks down on interrogation. Likewise, Asad shows, through a ‘grammatical investigation’ of the

conceptually parallel binary of sacred and profane that it too breaks down on examination (30-

33). In the Latin of the Roman republic, the word sacer referred generally to anything owned by a

deity taken out of the profanum and placed in the sacrum by action of the state. In early modern

English, the word ‘sacred’ referred to individual things, persons and occasions set apart and

venerated, although in no uniformly identifiable sense. It was late nineteenth century

anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages into

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a single immutable essence and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called

‘religious’.118 The classic statement is found in Durkheim (1915, 37, cited in Asad 2003, 31, note 24):

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic. They
presuppose a classification of all things, real or ideal, of which men think, into two classes or
opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by
the words profane and sacred. The division of the world into two domains, the one containing all
that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought.

The sacred became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane

action. It was both a transcendent force that imposed itself and a space that must never be

violated, that is, profaned. This supposedly universal opposition between the supernatural

‘sacred’ and natural ‘profane’ finds no place in pre-modern writing, where the prevailing

antimony was between the ‘divine’ and ‘satanic’—both transcendent powers—and ‘spiritual’ and

‘temporal’—both worldly institutions. In France, the word sacred (sacre) becomes salient at the

time of the Revolution acquiring strong resonances of secular power. The Preamble of the

Declaration of Human Rights speaks of ‘natural rights, inalienable and sacred’, and the right to

property is qualified as ‘sacred’ in Article Seventeen. Modernity thus sees the re-siting of the

sacred as the concept is used in a way that would be unrecognisable to the sensibilities of the

Middle Ages, let alone of antiquity. It is now a naturalised power part of a discourse expressing

the functions and aspirations of the modern, secular nation-state.

Importantly, for Asad, the essentialisation of the ‘sacred’ as a transcendent power is

connected with European colonisation (34). The things, words, and practices set apart by

‘Nature Folk’ were constituted by Europeans as ‘fetish’ and ‘taboo’. What had been previously

regarded in theological terms as idolatry and devil-worship (devotion to false gods) became the

118
O’Leary (2010, 2) notes that historian of religion Jonathan Smith was perhaps the first influential thinker
to declare that ‘religion’ was an entirely constructed category. Smith asserted that religion is the creation
of the scholar’s study, created for analytic purposes by imaginative acts of comparison and generalisation.
Religion, he noted, is not a native category, that is, it is not a first-person term of self-characterisation. It
is a category imposed from outside. What he means to say is that people, in origin—prior to the category
‘religion’ gaining widespread currency and naïve adoption—would refer to themselves as ‘Christian’,
‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, etc., not as ‘religious’.

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secular concept of ‘superstition’. They remained, as such, objects and relations falsely given

truth status and wrongly endowed with virtuous power. They had to be constituted as categories

of illusion and oppression before people could be liberated therefrom. ‘Profanation’, Asad

suggests, is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism (35). Reason requires that

false things be proscribed, or transcribed as objects for the properly educated senses.

Profanation is universal reason unmasking pretended power but also, simultaneously, affirming

its own status as legitimate power. The false sacred is replaced by a new sacred: the sacred right

to property, the sanctity of conscience, and later on, sacred ‘human rights’. The irony is that at

the very moment of becoming secular, these claims were made transcendent. Hence, Asad

concludes that although profanation appears to make the transcendent mundane, it actually

simply rearranges barriers between the illusory and the actual (36). We may say that where the

explicit aim is to unmask and eliminate the transcendent as illusory and false, the result is only

to relocate it or to reimagine it in a different figuration.

This analysis of Asad may seem, on the face of it, to seriously challenge Taylor’s reading

of religion in terms of transcendence, since the secular too has its forms of transcendence.

However, there is an important distinction between the two that prevents them being collapsed

into one. The transcendent of the secular in all its forms—its ‘sacred’ orienting principles such

as human rights, its ‘transcendent mediation’ (Chapter Four, p. 214), Habermas’s notion of

‘transcendence from within’ (Chapter Four, p. 184)—remains located within the immanent

(temporal-spatial) world.119 It is a sort of paradoxical immanent transcendence: a transcendence

within the immanent frame. An ‘immanent transcendence’ is a beyond-within, a beyond that is

still within this world. It is beyond in the sense of not being directly accessible through sensible

intuition, through experience, but it remains within this world in that it makes no appeal to

119
A different type of example would be Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, in which, as Hurd (2008,
489) notes, the transcendental field is differently configured: it resides beyond appearance, and is able to
be hold opacity and mystery, but is not unquestionable or morality-authorising.

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higher powers beyond the world such as God, as religious transcendence does. In turn, we still

find merit in Taylor’s conception of the religious-secular in terms of immanence-transcendence,

where transcendence is defined as not simply metaphysical but also beyond the immanent

frame. This is a subtle but important distinction that reflects the fact that while the religious-

secular binary is not a neat zero-sum opposition, it is still one that is meaningful. Indeed, all our

thinkers, including Asad, continue to use it in meaningful ways.

That said, we follow Taylor’s definition of religious-secular in terms of transcendence-

immanence with an important modification. Where for Taylor the ‘transcendence’ of religion is

defined primarily in terms of belief in a higher power beyond the world—lining up conveniently

with the modern reconstruction of ‘religion’, to which we turn in the next section—our sense of

‘transcendence’ is broader, encompassing practice, ritual, communal and social organisation

(attached to knowledge-production and power), as well as the belief in the higher power, which

grounds the practice, and importantly, revelation, which mediates and authorises the practice.

From the human perspective, the higher power and the revelation therefrom intervene in

history, in the immanent world, from beyond it, and are hence captured by the notion of

transcendence. Alternatively, religion is not just belief in a transcendent power (with limited

implications for how we live in the world); it rather marks ways of being-in-the-world tied to

ontological images of the world as ultimately grounded in a transcendent power.

Correspondingly, secularity marks ways of being-in-the-world tied to ontological images of the

world as a self-grounded immanent frame.

The Modern (Re-)Construction of Religion

The idea that the modern secular relates to a new notion of religion that is its own construction

is key to Asad’s critical anthropology of secularism. There are two aspects to this: one,

highlighting the problems with modern attempts to box religion into a universal definition; and

two, delineating the major differences between what pre-modern ‘religion’ was, even just within

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a European Christian context, and what modern religion becomes, in order to show that the

assumption of a universal ‘religion’ is unfounded. Rather, modern ‘religion’ is a construction of

modern secularity that transforms older notions of ‘religion’, primarily for the benefit of the

modern liberal state.

In Genealogies of Religion (1993), Asad makes the persuasive case that modern attempts

to define religion are problematic both in their conceiving of religion as a distinctive space of

human life and as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. Moving beyond nineteenth

century Victorian evolutionary thought—whereby religion was a primitive human condition

from which law, science, and politics emerge and detach as truer forms of archaic thought and

institutions—anthropologists in the twentieth century theorised it as a distinctive sphere of

human practice and belief not reducible to any other (27). It had an autonomous essence from

that of other distinctive spheres such as politics, science, law, and common sense, even if in

many societies these may intertwine. A particular historical cultural configuration could

entangle them just as it might separate them but their essence was understood as distinct and

identifiable. On this view, medieval religion pervades other spheres but is still analytically

identifiable: it is of the same essence as modern religion although its social extension and

function were different (28).

Against this view, Asad argues that there cannot be a universal definition of religion

because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific and because any such

definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes (1993, 29). Through a genealogy

of religion that locates its modern emergence and definition in the historical contingences of

seventeenth century Europe and through a critique of its conceptual grammar, Asad seeks to

show the mutation that the very concept of religion undergoes in modernity.120 From being a

120
‘Grammar’ for Asad, following Wittgenstein, ‘refers not simply to the formal rules of “proper” syntactic
constructions in natural language utterances but to the system of usages that permit some statements
within particular ways of life and not others to make sense’ (Asad 2018, 175).

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concrete set of practical rules grounded in belief as a constituting activity in the world and

attached to processes of knowledge and power, religion came to be abstracted, universalised—

and effectively marginalised—as a matter primarily of (disembodied) personal belief as a state

of mind, opposed to knowledge and separated from power (42, 44).

Following this transformation, we receive two images of religion in modern (secular

liberal) public discourse (Fitzgerald 2015). One is of religion as essentially peace-loving, non-

violent, non-political, concerned with inner spiritual life and the other world. This is ‘proper’

religion, which is about personal faith and piety, and keeps a safe distance from the ‘dirty’ rough-

and-tumble of politics and economics. The cultural, affective accent of this ‘religion’ is a nice,

fuzzy feeling of something positive if mysterious, even if many secular moderns might feel

themselves as above being in need of it. The other is of religion as essentially barbarous, violent,

an irrational and malign agent in the world. This is improper, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘extremist’

religion which moves beyond its proper private domain, straying into the world of politics and

public life, and in doing so acts as a constant threat to the peaceful, reasonable, and tolerant

nature of the secular liberal order (305). In turn, as Goldstone (2011) argues, liberal secularism

entails not a simple relationship with religion, of critique or commendation, but a complex

relationship of both. Specific kinds of religion are valorised and denounced, empowered and

disempowered. The demand of liberal states is not that religious subject, signs, beliefs and

practices be banished from the public sphere, but rather that these be refashioned from the

predicates of ‘bad’ fundamentalist religion to those of ‘good’ personal religion. The distinction

between the good and bad is made, invariably, in accordance with the transcendent values of

particular (secular liberal) ways of life (105-106).

Using Clifford Geertz’s influential universal definition of religion as a paradigmatic

example, Asad shows how the theoretical search for an essence of religion is geared towards

separating it conceptually from the domain of power despite the significantly different forms,

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preconditions, and effects of what is regarded as medieval and modern ‘religion’.121 For Geertz,

religion is a system of symbols which act to establish powerful moods and motivations in people

by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence clothed in an aura of factuality

(Geertz 1973 in Asad 1993, 29).122 This ‘cognitivist’—or ‘ideational-subjectivist’ (Mahmood 2015,

15)—notion of religion is problematic in multiple ways, argues Asad. First, to conceive of a

symbol as an object of reality that carries a meaning fails to account for the social relations,

discursive and non-discursive, that condition what are called symbols, and which establish some

to the exclusion of others as natural and authoritative. In other words, the authoritative status

of representations is dependent on, and intrinsically linked to, the appropriate production of

other representations.123

Second, where for Geertz religious symbols induce in the worshipper a distinctive set of

dispositions (‘moods and motivations’) which lend a stable character to his activity and the

quality of his experience, Asad argues that worship alone does not do this; the social, political,

and economic institutions within which a person is embedded are critical. Can we, for instance,

predict the distinctive set of dispositions for a Christian worshipper in modern, industrial

society as opposed to medieval, agrarian society? Further, even though the Christian will likely

argue that the effectiveness of religious symbols in producing the sought dispositions are not

essential—they are true even when they fail to induce anything—they will not be unconcerned

at the apparent lack of power of true symbols in modern society. He will want to ask: what are

the conditions in which religious symbols operate with greater effectiveness? (33) In a word,

121
It should be noted here that Geertz’s is in fact a sympathetic defence of religion against critiques of it
that charge it of irrationality or false consciousness. Asad, of course, is not interested in any normative
stance on religion one way or the other. He is interested only in the conceptual grammar of modern
articulations of ‘religion’, for which he takes Geertz as paradigmatic.
122
Geertz C 1973, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays, New
York: Basic Books, pp. 87-125.
123
The fundamental problem here, for Asad, is with the assumption that there are two separate levels: the
cultural, which consists of symbols, and the social and psychological. It is this Parsonian view that creates
the logical space for defining the essence of religion as a matter of culture (Asad 1993, 32).

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symbols do not produce meaning automatically or in isolation of the form of life in which they

are used—the social conditions in which they are embedded.

A third aspect—one that Asad is keen to emphasise—is that of the relation of power and

religious truth. Here Asad turns to Augustine, in order to show that in pre-modern Christianity

the domain of power went hand in glove with religion. In the context of the Donatist heresy,

Augustine elaborates on the creative religious function of power whereby coercion and

discipline form conditions in which truth is realised and maintained (34). The final, individual

choice made by a person must be voluntary and spontaneous, but this choice is prepared by a

long process, often imposed, of teaching (eruditio) and warning (admonitio). Augustine

summed this up in the concept of disciplina, an active process of corrective punishment, ‘a

softening-up process’, a ‘teaching by inconveniences’ (a per molestias eruditio). Man, having

fallen from grace, could not do without external restraint, sometimes administered by God

directly (as with the Chosen People in the Old Testament) and other times through temporal

rulers. Coercion and punishment were part of the awesome discipline of God ‘from the school-

masters’ canes to the agonies of the martyrs’, by which fallen human beings were recalled, by

suffering, from their own evil inclinations (35). It is not mere symbols here, Asad wants to

underscore, that induce true Christians dispositions, but power in all its forms: laws (imperial,

ecclesiastical); sanctions (hellfire, death, reputation, peace); the disciplinary activities of social

institutions (family, school, city, church), and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience,

penance) (35). Power assumes a religious form because of the end to which it is directed. It is

not the individual mind moving spontaneously to religious truth, but power seeking to create

the conditions in which this can be done.

Further, institutional power serves a crucial creative role in the form of authorising

doctrine and practice (37-39). The authorising discourses of the Middle Ages, for instance,

comprised a diverse range of authorisations whereby ‘religion’ is created, its space defined and

time and again redefined: rejecting/accepting ‘pagan’ practices; dis/authenticating particular

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miracles and relics; authorising shrines; compiling saints’ lives as a model of and for Truth;

requiring the telling of sinful thoughts, words, and deeds to a priestly confessor; regularising

popular social movements into rule-following Orders. In this regard, the medieval Church

sought subjection of all practice to a unified authority, not absolute uniformity of practice. The

power of authenticating truth from falsehood (religion from what sought to subvert it) and

sacred from profane (religion from what was outside it) was to lie with a single source. Thus,

here too the reading of symbols by individual Christians is not sufficient. At least for medieval

(European) ‘religion’, authorisation by an institutional power is more significant, holding as it

did the capacity to manage any tension, bound to occur as it was, between individual readings

and authorised readings of the same symbols—by declaring ‘heresy’, the subversion of Truth,

for instance. Even with much of modern Christian religion, where the weight shifts more and

more onto the ‘moods and motivations’ of individual believers and as discipline gives way in the

religious space to ‘belief’, ‘conscience’, and ‘sensibility’, the validation of this redefinition by one

authoritative church or another is still important, albeit not to the same extent.

The result of what ‘religion’ means in both theory and practice, as a function of changing

authorisation, is also substantively different. An example of a significant change in

(epistemological) theory is the opposition between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ that undergirds the

modern conception of religious belief. This conception emphasises belief as a state of mind

rather than as constituting activity in the world and sharply contrasts belief with knowledge

(47). Even for the modern Christian apologist, let alone the modern secularist, belief is not a

conclusion to a knowledge process but its precondition. It is a sense of conviction as a particular

state of mind, not a corpus of practical knowledge; it will not pass for knowledge of social life,

less still for the systematic knowledge of objects that is the domain of natural science. This sharp

contrast between belief and knowledge, however, was not at all axiomatic for medieval

Christians for whom belief was built on knowledge—knowledge of theological doctrine, canon

law and Church courts, the powers of ecclesiastical office, the preconditions and effects of

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confession, the rules of religious orders, the locations and virtues of shrines, the lives of saints,

etc. (Ibid.). Familiarity with all such religious knowledge—an oxymoron in the modern

register—was a precondition not for ‘religious life’ but social life tout court, and belief,

embodied in practice and discourse, was an orientation for effective activity in it, for the clergy

as much as for the laity. Thus, while belief is an important component of what is identified as

‘religion’, the form, texture, and function of medieval belief is substantively different from

modern belief, rendering problematic the backward projection of ‘religion’ as universal.

An example of a substantial change in practice is the role and reception of pain. The

medieval valorisation of pain as a mode of participating in Christ’s suffering contrasts sharply

with the modern Catholic perception of pain as an evil to be overcome as Christ the Healer did

(46). That this lines up with modern secular conceptions about suffering and pain is no

coincidence. Geertz is thus right, Asad asserts, in wanting to link religious theory and practice

but the connection he draws in mistaken (44). The connection is not cognitive such that a

disembodied mind can identify religion from an Archimedean point. Rather, the nexus between

religious theory and practice is a matter of intervention, of constructing religion in the world

(not the mind) through authorising discourses. Two factors are therefore extremely significant

yet missing from modern accounts of religion such as Geertz’s: authorisation by institutional

power and the historical conditions which frame (and produce) that power.

Asad’s Genealogies of Religion, whilst an influential contribution, sits within a broader and

growing literature on the critique of the modern category of religion.124 Some of these studies

124
Staring with Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s landmark The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), Fortress:
Minneapolis, MN, major contributions include Smith JZ 1982, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to
Jonestown, University of Chicago Press: Chicago; McCutcheon RT 1997, Manufacturing Religion: The
Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, Oxford University Press: New York;
Dubuisson D 2003, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, John Hopkins
University Press: Baltimore, MD; Masuzawa T 2005, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European
Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, University of Chicago Press: Chicago; Fitzgerald
T 2007, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories, Oxford
University Press: New York; and Nongbri B 2015, Before Religion: A History of the Modern Concept, Yale
University Press: New Haven.

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focus on various features of pre-modern religion, such as its inherent imbrication with

knowledge and power, or, negatively, its not being a distinct realm of human life differentiated

from other distinct realms (state, politics, science, and culture). Others underscore the early

modern work done to actively construct religion in precisely this sort of mould. Fitzgerald

(2007), for example, shows that the essentialising distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘governance’

or the ‘political society’ is made without precedent by early modern writers, such as John Locke

and William Penn. Before them, we do not find a sustained discourse on politics as a separate

domain of human action, such as Locke’s distinction in his Treatises of Government between

‘man in the state of nature’ and ‘political society’. The other important distinction this discourse

on politics made was a sustained argument about the need for a domain of governance strictly

separated from the domain of religion. The latter was properly interior and a matter of

conscience; the former related to the outer, public order of the magistrate. Notably, in making

this distinction Locke is arguing against the dominant understanding of religion at the time,

which did not separate it from power and society in this way. Locke’s privatisation of religion

and immanentisation of politics was a prescriptive argument about how we ought to

reimagine—even if not made explicitly as such—religion and politics, not a neutral description

of what these were. Fitzgerald wants to highlight that these early modern discursive labours

construct—as universal categories, no less—not just ‘religion’ but related categories of the

putatively non-religious realms of politics, state, and economics as well.

Brown: Secularity as Pragmatic Engagement of World (Minus Secularist Hubris)

Wendy Brown takes the path of a materialist assessment on the question of religion and

secularity. She seeks to locate their fundamental development in the material conditions of

society—in particular, capitalist society with regard to the modern forms of the secular and

religious. She does so through a reengagement with Marx’s thinking about religion and its

relation to capitalism, with a particular eye to the contemporary resurgence of religion that she

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describes as coextensive with the unprecedented intensification of globalised capitalism (Brown

2014, 113). She locates a useful resource for this in nineteenth-century materialist thinkers’—

Marx, Feuerbach and others—critiques of religion: their attempts to theorise the precise

relation between specific earthly orders of existence and the human production of religion. This

is notwithstanding what she acknowledges as the flawed, limited, even crude nature of these

critiques in part, and the now discarded conceits about direct apprehension of ‘real’ human

existence entailed therein (2011, 86, 89).

For Brown, Marx seeks to specify the relation between human life form and religious form

in a nuanced way often missed by crude generic characterisations of his position on religion

(2014, 114). He develops the Feuerbachian assertion that religion is an expression of human

alienation—a projection of human capacities onto an imaginary Other—with a Hegelian

appreciation of the developmental historical logic of religions. Thus, although he thought that

urbanisation might be the death knell of formal religious adherence, he did not believe, with

other secularisation theorists, that religion is automatically displaced by reason and science or

destroyed by capitalism. If religion is an inherent emanation of all alienated and unfree social

conditions, its staying power does not, it follows, depend on a trick of the exploiters or rest in

consolation of the poor.

Marx’s materialism, thus, is sharper and thicker than Feuerbach’s. For the latter, religion

is grounded in the unique human capacity for consciousness in excess of experience and in the

feeling of weakness and dependence. As a more direct effect of consciousness itself, religion is

more easily resolved by a shift in consciousness: ‘he who no longer has any supernatural wishes,

has no longer any supernatural being either’. For Marx, religion is more thoroughly tethered to

specific social arrangements of unfreedom, to historically produced and organised human needs

and desires, instead of Feuerbach’s transcendent ones. Thus, Marx both adopts part of

Feuerbach’s critique of religion and revises it to the effect that overcoming religion and

shedding religious consciousness becomes much more difficult (Brown 2011, 90-91).

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 Religion, for Marx, is not ideology; the difference between the two is important. Ideology is

a cloak for power generated by power itself. Religion, on the other hand, expresses the separation

of humans from the effects of their own generative capacities and the subordination thereof by

powers larger than their aggregated selves (2014, 115). Ideology is a reflection of the world from

the perspective of the ruling class, wherein subordination and stratification are naturalised or

erased. Religion, however, is grounded in alienation and unfreedom across the board whereby

man’s alienated powers are attributed to and conferred upon sovereign Others (120).

Riding on the shoulders of Marx, Brown’s own conception of religion sees it as a human

projection, grounded in alienation and unfreedom, of human capacities onto other entities, as

a modality of escape from pragmatic realities into the realm of imaginary ideals. In turn, she

identifies something like the Democrats enthusiastic uptake of the early ‘Obama phenomenon’

in 2008 as religious (2011, 84-85). What Obama’s ‘Yes we can’ campaign incited, argues Brown,

was not just hope against despair but the countering of cynicism with belief, tout court—a belief

as religious as anything touted by Christian evangelicals, just as strikingly contrasted to earthly

realities and pragmatics, and just as desperate for relief from such realities. The belief Obama

inspired was not one in particular projects, agendas, or trajectories; such substantive content he

did not offer. Obama’s ‘gift to progressives was belief itself—belief in belief’, belief that is

necessarily empty of content: ‘its religiosity is contoured by this very emptiness’ (2011, 85).

Likewise, the adversary, the ‘no’ implicitly figured by Obama’s ‘Yes we can’, was the ‘no’ within,

the absolute rather than determinate negation of belief and will.

It is Charles Taylor, in fact, who pushes Brown to rethink about Marx and Feuerbach on

religion (2011, 87). Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), for Brown, invites us to think of secularism not

just as a system of beliefs or mode of political organisation, but more fundamentally as a matter

of human experience, as a condition of being, knowing, and inhabiting the world in a particular

way. He provides us with the first erudite phenomenology of secularism through a historical

construction of secular subjectivity. In doing so, however, Taylor’s historiography seeks, in part,

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to challenge materialist accounts of secularisation with one that centres on a history of ideas.

In the same work, Taylor opts for a reformulation of materialism as the thesis that certain

material/economic motivations are dominant in history (212-13). That is, in any ‘package’ of

mode of production and associated legal forms and ideas, the former is the crucial explanatory

factor since the underlying motivation pushing agents to adopt the new mode also led them to

adopt the requisite new legal forms essential to that mode. The mode is central, the ideas are

supplementary requirements, and the form of explanation becomes teleological (an in-order-to

explanation) instead of one of efficient causation. This form of materialism, argues Taylor,

achieves coherence, but only at the cost of universal plausibility, since the economic motive is

primary, even discernible clearly as such, for only some historical phenomena (1960s expressive

individualist advertising) to the exclusion of others (sixteenth century spread of Reformation

salvation by faith doctrine).

For Brown, Taylor’s critique of historical materialism relies on a caricature of it, a

markedly thin and unrecognisable version of it that mischaracterises it as an attempt to explain

what psychologically animates human action (the economic motive) instead of what generates

historical conditions. Historical materialism, for Brown, is not about human motives but the

conditions in and through which any such motives and the actions they bear are shaped,

constrained, and enacted. It is interested in the conditions that produce and contour our

motives, in which our actions are iterated, and with which our actions interact to produce

certain effects (2011, 88). Brown finds Taylor’s particular form of idealism richer than the

standard Hegelian steady progressive, dialectical unfolding of ideas bearing an inevitable and

positive telos. Informed by Foucault and Weber, it has a strong genealogical cast, allowing it to

include accidents and surprises in ideational development (87). Nevertheless, as a form of

idealism, it diminishes the importance of historical forces conditioning and contouring any

phenomena that do not take shape primarily as ideas or explicit human aims (89). It is to address

this diminution that Marx’s materialist critique of religion becomes a resource.

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 A significant part of Taylor’s historiography of secularisation is the rise of certain modern

‘social imaginaries’, which are effectively ideas or understandings that start off as a theory before

they find social currency. Since this may smack of historical idealism—the attributing to ideas

an independent or dominant force in history—Taylor seeks to repudiate any such charge (2007,

212). It would be foolish, he accepts, to think that ideas impinge ‘from nowhere’ and drive

historical change (216). Rather, at every stage of historical development we have an inextricable

interweaving of ideas, ideals and material practices. Setting up ‘ideas’ and ‘material factors’ as

rival casual agencies, Taylor argues, relies on a false dichotomy (212-3). Human history presents

us with a range of human practices that are both, at once, ‘material’ in that they are carried out

in space and time, and often coercively maintained, and at the same time self-understandings

or modes of understanding, which make sense of the practice to its participants. Any new

practice or institution has material conditions but these pose conditions in the realm of ideas;

people have to share certain understandings of how they can function with each other, what the

norms are, if they are to engage in the practice. As such, the ideas are internal to the material

practices, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to clearly distinguish the two in order to

ask which causes the other.

As such, Taylor and Brown are not as far from each other on the question of what drives

historical development than it may seem at first glance. Both are willing to consider material

and ideational forces, even as they may place relatively greater emphasis or ascribe greater

priority on one rather than the other. Taylor’s reconciliation of the two within a dialectical

relationship is convincing, even as Brown’s insistence on the greater consideration of material

conditions is warranted. Without this, various crucial aspects of how a phenomenon actually

plays out in the world in a given context can be missed. Thus, we see that where Brown seeks to

examine secularism’s roles as an instrument of empire, this aspect is largely missing from

Taylor’s work (likewise, Habermas’s). This may not be because he thinks secularism’s real-world

manifestations or excesses are unimportant as much as because he is focused on theorising

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about secularism as an ideal which ought to be strived for regardless of how it may be practiced

now or in the past. Such an approach, however, is insufficiently attentive to the real-world

effects and power-imbrication of secularism.

Conclusion

Secularity is a much more complex phenomenon than something that is the simple opposite of

religion. Such conceptions are too heavily invested in neat binaries of the religious and secular

that assume these to be fixed and fully opposed categories; in unexamined Enlightenment

critiques of religion; and in subtraction stories where religion simply falls away as humanity

comes of age. Rather, as both the passage of time and critical study have shown, the religious

and secular are much more mutually implicated and constituted. They are not, in a diachronic

assessment, fixed at all—they do not have universal essences. As we have seen, the secular

develops from being a residual theological category in Medieval Christendom to a central

modern category in reference to which theology becomes, apparently at least, marginal. In this

remarkable inversion, ‘religion’ too is completely re-constituted in modernity as a personal,

(apolitically) institutionalised, epistemically suspect and politically dangerous, supernatural

belief. From being a concrete set of practical rules grounded in belief as a constituting activity

in the world and attached to processes of knowledge and power, religion is abstracted,

universalised—and effectively subordinated—as a matter primarily of disembodied, personal

belief as a state of mind, opposed to knowledge and separated from power. From being an

overarching paradigm that flows into and above all aspects of human individual and social life,

it is rendered—through social-scientific surgery—into a distinctive space of human life that can,

in theory at least, be cordoned off from its other spaces.

At the same time, in any synchronic assessment—at any given historical point and within

a given discursive world—the two categories do have certain defining features that are

sufficiently stable and mutually opposed is some way for the binary to be meaningful. As

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hegemonic modern Western categories, not as transcultural or transhistorical universals, the

secular may be cogently said to pertain to the worldly or immanent in the specific sense that

renders religion—conceived as pertaining in some sense to the otherworldly or transcendent—

subordinate, secondary, or vestigial. The key notion here is of subordination, not negation. The

secular and religious are not simple opposites, such that the former negates the latter or that

the hegemony of the former leads to the extinction of the latter. Rather, the relationship is one

of subordination and hierarchy. Modern secularity, at its core, maintains a hierarchical

relationship between the secular and religious, with the latter taking its place at the lower rungs

well below the former. Subordination and hierarchy here are primarily, if not exclusively, about

the ability to define, manage, legitimate (and de-legitimate) that which is subordinated, which

is precisely what modern secularity does with religion—and what pre-modern religion

(Christianity) did with theologically-defined secularity.

In turn, secularity is better conceived as pertaining to ‘worldly’ phenomena—objects,

concepts, practices, doctrines, people, identities, subjectivities, ideals, virtues, desires,

aspirations, habits, commitments—not in any general sense, but in the specific sense that

renders religion, or otherworldly/transcendent concerns, subordinate and secondary at best.

That is, they either ascribe a secondary value to religion or none at all. Secularity is a mode of

being in the world structured by a prioritising of ‘worldly’ concerns and relegation of

‘otherworldly’ concerns, where both are defined necessarily through the lens of secular

ontological and normative worldviews. It is a social mode of being in the world that uniquely

structures modern life in the West. It can thus describe objects in the world and the like but

only with reference to a framing subjectivity. This helps to explain why the accounts provided

by our selected thinkers focus explicitly or implicitly on subjectivities and social imaginaries, on

the modes of being-in-the-world of individuals and societies. A distilled reiteration of these

accounts is beneficial here to show how the notion of secularity subordinating religion or

making it secondary is embedded within these.

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 For Habermas, secularity comprises a ‘post-metaphysical’ subjectivity that is reflexive, self-

consciously fallible, open to plurality, and radically self-critical. It takes science as authoritative

and morality as profane. It understands religion to be epistemically inferior because it is

dogmatic and lacks the self-critical posture that is self-evidently the calling of modern life, and

to have a destructive potential, even as it has restorative potential because of its genealogically

relation to secular reason. The hierarchising of secularity above religion is explicit here. For

Taylor, secularity is a background frame of immanence within which people at large experience

the world. This immanent frame marks the eclipse of transcendence and is defined by a social

imaginary that sees the world as a constellation of differentiated, self-sufficient orders: a ‘natural’

cosmic order fully open to our understanding by science; a moral order that is exclusively

humanist and accepts no final goals other than human flourishing; and a social order that is fully

open to human construction and reconstruction. That religion is rendered secondary here too is

apparent in the fact that the frame is ‘immanent’ and marks the eclipse of transcendence, while

still being open to transcendence for those who prefer it as such. Immanence structures the

world; transcendence is rendered a preferential choice for the individual.

For Asad, secularity is the domain of sensibilities, experiences, and embodied concepts

which orient people’s sensorium and guide public understandings of truth. It leans on a

particular conception of the world (‘natural’ and ‘social’) such that humans become the self-

conscious makers of History and the foundation of universally valid knowledge about nature

and society. The concept of the secular cannot do without its twin concept of religion, and the

twain are critical to ‘modernity’ as a way of living in the world. While Asad is reticent to mark

out this domain by any substantive attributes, it is not difficult to see that his characterisation

of it does not fall far from something like Taylor’s immanent frame. Asad is clear in arguing that

while secularity does not eliminate the sacred or transcendent, it relocates these on its own

terms as a new normative power. To redefine something on one’s own terms is precisely to

subordinate it to oneself. For Brown, secularity is the eschewing of imaginary ideals and

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engagement with pragmatic realities as they are. It is the always ongoing human and fallible

attempt to do so, without the claim to direct access to ‘reality’ as it is. Whilst this claim ought

not to be made, the real-imaginary structure of the secular-religious is decisive here.

For Brown and Habermas then, there is a stronger sense of a normative hierarchy—

critical-dogmatic, real-imaginary—that structures secularity in its relation to religion, even if

they take opposing analytical and normative positions when it comes to liberal secularism.

Taylor’s and Asad’s accounts are more descriptive in terms of what comprises modern secular

subjectivity. Here too, nevertheless, secularity is made sense of in relation to religion through

the former’s rendering secondary or marginalisation of the latter. From this standpoint, we may

make a number of observations. First, our secular age is marked by the dominance of the

immanent frame that is still, however, open to transcendence but only as a personal, and

therefore limited, experience. Second, religion conceives or experiences the world as having its

grounds in a transcendence beyond the immanent frame while secularity allows only for

transcendence within it. Third, the two are opposed insofar as these two positions are not fully

mutually compatible. This implies that while secularity does not seek to eliminate religion, it

nonetheless stipulates how it is to be expressed, and in particular, the ways it can go public. The

secular must manage and contain the religious. Different conceptions of secularism, as we shall

see in Chapter Four, assert different limits of this containment—from delimiting it to the private

sphere alone to conditionally allowing its expression in the public sphere as well—but no

conception is free of it.

Therefore, what modernity brings us is not mere political rearrangements of roles

between fixed, natural, or universal categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, ‘politics’ and ‘state’,

‘ethics’ and ‘law’, but rather the transformation of these very categories. What we get is a

transformation and substantive makeover of characters in what becomes a new cast on the

European stage of world history, not the mere swapping of roles by the same characters. It is a

transformation that comprises tectonic ontological and epistemological shifts, not mere

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political reconfiguration. The secular emerges as a normative force in its own right tied to the

controversial project of modernity. While this emergence is not without struggle, revision, and

compromise, the new formation eventually becomes hegemonic and finds widespread approval.

What are the grounds of this normative sanction? What are the requisite goods that secularity

delivers and for which it finds almost universal acceptance in the twenty-first century? Having

examined the secular descriptively, we move in the next two chapters to explore the normative

justification of secularism as a form of political organisation.

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 Chapter Four

Secularism I

What is it and Why is it?

The conclusion which clearly follows is that any polis which is truly so called, and is not
merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness.
— Aristotle, Politics, 1280b

Only a formal law, one that prescribes to reason nothing more than the form of its
universal lawgiving as the supreme condition of maxims, can be a priori a determining
ground of practical reason.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788

In the September of 1960, John F Kennedy took up the invitation of the Greater Houston

Ministerial Association—an association of Protestant Ministries—in the context of a

presidential campaign to address them on the question of religion and politics. As the potential

first Catholic president of the United States, he faced concerns about what his Catholicism

meant for his potential presidency. His answer was categorical—nothing: ‘I believe in an

America where the separation of church and state is absolute…I believe in a president whose

religious views are his own private affair’. He would decide on policy questions by Democratic

Party values and ‘what my conscience tells me to be the national interest’ without regard to

‘outside religious pressures or dictates’.125 Some five decades later another to-be American

President from the Democratic Party, again pushed to speak on the connection of religion and

politics, proffered a somewhat different view. Secularists are wrong, asserted Barack Obama, in

his keynote address at the Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference

in Washington, D.C., in 2006, ‘when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before

entering into the public square…to say that men and women should not inject their “personal

morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a

125
Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 12 1960, John F Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum, accessed 21 May 2022, <https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-
speeches/address-to-the-greater-houston-ministerial-association>.

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codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.’126 This he offered

as a corrective to a previous position, more in line with Kennedy, on the role of his faith in

guiding his values and beliefs as a political leader.127

This type of debate on the finer points of the role of religion in politics in modern liberal

democracies has played out across the Western world for a long time now in political, popular,

and academic circles alike. In fact, the question has been around for as long as secular liberalism

has. In a way, it represents an aspect of the Western tradition in which an aspect of its past

continues to haunt its present and future, or at least, has never been decisively resolved.

Incidentally, or perhaps indicatively, the contrast between Obama’s and Kennedy’s positions

tracks recent developments with the advent of a ‘post-secular’ moment that is relatively more

accommodating of religious influence in public life than its secular predecessor. When had on

these terms, nevertheless, the debate remains on the surface—about extent of indirect

influence—of a deeper problematic, and the two positions are substantively not that far away

from each other. If Kennedy were asked whether his religion has a part to play on his conscience,

he would, one thinks, answer in the affirmative. If Obama were asked whether the religious

grounding of American law ought to become a direct source of the law, he would no doubt

answer in the negative. Both positions affirm the fundamentals of secularism—separation of

church and state, neutrality of governance, translation of religious content into secular

language—while quibbling over the details.128 In this case, the quibble is over ‘where to draw

the line’ for religious influence in politics. Even such quibbles, however, push naturally in the

direction of a more basic critical assessment: why does such a line need to be drawn at all?

126
Obama’s 2006 Speech on Faith and Politics, June 28 2006, The New York Times, accessed 21 May 2022,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/us/politics/2006obamaspeech.html>.
127
This particular juxtaposition between Kennedy and Obama is adapted from Sandel (2010, 128).
128
Thus Obama makes sure to reiterate some of these fundamentals in the above-noted speech: ‘Democracy
demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific,
values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason...[and explained in
relation to principles] accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.’

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Stated differently, where one draws the line of separation depends on some normative paradigm

that defines what the separation is for—that is, what it seeks to achieve—and why these goods

are legitimate and valuable.

Having examined the descriptive conception of secularity as the basic category that speaks

to epistemological and ontological positions and of secularisation as a historical social process

in the preceding chapters, we now turn to the normative conception and justification of

secularism as a political doctrine. We find that most of our interlocutors, although critical of

liberal secularism as currently applied, uphold the need for some form of secularism. In this and

the next chapter, we outline and assess the justifications provided for this position. This is an

all-the-more crucial undertaking because secularism has become something of an epistemic

knowledge regime, a Foucauldian episteme, held unreflexively and phenomenologically

assumed as the taken-for-granted ‘natural’ structure of modern reality, a modern doxa or

‘unthought’ (Casanova 2009, 1051). The idea of separation relies on an imposed or asserted

fundamental difference between religion and politics, one that is so deeply rooted in the modern

secular imaginary, however, that it can be difficult to recognise it as an imposition (Scherer 2013,

73). As such, the question of its justification often goes unaddressed, instead simply being

presupposed as self-evident. Indeed, explicit justifications are difficult to come across in the

literature (likewise, in popular discourse). Rather, what we mostly get are reasons offered for its

benefits and the political goods it secures. Nevertheless, an analysis of these allows for the

reconstruction of justifications, which, together with the odd explicit justification that has been

proffered, can then be critically assessed.

The division of labour between this chapter and the next is that the present chapter

focuses more on the ‘what’ of secularism while also identifying the ‘why’ of it, the following

chapter then takes up the latter aspect more specifically. This chapter begins with a broad

outline of how secularism is understood by scholars in political theory and philosophy and the

legitimating reasons offered for it, before moving to focus on the particular accounts of our

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chosen thinkers, broadly using Asad and Brown to interrogate the more standard liberal

positions articulated by Habermas and Taylor, as well as some genetically related models, while

highlighting the difference between and among all four. This discussion identifies some key

notions at the heart of most legitimations of secularism: neutrality, public reason, freedom and

equality. The following chapter then zeroes in on each of these to critically examine and assess

each of them in more depth.

The Four Goods of (Late) Modern Secularism

What is secularism and what is it for? The two are entirely separate questions. For, as with any

concept of political theory, it is, in part, what it is for. The road to understanding the different

ways it is conceived or imagined can be approached from a number of paths. At one level, it is

about state policy and practice, comprising some form of separation or independence between

two domains understood as ‘religious’ and ‘political’. At a second level, it concerns the normative

values or reasons why such a separation is considered ideal and what is thought to be achieved

through it—first-order justifications of the state policy. At a third level, it relates to the grounds

that substantiate or secure these values—the second-order justifications or ‘deeper’ reasons. This

three-layered approach, given by Bhargava (1998, 6-7), is incisive, not least because it allows us

to consider secularism comprehensively, and to appreciate why secularism is understood both in

narrower terms as a political doctrine, but also in broader terms as an ideology or worldview.

At the first level of state practice, if secularism minimally means maintaining some form

of independence or separation between the political and the religious, its various types branch

out from contestations about the ideal form and extent this separation ought to take. Different

models range from strict non-interference to interventionist control, to neutrality in terms of

equidistance, or ‘principled distance’ (Bhargava 1998, 7). There is agreement that the state’s

treatment of all religions ought to be symmetric, but not on what form such symmetry should

take. Stated differently, there is disagreement about whether a secular state implies severe

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aloofness from religion, benign impartiality toward it, corrective oversight of it, or a fond but

equal indulgence of all religions (Galanter 1971, 467). These models are also expressed with

reference to states that apply them (French/American/Turkish/Indian) or with reference to

some conceptual ideal-typical categorisation that aims to distinguish them by their mode or

degree of separation—hard/soft (Kosmin and Keysar 2007); moderate/radical,

pragmatic/ideological, absolute/relative (Modood 2010); passive/assertive (Kuru 2009);

militant/moderate (Laborde 2013).

It is worth qualifying here that in the vast majority of liberal secular models, separation

does not mean that there ought to be no relation with religion whatever. In all of Western

Europe—with the exception only of France—there are points of symbolic, institutional, policy

and fiscal linkages between the state and aspects of Christianity (Modood 2010, 5). This

‘mainstream’ European secularism—which is even more the case across the Atlantic—takes the

form of a historically evolved and evolving compromise with religion, treated as a public good,

rather than absolute separation. In the French case, where religion may not be seen in this way,

the lack of absolute separation takes the form of active state intervention in policing, even

forming (state-approved) religion. No European society or political system is secular in the sense

of a neat absolute separation between religion and the state. More generally, Europe’s Christian

heritage has shaped and continues to shape its vocabulary, self-understanding, institutions,

ideals and practices (Parekh 2008, 21). From ideas of human dignity and equality, to views about

human nature and history, to more quotidian matters like treating Sundays, Christmas and the

New Year as public holidays all have clear roots in Christian thought and practice. Rather,

European states are secular in the more specific sense that they do not impose religion on their

citizens, are not guided explicitly in law and policy by religion, and do not derive their legitimacy

directly from religion.

The first-order justifications for state practice, for why there ought at all to be any

separation between the religious and political, throw up a variety of reasons: it prevents

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sectarian/religious violence, securing civil peace; it allows for full religious liberty and precludes

state imposition of religion against the will of people, facilitating individual autonomy; it

provides the grounds necessary for democratic citizenship; and it allows for establishing the

public authority of universal reason and science as opposed to the particular reasons of any one

religion or another. With respect to this last reason, for instance, one principal characterisation

of secularism is as a worldview that seeks to understand the world and cosmos in terms of

natural laws and explanations, as opposed to metaphysical or theological explanations, and to

establish moralities and politics based on reasons and regard for human well-being in this life,

as opposed to belief in God or reference to some life to come (Tambiah 1998, 419).

A major objective of this chapter is to identify these direct legitimating reasons for

secularism in liberal political theory. It is analytically useful to categorise them into broader

categories. We find that they can be classed under four primary goods that secularism is said to

secure or facilitate.129 The first is individual autonomy, including freedom of conscience, choice,

and religion. This is perhaps the most emphasised reason given its centrality to liberalism. We

can include here also state neutrality—that no particular worldview or religion is imposed or

privileged by the state—required for individual autonomy. This aspect is particularly

underscored in Habermas’s account. The second primary good is democratic citizenship,

namely, equal and fair participation by all citizens in self-rule. Two goods are brought together

here: popular sovereignty, and the equality and fairness of citizen participation therein. This

129
It is worth noting that a further theological argument no longer used today was offered by early liberals,
like Locke and Jefferson, namely, that proper religion was private, a matter of personal belief, and that
mixing with politics corrupted it. According to this argument, secularism becomes a means of securing
proper religion. ‘Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God’,
wrote Jefferson, ‘I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which
declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof”, thus building a wall of separation between church and State’ (Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jan 1, 1802, in Appleby J and Ball T (eds.) 1999, Jefferson:
Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, p. 397). In the American context, the Supreme Court has
also marshalled this argument in less recent times in reading the establishment clause of the First
Amendment. See Sandel (1998), pp. 80-81.

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aspect is relatively stressed more by Taylor. The third is the public authority of (universal,

secular) reason, as opposed to the particular reasons of specific worldviews or religions. This

good could be seen as instrumental for the second one above, to the extent that ‘public reason’

is considered a necessary means, the requisite language, for deliberation and decision-making

in a democratic context. However, we afford it a separate category because the public authority

of reason is required by some based also on an account of religious reason and belief being

epistemically inferior to its secular counterparts, as we shall see with Habermas. The fourth

good is civil peace or social harmony, or, negatively, preventing sectarian strife and violence.

This aspect has greater historical priority in that it serves as the context for the historical advent

of modern secularism (as a solution to the European Wars of Religion). While it is still offered

theoretically, it is less emphasised than the above reasons, perhaps because that sort of

confessional violence is not expected in the late modern Western context.130

As normative values the substantiation of these first-order justifications (autonomy,

equality, democracy, civil peace, the authority of reason) as authoritative ideals calls for a final

level of ‘deeper’ reasons that is also disputed. For some, like Taylor and Habermas, as we shall

see, the ultimate ground is an ‘independent mode’, a foundational ethic abstracted from all

religions or worldviews. For others, it is a foundational ethic common to them all, or to most of

them. For yet others, like Rawls, it is the ‘overlapping consensus’ of the first-order normative

values, not the second-order deeper reasons, which ought to be bracketed given their

controversial and irresolvable nature.131

130
For this reason, we consider this last legitimating reason supplementary and address it at the end of
this chapter, while focusing on the first three as core justifications in the next.
131
Bhargava mentions two other strategies—the ‘constrained modus vivendi’, whereby practical
accommodation is restricted by agreement on some first-order normative reasons, and the ‘bare modus
vivendi’, whereby mere practical accommodation is sought through prudential ad hoc maxims regarded
as neither true nor reasonable—that we leave out because the vast majority of liberal theorists do not
regard modus vivendi models as acceptable in the first place on count on their lack of stability. They seek
moral or theoretical, not merely prudential, models.

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 Given these three levels, secularism can be, and is, conceived diversely by different

thinkers and advocates as mere policy of separation of religion from state, or as a limited

worldview comprising a set of normative values that imagine the ideal society in a particular

way, or as a more comprehensive worldview comprising both these values as well as an

independent (secular) foundational ethic that undergirds them. The distinction between

‘political’ secularism and ‘ethical’ or ‘comprehensive’ secularism speaks to this difference

(Bhargava 1998, 492). Political secularism seeks separation of religion and politics for ‘merely’

political reasons purportedly unconnected to any ultimate ideals. Ethical secularism does so as

a contribution to some such ideal/s like autonomy, equality, or democracy. We argue that all

forms of secularism should be understood in the latter comprehensive sense, as against the

former, given the difficultly, if not outright untenability, to cleanly separate the ‘mere’ politics

from the values and deeper ethical reasons that motivate, legitimate, and even, more basically,

allow us to make sense of it.

Following this introductory outline, let us turn to the specific accounts of our chosen

interlocutors to detail both how they define secularism and how they legitimate it.

Habermasian Procedural-Constitutional Secularism

Secularism, for Habermas, is that form of political organisation in which the state is neutral with

respect to competing worldviews—religious ones in particular—and where public discourse is

conducted in the neutral language of ‘public reason’. It is justified, and here to stay, as quite

simply a necessity of pluralistic society: ‘[I]n view of the fact of persisting pluralism, it is hard to

see on which normative grounds the historical step toward the secularization of state power

could ever be reversed’ (Habermas 2011, 24). Secularism, on this view, is an essential, even

inevitable, requirement to politically organise societies that are diverse with respect to the

worldviews adopted by its citizens. The secular character of the state is a necessary, though not

sufficient, condition for guaranteeing equal religious freedom for all (Habermas 2008, 120). In

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the wake of the post-metaphysical turn, we have to give up on the claim of classical philosophy

to be able to place competing ways of life in a hierarchy with one privileged above all others, in

favour of the modern principle of tolerance whereby one view of life is as good as any other

(Habermas 1993, 122). Since clashes on political and social questions over beliefs impregnated

by different worldviews are inevitable, the secular grounds for the separation of religion from

politics provides a way to deal with the fact of pluralism in a non-violent way, that is, without

disrupting the social cohesion of a political community. Managing a diverse population, argues

Habermas, ‘requires a justification of constitutional essentials and the outcomes of the

democratic process in ways that are neutral toward the cognitive claims of competing

worldviews’, and democratic legitimacy—the deliberative mode of inclusive and discursive

opinion- and will-formation—is the only available option today (Habermas 2011, 24; 2008, 121).

With modern secularism, religious legitimation of the state gives way to a democratic

constitution-making which generates the basic rights (Grundrechte) that free and equal citizens

must accord one another if they wish to organise their coexistence reasonably and

autonomously by means of positive law (Habermas 2008, 121). This Kantian republican version

of political liberalism ‘understands itself to be a nonreligious and postmetaphysical justification

of the normative foundations of the democratic constitutional state’ in the tradition of rational

law (Vernunftrecht), derived from the ‘profane sources’ of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

philosophy (Habermas 2006, 252). Constitutional liberalism aims at protecting people and their

individual ways of life from the intrusion of state power. It secures for them the free space to

pursue a plan of life informed by their own conception of the good, to lead a self-determined,

‘authentic’ life (Habermas 2000, 100). From this perspective, the public autonomy of citizens

who participate in political self-legislation is geared towards facilitating personal self-

determination of private persons. Two components, in turn, afford the democratic procedure

its legitimating power. First, the equal political participation of all citizens which secure

autonomy and self-determination: the addresses of the positive law can, à la Rousseau,

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understand themselves as its authors. Second, the epistemic dimension of a deliberation that

grounds the presumption of rationally acceptable outcomes: citizens owe each other good,

mutually-acceptable reasons for the laws they advocate. Habermas here gives a nod to Rawls’s

‘duty of civility’ (Rawls 1996, 217):

The ideal of citizenship imposes a moral, not a legal, duty – the duty of civility – to be able to
explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they
advocate and vote for can be supported by the values of public reason. This duty also involves a
willingness to listen to others and a fair-mindedness in deciding when accommodations to their
views should reasonably be made.

Historically, secularisation of state power came as the appropriate response to the confessional

wars of the early modern period in Europe (Habermas 2009, 66-68). Religious minorities

progressively acquired more rights but only with a modus vivendi. This precarious coexistence

of antagonistic subcultures proved inadequate for the new political order born of the late

eighteenth century’s convulsions in Europe. Constitutional revolutions subjected secularised

states to the rule of law and the democratic will of the people. The new setup necessitated that

all subcultures, religious and secular, loosen their hold on members so that the latter can

recognise each other reciprocally as citizens, as members of the one and same political

community. In this way, Habermas suggests, the universalist project of the political

Enlightenment does not contradict the particularist sensibilities of multiculturalism. Rather the

universality of the democratic citizen works hand-in-glove with the private citizen by the former

giving the latter—themselves—those laws which enable them to preserve their particular

cultural identity. As we shall see, however, the mediation of the universal and particular is not

as smooth as posited here, and this task does not quite work when the requirements of secular

democratic citizenship place significant burdens on religious cultures such that they conform

to certain secular preconditions—the most basic of which is the ‘uncompromising expectation’

(Habermas 2017, 156) that religious citizens and communities ‘must appropriate the secular

legitimation of constitutional principles under the premises of their own faith’ (Habermas 2009,

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75, emphasis added)—conditions without which they are not welcome in the secular political

community in the first instance.

The contemporary situation, however, Habermas asserts, requires further adjustment. The

normative question for him is: How should we understand ourselves as members of a post-

secular society, and what must we expect from one another if we want to ensure that social

relations remain civil in spite of the growth of cultural and religious pluralism? (2009, 63) Here,

Habermas finds both the progressivist and decline narratives of secularisation as making the

same mistake of construing it as a zero-sum game between the secular and religious; between

‘the capitalistically unbridled productivity of science and technology on the one hand, and the

conservative forces of religion and the church on the other hand’ (Habermas 2003, 104). Both

sides, he argues, have to learn from each other in ‘complementary learning processes’ and adapt

to the new context through a ‘democratically shaped and enlightened common sense’. A

functioning ‘post-secular’ society requires its secular citizens to cease treating religious

viewpoints as outdated and illegitimate and its religious citizens to translate their viewpoints

into a language accessible to all. Thus, for Habermas, the way in which secularism managed

diversity at the point of its advent was by delimiting religion to the private sphere and thereby

‘secularising’ the (nascent) public sphere. Thereafter, Europe moves from a precarious modus

vivendi to a more stable political configuration on the basis of the concept of citizenship.

However, the persisting bias against religion and its marginalisation to the private sphere is no

longer appropriate in a post-secular world; religion is to be admitted entry into the public sphere.

Drawing on Kant, Habermas favours a proceduralist constitutional democracy, based on

a formal rather than ideologically or culturally substantive grounding for shared citizenship.132

This is based on the view—adopted by many liberal political theorists—that a diverse liberal

society has to treat all its citizens with equal respect. Since citizens adopt an array of different

132
For a detailed account of Habermas’s engagement with Kant see Chapter 8 of his Between Naturalism
and Religion (2008), pp. 209-248.

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worldviews and associated conceptions of the good, the society itself cannot adopt any

particular worldview or conception of the good. If it did so, this would amount to favouring

some citizens over others. Those who adopted that particular conception of the good would

have a clear advantage over those who did not. Rather, a liberal society can only be founded on

a theory of the right/just that seeks only to equally facilitate individuals’ pursuance of their own

life plans around their own ethical views, and to resolve disputes and establish some basic

notion of justice. It cannot, however, be in the business of adopting or facilitating any

conception of the good life. Contra the Aristotelian view, this is neither required for politics nor

an equitable way of governance.

If we are abstract from all worldviews and normative conceptions of the good in this

manner, however, one may wonder, how can we establish any ethic of the right? Any notion of

justice, after all, as a markedly normative concept, must appeal to some normative values. To

appreciate how Habermas goes about this, it helps to pan out and consider the contours of

relevant parts of his broader moral and social philosophy.

Communicative Reason and Discourse Ethics

Reason is embodied in the symbolic forms of language and culture, manifest in a historically

articulated space of reasons. Communicatively socialised subjects draw upon these reasons in

problem-solving through the contingencies of the world, and in turn transform and extend

them through experience and communication (Habermas 2021, 7). The basic unit of meaning,

according to Habermas, is the speech act, which mediates and structures communicative

interaction between people. Communicatively mediated interaction operates, indeed is only

possible, in the backdrop of consensually accepted facts and shared norms about basic features

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of the natural and social worlds in which human life unfolds.133 Where disagreement occurs,

consensual interaction is disrupted, and its restoration requires a different type of discourse

such that claims to truth or rightness are subject to critical scrutiny in argumentation freed from

the imperatives of action. ‘Communicative action’ is therefore specific to particular

communities, while ‘discourse’ calls for universal validation across all human communities.

Normative rightness, to which moral judgment raises a claim, is analogous to, albeit still

distinct from, factual truth. Both are essentially discursive matters adjudicated on publicly

intelligible reasons in argumentative discourse, as opposed to being validated monologically—

in the Aristotelian or Kantian vein—in deductive fashion or by appeal to evidence or intuition.

The objectivity of moral discourse is related to the kinds of reasons offered in validating them in

open intersubjective discourse. Moral validity is thus related not to specific moral positions or

the evidence adduced for them but rather to the conditions of ideal discourse (the ‘ideal speech

situation’) free from distorting impediments—such as the right of all to participate and the

absence of coercion and ideology.134 Although counterfactual, these performatively presupposed

idealising assumptions serve the function of a regulative idea. They are necessary and represent

a ‘transcendence from within’ that serves a critical function: they orient discourse, by way of

revisions made in their light, in the direction of learning processes (Habermas 2021, 8). And they

orient us, in communicative action, toward unconditional validity claims that we can only raise

in the context of our provincial languages and forms of life but that point to and assume a place

beyond this provinciality (Habermas 2002, 80). The basic principle of moral deliberation is thus

a procedural or formal principle of universalisation, in the Kantian mode: namely, that valid

133
Habermas refers to this interaction as ‘communicative action’, theorised most fully in Volume One of
his Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1984), McCarthy TA
(trans.), Beacon Press: Boston, MA.
134
The procedural constraints of the ‘ideal speech situation’ specify a communicative norm: each
participant must have an equal chance to initiate and continue communication; to make assertions,
recommendations, and explanations; to express their desires, and feelings; and to thematise those power
relations which in ordinary contexts would constrain the free articulation of opinion (Benhabib 1989, 150).

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moral norms are those the anticipated consequences and side effects of whose general

observance, for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests, can be accepted by all affected thereby

(Habermas 1990, 65). This principle preserves the central role of the autonomy of rational agents

from sources external to their wills, now inflected in intersubjective terms as each person is

compelled to adopt the perspective of all others concerning ends that can be willed in common.

Practical reason here, following the ‘individualistic turn’ in modernity, is Kantian rather

than Aristotelian in that it no longer operates in essential relation to the animating backdrop of

community values. With Aristotle, it is worth recalling, the polis is the communal bearer of

values and practices in direct relation to which a person orients their practical deliberation. In

Kant, the individual is an independent source of value and practical reason precludes any final

appeal to ‘heteronomous’ substantive value—those extraneous to the individual rational will. It

must now produce unconditional moral demands in an immanent fashion from purely formal

and procedural requirements (as Kant does with the categorical imperative). Practical reason is

thus transformed from a context-dependent faculty of prudent deliberation operating within

the horizon of an established form of life into a faculty of pure reason operating independently

of particular contexts (Habermas 1993, 120). It is, for Habermas more specifically, a practical

reason embodied in processes rather than contents with a ‘post-metaphysical’ authority

independent of comprehensive doctrines (Habermas 2000, 95).

Further, three distinct kinds of practical questions correlate with diverse modes of practical

reasoning and different kinds of answers (Habermas 1993, 2-10). Pragmatic questions address

strategic techniques for satisfying contingent, subjective, or ‘weak’ preferences. They relate to

purposive rationality and require making a rational choice of means/goals in light of pre-

determined purposes or value orientations. Ethical questions address prudential life plans in

light of ‘strong’ preferences tied to particular cultural self-interpretations, values, and ideas of

the good life. They relate to the clinical and the good, not just the purposive and technical, and

to optional maxims about what is good for me and are justified through hermeneutical self-

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clarification. Finally, moral questions address the just, impartial regulation of social interaction

and conflict. They relate to categorical, general laws that everyone can accept and are justified

through intersubjective discourse. They cannot be based on subjective preferences, without

treating others as mere means for one’s own ends, or on strong cultural evaluations, without

being partial. The categorical ‘ought’ of moral injunctions—unlike the relative ‘ought’ of

pragmatic recommendations or the teleological ‘ought’ of clinical advice—is directed to the

autonomous free will that is completely open to determination by moral insights. All

heteronomous elements of mere choice or idiosyncratic way of life have been expunged from

such a will. Only these moral-practical matters admit of universally applicable and valid

principles, and this is the proper remit of discourse theory. Whereas ethical disputes over the

value of competing forms of life lead to reasonable disagreements, moral questions and questions

of political justice admit in principle of universally valid answers (Habermas 2000, 99).

Contra the likes of MacIntyre (2007)—who see in the turn to abstract autonomy, ‘empty’

formal principles, and unsituated reason regressive decay in moral deliberation—for Habermas,

these are progressive and irreversible historical processes of increased differentiation of spheres

of validity and discourse that uncover dimensions implicit in previous philosophical thought.

In modern societies, cultural traditions have become reflexive in the sense that competing

worldviews no longer simply assert themselves against one another in non-communicative

coexistence. They are compelled to justify their claims to validity self-critically in the light of

argumentative confrontations with the competing validity claims of others (Habermas 1993,

181). These modern conditions of life leave us without alternatives; we cannot alter them at will,

and hence they do not stand in need of retrospective normative justification. In a sense, they

are the background conditions to which all cultures must adjust. Particularly in light of modern

irreducible pluralism, where consensus on norms and ideas of the good life are no longer

possible, we have no resort—short of embracing relativism—other than to a procedural morality

that grounds norms in the rational structure of communication itself.

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 The way, then, in which Habermas would have a ‘political justice that stands on its own

moral feet’ without needing support from the normative standpoints of any comprehensive

doctrines—the way in which ‘moral judgments gain independence from metaphysical contexts’

(2000, 98)—is by effectively reformulating moral judgments as purely procedural and discursive

matters, the validity of which rests on intersubjective argumentation via the medium of public

reason. To the extent, however, that he does this through the elaboration of a detailed

philosophical theory that is hardly self-evident, but must be argued for as against competing

theories, we are left with what would seem to be an obvious question: Why should this

reformulation of morality not be considered part of a comprehensive worldview in itself, leaning

on interpretations of world and self as contestable as any other? And if it is considered as such,

is the objective of abstracting from competing worldviews achieved when doing so through the

erection of a new one? We suggest that it is not: Habermas is not able to escape the privileging

of certain controversial moral-political conceptions over others—as shown at greater length in

the following chapter (pp. 259-265).

‘Translation’ and the Symmetry of Cognitive Burdens

The above-mentioned admittance of religion into the public sphere that Habermas now

advocates for, it must be noted, is not unconditional. Religion is to be admitted only if

secularised, albeit in a ‘non-destructive’ way, the mode of which is translation (2003, 114).

Religion is thus welcome in the public sphere only with certain provisos that seek to keep it in

check. The classic ‘proviso’ is that of Rawls (1997, 783):

Reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or non-religious, may be introduced in public

political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons, and not
reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines, are presented that are sufficient to support
whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support.135

135
This revised proviso is less restrictive than Rawls’s original proviso in Political Liberalism (1996)
according to which religious views had no place in the public sphere wherein everyone must deliberate

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Habermas takes seriously the objection to this that such a requirement demands of religious

citizens an artificial and difficult cognitive division that undercuts their very practice of religion

(2008, 127). A devout person conducts her daily existence on the basis of her faith, which is not

merely a doctrine believed in but also a source of energy performatively nurturing life as a

whole.136 Religious reasons for action come naturally to such a person whereas making a nimble

switchover to a different cognitive basis is not natural or straightforward at all. It places an

additional cognitive burden that, for Habermas, is difficult to square with express liberal

protection of such forms of existence as a basic right. Seeking to overcome this critique against

the Rawlsian proviso that it places an asymmetrical burden on religious citizens, Habermas tries

to better it with his ‘translation proviso’ (2011, 25-27):

[A]ll citizens should be free to decide whether they want to use religious language in the public
sphere. Were they to do so, they would, however, have to accept that the potential truth contents of
religious utterances must be translated into a generally accessible language before they can find their
way onto the agendas of parliaments, courts, or administrative bodies and influence their decisions.

This ‘institutional filter’, Habermas asserts, between informal communication in the public

arena and formal deliberation of political institutions achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that

all legally enforceable decisions are formulated and justified in a universally accessible language

whilst also not distributing burdens asymmetrically (2011, 26). Religious citizens accept—not

necessarily assume, as they would on the Rawlsian model—the burden of translation. They must

know and accept that only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold separating

the informal and formal domains of the public sphere. This calls only for the epistemic ability

to consider one’s religious convictions reflexively from the outside and connect them with

secular views (Habermas 2008, 130, 138). On the other hand, secular citizens are obliged not to

in the language of ‘reason alone’ and, as such, appeal to any comprehensive doctrines, in discussions of
constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, was disallowed altogether (224-5).
136
Habermas accepts the contention of Wolterstorff (1997) that for many religious people religion is not
about something other than their social and political existence, but includes this aspect too (105).

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dismiss religious contributions as mere noise or nonsense from the start, or as the archaic relics

of pre-modern societies persisting into the present. They must engage their religious

counterparts with minds open to the possible truth content of religious discourse and they must

cooperate in the task of translation. They need not just a respectful sensibility for the possible

existential significance of religion for some other person but in fact a self-reflexive overcoming

of rigid and exclusive secularist self-understandings of modernity. The philosophical

recapitulation of the genealogy of reason plays a similar role for a critical self-reflection of

secularism as the reconstructive work of theology plays for the critical self-reflection of religious

faith in the modern world (143).

As such, Habermas argues, the cognitive burdens imposed on both sides are not

asymmetrical. Both religious and secular citizens are involved in the interaction that is

constitutive for a democratic process ‘springing from the soil of civil society and developing

through the informal communication networks of the public sphere’. Such a model, Habermas

explains, requires citizens, believers and unbelievers alike, to be aware of the fallibility of their

worldviews (2003, 105). And it requires the neutral state to abstain from prejudging political

decisions in favour of one side or the other when confronted with competing claims of knowledge

and faith. ‘Democratic public reason’ remains osmotically open to both sides, science and religion,

without relinquishing its independence, whilst keeping equal distance, in the outcome, from any

strong traditions and comprehensive worldviews. In this sense, Habermas’s secularism singles out

religion for exclusion from certain ‘formal’ domains of public discourse whilst still making room

for it in the public sphere more generally. It is welcome in civil society, but it is to be filtered out

of the formal deliberation of political bodies. Even in civil society, however, it is, ideally, to be

translated to the ‘common’ vernacular, which is the ‘secular’ language of public reason.137 As for

137
This view turns on the presupposition that secular language is universal, while religious language is
particular, and on a secular liberal notion of ‘public reason’. We return to outline and critique these in
Chapter Five, pp. 275-286.

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the formal public sphere, translation is necessary here in order to maintain the state’s neutrality

toward competing worldviews. If religious reasons and arguments are permitted here as well—as

Wolterstorff (1997) and Weithman (2002) among others would have it—then the secular, liberal

requirement of neutrality is infringed (Habermas 2008, 132).

Habermas’s claim that his proviso shares the cognitive burdens symmetrically between

religious and secular citizens may well be admitted, at first sight. However, there is little doubt

that the overall treatment of the religious and secular is still explicitly asymmetrical. The latter

reigns as reference point and sets the parameters of political life, while the former is to be

managed to fit in. Religious reasoning is permitted, on this model, as in Rawls, but only in the

capacity of ‘minors who needed to be chaperoned in political debate by an adult’, that is, by a

genuinely public reason (Chaplin 2012, 323). Secular reasons have priority; religious reasons

need to be translated. Secular knowledge has universal relevance; religious knowledge is

particular. More fundamentally, the very self-critical reflexivity towards core beliefs that is

demanded of everyone is, according to Habermas himself, a distinguishing feature of modern

secularity. What he is effectively seeking, then, is for religious citizens to secularise and for

secular citizens to make themselves, or their political engagements at least, more properly

secular. Further, it is questionable whether Habermas achieves his goal of not requiring religious

citizens to undercut the way they live their faith. This is because, on the one hand, he

distinguishes religious from secular convictions by the former’s reliance on a dogmatic core that

is sheltered from reflexive thinking and, on the other, his institutional proviso demands that

religious citizens consider their own convictions reflexively in order to connect them with

secular views. This alone is sufficient to show that, on his own view, the cognitive burden on

religious citizens is not only greater than their secular counterparts but in fact requires them to

live their faith differently to how they otherwise would.

Moreover, to the extent that we are here considering the burdens effected by Habermas’s

institutional proviso in light of the liberal protection of people’s basic right to live their lives as

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per their own worldviews, it is worth mentioning that secular citizens are also burdened by

affirming beliefs they otherwise would not. For instance, some secular citizens do genuinely

believe that religious contributions are nonsense because they are based on fundamentally

flawed premises. Why should they have to not only believe otherwise but also bear some of the

burden of translating what they think has little to no worth? Notably then, while Habermas has

successfully placed cognitive burdens on both sides, not only are they asymmetrical, but they

also entail artificial encumbrances that would have people live, their public lives at least, in ways

different to what they would choose to without such encumbrances—all the while being told

that their basic right to live as they want is secure. Such burdens and demands that would have

religion itself, even before its reasons, ‘translated’ into secular form may well be argued as

necessary for the requirements of secular liberal democracy and its conception of an equitable

politics, but it is untenable to simultaneously claim to be treating religion and secularity

symmetrically, let alone to claim that this form of statehood or politics is neutral with respect

to all worldviews. It is not neutral precisely because these requirements, as with the rest of the

fundamentals of the model, are the normative, contentious and contestable, demands of a

secular liberal worldview—as we attempt to show at length in Chapter Five.

Taylorian Substantive-Republican Secularism

For Charles Taylor, secularism is justified on much the same grounds as those invoked by

Habermas— primarily, the need to manage diverse societies: ‘The pluralism of society requires

that there be some kind of neutrality’ (2011, 34)—with three significant differences: one, that

secularism should not single out religion as a special case among competing worldviews; two,

that secular reason ought not be privileged over religious reason, hence there is no need for any

translation proviso; and three, that proceduralism is insufficient for the burdens of the modern

liberal state. Against his notion of an ‘exclusive humanism’, Taylor advocates for an ‘inclusive

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humanism’: a liberalism that is patriotic rather than procedural, that preserves state neutrality

from religious domination but is fully open to religious contribution in public life.

Taylor asserts that secularism warrants a radical redefinition to free it from an unhealthy

and unjustified fixation on religion, from treating religion as a ‘special case’. Secularism, for

Taylor, seeks three goods that can be classed in the three categories of the French Revolutionary

trinity: liberty, equality, fraternity (34-35). Specifically, no religion or basic belief is to be forced

on anyone (liberty), or to enjoy a privileged status in society (equality), and all are to be included

in deliberation on the political identity of the society and how it will achieve these goals

(fraternity). If this is the case, then secularism is not about the relation of the state with religion

but rather has to do with the correct response of the democratic state to diversity (36). The aim

is to protect people in the belief and practice of whatever outlook they choose, treating them

equally regardless of this choice, and giving them all a fair hearing. The ‘political principles’ of

human rights, equality, rule of law, and democracy are what is sought. There is no reason here

to single out religion as against non-religious viewpoints: ‘the point of state neutrality is

precisely to avoid favoring or disfavoring not just religious positions but any basic position,

religious or nonreligious’ (37).

The treatment of religion as a special case is indeed curious. Following the ‘cultural turn’ in

the humanities and social sciences, the classical liberal separation of culture and politics is

commonly held to be mistaken (Modood 2010, 4). Yet religion, otherwise subsumed by social

scientists under the category of culture, continues to be uniquely held as an aspect of social life

that must in some form be kept separate from politics and the state. This fixation on religion, for

Taylor, is bound up with a tendency to define secularism in terms of some institutional

arrangement (2011, 40-41). This ‘fetishisation’ of some institutional formula, such as the idea of a

‘wall of separation’ between church and state, becomes the goal in and of itself and the entire

matter is reduced to how best to meet this formula. Instead, argues Taylor, we should start from

the goals—such as those outlined above—and derive the requisite arrangements therefrom. Some

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separation of church and state—some mutual autonomy of governing and religious institutions

and the neutrality of the former—will still be indispensable but what form they are to take and

what they mean in practice should be determined by how we can maximise the three basic goals.

With this adjustment, secularism, for Taylor, much like for Habermas, is not simply

needed or preferable but inescapable, in virtue of the requirements of democratic legitimacy

(1998, 47). Its inescapability flows from the nature of modern democratic states as ‘imagined

communities’ with a social imaginary bearing certain features distinct from pre-modern

societies (38-39). Two features of modern societies in particular are highlighted by Taylor:

direct-accessibility and temporal homogeneity.

Pre-modern societies, argues Taylor, were marked by hierarchy and mediacy of access (39-

40). One belonged to such a society via belonging to some component of it, such as a peasant

being linked to a lord who attached to a king, or a member of a municipal corporation with a

particular standing in the kingdom. The only way people could understand belonging to a larger

whole, like a kingdom or church was through the imbrication of more immediate units (parish,

manor, town, cloister). By contrast, modern societies, as a facet of modern equality and

individualism, are horizontal and direct-access. However one might relate to society through

intermediary organisations, their fundamental belonging to the state is not dependent on these;

it is direct through the notion of citizenship. All citizens, at least in the normative conception

of the new social imaginary, if not always in practice, stand in direct relation to the state.

Modernity has brought about a revolution in our social imaginary through the diffusion of

images of direct-access, facilitated by multiple developments: the rise of the public sphere in

which all have equal right to participate; the extension of the marketplace whereby all contracts

are between legal equals; and the concept of citizenship.

The other important feature of the modern social imaginary is that it no longer sees greater

translocal entities as grounded in something higher than common action in secular time (40-41).

All time is equally profane. This temporal homogeneity is in contrast to pre-modern states where

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the hierarchical order of the kingdom was seen as based in the Great Chain of Being, and the tribal

unit was constituted as such by its law. The importance in pre-modern revolutions of the

backward look to an original law comes from the understanding that the polity in action-

transcendent. It cannot simply create itself by its own action. Rather, its action requires a prior

constitution, hence legitimacy attaches to returning to the original constitution. A new way of

conceiving things enters the social imaginary in the late eighteenth century with the American

(and then French) revolution, which was initially undertaken in the backward-looking spirit but

out of which emerges the crucial novel fiction of ‘we, the people’ who exist prior to their political

constitution and give themselves a desired political form by their own free action in secular time.

These two features are also related, argues Taylor, following Anderson (1991), whose

notion of ‘imagined communities’ he is explicitly leaning on here (42). A purely secular

temporality allows for an image of a horizontal society without ‘high points’ that touch ‘higher’

time. In turn, we are without need of recognising privileged agencies who mediate at such

points. This radical temporal horizontality goes hand-in-glove with the immediacy of each

member of society to the whole. Together, these two features mean that there are no privileged

persons or events, and hence no mediations. They also form the background to the

contemporary sources of legitimate government in the will of the people, a principle, argues

Taylor, that is now virtually the only acceptable basis for any permanent regime (43). The

functional requirement of this is active citizen participation and a strong sense of common

identity. Unlike traditional despotisms, which required people to remain passive and merely

obey the law, free democratic societies substitute despotic enforcement with a degree of self-

enforcement and require of citizens some degree of participation in the process of governance.

It is from here, for Taylor, that the need for secularism arises. Modern democratic states

need a healthy degree of citizen identification with the polity, which is why they try to create a

strong sense of common identity even where it did not previously exist (44). This requires the

attempt to shift the balance within the identity of the citizen so that being a citizen takes

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precedence over other poles of identity, such as family, class, gender, and, in particular, religion.

This may be done deliberately on the basis of an express ideology, as with French

Republicanism, or indirectly by figuring other modes of description (gender, race, religion)

irrelevant in the operation of public life. The foregrounding, indeed the very formation, of the

‘citizen’ is required if people are to be bound together to form a single deliberative and decision-

making unit, as necessitated by their being the locus of sovereignty. The sovereignty of the

‘people’ in modern democracies requires that they see themselves as more-or-less equal and

autonomous members bound together in the common enterprise of self-rule (45). Democratic

legitimacy requires that the laws we live under are understood as resulting from our collective

decisions. If some segments are systematically excluded from the processes of deliberation and

decision, the legitimacy of democratic rule is under challenge.

The mode of citizens’ identification with the polity and with each other is a key point of

divergence for Taylor vis-à-vis Habermas, in large part because he adopts a different social

ontology and a different approach to morality. Contra Habermas’s proceduralist morality of the

right/just, Taylor argues for a substantive, if minimal, morality of the good. This is because, for

Taylor, the social glue in any society needs to be some substantive image of the good, which

cannot be based in mere procedures. Proceduralist conceptions of morality or practical reason,

whether utilitarian or Kantian, have two primary defects, according to Taylor (1989, 87). First,

they mask the fact that they themselves are grounded in substantive concepts of the good.

Second, they overly emphasise the domain of rights and reciprocal obligations and neglect the

‘qualitative distinctions’ that necessarily mark the self-understanding of persons. A ‘post-

metaphysical’ proceduralist morality of justice is based on a selective understanding of modern

identity which deprives it of important sources of moral deliberation and motivation. It cannot

motivate or awaken moral sensibility, or even overcome moral cynicism in providing a cogent

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answer to the question, ‘why be moral at all?’138 To understand his position better, it helps to

step back and consider Taylor’s broader philosophy of self and morality.

Strong Evaluation and (necessary) Pictures of the Good

Taylor identifies with a Humboldtian ‘holist’ social ontology that recognises the social

embeddedness of human agents but still prizes, as a matter of social advocacy, liberty and

individual differences (Taylor 2003). Contra the ‘disengaged’ identity/subject of procedural

liberalism, Taylor upholds the idea of a ‘situated subject’ embedded in community bearing

particular value horizons, constellations of values, norms, and background assumptions,

structured by language and intersubjectivity (163). Situated subjectivity marks the world

character of the self, for whom reflection is a self-interpreting, not a self-observing, as per to the

Cartesian subject-object scheme, and is structured by language as world-disclosing: it reveals a

subjective and communal world. The self is a temporal being in a historical world with given

connections to past and future.139

Selfhood is thus inextricably linked with morality and pictures/images of the good. The

moral intuitions we all have (respect for others’ life and well-being), the ‘spiritual’ senses we all

bear (notions of self-dignity and what makes a worthy life), and the moral obligations we all

acknowledge (not to harm others gratuitously) only make sense against a (mostly unarticulated)

background or moral horizon. Understanding this background is crucial but mostly ignored by

138
Habermas concedes the charge that deontological theories cannot answer the question of why we
should be moral at all (2003, 4; 2021, 9). Procedural political theories are likewise unable to answer the
question of why the citizens of a democratic polity should orient themselves toward the common good
in the first place. His earlier response on this problem was tied to the hope that processes of socialisation
and political forms of life meet theories of justice halfway. More recently, this hope is complimented by
the fact of moral progress in history encouraging us to understand ourselves (as autonomous rational
beings) in a way that dispenses with the need for any further answer to this question.
139
Habermas is equally critical of what he calls the ‘philosophy of the subject/consciousness’ and very much
in agreement with the inextricable mediation of selfhood and reason by language and intersubjectivity. For
him, however, this does not mean that politics requires attachment to conceptions of the good.

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contemporary moral philosophy—in its predominant utilitarian and neo-Kantian forms—given

its narrow focus on what it is right to do rather than what it is good to be (1989, 3-4). The moral

intuition of respect for life, for instance, is universal, while the shape it takes differs from culture

to culture. This shape, nevertheless, in inseparable from an account of what it is that commands

our respect and why. The account articulates the intuition: humans are creatures of God made

in this image, or they are immortal souls, or they are rational agents with a unique dignity, and

therefore we owe them respect (5). Thus the intuition is instinctual but also leans on a claim

about the nature and status of human beings, an ontology of the human. The ontological

account articulates the claims implicit in the moral instinct.

For Taylor, at the core of this background horizon is ‘strong evaluation’ manifest in

‘qualitative discriminations’ of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower. These are

distinctions of kind, not just degree, which are not rendered valid by our personal desires,

inclinations, and choice (the products of ‘weak evaluation’) but stand independent of these and

offer standards by which these are judged (20). I may be given to laziness or constant

procrastination (or overworking) but I have a sense that this inclination isn’t right; I ought to

do something to correct it. Strong evaluations are thus qualitatively more substantive values

relative to criteria of comfort and convenience and are the real action-guiding considerations of

people. They define pictures/conceptions of the good that command our awe, orient our sense

of what is important in life, and function as standards of strong evaluation. The goods they

articulate are thus ‘hypergoods’, ‘goods which not only are incomparably more important than

others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.’

(63). Pictures of the good about the ‘higher’ (worthier) life as being the life the warrior/solider,

or the life of mastery of self by reason (against lower desires) defined in terms of a vision of

order in the cosmos and soul, or the life guided by reason defined procedurally (in terms of

instrumental efficacy, maximisation of the value sought, or self-consistency), or the life of

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transformation of will by grace, or by a selfless dedication to others/the general good, or the

artistic life of vision and expressive creativity and power (21-22).

Qualitative discriminations thus define our conceptions of the good and together these

constitute the moral-spiritual horizon within which self-understanding takes place—and can

only be fully transcended at the cost of losing one’s identity. Taylor’s examples identify various

conceptions of the good that have gained currency in different times and places in the Western

tradition, but his point is that some such conception is ineluctable for every person; it provides

a moral and ‘spiritual’ orientation essential to our identity (78). It provides the reasons that

makes sense of, or comprise the conditions of possibility for the sense of, our moral instincts.

Reasons not in the sense of external considerations that one might give others in trying to

convince them to adopt a certain vision of the good, nor in the sense of reasons for a moral

principle that confer on it moral force, but rather reasons that much more basically articulate

the shape of one’s moral horizon.140

The upshot of this analysis is that conceptions of the good are essential to selfhood and

morality. Contra Habermas’s preference for Kantian over Aristotelian practical reason, Taylor

goes in the other direction. For him, moral philosophies that focus on the right to the exclusion

of the good make a serious mistake. The epistemological and metaphysical predilections of

naturalism and the desire for a fully universal ethic have led these to sideline qualitative

discriminations and conceptions of the good in moral considerations (85).141 As have some

strong moral motives: the valorisation of ordinary life against the demands of supposedly

specious ‘higher’ goods, the modern conception of freedom and autonomy, certain readings of

140
Thus, ‘It is one thing to say that I ought to refrain from manipulating your emotions or threatening
you, because that is what respecting your rights as a human being requires. It is quite another to set out
just what makes human beings worthy of commanding our respect, and to describe the higher mode of
life and feeling which is involved in recognizing this’ (Taylor 1989, 77).
141
Habermas’s (1993) response to Taylor’s notion of ‘strong evaluation’, and the relating of morality to the
good it benefits, is that it is too broadly defined, conflating ethics and morality, which according to
Habermas, must be treated separately, as detailed above, see p. 184.

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the demands of benevolence and altruism.142 And of course modern ‘authenticity’ in Trilling’s

(1971) sense, on which Taylor (1992) builds. Such considerations have motivated a move to

procedural conceptions of morality, which focus on procedures or rules for deciding norms, as

opposed to the moral substance or content of norms. Taylor is wont to show, however, that

these very motivations belie the exclusion they seek, because in themselves they represent

conceptions of the good: moral freedom/autonomy, altruism, universalism (88). These are the

distinctive hypergoods of modern Western culture, which drive procedural moral theories, in a

strange pragmatic contradiction, to exclude consideration of all goods.

To be sure, Taylor does not want to figure these hypergoods of modern culture as

illegitimately smuggled in, in order to reject them. On the contrary, he seeks to show that they

are the inexorable transcendental conditions of the modern identity that have much to their

credit, in order to affirm them (1989, 30-40). He also wants to show, however, that this

affirmation does not necessitate recourse to procedural reason and ethics. Rather, recognising

the irreducibility of qualitative distinctions and the hypergoods they articulate to subjective

wills or preferences facilitates the revival of an ethics of the good under modern conditions. In

painting the full picture of modern identity in Sources of the Self, Taylor is not merely describing

the cultural history of values that have attained pre-eminence in the modern era, he also seeks

thereby to vindicate a modern self-understanding that has become ineluctable and

authoritative. In turn, his practical reason is Aristotelian but mediated through modern culture:

it is a ‘modernized and individualized Aristotelianism, where modernization refers to the role

of identity, autonomy, authenticity and value pluralism’ (Laitinen 2008, 33).

142
A substantive practical reason implies that practical wisdom is in some sense in the order of nature. To
reverse this and give primacy to the agent’s own desires or will requires a procedural practical reason.

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The Deficits of Proceduralism

Returning to Taylor’s political philosophy, he argues that from the perspective of society,

without a socially endorsed conception of the good, proceduralism does not supply the basis of

common action, as distinct from collective instrumental action.143 It therefore cannot provide

for the requisite self-motivated disciplines and civic energies—of the sort that republican

patriotism was said to secure in the civic humanist tradition—that a free, democratic society

needs. For Taylor, other ‘atomist’ candidates for the basis of such common action, and thus a

viable liberal society, are all deficient (2003, 173-5). Enlightened self-interest, as per the

eighteenth-century view, will never move people strongly enough. The idea that by virtue of

higher (modern) moral standards citizens are sufficiently imbued with the liberal ethos to

support and defend their society may be true for some people but only few will be moved by

such a universal principle, unalloyed with particular identifications. As for those who support a

society because of the security and prosperity it generates—according to the idea from

‘revisionist’ democratic theory that a mature liberal society does not demand active citizen

participation in the first place, as long as it provides for their security and prosperity—such

people are fair-weather friends bound to let you down in difficult times.

Alternatively, if we construe the ethic of right as the sufficient basis for identification with

a common good—as some advocates of procedural liberalism are wont to do—we miss the fact

that converging moral principles alone are insufficient. The socially endorsed good is also a

common allegiance to a particular historical community (2003, 176). Identifying with,

cherishing, and sustaining a concrete historical set of institutions and forms is the required

common goal, and this is much more than just agreement on an abstract rule of right. Using the

143
For Taylor, the distinction between collective instrumentality and common action rests on a prior
distinction between ‘immediately common goods’, where the good is that we share in certain meanings,
actions, and social identification, and merely ‘convergent’ goods, like security or public utilities, which
are only ‘common’ or ‘public’ in the sense that they can only be secured collectively. For more on this, see
Taylor (2003), pp. 167-170.

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example of the Watergate affair in the United States, Taylor posits that this is in fact how

modern liberal democracies function (174). The mass outrage seen in events such as this is not

a response to calculations of long-term interest, or a general moral commitment to liberal

democratic principles, or a function of seeing society instrumentally. It is rather the result of a

species of patriotic identification. In the US, there is a widespread identification with ‘the

American way of life’, a sense of Americans sharing a common identity and history, defined by

commitment to certain ideals articulated in specific significant moments of a shared history

such as the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Patriotism is, of

course, also responsible for much evil, such as in its virulent nationalist form, but whatever

menace its malign effects have spawned, the benign ones have been and are essential to the

maintenance of liberal democracy (175).

A further problem with proceduralism is that it only allows for the ‘politics of equal

dignity’ but not a ‘politics of difference’ qua a ‘politics of recognition’ (Taylor 1994). The former

recognises what is unique and equal in all humans qua human, and manifests in an identical

basket of universal (liberal) rights and immunities. The latter requires a recognition of the what

unique to the identity of an individual or group, their distinctness from others. The ‘procedural

republic’ (Sandel 1984), with its difference-blindness and allergy to ethical substance, does not

allow for this. This ‘restrictive’ view of ‘rights-liberalism’ and of equal rights is not however the

only option (52). According to a more ‘hospitable’ view, which Taylor favours, a society with

strong collective goals can also be liberal so long as it distinguishes ‘fundamental’ liberties,

which can never be infringed, from contingent privileges and immunities for individuals and

groups, which can be revoked or restricted for reasons of public policy (59). Taylor thus favours

a ‘multiculturalist’ liberalism as against a proceduralist, merely rights-based, liberalism.

Habermas’s (1994) response to this criticism is that constitutional liberalism is not just

about a set of legal rights, adjudicated juridically, that are blind to social conditions and cultural

differences. Such an interpretation—Taylor’s—is paternalistic and reductive. It acknowledges

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only half of the concept of autonomy. The other half refers to the internal connection between

democracy and the constitutional state. Citizens acquire autonomy only to the extent that they

understand themselves not just as equal under the law but also as the authors of that law (112).

The democratic elaboration of a system of rights has to incorporate the collective goals

articulated in struggles for recognition (124). Every legal system is also the expression of a

particular form of life, not merely of the universal content of basic rights, and every democratic

process for actualising basic rights is inevitably permeated by ethics (126). Constitutional

democracy, however, maintains legal neutrality with respect to ethical communities at the sub-

political level—hence its common political culture is procedural, not substantive. In turn, it

grants members of minority cultures equal rights of coexistence with majority cultures, but only

as individual rights of association and non-discrimination, not as groups’ rights of survival (134).

Taylor finds this insufficient. He maintains, in agreement with liberal neutralists, that states

adopting a religious conception of common good is discriminatory, but, against them, is in favour

of state support for a particular historical community that can serve as the locus of citizen

patriotism. This becomes a problem however, as we shall see, because any particular historical

community will relate to some conception of the good, discriminating against those not in favour

of this particular conception, and compromising the very neutrality of state Taylor requires.

The difference between Taylor and Habermas on the epistemic status of secular vis-à-vis

religious reason is also a significant one. Far from a being difference in detail, in otherwise

similar models, this disagreement testifies to a deeper schism—a more fundamental

philosophical divide on how ‘modernity’ is understood (Spohn 2015, 121). This difference

concerns the possibility of ‘independent justification’—justification not relying on any

comprehensive doctrine—and related questions of public reasoning and state neutrality.

Habermas upholds the universality of modern Western secularity and thus the possibility of

independent justification because he takes an ‘acultural’ view of modernity, whereby its key

features, such as secularism, are the result of a neutral process of human progress which any

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culture can undergo. On the contrary, Taylor sees modernity as ‘cultural’, that is, its key features

are expressive of a newly constructed culture: ‘liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete

cultural neutrality’ (1994, 62).144 In turn, he is critical of any general epistemic privileging of

secular reason since for him the secular moral outlook is no more neutral than any other: it rests

on a specific vision of the human being and society that competes in the plural field of

philosophical anthropologies and social scientific paradigms (Spohn 2015, 127). Taylor’s position

is more plausible, as we come to see in Chapter Five, but it also renders his larger case less

coherent. Where Habermas can hang the purported neutrality of his secularism on its universal

and acultural status, Taylor cannot do the same, yet he still argues that secularism is in some

fundamental senses neutral.

A Necessary Substantive-yet-Neutral Secularism?

With these differences noted, nevertheless, secularism in some form, for Taylor as for

Habermas, is a necessity for the democratic life of diverse societies, precisely because it allows

for neutral governance: ‘The pluralism of society requires that there be some kind of neutrality’

(2011, 34). Thus, while Taylor eschews proceduralism in favour of a substantive republicanism,

he also wants neutrality. Political power must be ‘neutral towards religions’; the democratic

state must be ‘neutral or impartial in its relations with the different faiths’ and, more broadly,

‘in relation to the different worldviews and conceptions of the good—secular, spiritual, and

religious—with which citizens identify’ (Maclure and Taylor 2011, 9-10). Otherwise, some

citizens would be treated as second-class citizens. Further, abstracting from religious (and non-

religious) difference is needed to form a homogenous, sovereign ‘people’. The requisite sense of

mutual bonding and the reference points of political debate that flow from it must be accessible

144
Spohn borrows the terminology of cultural and acultural from an earlier work of Taylor. See Taylor C
1995, ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, in The Hastings Center Report, 25, pp. 24–33.

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to citizens of different religious (or secular) commitments (Taylor 1998, 46). If people were

defined confessionally or the political debate were had in confessional terms, members of other

(or no) confessions would be excluded from full participation in self-rule; they would not be full

members of the sovereign. They would be outside the bonded group and their perspectives

would by definition be accorded lesser legitimacy. The requirements of democratic legitimacy

then place such minorities in an anomalous position of resident aliens, which can only be

‘finally’ resolved by removal, emigration, or worse (47). Non-secular regimes in the democratic

age are, therefore, exclusionary and their logic is frightening. The end of hierarchy has raised

the stakes: ‘either the civilized coexistence of diverse groups, or new forms of savagery’ (48).

Thus, argues Taylor, secularism is no longer optional—it allows modern societies to define a

political ethic independent of religious convictions, something they simply cannot do without

given their heterogeneous nature.

Such a politic ethic is arrived at through an ‘overlapping consensus’, which allows people

to have different, even mutually exclusive, reasons for affirming the politically significant ethic,

and disputes are to be addressed through persuasion and negotiation.145 The difference in

strategy between the ‘common ground’ and ‘independent ethic’ approaches, dealing with only

intra-Christian confessional conflicts in early modernity, gives rise to different ways of

understanding the grounds of peaceful coexistence in late modernity between people of diverse

faiths or, more broadly, diverse worldviews, religious and secular (Taylor 1998, 34).146 Where

one approach appeals to the competing worldviews in trying to locate a common denominator

145
For instance, the ‘political principles’ of ‘human rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy’ as a
political ethic is said to be shared by people of very different basic outlooks: ‘A Kantian will justify the
rights to life and freedom by pointing to the dignity of rational agency; a utilitarian will speak of the
necessity to treat beings who can experience joy and suffering in such a way as to maximize the first and
minimize the second. A Christian will speak of humans as made in the image of God. They concur on the
principles but differ on the deeper reasons for holding to this ethic. The state must uphold the ethic, but
must refrain from favouring any of the deeper reasons’ (Taylor 2011, 37).
146
For an outline of the ‘common ground’ and ‘independent ethic’ approaches, see p. 104 above.

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of fundamentals, the other abstracts from them altogether for purposes of a political morality

set up on an independent ground. With the diversification of late modern societies—the

presence beyond just Christians of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Atheists—however, both these

strategies fall short of the mark (36). Such disparate worldviews, religious and secular, make it

nigh impossible to find a common ground between all of them or an independent ethic to whose

foundation they might all subscribe. This, Taylor argues, calls for a third ‘overlapping consensus’

approach—following Rawls (1995)—which is effectively the independent ethic strategy shorn of

the requirement that its foundation be shared (37).147 This approach aims only at universal

acceptance of the political ethic comprising of certain political principles while recognising from

the outset that there can be no universally agreed basis for these, religious or ‘independent’.

Rather, the political ethic is embedded within diverse worldviews for their own reasons.

On this view, the markedly liberal moral-political positions of human rights, democracy

and equality become mere ‘political principles’, ‘basic principles’ or ‘basic norms’ that everyone

can agree with, as if they are neutral values, not themselves emanating from the ‘deeper reasons’

of liberalism (Taylor 2011, 40). We would assert that Taylor’s move here—as with Rawls and

Habermas—is to take the fundamental normative contents of one worldview, namely liberalism,

and elevate them to the (non-negotiable) political ethic of the state, which it is to support and

implement, all the while claiming to uphold the notion that the state is not to privilege any

particular worldview. This move makes the liberal worldview invisible, masking its normativity

in the mantle of alleged neutrality, which is precisely what Taylor sought to avoid when arguing

against procedural forms of liberalism.

147
Taylor distinguishes himself from Rawls on this count in so far as Rawls sees a liberal society as
converging on ‘justice as fairness’ not just in terms of the principles of justice as guides for action, but also
in terms of the rationale for these, in a doctrine of political constructivism, reasonable mutual expectations,
and just terms of cooperation. For Taylor, this is asking for too much since the point of the overlapping
consensus is precisely that it does not prescribe any underlying justification (Taylor 1998, 51-52).

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 Taylor would argue that ‘human rights’—to take one of his ‘three basic norms’—is a

foreground principle supported by many different worldviews, albeit based on different

background or deeper reasons. The modern notion of human rights, however, is much more

closely tied to liberalism than to be so easily quarantined and abstracted as a general, free-

standing principle.148 Even if the premise that human rights is a foreground principle is

conceded, however, it can only be true to the extent that ‘human rights’ is conceived of as an

empty shell—an ‘empty signifier’ without any necessary body or content (Laclau 1992, 90)—

meaning little more than the assertion that human beings have certain (unspecified, undefined)

fundamental rights. Such a vacuous notion lacks the concrete content that bestows on it any

utility as a political ethic, as a value to be fostered by the state and society, the very purpose

ascribed to it by proponents such as Taylor. As soon as the shell is filled with any content, we

face serious moral questions that simply cannot be answered in abstraction from the deeper

reasons of particular worldviews. Alternatively stated, the shell cannot be filled with any content

without privileging a particular worldview over others.

This point does not escape Taylor, who is inclined to point out that ‘distinguishing the

ethic converged on from the underlying reasons’ is not easy because ‘a political ethic does not

interpret itself’ but ‘will be interpreted in the light of the entire background of justification from

which it springs’ (Taylor 1998, 49-50). We may take the ‘right to life’ as an example. All

normative worldviews may agree to humans having a basic right to life, but none affirm it

unconditionally. That is, they all allow life to be taken under certain circumstances but disagree

markedly on what those circumstances are. Any right to life, then, cannot be upheld concretely

without reference to the deeper reasons and specific moral content of a particular normative

worldview. Taylor’s own example is the abortion debates in some Western societies ‘where the

generally accepted “right to life” is given a very different meaning by people with a different

148
The substantively liberal nature of human rights is discussed in Chapter Five, pp 146-147.

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basic understanding of human agency and its place in the universe or in God’s plan’ (50). He

accepts that in a society conceived as an overlapping consensus, this sort of dissensus will

ineluctably become more common because there is, by definition, no agreement on any

authoritative canon for adjudication. We have no recourse except to proceed by persuasion and

negotiated compromise. However, since the adjudicating premises come from the

deeper/background reasons that are not shared, on what basis is any persuasion to proceed?

What ends up happening, in fact, is that the prevailing worldview, in any given society or

subsection thereof, and its fundamental premises are assigned adjudicative authority.

Taylor’s legitimation of secularism thus falls, we assert, on three counts. First, and most

importantly, it rests on the ability of secularism to provide an independent, neutral ethic—for

which it is deemed inescapable—but which it simply cannot provide.149 Rather, a minimally

secular liberal ethic is merely presented as independent. This reveals a major tension-generating

faultline in Taylor on the question of neutrality. When theorising liberalism, he is wont to

eschew requirements of neutrality (in the form of proceduralism) in order to make room in

politics for conceptions of the good. But when theorising secularism, he needs to bring

neutrality back in, in order to secure freedom and impartiality between religions. Yet the first

move cramps room for the second and the tension remains unresolved: Taylor cannot have his

neutral cake, and eat it too.

Second, Taylor’s necessitating of secularism is done with consistent qualification of, and

reference to, democracy. He leans the legitimation of secularism on democratic legitimacy.

However, secularism and democracy historically and conceptually go hand-in-glove. The early

modern ‘anthropocentric turn’ away from God towards the human and the world is what makes

popular sovereignty desirable, indeed, even thinkable. If this is true, then presupposing

democratic ideals in a legitimation of secularism suffers from an obvious circularity. It amounts

149
The claim and critique of secular neutrality is discussed at length in Chapter Five.

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to saying that we must abstract away from religion/God if we are to turn away from divine to

popular sovereignty. That is true, of course, but only trivially or tautologically. It leaves open

the normative question of why such a shift is desirable and how it is legitimated with respect to

opposing positionalities.

Third, it is not clear why non-secularity is said to inevitability lead to ‘savagery’. If pre-

modern forms of hierarchised politics managed, in many if not all cases, to avoid outright

violence, why should we presuppose that this is no longer possible? Notably, Taylor reaches this

conclusion because he is presupposing democratic parameters: those excluded from popular

sovereignty become resident aliens and a constant potential threat. However, questioning

secularism is to question these very parameters and to ask whether they may be otherwise.

Furthermore, to the extent that secularism itself—in both theory, as we contest, and more

evidently in practice—does not escape a hierarchised politics, it should be clear that savagery is

not at all an inevitable outcome. The critiques of Asad and Brown bring these points into sharper

relief. Before that, we consider another sophisticated model that leans on Taylor but in some

respects does better than him.

Bhargavian ‘Contextual’ Secularism

Rajeev Bhargava (1998) presents a model that is Taylorian in mould but more explicit in

attempting a systematic legitimation of secularism, and therefore worth considering at some

length for our purposes. Bhargava advocates for a ‘political’ secularism legitimated on an

argument from ‘ordinary life’ (1998, 490-491). Ordinary life, a concept he takes from Taylor

(1989), is life spent in the production and reproduction of life itself, as distinct from life spent

in the pursuit of some ultimate ideal. We may think of this as the technical aspects of life tied

to its subsistence, as against its moral telos. A clash of competing ultimate ideals, associated

with competing religious or secular worldviews, carries the potential of depriving people of

leading a minimally decent ordinary life. Since the sole business of the state is to facilitate such

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a life for everyone, Bhargava asserts, all ultimate ideals ought to be expunged from its affairs.

Stated differently, the separation of religion and politics is required in order to avert suffering

and degradation of life.

Political secularism here, along the lines of Rawls ‘political liberalism’, is conceived as a

secularism justified by the exclusion from politics of all ultimate ideals, in contrast to ‘ethical

secularism’, which justifies the separation of religion from politics by an appeal to ultimate

ideals (autonomy, equality, democracy) (Bhargava 1998, 495-496). In doing so, the latter

privileges some ultimate ideals (and their associated worldviews) over others. On this view, the

models of Habermas and Taylor detailed above are instances of ethical secularism, which thus

fail in their quest to establish state neutrality precisely because they privilege some ultimate

ideals over others. Political secularism, however, seeks independence from, or neutrality

towards, all ultimate ideals. It demands of everyone, symmetrically, believer and non-believer

alike, that they give up something of exclusive importance in order to sustain that which is

generally valuable: the facilitation of ordinary life.

Having framed political secularism as the symmetrical exclusion of all ultimate ideals,

however, Bhargava is forced to ‘reintroduce’ some ideals (498-499). This is because, as he

acknowledges, political secularism has ideals of its own. It relies on the priority of the right over

the good, and the right, following Taylor (1989, 89), derives its point from the good since mere

procedures have no value independent of the good. The two inform each other in a dialectical

relationship, which means that, at least in part, notions of the good are determinative of the

right—even as the right serves a functional role for the good: to allow a stable quest for it. It

serves the ‘small’ ideals of a stable ‘ordinary life’, which have priority over it, only within which

can people strive for their own ‘high’ ideals, over which it has priority. The ‘lexical order’ of

priority for political secularism then is ‘uncontroversial’ small ideals—right—controversial

ultimate ideals (500). Thus, there is a (purportedly uncontroversial, common) good that has

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priority over the right—and without which the right would be a meaningless pure formality—

before the right has a priority over a different type of (controversial, particular) good (539).

The upshot, for Bhargava, is that in fact political secularism need not exclude all ultimate

ideals, but only those that are ‘excessively controversial’ (499). What, we are surely justified in

asking, determines the controversiality of an ideal? If judged normatively, one would be

introducing further ideals as the criteria of controversiality. Bhargava avoids this by proposing

a descriptive-functionalist criterion: an ultimate ideal is only (contingently) controversial when

it leads, in fact, to social mutual understanding breaking down and people inclining to use force

to resolve their clash of ideals. The actual occurrence of conflict indicates, retrospectively, on

the controversial nature of the ideals that caused the said conflict. In ending up here, however,

the ball has landed outside the ballpark. Bhargava started off trying to justify secularism, that

is, to justify the separation of religion from politics. What he ends up justifying instead is the

resolution of actual conflict, when it turns violent, by excluding its purported cause at that point

(arguably too late in the piece). But since he also notes that a ‘clash of brute interests can

generate as much cruelty as a conflict of ultimate ideas [sic]’ (491, note 7), it is no longer clear

how bracketing only ultimate ideals is a recipe to avoid the resort to violence.

It does not take much reflection to see that the legitimacy of Bhargava’s reintroduction of

ideals into his political secularism, and the coherency of his model overall, rests on his distinction

between ‘small’ and ‘high’ ideals and the claim that the former, unlike the latter, are not

controversial. This claim, we submit, is not established; it is an a priori view merely asserted but

one that ought not fairly be accepted as such. It is worth pointing out, first, that the very

distinction is arbitrary to the extent that a ‘small’ ideal, qua ideal, rests on normative premises.

Its ideality means it is asserted as something worth striving for. As such, it is either worth striving

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for as an end in itself or as a means for something else worth striving for, namely, ‘higher’ ideals.150

This, however, cannot be decided without reference to normative premises that sketch some

image of the good life. Any ‘small’ ideal is connected to its ‘higher’ siblings, even when being cut

off therefrom. Stated differently, the procedure to render an ideal uncontroversial (making it

‘small’) itself relies on controversial assumptions. Assumptions like, for example—one that

Bhargava later mentions en passant—that politics is an arena of conflict resolution rather than a

domain where people persuade each other about substantive values (511).

Further, underlying Bhargava’s model is not just the facilitation of ‘ordinary life’ but its

prioritisation. That this is a controversial premise ought not be difficult to see particularly in

context of the contestation of religious and secular worldviews. Clearly, many religious

worldviews will prioritise what they see as an otherworldly life to come over the present worldly

life, since for them the latter serves an instrumental purpose for the former. As in Augustine,

for instance, Christians ought to be like pilgrims in the saeculum who sojourn in this earthly

city and sigh for the peace of their heavenly country, the city of God (1994, 461). For many secular

worldviews, this world is an end itself. These are competing and therefore controversial

conceptions. Yet Bhargava has to assert the prioritisation of ordinary life as an uncontroversial

or self-evident and minimally overlapping common good for his political secularism—and his

minimally ethical secularism, which we come to below—to even get off the ground.

That political secularism is structured by its own controversial ideals is not its only

problem. It faces another, Bhargava inform us, again following Taylor: it is without a conception

of ‘togetherness’ that can provide for a viable community (508). It merely provides a way of

living together, not of living together well. The latter requires a high degree of community.

Political secularism allows me to live together with those around me to whom I owe minimal

150
This would be another way to parse ‘small’ and ‘high’ ideals, namely, that the former serve the securing
of the latter. That is, small ideals are instrumental for higher ideals. The key distinguishing factor for
Bhargava, however, is controversiality.

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respect in human interaction. But it does not provide the good for us to be bound up as one

community. My fellow citizens are people I live with, not people of my community. Ironically,

notes Bhargava, political secularism lacks a properly political conception as its citizen is just a

passive recipient of state benefits, not an active participant in communal/political life (512). For

this reason, Bhargava finds political secularism not ‘fully satisfactory’ except as a temporary fall-

back measure in times of deep and open discord (509). Such a right-based secularism flourishes

in conditions of radical difference (539). For more propitious times, he resorts back to ‘ethical’

secularism. Indeed, under circumstances of deep diversity, we are told, ‘only ethical secularism’

can fulfil the ideal of a political community (510, note 26).

Since ethical secularism appeals to controversial ultimate ideals, however—which is what

motivates the resort to political secularism in the first instance—Bhargava calls forth a particular

variety of it, a ‘contextual secularism’ that sits on a spectrum in between ‘hyper-substantive’ and

‘ultra-procedural’ secularisms (514-515). The latter are absolute versions of secularism in their

reliance on all substance (a set of ultimate ideals comprising a secularist worldview) or all

procedure (not invoking any ultimate ideals). In contrast, contextual secularism combines

substantive values and procedures without an a priori commitment to the absolute priority of

either. It has room for some ultimate ideals but is also open to excluding them all, if and when

they result in social conflict that threatens the structure of ordinary life. And because it has room

for some ultimate ideals, it is able to provide for a sense of community and active citizenship.

However, because it relies on some ultimate ideals—and these are invariably liberal ideals

(autonomy, equality, freedom)—the model is no longer neutral or symmetric between

competing worldviews or the citizens who ascribe to them, and arguably counters those very

ideals; liberalism, in this case, is explicitly privileged. This is the point at which Bhargava’s

contextual secularism too fails to remain coherent. He sees it as justifying the separation of

religion and politics because it brackets out ultimate ideals when ordinary life is threatened,

and ultimate ideals are constitutive of religious worldviews (515). To the extent that they are

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also constitutive of secular worldviews, however, it ought to be separating secularity from

politics when ordinary life is threatened. Contextual secularism, then, is really about separating

controversial ideals when they threaten social order, not about separating religion from politics

specifically. And, in the ‘good times’ when social order is not threatened, it is a form of

imposition that privileges liberal ideals over all others. In both cases, it fails to live up to the

explicit ideals of liberal secularism.

Notably, for Bhargava, the form of this contextual secularism’s ‘separation’ is neither

disengagement nor equidistance but rather ‘principled distance’ (515). The state’s relation with

religion is not one of simple intervention or non-interference. Rather, it may intervene or refrain

from doing so, on a case-by-case basis, depending on which strategy in any given case better serves

the principles of secularism, namely, religious liberty and equality of citizenship.151 Even the

‘intermingling’ of religion and politics is allowed so long as it meets these objectives. Further, the

state may in fact differentially treat various religions, but it must treat them based on non-

sectarian principles consistent with a set of values that secure a life of equality dignity for all.

Contextual secularism ‘advocates state intervention for the sake of substantive values’ (520).

‘Many forms of separation’, Bhargava avers, ‘lie between total exclusion and complete fusion’ (516).

Of course, intermingling and fusion are not forms of ‘separation’ by any stretch of the word’s

signification, indicating, again, that Bhargava’s secularism is not about religion per se, or about its

separation from politics, even if this is how he explicitly defines it. It is rather about the

management of society, including religion but not specific to it, by a set of (controversial, liberal)

ideals. It is about the privileging and prioritisation of these ideals, and, to the extent that they are

not open to being overturned even by democratic fiat, their imposition and sacralisation.

151
This is analogous to Taylor’s secularism which ought not single out religion for separation or
management but focus on a set of basic principles or ideals. Bhargava’s is doing something similar while
still tying secularism to the state’s relation with religion in particular because he sees religious worldviews
as somehow more reliant on, or more inherently constituted by, ultimate ideals.

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Asadian Constructive-Normative Secularism

Talal Asad presents a different, critical account of liberal secularism. Modern secularism, for

Asad, is not the mere separation of religion from the public sphere, nor the mere organisation

of diverse societies, as it is for Habermas or Taylor. Rather, it is a process of establishing a new

form of normative power over the modern subject, to which end it distinctively presupposes

new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’, and new imperatives associated with them

(Asad 2003, 2). It is not simply the organising structure for a priori elements of social-political

organisation—public, private, political, religious, ethical, civil, legal—but a discursive operation

of power that generates these spheres, establishes their boundaries, and suffuses them with

content, such that they acquire a natural quality for those living within and by its terms

(Mahmood 2015, 3-4). Only when these categories are understood as ‘natural’ can secularism be

figured as mere separation. Once historicised, not only are the effects of ideology and power are

made apparent, the generative contradictions internal to secularism—driven by its twin

propensities towards religion of a regulatory impulse and liberatory promise—are revealed.

Secularism’s self-image as merely erecting walls of separation is confounded by its self-assumed

(impossible) task of both freeing religion from, and subjecting it to, state power.

From another angle, secularism attempts ‘transcendent mediation’: it is an enactment by

which a political medium—the representation of citizenship—redefines and attempts to

transcend particular and differentiating practices of the self, articulated through class, gender and

religion—in contrast to the mediation enacted in pre-modern societies which sought to mediate

local identities without aiming at transcendence (Asad 2003, 5). This it does as part of a series of

interlinked projects that characterise ‘modernity’ and aim at institutionalising a number of

principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry,

consumerism, and free markets. As such, secularism accounts for distinctive sensibilities,

aesthetics and moralities, even if not constituting an integrated totality. It employs proliferating

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technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new

experiences of space and time, experiences constituting ‘disenchantment’, implying an immediate

access to reality stripped off myth, magic and the sacred (13-14). Thus, it is hardly neutral in any

sense of the word. It represents a very particular mediated experience of the world.

Asad (2021) suggests provocatively that the secular state in the West today, whether

French or American, seems to abide by the cuius regio, eius religio principle, not in its

commitment to any religion per se, but in its will to centralised power and its enunciation of

political/public truth from above. This is why secularism requires the establishment of a single

power (the sovereign state) legitimised by a single abstraction (the nation) and given a single

task: the worldly pastoral care, regulation and defence of its citizens from internal and external

threats (172). In practice, argues Asad, it is not any free and fair deliberation by the ‘people’ as a

collective agency that resolves important questions of political and social organisation. Rather,

the regnant worldview of liberalism has greatest influence, and the disparate distribution of

power is determinative. It is from this perspective that Asad critiques Taylor, challenging the

latter’s conception of modern society as direct-access on almost all counts (Asad 2003, 3-6).

Political participation, Asad argues, has more to do with state enforcement than self-

enforcement. He notes the influence of pressure groups on government decisions, opinions

polls as a means for government anticipation and influencing of public opinion, and the role of

mass media which directly mediates individuals’ imagination of their national community, as

evidence that there is in fact a lesser direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary

representatives. The latter are less and less representative of the socio-economic interests,

identities, and aspirations of a culturally differentiated and economically polarised electorate.

Modern society, Asad asserts, in important ways is not at all a direct-access society. There

is no space in which citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another. Negotiation in

public life is confined to such elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary

legislators, and business leaders. The idea that disputes about background justifications and

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foreground political principles can simply be addressed through persuasion and negotiation is

based in a generous but naïve impulse (2003, 6). The nation-state is not a generous agent and

its law does not deal in persuasion. Given obvious imbalances of power, negotiation amounts to

the exchange of unequal concessions forced on weaker parties. Pursuing a number of lines of

argument, Asad shows that the liberal public sphere is far from being a neutral, empty space for

moral discourse by all citizens. It is rather an exclusionary space constituted by particular

sensibilities and a culturally and historically-thick dominant identity.152

(Impossible) Translation as Transformation

Asad also takes issue with Habermas’s epistemic privileging of secular language and his

translation requirement. Habermas’s proposal for ‘translation’ from particular and obscure

religious language to universal and clear secular language is still part of the attempt to find

distinctly secular modes—in spite of the ‘postsecular’ designation—of expanding the domain of

the political and is intended to strengthen liberal politics by a new argument for a ‘religiosecular’

pluralism (Asad 2018, 43-44). Such a move in fact harks back to the Protestant dissenters of early

modernity, now hopefully cleansed of their religious passion and dogmatism by an open-

minded attitude supposedly characteristic of secular cosmopolitanism as a variety of

universalism. For Habermas, on Asad’s reading, ‘religion’ is not simply translated in the course

of secularisation. It is first defined so as to be recognised as religion and then split in two: one,

the language and practice inherited from Christianity that define the secular state; and two, the

language and practice of liberal believers who live in secular society and have redefined their

religiosity so that it is compatible with, if not entirely equivalent to, the secular (46). This liberal

religion is distinct from pre-liberal religion in that the former has conceded some of the

premises of the secular state and secular reason in developing new sensibilities and attitudes.

152
These arguments are considered in detail in the following chapter, pp. 301-307.

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The latter finds no place in Habermas’s political world because it insists on metaphysical

thinking in a (secular) world where only post-metaphysical thinking is welcome.

In Habermas’s own articulation, what sociologists describe as the ‘modernisation’ of

religion and religious consciousness is a response to the challenges posed by the fact of religious

pluralism, the emergence of modern science, and the spread of positive law and secularity

morality (Habermas 2008, 136-137). The cognitive dissonance caused by these must be processed

by traditional faith communities in ways that accord with overarching secular liberal norms.

Religious citizens must develop a particular epistemic stance, one that allows them to relate

their beliefs in a self-reflexive manner to the claims of competing doctrines of salvation;

reconciles their articles of faith with the autonomous progress of secular knowledge; and accepts

the priority of secular reason in politics by embedding the egalitarian individualism of modern

natural law and universalistic morality within their own religious doctrines. Religious citizens

and communities must do more than merely conform to the constitutional order, they must

‘appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles’ (2009, 75). Already

accomplished in major Christian traditions through Protestant theology and Catholic apologetic

philosophy of religion, this change is demanded of all other religious traditions before they can

be accommodated by the secular state.

Further, this modernisation or reformation must be undertaken internally within

religious traditions themselves as a ‘hermeneutic self-reflection’ and a ‘learning process’ that

reconstructs faith in light of modern conditions of life to which there are no longer any

alternatives (Habermas 2008, 138). The appropriation of secular legitimation must occur under

the premises of their own faith. If the change were a result of conditioning or forced adaptation,

then the cognitive preconditions of a liberal civic ethos could only be met through a kind of

discursive power (à la Foucault) that imposes itself in the apparent transparency of enlightened

knowledge. This, Habermas avers, would contradict the normative self-understanding of the

secular constitutional state. One questions, however, whether religious traditions that on their

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own terms are not convinced by secular liberal norms and want to maintain their traditional

self-understandings have any other option? If they refuse to ‘reform’, the secular state cannot

accommodate them. If they want to participate as full members, availing themselves of the right

to self-expression, they must change. For them, it would seem that the status quo is indeed one

of forced reform through discursive and state power.

Habermasian translation, thus, while presented as a means of making religious and non-

religious citizens equal is also the means by which the secular can lay claim to be the true heir

to the proper function of religion in the modern state. For this reason, it is not all religious

language and meaning that Habermas seeks to find a place for in the public sphere. Only one—

the language of ‘Judeo-Christianity’—is thought to have sufficiently developed the quality of

abstraction necessary for modern knowledge, universal morality, and a truly cosmopolitan order

(Asad 2018, 49). In contrast, a religion like Islam cannot be a source of inspiration for the

modern world because Habermas sees it as the quintessential example of a religious tradition

that has not been able to adjust to modernity.

Moreover, Asad goes beyond the implied epistemic hierarchy on which the translation

proviso leans to question the underlying presupposition about the very possibility of the type of

translation it requires. In his most recent work, Secular Translations (2018), Asad reflects on

translation, broadly construed, within a Wittgensteinian view of language, arguing that it is nigh

impossible to abstract an important idea that expresses something distinctive of a particular

form of life and find a ready expression in another language belonging to a very different form

of life (5-7).153 Translation, indeed every use of language in a language game, is not a purely

cognitive enterprise in which signifying words can be substituted for others. It is rather a

153
Asad uses Roman Jakobson as a paradigmatic contrasting view—of the sort presumably underlying
Habermas’s translation proviso—whereby ‘all cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in
any existing language. Whenever there is deficiency, terminology may be qualified and amplified by
loanwords or loan-translations, neologisms or semantic shifts, and finally, by circumlocutions’ (Jakobson
R 1959, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, 23(1), 232-239,
234; cited in Asad 2018, 6).

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complex of expressions that evoke, in particular contexts, particular sounds, images, and

feelings, and help to realise particular actions and attitudes. Language is rooted in a ‘somatic’

complex (hearing-feeling-seeing-remembering) (2006, 212). Indeterminateness, opaqueness, an

evocation of the past, the impossibility of understanding some discourses without far-reaching

shifts in the way one lives, feels, and thinks—these are all inherent features of language (2018,

49). In any translation a particular message is selected and some values and meanings are

dismissed, forgotten, or simply impossible to translate. This process of selection is not only

cognitive; it depends on sensibilities as products of shifting experiences of the sensible body.

Cultivated practices of the self are not simply carriers of meaning that can be equally expressed

in any language of one’s choosing. They are ways of learning how to live in a given tradition—a

discursive tradition that represents an implicit continuity embodied in habit, feeling, and

behaviour that one acquires as a member of a shared way of life.

In contrast, Habermasian translation is an abstract cognitive process in which one word is

replaced by another, or by a circumlocution (48). The demand for engagement with the

sensibilities expressed in ‘religious’ utterances is ruled out. Language, here, is a neutral system for

description and argument, not an aspect of how we inhabit the world. For Asad, when language

is understood as a part of how we inhabit the world, then a foreign language is not merely a

possible source of inspiration but actualises particular ways of living (50-51). In turn, its obscurity

is not a sign of its poverty or irrationality, requiring its epistemic demotion, but an occasion for

us to think about the limits of our language in imagining and living another form of life.154

154
Another insightful critique of Habermas’s translation proviso comes from Stoeckl (2017, 38, 42), who
notes that the proviso i) assumes that all religious content is translatable into secular language; ii)
assumes that mere translation can resolve conflict; and iii) shares the burden of translation unequally
amongst religious citizens, let alone between religious and secular citizens: liberal religious actors will
find it much easier to translate than more conservative actors. Stoeckl presents this critique within a
broader one about the debate on secularism—and the discourse of the social sciences related to religion
more broadly—suffering from a theology blind spot in which the nuance and difference within religion
is not given sufficient consideration.

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Complimentary Critiques

A different critique of secularism, in the Asadian vein but also pushing back on Asad a little, is

Agrama (2012). For Agrama, secularism is best characterised by an ongoing, deepening

entanglement in the question of the dividing line between religion and politics for the purpose

of identifying and securing liberal rights and freedoms (29). He proffers that perhaps the

critique of secularism that reveals it as managing and disciplining religion, while insightful and

needed, unwittingly entrenches some of the fundamental features of the secular narrative it

critiques by remaining beholden to it assumptions (24-26). Specifically, the assumption that the

power of secularism resides in the successful establishment of the self-articulated norms it seeks

to enforce for the purposes of liberal governance. Agrama suggests that secular power should

instead be considered in terms of the work it actually does, which includes rendering precarious

the very categories and norms on which it ostensibly depends and seeks to establish—

incessantly generating the very question it must answer: where to draw the line between religion

and politics—opening up thereby a gap between the aspirations of its political ideals (religious

freedom, tolerance) and the attitudes thought to come with it (generous disposition, democratic

sensibility), as opposed to those that actually dominate (continual normative questioning,

critique, suspicion). This gap arises because secularism remains an expression of the state’s

sovereign power and regulatory capacity—state sovereignty ultimately decides where to draw

the line between religion and politics: it defines and regulates both religion and politics, and as

such stands prior to both. By standing prior while not being indifferent to either, it becomes the

source of irrevocable indeterminacy/ambiguity that is historically entrenched, and reveals a

deeper intractability that is a peculiar feature of secular power. This intractability or ambiguity

does not, however, undermine secular power. On the contrary, it opens up a space of internal

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critique that animates, sustains, and even further entrenches the question of where to draw the

line by allowing it to be raised and re-raised incessantly (227).155

Another significant and penetrating critique of prevailing forms of liberal secularism is

William Connolly’s Why I am not a Secularist (1999). Connolly argues that secularism is the

endeavour to ‘strain metaphysics out of politics’ and to dredge out of public life as much cultural

density and depth as possible in order to uphold public reason, procedure and justice (23). It is the

attempt at a ‘postmetaphysical’ politics: ‘a world of politics in which controversial religious and

existential orientations are bracketed from public discourse and political life’ (Connolly 2011, 648).

Where Asad et al. emphasise that it does not succeed in such bracketing, Connolly attempts to

highlight the impoverished nature of the imagined product. It is a secular conceit, he argues, that

tries to ‘provide a single, authoritative basis for public reason and/or public ethics that governs all

reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or “private” faith’, and in doing so tries to seal off public

life not only from religious doctrines but also non-theistic orientations of reverence, ethics and

public life. In some ways similar to Taylor, he finds secular conceptions of language, ethics,

discourse, and politics ‘insufficiently alert to the layered density of political thinking and judgment’

(4). In response, he seeks the refashioning of secularism—notwithstanding the title of his book—

not its elimination (19). It must be converted into one perspective amongst several in a pluralistic

culture in which all metaphysical perspectives including the secular are denied the privilege of

elevating themselves to a position of primacy (39). This ‘multidimensional’ or ‘decentred’ pluralism

is a ‘more vibrant public pluralism’ in which each constituency (religious or nonreligious) projects

its perspective into the public fray without any being the single authoritative source from which all

others must draw. Importantly, for Connolly, the fundamentals of all constituencies are contestable,

whether that be a theological creed, public reason, or communicative rationality.

155
One way out of this vicious cycle, albeit a fragile one, is to not be concerned with where to draw the
line, a position Agrama marks as ‘asecularity’ (231). Another way, perhaps, is to switch from the question
of ‘where’ to draw the line to ‘why’ it ought to be drawn in the first place, as we attempt in this dissertation.

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Brownian Secularism as Governmentality by Other (Still-Religious) Means

For Wendy Brown, modern secularism is that characteristically liberal form of political

organisation that in the name of freedom proliferates conditions of unfreedom. Far from doing

away with religious modalities and imaginaries, it displaces these into secular forms and utilises

them. It operates ideologically, masking its own normativity and presenting its subordinations

and stratifications as natural, even self-evident. On such a basis, it is able to maintain the claim

to neutral governance and politics. Brown concurs with and amplifies the thesis that secularism

is not religiously neutral and does not merely contain religion. Rather, whether animated by the

concern to protect individuals from state imposition of religion (as in the French model) or the

concern to protect religious belief from state interference (as in the American model),

secularism generates a specific model and meaning of religion and particular kinds of religious

subjects and practices. Much more than merely separating church and state, religion and

politics, public and private, it produces the meanings by which both sides of these divides, as

well as their relations, are understood and deployed (2014, 111-112). Shaped by the Reformation,

secularism as a form of governmentality mobilises a Christian Protestant theology of

propositional belief, privatised worship and faith rooted in conscience and a personal

relationship with God (Brown 2012, para 8-9). It transforms and governs religion not from some

religiously neutral outside but decidedly from a specific religious viewpoint and model.

In a reflection on secularism in the context of the prohibitions on the headscarf, niqab or

burqa in contemporary Western liberal democracies, Brown pursues some of its ‘conceits’ arising

precisely from its lack of religious neutrality (2012). First, the assumption that secularism is equally

available to all religions; that it generates tolerance and mutual respect among religions; that it is

culturally neutral; and that it generates gender freedom and equality. These are the assumptions

and conceits of secularism that make something like policing women’s dress conceivable and

legitimate in the secular imagination. Second, secularism transforms and disseminates religious

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imaginaries and modalities across society, reaching from the character of modern sovereignty

(Schmitt) to the nature of state-civil society relation (Marx), to the normative orientation and

ethos of the subject (Weber and Foucault). Third, religious consciousness does not fade or die

with a secular commitment to its formal expungement. Many ostensibly secular concepts,

formulations and thinkers are suffused with religious temporalities, narratives, and ordinances.

Nietzsche self-appoints himself as the Antichrist; Schmitt formulates sovereignty as inherently

timeless, eternal, absolute, impersonal, and capable of making and deciding truth; and Marx’s

materialist historiography frames a narrative that begins with an original fall from graces and ends

with redemption and heaven on earth. Fourth, desacralisation is not equivalent to secularisation

and is not an even or progressive process. Secular displacements or containments of religion do

not inhibit the informal sacralisation of processes or entities, be these commodities, money,

status, cultures, nations, states or civilisation.

On the point of secularism’s presumed equal availability to all religions, the presumed

viability of their privatising fundamental beliefs and adopting individual autonomy, Brown

(2006) notes that ‘most of the belief structures of most of the world’s people for most of human

history’ do not fit with these presumptions (note 23, 254). Reformation doctrine does not work

well for the faith structures of the ancient Greeks, Medieval Christians, or modern Muslims,

Jews, Hindus, or Catholics (nor for a socialist, tribalist, or communitarian ethos or order). As a

political rationality shaped by a particular history, it was coined to solve specific problems: how

to allow Protestants the right to worship without undercutting both church and state authority,

how to substitute accommodation of such sects for their (costly and destabilising) violent

repression, and how to stem the tide of blood spilled in religious conflict in early modern

Europe. To universalise this rationality is to generalise the relevance of this very particular

history for all regions and cultures in late modernity.

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Unmasking Secular Tolerance

Brown’s most elaborate contribution to the critique of secularism—a good compliment to

Asad’s critique of the liberal public sphere—comes in the form of an elaborate reflection on one

of its prominent aspects, tolerance. In Regulating Aversion (2006), Brown presents an incisive

analysis of secular liberal tolerance as a political discourse and practice of late modern, national

and transnational, governmentality that masks aversion and aims at regulating its objects. 156

While posing as a universal, norm-free virtue and impartial practice of enlightened, secular

capaciousness, liberal tolerance iterates the normalcy of the powerful and deviance of the

marginal in order to tame both unruly domestic identities and affinities and non-liberal

transnational forces that challenge the universal standing of liberal precepts and power (8). As

a productive force, it fashions, regulates, and hierarchises subjects, citizens, and states, and

legitimates certain actions and practices as against others. This operation as a discourse of

power is masked, however, because there is no acknowledgment of the norms, subject

construction and position, or the civilisational identity at stake in tolerance discourse (19).

Instead, liberal power and law is cast as above culture and from there able to manage culture

through the depoliticising discourse of tolerance.157

Nestled among sister discourses of liberalism, individualism, and market rationality,

tolerance discourse works to depoliticise: it casts social inequality or injury as matters of

individual or group prejudice, and group conflict as rooted in ‘natural’ hostility toward

156
While tolerance is not reducible to liberalism or secularism, in the prevalent Western discourse it is
intimately tied to both. As a political principle, it is considered the product of the early modern European
religious wars that initiated the prising apart of political and religious authority, and the carving out of a
space of individual autonomy from both (Brown 2006, 9).
157
Brown’s approach to tolerance stands in contrast to those philosophical, political-theoretical, and
historical considerations of it as a benignly positive, if difficult, practice, as figured in Rawls (1971, 1996),
for instance. A different approach that is sensitive to Brown’s critique but still finds worth in constructing
a positive philosophical-political theory of liberal tolerance is Forst (2003). For a productive engagement
between these two views, see Brown and Forst (2014).

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essentialised religious, ethnic, or cultural difference (15-18).158 An object of tolerance is

analytically divested of constitution by history and power, and is instead identified as naturally

or essentially different from the tolerating subject. Not only the involved parties, the scene of

tolerance is also ontologised in its constitution as produced by the problem of difference. Along

with the depoliticisation of the sources of political problems, the solutions get the same

treatment: political redress and justice of/for inequality or violent exclusions is substituted by

(tolerant) behavioural, attitudinal, and emotional practices.

Secular liberalism positions itself as acultural—culturally neutral and culturally tolerant—

through three related moves (21). First, its basic ‘political’ principles (secularism, rule of law,

human rights, moral autonomy, individual liberty) are cast as universal and therefore not

cultural, since culture is particular, local, and provincial. This legitimates the subordination of

culture to politics as the reasonable subordination of the particular to the universal (2006a, 313).

Second, its focus on the individual as a unit of analysis and the object of its project (to maximise

individual freedom) stands in contrast to culture’s role in providing coherence and continuity

to social groups. Third, it presumes to master culture by privatising and individualising

(liberalising) it, just as it does with religion (2006, 21). Both culture and religion must not govern

public life, but rather are the subordinated objects only of properly optional, private enjoyment.

Without liberalism, culture is thought to be oppressive and dangerous because of its

disregard for individual rights and liberties and the inextricability of its non-universal principles

from power. This danger is purportedly checked by secular liberalism by containing culture and

providing universal principles for (neutral) public governance over individual private citizens

who enjoy culture, freely opting in and out of different cultures as they wish. This choosing is

made possible through the figure of the autonomous liberal subject who bears a merely optional

158
‘Depoliticisation’, for Brown, is the eliding of the political and historical constitution of subjects and
conflicts, in favour of personal, natural, or cultural diagnosis and prescription. An example of this is
Mamdani’s notion of the ‘culturalisation of politics’, the assumption that every culture has an essence in
reference to which political matters are explained (Brown 2006, 18, 20).

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relationship with culture and religion, a figure discursively curved out by abstracting

deliberative rationality from embodied locations or constitutive practices (2006a, 300). As in

Rawls and Habermas, following Kant, rationality exceeds embodiment and cultural location,

and its proper function requires independence (individuation) from others, from authority, and

the independence of reason itself. This liberal formulation of the rational, willing, individuated

subject figures a non-individuated, ‘organicist’ creature, who is so because of the

underdevelopment of both rationality and will. For the latter, culture and religion are saturating

and authoritative, hence oppressive. For the former, they become ‘background’ and extrinsic.

Culture has the non-liberal subject; the liberal subject has culture. Through individuation

(‘moral autonomy’), the rule of culture and religion is replaced by the self-rule of men (301).

In its self-representation, then, liberalism is the ‘sole political doctrine that can harbour

culture and religion without being conquered by them’, and in turn it is ‘uniquely tolerant of

culture from its position above culture’ (23). As with secularism’s ‘containment’ of religion,

however, what we have here is no mere rearrangement of culture (from public to private), but

its reconstruction and transformation. ‘Culture’ goes from something like a necessary set of

organising ideas, values, and modes of being together to something like an optional set of

practices mostly associated with food, clothing, art, music, and lifestyle. The former broader

meaning does not vanish, however. It still applies but only to non-liberal, non-secular cultures,

who are said to be ruled and ordered by culture, in contrast to liberal orders, which are ruled by

law and have culture. Not only does the liberal subject establish an optional relationship with

culture, secular liberalism is also able to secure the relative autonomy of the political and

economic from the ‘cultural’ (22). We thus have twin conceits about autonomy in liberal orders:

the autonomy of the subject from culture and the autonomy of politics or the state from culture

(2006a, 311). The liberal subject is thus enlightened and free and the liberal state is enlightened

and neutral. Culture is individual autonomy’s antinomy and hence what the liberal state claims

to have subdued, de-powered, privatised and detached from itself (314).

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 These are, however, Brown argues, fanciful (but politically productive) conceits because

liberalism is as cultural as any other political form in the broader sense applied consistently. It

promotes certain cultures (individualism, entrepreneurship) over others, is always imbricated

with majoritarian ‘national cultures’, exists only in particular varieties (republican, libertarian,

communitarian, social democratic), and instantiates in law particular, normative values and

practices. More basically, the constructive and repressive powers of culture—that produce

subjects’ relations and practices, beliefs and rationalities, without their express choice—are

neither conquered by, nor absent from, liberalism (2006, 22-23). Even in the texts of its most

abstract theorists, it is fused with contested analytical and normative assumptions, values, and

practices about being human and being together, about relating to self, others, and world, about

practicing and valuing select modes of being and knowing over others.159

This self-appellation of universality above culture and power, is crucial for liberal

tolerance discourse. Tolerance, Brown notes, arises within and codifies a normative order in

which those who deviate from the norms are eligible for it; it is conferred by those who do not

require it on those who do (2006, 186). Power discursively disappears, however, convening

instead the hegemonic as the universal who tolerates the minoritised as the particular. Indeed,

not just as particular but as saturated by the particularity: homosexuals appears as more

thoroughly defined by their sexuality, Jews and Muslims more relentlessly saturated by their

ethnic or religious identity. In aligning itself with universality and relative neutrality, the

unmarked-because-hegemonic identity associates tolerance with this standing and objects of

tolerance with particularity, partiality, and controversiality.

On the transnational level, tolerance discourse legitimates a new form of imperial state

action through the discursive construction of a tolerant, cosmopolitan, free West and its

159
This point is demonstrated at length in our analysis of Rawls, Habermas, and Taylor in Chapter Five.

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intolerant, fundamentalist other (2006, 6).160 Through the depoliticising culturalisation of

conflict and difference and having setup (non-liberal) culture as opposed to moral autonomy,

freedom, and equality, there merges a civilisational discourse that identifies the tolerant and

tolerable with the civilised (cultured) West and the intolerable and intolerant with the non-

liberal (culture-ruled) non-West (2006a, 299). The dual function of civilisational discourse,

marking ‘civilisation’ and conferring moral and developmental superiority on the West,

produces tolerance in two intersecting power functions: as part of what makes Western

civilisation superior, and as that which reveals certain non-Western ideas, practices, and

regimes as intolerable (2006, 178-179). This logic insulates all legal practices in liberal orders

from the tag of ‘barbarism’; all instances of the barbaric and coerced are found on the non-

Western side of the line.161 It also facilitates legitimating aggression toward non-Western

practices and regimes deemed intolerable (314). Liberal states can export by imposition

‘universal’ liberal principles without being culturally imperialist or culturally supremacist and

without tarring their ‘civilised’ status. Since non-liberal orders represent the crimes of

particularism, fundamentalism, and intolerance, arising from the dangerous insistence of

unindividuated humanity, they can legitimately by liberalised as part of a civilising mission

(313). Explicit and ubiquitous in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this logic of secular

liberal foreign policy remains operative even today, as seen vividly in the Wars on Iraq and

Afghanistan at the head of the twenty-first century.162

160
Cavanaugh (2009) makes a similar argument from the premise of the ‘myth of religious violence’, which
constructs a prone-to-fanaticism religious Other of the rational, peace-making secular subject. This is then
used domestically to marginalise certain types of ‘religious’ practices and groups, and in foreign policy to cast
non-secular orders, especially Muslim societies, as legitimate targets of (rationalised) secular violence (4).
161
Instances of the ‘barbaric’ and intolerable are thus things like clitoridectomy, child brideship, widow
suttee, and polygamy, but never any legal Western practices such as: feasting on animals, polluting the
planet and plundering its resources, living and dying alone, devoting life to the pursuit of money,
stockpiling nuclear weapons, tolerating pornography and sex clubs, tolerating homelessness and enjoying
flagrant luxury in the presence of the poor, or undertaking imperialist wars (Brown 2006, 190).
162
Thus George Bush in initiating the U.S. lead war on Afghanistan in 2002 cast ‘non-negotiable’ liberal
principles as standing apart, and above, from American culture: ‘We have no intention of imposing our

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 Liberal tolerance thus is not absolute; it allows for intolerance of those deemed intolerant,

at home and abroad. When the tolerant civilisation meets its limits, however, it is said to

encounter, not political or cultural difference, but the limits of civilisation itself, justifying for

itself intolerance (203). What makes this secular intolerance justified, as against

religious/illiberal intolerance, is its very secularity (Scherer 2013, 72-73). It is suggested that the

secular has evolved beyond its religious precursors, adding tolerance to mere intolerance.

Secular intolerance is thus necessary, while religious intolerance is gratuitous. There is a decided

circularity here, however, because the difference between the secular and religious, in the

modern secular imaginary, is itself in significant part construed in terms of a properly secular

capacity for, and a properly religious incapacity, for tolerance.

A complimentary account to Brown’s that also considers the contours of secularism as an

instrument of empire is Meziane. In Des Empires Sous la Terre (2021), Meziane deploys a racial

and ecological history of secularisation to argue that the reality of the secular is the earth itself

as it is transformed by industrial capitalism. For Meziane, the critique of secularism goes beyond

the critique of a political doctrine demanding the privatisation of religion. It is no less than the

critique of how the earth itself has been transformed, mostly for the worse. Industrial capitalism

has unleashed its full force on the earth, burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels in pursuit of

the accumulation of capital, giving rise to a new geological time, the Anthropocene. The

Anthropocene is the epoch marked by the human footprint on the earth, the epoch in which this

footprint has enlarged beyond all proportions leaving all sorts of ecological damage in its wake.

With reference to this idea, and given the intimate historical relations of industrial capitalism

with secularism, Meziane asks a provocative but legitimate question: is there a secularocene?

(2021a). The attempt to realise heaven on earth—the project of collapsing heaven and earth,

culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule
of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women; private property; free speech, equal justice;
and religious tolerance.’ (Brown 2006a, 314) Notably, this logic was not exceptional but echoed by all the
participating states comprising a broad cross-section of the Western liberal world.

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secularisation—has brought us to this point, a point of crisis. The Anthropocene, he argues,

should be seen as an effect of secularisation. On this view, secularity refers to an ontology that

posits the world as the sole reality and opposes immanence, or earth, to transcendence, or

heaven, and secularisation is that order (‘philosophy and politics, discourse and practice’) which

seeks to do away with otherworldly heaven, in order to, or along with, taking up the task of

realising heaven on earth instead. The critique of (religious, otherworldly) heaven is not, as per

Marx, the condition of all critique. It is how capitalism operates and whereby it has transformed

the earth itself through the secularisation of both empire and capital.

Secularist ‘Separation’ as (Mandatory) Transformation

The argument that secularism in fact governs, transforms, and disciplines religion from a non-

neutral position has been echoed in other recent studies. Scherer (2013) notes that secularism

actively mediates the relation of religion and other social spheres in multiple ways: it shapes the

development of law by determining which authorities will decide which questions with

reference to which authorised canons of reasons and interpretation of which texts; it shapes

education by determining which institutions will receive state funding, and which texts and

traditions will be taught, by whom and in which manner; it shapes social policy by determining

what counts as legitimate factors in decision making, and which areas of society will be open

for or closed to intervention; and it shapes religion itself by determining which of its practices

and claim will be entitled to public respect and protection, which of its denominations will be

recognised as legitimate and permissible, and which of its functions will be stripped of it and

assimilated within larger apparatuses of governance (10). His broader thesis is that, against the

authorised view of secularism as primarily a matter of separating religion and politics, it has

been, and continues to be, a matter of transforming the interrelated fields of religion and politics

in processes of multifaceted, layered (‘crystalline’) conversion. Per the authorised narrative, the

modern liberal state emerges along with the protection of conscience and ascendance of

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toleration, and hence when political power ceases being used for forced religious conversion.

However, the very transformations that produce modern states, nations, publics, and religions

in their distinctive forms are themselves processes of conversion, which, instead of

acknowledging or accounting for this, obscure their nature as such (18).

Concrete examples of avowedly secular institutions interfering with, transforming, and

governing religion—or undermining, from the perspective of religious adherents forced to

change their forms of life—abound. In the American context, Sullivan (2005) makes the

compelling case that the ‘religious freedom’ cannot be secured by secular law. Using the

example of juridical oversight on the constitutional 'free exercise of religion' she shows that to

adjudicate in the space, courts need to define 'religion'. Since there is no one 'religion', but

multiple instantiations and understandings of religion, there is no way to secure free exercise in

an impartial manner. Not only do secular courts end up engaging in theology in order to define

religion, but they tend to do it quite narrowly, leaving many people's quite reasonable

understanding of their own religion out in the cold. Thus, in ostensibly adjudicating boundaries,

they in fact stipulate, define and even transform religious content and practice.

In the post-colonial Indian context, secular ‘reform’ of Hinduism saw the Indian

Parliament and courts cut through the immensely complicated web of local and sectarian

variations comprising ‘Hindu law’ as it had emerged through the colonial courts—itself a result

of a prior (colonial) secular governance of religion—to lay down a single code of personal law

for all Hindu citizens (Chatterjee 1998, 356). Markedly, many of the new provisions were far-

reaching in their departure from traditional Brahmanical principles. In justifying these changes,

the reform proponents argued on behalf of the Hindu tradition that it could not stay stagnate;

it needed to move with the times (357). In making the requisite updates, secular government

ministers and judges had to decide what was or was not essential to the Hindu religion. They

became interpreters of the religion and expounders of its scriptures.

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 A relatively early and trenchant critique of secularism’s lack of neutrality with regard to

religion worth mentioning in this connection comes from Marc Galanter (1965) in response to

Donald Smith’s India as a Secular State (1963).163 In the latter work, Smith presents an ideal

conception of the secular state marked by three distinct but interrelated sets of relations: that

between religion and the individual, where freedom of religion reigns and the state is excluded;

between the state and the individual, marked by the notion of citizenship, where religion is

excluded; and between the state and religion, where there is strict separation and state

neutrality (4). Thus the secular state is marked by freedom of religion, religiously-indifferent

citizenship, and state non-interference in, and non-promotion of, religion. The underlying

assumption of this separation, Smith avers very matter-of-factly, ‘is simply that religion and the

state function in two basically different areas of human activity’ (6). It is not the function of the

state to promote, regulate, direct, or otherwise interfere with religion, and political power is

outside the scope of religion’s legitimate aims.164

As Galanter (1965) argues, however, regulating, even redefining and remaking

(‘reforming’), religion is precisely what the secular state is called on to do per the standard

theories (242). Smith himself is clear on this point: ‘Paradoxically, the secular state, in order to

establish its sovereignty and confirm its secularity, is required to undertake the most basic

possible reform of religion’ (1963, 498). The secular Indian state is ‘called upon by the

163
This engagement takes place in the context of a discourse on the development of secularism in post-
independence India. David Smith’s work is the locus classicus on the ‘early debate’ (1960s-70s) on
secularism in India. Smith presents a basic (fairly standard) theoretical model on Western, specifically
American, secularism by whose lights he undertakes a thorough survey and assessment of the Indian state
to conclude that it was indeed secular, but not without some serious problems that compromised its
secularity, such as state-sponsored religious reform, state-managed religious endowments, and personal
laws differentiated by religion instead of a uniform civil code. Galanter’s basic line of critique is to ask
why principles derived from a Western/American experience should be taken as a trans-cultural ideal
and used to evaluate a country with very different religious traditions and political problems. In doing so,
he highlights various inadequacies in standard theories of the secular state.
164
To the extent that Smith, even as a political scientist, is defining the proper domain of religion’s
legitimate aims, this is an instance of a theological justification for secularism that no longer curries
favour in liberal political theory. See note 129, p. 177 above.

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Constitution’ he proffers, ‘to strip Hinduism and Islam of the socio-legal institutions which have

distinguished them as total ways of life’ and to reduce them ‘to their core of private faith,

worship, and practice.’ That he qualifies this task as paradoxical does little to lessen the

contradiction in maintaining, on the one hand, that the state ought not regulate or interfere

with religion, and, on the other, that it must cut religions down to their proper size. Further,

even though Smith speaks of customising Hinduism and Islam down to ‘their’ core, what he

actually means—and this does not escape him—is that they ought to be amended to fit the

mould of a model religion. This is because while private faith, worship, and practice may be the

core of modern Western Christianity, it is not the core of a religion like Islam, with its emphasis

on the disciplined ordering of social and political life (Galanter 1965, 143). In fact, a model

religion with a core of private faith is not even representative of all Christian confessions, let

alone non-Christian religions. In secularity’s grasping for a universal ‘religion’—marked by a

normative view of what it ought to be—to which all particular religions must be cut to fit, there

is an apparent imposition: how some religions conceive themselves is hoisted upon others that

do not self-ascribe to such parameters.

Hence, the secular state not only regulates and interferes with religion but also promotes

one form of religion as against others, all the while claiming neutrality to, and non-interference

in, all religions. This reliance on the conception of one religious tradition as against others also

comes out in Smith’s ‘underlying assumption’ of the concept of separation, that religion and

state function in different areas of human activity. Such a distinction, as Galanter (1695, 148,

note 37) observes, implies a radical dichotomy between profane everyday reality and a sacred,

autonomous realm of souls. It also implies a sacramental church that acts on institutions of the

profane world but cannot replace them or alter their ultimate character. Such views work well

with some religious traditions but would be profoundly unacceptable to others, in particular

those which stress the transformation of worldly institutions in accordance with divine precept.

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 All of this has serious implications. The freedom of religion that secularism offers and

attempts to secure is not of religion as it is, or as it manifests in different particular religions, but

of religion as it ought to be (Galanter 1965, 151-152). In other words, it is a normative rather than

descriptive view of religion that is upheld as free to express itself. Indeed, it is the normative view

of a specific (Western, early modern, Protestant) type of religion, taken up by liberal thinkers and

the secular liberal state and authorised as ‘proper’ religion. This modern ‘religion’ turns the tables

on pre-modern ‘religion’ but without explicitly acknowledging that a radical transformation has

taken place. The pre-modern relationship is hierarchical: the religious encompasses the secular.165

The modern relationship is also hierarchical but in the opposite direction: the secular

encompasses the religious. Notably, however, the pre-modern hierarchy is apparent and

acknowledged while the modern hierarchy is masked and, in fact, presented as the flattening of

hierarchy. The upshot of this is that the meaning of freedom of religion is circumscribed: it is

freedom of conscience, belief, and association to communicate and commemorate such beliefs. It

does not include freedom to live life according to the precepts of a given religion. On the contrary,

there is a desire to eliminate various religious practices from public life as archaic, superstitious

and incompatible with secular ‘progress’, ‘morality’, and ‘human rights’. The ultimate argument

for a secular state then, for Galanter, is not to maximise presently desired freedoms but to

substitute a new, more appropriate kind of freedom; it is an argument for enlightenment, for a

fundamental change from an inferior view of the world—in which religion transgresses its proper

boundaries to ill effect—to a superior secular view of the world.

165
This is true of all pre-modern religions up until the Reformation makes a departure within the Christian
tradition (Madan 1998, 307).

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Conclusion

Per its advocates, secularism is most basically about the equitable and tolerant organisation of

diversity. For Habermas, it is a matter of governance neutral to competing religious worldviews,

conducted in the (neutral) language of public reason, that is essential to the equitable

organisation of modern pluralistic society. It is necessary for securing religious freedom and

managing clashes on socio-political questions in a non-violent way by affording public

epistemic authority to secular reason. Secular constitutional liberalism secures the public

autonomy of citizens to equally participate in self-legislation geared towards the facilitation of

their diverse projects of personal self-determination. That equal and equitable participation

requires abstracting for substantive normativity of all comprehensive doctrines and resorting

for moral underpinning to procedural justification, wherein manifests the neutrality of secular

governance. Likewise for Taylor, secularism is governance neutral to all worldviews or basic

beliefs. However, it ought not be about the relation of the state to religion per se, or some given

institutional arrangement of separation fetished for its own sake. Rather, it is about the response

of the state to diversity, oriented towards securing the political goods of liberty, equality, and

fraternity. Secularism thus understood is inescapable for modern democratic states whose

societies have become direct-access and temporally homogenous. Democracy requires

secularism because popular sovereignty demands a cogent, deliberative unit of ‘the people’

bound together by a political ethic, instead of the substantive religious or secular ideological

differences that define only some subset of them.

Critics, however, point out that these are convenient but inaccurate accounts of secularism.

According to Asad, secularism is not about the mere organisation of pre-given realities. Rather, it

is a process of establishing a new, decidedly non-neutral, normative power over the modern

subject, tied to novel authorised concepts of religion and politics, ethics and law, public and

private. This power seeks to transcend the concrete differentiating forms of being and knowing

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among people by backgrounding these in favour of constructing ‘citizenship’ as the primary

political marker of their identity. In doing so, it fosters distinct sensibilities and moralities and

generates new experiences of space and time. Although the political medium of citizenship is said

to form a deliberative unit of ‘the people’ who decide on socio-political question through

deliberation and persuasion, these questions are decided more so by the state and its powerful

institutions, commonly, given imbalances of power, to the disfavour of weaker parties. Far from a

neutral, merely procedural, all-inclusive space for citizen discourse, the liberal public sphere is an

exclusive space dominated by the sensibilities, norms, aesthetics and ethics of the (secular liberal)

majority culture and identity. Wendy Brown likewise is wont to expose the conceits of secularism,

which, for her, is the currently hegemonic form of political organisation that extends secularist

and liberal ideology, while deploying its own religious modalities, proliferating conditions of

unfreedom. Generating a specific model and meaning of religion and politics, church and state,

public and private, it is a form of governmentality, à la Foucault, that mobilises a Christian

Protestant theology by which all religion is disciplined. It operates ideologically through a number

of conceits about religious neutrality, tolerance, and freedom.

When it comes to conceptions of secularism then, both Habermas and Taylor uphold

revised models of secularism as a necessary means of managing diverse societies. Their models

advocate for a new epistemic attitude that moves beyond the secularist assumed superiority of

positivist rationality over religion. In turn, both propose significant revisions of the authority of

the secular and emphasise the importance of learning from religion. Nevertheless, they still

privilege the secular, Habermas more than Taylor. Asad and Brown rightly critique this position

as privileging secularity whilst claiming neutrality, in turn being inattentive to its excesses and

giving mere lip service to genuine pluralism.

We noted in the introduction to this chapter that the legitimating reasons for secularism

offered by liberal theorists can be classed into four categories each marked by a political good

that it is said to secure: individual autonomy (freedom of conscience, choice, religion),

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democratic citizenship (equal, fair participation by all citizens in self-rule), public authority of

secular reason, and civil peace. The fourth of these has less relevance in the contemporary

discourse, leaving three ‘core’ justifications. These too in fact can be filtered down to two

because the third is instrumental to the second: public reason is necessitated as a means to

conduct democratic politics. This leaves us with two primary justifications. Crucially,

secularism’s putative ability to secure state neutrality is fundamental to the securing of both

(likewise for public reason as an appeal in itself to epistemic neutrality). Both individual

autonomy and equal, fair political participation of all citizens require, by the lights of liberal

theory itself, state neutrality. Indeed, it is secularism’s unique ability to provide for such

neutrality that is said to make it necessary, if not inevitable. Conversely, if it fails on the promise

of neutrality, it fails in securing both core, primary goods. That, then, is precisely our chosen

line of critique. Following a shorter treatment of the fourth justification below, we focus at

length in the next chapter first on the claim to neutrality, then on public reason, and finally on

secular freedom and equality. We then return in the concluding chapter to articulate our

critique in more detailed, positive terms, and to reflect on the implications.

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Secularism as Antidote to Religious Violence?

Collective cruelty is neither new nor confined to the West. But it is the secular modern state’s
awesome potential for cruelty and destruction that deserves our sustained attention.
— Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 1993, p. 306 (paraphrased)

The memory of the role of religion in the origins of modernity powerfully reinforces the
contemporary prejudice that religion in the public square is divisive, intolerant, and
destructive of civil society.
— Wolfhart Pannenberg, How to Think About Secularism, 1996

The attribution to religion of intolerance, cruelty and violence is another plank in the legitimation

of secularism as a superior form of political organisation. Indeed, the conventional liberal story

about the origins of secular liberal democracy goes something like this (Vallier 2014, 11):

Several centuries ago there existed a religio-political unity called “Christendom.” Citizens of
Christendom practiced some version of Christianity and took its basic tenets for granted. But once
Christians were free to argue amongst themselves about which sect had the correct theology, they
produced a century and a half of devastating military conflicts between Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anabaptists and Catholics that culminated in the Thirty Years’ War. This “holy cataclysm”
consumed many lives until the Peace of Westphalia terminated the bloodletting.

This story is part of a secular self-representational narrative that grounds its historical

constitution in breaking an end to the otherwise interminable religious conflict of the European

‘Wars of Religion’. Different versions of this story are consistently recalled by liberal political

theorists, early and late—from Locke and Rousseau to Shklar, Rawls, and Fukuyama

(Cavanaugh 2009, 125-134). We can add Habermas and Taylor, as noted above. According to

such narrative accounts of modern secular liberalism, it arises in the wake of, and as a solution

to, the crisis of religious warfare in Europe, breaking from an intolerant and violent religious

past and emerging anew as tolerant, peaceful, and enlightened (Scherer 2013, 74). With this

origin story, religion is constituted with an intrinsic propensity for violence. Habermas, for

instance, sees in religion an inherent potential for violence: ‘worldwide Islamic terrorism [is]

only the most spectacular example of a political unleashing of the potential for violence inherent

in religion’ (2009, 61-62, emphasis added). More generally, religiously grounded governance

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(‘theocracy’) is said to be exceptionally violent because the sovereign’s support of the ‘true path’

to eternal life is said to hang in the balance. Throughout history, it is asserted, religion has been

the handmaiden of war (Mueller 2009, 384). Given that it perceives itself to have arisen as a

solution to the devastating and persistent religious wars of medieval Europe, perhaps secularism

must conceive of violence as intrinsic to religion, its supposed Other. Only a secular legal

constitution, it is argued, can restrain religious passion, violence and intolerance.

This perspective, however, to the extent that it portrays secularity as intrinsically less

violent, fails to account for well-attested historical facts. It overlooks the brutal conquests and

colonisation of Africa and Asia by now-secular European powers in the nineteenth century that

were congenial with the rise and consolidation of secularism in Europe and had little to do with

religion per se (Asad 2003, 100).166 By way of example, the Third Republic of France, having come

out on top in a century of bitter conflict between the secular state and the church—following

and building on the French Revolution which had no shortage of its own startling violence167—

was dedicated to a (violent) civilising mission in the name of the Revolutionary ideals of

humanity and progress (Asad 2006, 499). Just as it instituted compulsory secular primary

schooling at home in the 1880s—to inculcate positivist humanism and wean future generations

away from the historical Church—it was significantly extending, by way of brute violence, its

colonial conquests abroad.

Likewise, this view ignores the devastatingly cruel secular powers of the twentieth century:

Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russia, Imperial Japan, Maoist China. Nazi rule did not

166
For recent studies that show the adoption of imperialism by liberal thinkers of the mid-nineteenth
century (correlating with the consolidation of secularism), following an earlier repudiation thereof, see
Pitt J 2005, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France, Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ; and Mehta U 1999, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British
Liberal Thought, University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
167
For accounts of violence in the French Revolution see Tackett T 2015, The Coming of the Terror in the
French Revolution, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA; and Brown HG 2006, Ending the French
Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon, University of Virginia Press:
Charlottesville, Virginia.

239
abandon secular principles but was in fact accompanied by an attempt to de-Christianise public

life and undermine the influence of Catholic and Protestant churches (Chatterjee 1988, 345).

Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy was also not dependent on the union of state and religion. The

violence of the modern state has shown time and again that intolerance and suppression of

minorities do not require the collapsing of state and religion, nor do they presuppose the existence

of theocratic institutions (346). Rather, the avowedly secular modern state is perfectly capable of

such violence. In Hobsbawm’s words, during the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ (1914-1991), the most

secular period globally than any prior, ‘more human beings had been killed or allowed to die by

human decision than ever before in history’ (1995, 12). Furthermore, the secular age has not only

beaten all records of human-on-human violence, it has also set unprecedented records of human-

on-world violence: ecological violence that has precipitated the naming of a new geological

epoch—the Anthropocene—and brought the Earth to the brink of ecological crisis.

These historical realities problematise the simple equation of institutional religion with

violence and cruelty. Contemporary secularism, likewise, is not at all incompatible with

violence, disharmony and intolerance as we see, for instance, in the United States and India

(Asad 2003, 7-8). In the US, which has a model secular constitution, ‘the repeated explosions of

intolerance in American history…are entirely compatible (indeed intertwined) with secularism

in a highly modern society’. In India, again with a secular constitution and functioning liberal

democracy, communal riots between Hindus and various minorities (Muslim, Christian,

‘Untouchable’) occur with disturbing frequency.168 A secular state, Asad concludes, does not

guarantee toleration and do away with violence; it puts into play different structures of ambition

and fear and deploys different types of violence. Otherwise, the ruthlessness of secular practice

yields nothing to the ferocity of its supposed religious counterpart (Asad 1993, 236).

168
For an outline of communal violence in India see Chandhoke (2019), Chapter 3, pp. 19-56.

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 Yet the contemporary secular imaginary rather selectively forgets more recent memories

of secular ideological conflict, retrieving instead deeper memories of early modern religious

wars when making sense of current conflicts (Casanova 2009, 1060). Ignoring the common

structural contexts of modern state formation, interstate geopolitical conflicts, modern

nationalism, and the political mobilisation of ethno-cultural and religious identities—processes

central to modern secular European history that became globalised through colonial

expansion—these conflicts are attributed to ‘religion’, to religious ‘fundamentalism’ and the

fanaticism and intolerance supposedly intrinsic to religion. This selective historical memory

safeguards the perception of the progressive achievements of secular modernity, offering a self-

validating justification of the secular separation of religion and politics as the condition for

modern liberal democratic politics and for global peace.

Finding Religion in the ‘Wars of Religion’

This deeper memory of the European ‘Wars of Religion’ also operates with mythological, more

than historical, force. As Cavanaugh (2009) has persuasively argued, the idea the ‘religion’ (as a

transcultural and transhistorical concept) is inherently prone to violence is one the foundational

legitimating myths of the secular liberal state, used to undergird secular power and the secular

state’s monopoly on violence. It rests on the ‘wars of religion’ story as a kind of ‘creation myth’

for the modern state (10). This story—that Protestants and Catholics were killing each other

over doctrinal disputes until the modern secular state took form and secured peace by

privatising these disputes—however, is belied by the history we know when considered in its

detail. First, much of the wars involved Catholics and Lutherans killing people of their own

confessions, as well as Catholic-Protestant collaboration (142-151). The last half of the Thirty

Years’ War, to suffice with one example, was essentially fought between the (Catholic)

Habsburgs and Bourbons. Second, in the not-yet-secular sixteenth century there was no clear

divide between religious and social, political, or economic causes of war, such that the former

241
could be isolated as the root or primary cause of these wars (156-159). Third, the process of the

secularisation of state power in early modern Europe starts long before the Reformation and,

far from securing peace, is itself a cause for conflict (160-177). Much of violence can be explained,

for example, in terms of the resistance of local elites to the centralising efforts of monarchs and

emperors.

Further, the period directly following the ‘wars of religion’ is not a period of peace but of

more wars, now fought between nascent states for a host of reasons. Nor is it a period in which

there is a separation of religion and politics, with the rise of enlightened monarchs claiming

divine rights to rule. On the whole, then, the process of secularisation by which the nascent

state centralises power by wresting the share of it previously with the church can be more

accurately described as a transfer of sacralised authority from church to state, on both temporal

sides of which there is great violence. State power does eventually get desacralised, at least on

the apparent, by becoming self-authorised with profane legitimations, but this is not

accompanied with an decrease in violence or conflict.

Cavanaugh also shows that the features of ‘religion’ said to be the cause of its greater

propensity to violence—absolutism, divisiveness, irrationality169—are found as much in secular

ideologies, such as nationalism, Marxism, capitalism and liberalism, as in religions likes

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Judaism. Nevertheless, there is a tendency even amongst leading

thinkers to locate religious violence in some intrinsic feature of religion, while treating secular

violence extrinsically as a matter of human or systemic excess. Habermas, for instance, relates

169
Cavanaugh reviews numerous recent accounts that make a case for how one or more of these features
make ‘religion’ more prone to violence, including (2009, 21-54): Kimball C 2002, When Religion Becomes
Evil, Harper: San Francisco, CA; Juergensmeyer M 2000, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of
Religious Violence, University of California Press: Berkeley; Rapoport DC 1992, ‘Some General
Observations on Religion and Violence’ in Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, Juergensmeyer
M (ed.), Frank Cass: London; Parekh B 1999, ‘The Voice of Religion in Political Discourse’ in Religion,
Politics, and Peace, Rouner L (ed.), University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN; Appleby SR 2000,
The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham,
MD; Selengut C 2003, Sacred Fury: Understanding Religious Violence, AltaMira: Walnut Creek, CA.

242
events like the September 11 attacks on the United States by religious actors to ‘fundamentalism’

(Habermas 2003a, 31). Fundamentalism, he submits, is a peculiar, stubborn cognitive attitude that

insists on the political imposition of its own convictions, even when they are far from rational.

This holds especially, we are told, for religious beliefs since religion is based on faith, dogma and

orthodoxy. Orthodoxy veers towards fundamentalism when the guardians of the true faith ignore

the epistemic situation of a pluralistic society and insist, even to the point of violence, on the

universally binding character and political acceptability of their doctrine. They refuse, that is, to

adopt secular reflexivity in coming to terms with modern pluralism.

Whatever the merits of this argument, it is notable that the violence of secular states is

not, in similar fashion, related to some essence of secularity. This is in spite of the fact that

epistemically, secularity, like all worldviews, is not free of ‘faith’ in its most basic premises (the

mind-independent reality of the external world; the reality of ‘free-will’, the reliability of human

sensation, etc.) and that politically, secular liberal states too insist on some of their

fundamentals as universally binding and they do so to the point of (stated-enacted) violence,

domestically and internationally. It is not that Habermas does not see the violence of secular

actors or its immense magnitude. On the contrary, he acknowledges, indeed laments, the

‘devastating stratification of world society’ and the ‘deprivation and misery of complete regions

and continents’ (Habermas 2003a, 36). However, instead of locating the cause of these in some

inherent attribute of the secular—as he does for religious violence—he ascribes it more

contingently and extrinsically, to the excesses of ‘unbounded capitalism’ and the power politics

of secular states motivated by securing their ‘vital material interests’.

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The Shifting Axes of (Secular?) Violence

We would agree with Asad (2003) that secularism does not solve the problem of violence as much

as it shifts it.170 The state forcibly establishes and defends core ‘political’ principles, which its courts

enforce through violence, leading to cumulative disaffection in those with different views. This is

comparable to the early Euro-American historical experience with secularism, which claimed to

ensure peace between rival groups but in fact merely shifted the violence of religious wars into

the violence of national and colonial wars (10). It is thus difficult to see secularism primarily as the

modern formula for toleration or peace. Besides the historical reality, across time and space, of

rigid secular societies and relaxed religious ones, the idea of tolerating difference—itself a

complicated idea ranging from indifference to endurance—predates the modern political doctrine

of toleration. Rather, secularism has to do with particular structures of freedom and sensibilities

within the differentiated modern nation-state (Asad 2006, 508). In turn, it has to do with

conceptualising and dealing with sufferings thought to negate, endanger, or discourage those

freedoms and sensibilities. In this sense, secular agency is confronted with having to change a

particular distribution of pain and suffering, not to do away with pain and suffering per se.

Modern secularity is also tethered to a particular ethical conception that determines what

sorts of cruelty and violence are problematic or immoral and which are allowed to pass.

According to liberal ethics, cruelty is essentially the intentional and gratuitous infliction of pain

by one person on another (Asad 2018, 42). This conception excludes the cruelty inflicted by a

particular form of life on vulnerable humans and non-human species, such as the ‘collateral

damage’ of modern warfare. It also excludes the more ubiquitous cruelty that underlies much

of everyday life in the progressive, liberal world. For example, the large urban populations of

liberal democracies now have access to plentiful supplies of cheap, nourishing food that aims

for ‘welfare for all’ but is produced by the mass production techniques of industrial agriculture

170
This is on top of the observation that violence is built in to the very logic of liberalism; see note 198, p. 271.

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that entails unprecedented cruelty to animals, plants, and the environment more generally. At

the same time, religious sacrifice of animals seems to offend secular sensibilities more because

it is ‘unnecessary’ killing or ‘senseless’ cruelty, the implication being that some types of killing

and cruelty are necessary and not senseless. Such distinctions can only be determined on the

basis of thick, normative ethical conceptions.

In that capacity, secular agency does not eliminate violent excesses. It tries to curb some

of these—prominently those identified as ‘religious’—but also allows, indeed relies on, others

that are justified by a secular calculus of social utility and a secular dream of happiness. In a

word, it replaces patterns of pre-modern pain, punishment, and violence, with those that are

peculiarly its own (Asad 2006, 508). Thus the deliberate destruction of large civilian populations

in the Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II, the ruthless

American prison system, and the treatment of non-European asylum-seekers by EU countries.

Such state-sanctioned practices by liberal democracies are based on calculations of worldly pain

and gain, not on religious doctrines and passions. Indeed, they can be said to be based on secular

passions—which may come across as an odd combination since in the secular frame it is

precisely religion that deals in passions, while secularity is marked by reason and considered

deliberation. Passionate support of secular beliefs and passionate deployment of policies

enacted by secular powers, which clearly exist, are not regarded in the same way. That passion

is felt to be more like the public expression of ‘objective principle’ rather than ‘subjective belief’.

Good passion is the work of secular enlightenment, not of religious bigotry (Asad 2006, 515).

Ironically, where the emotional concern about Antisemitism or Islamophobia is always an

example of good (because secular) passion, being emotionally steeped in the object of

Antisemitism or Islamophobia (the traditions of Judaism or Islam themselves) may not be (515).

What is most salient about human suffering—of which there was no shortage in pre-

modern times dominated by ‘religion’ or in secular modernity—is that it registers in different

ways and its quality or valence is shaped by changed relations and ideas (Asad 2006, 508-509).

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Contra Taylor’s (1989, 394) idea that the Enlightenment has bequeathed modern secular

subjectivity with a with a calling to end suffering, Asad (2015) shows—through a reflection on

the notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’—that this subjectivity is far more complicated,

with room for various particular kinds of suffering. Deliberately inflicted suffering in modern

war and government blends into widespread social misery produced by neo-liberal economic

policies. People are told they are free and equal, that they can fulfil all their legitimate needs

and desires. To their anguish, they find they are not and cannot. The modern sufferer’s sense is

more that pain is always worldly, that it is a matter of brute fact and of no moral significance.

This might make it harder to bear (or perhaps easier). Modern poverty is experienced as more

unjust, and so more intolerable. The point of course is not any judgment of relative magnitude

between the distribution of pain engendered by modern power and its equivalent in pre-modern

societies, or any normative judgment about which is worse, but rather only that the two are

different in fundamental ways. The claim, then, that secularism, as concerned primarily with

compassion, diversity and tolerance in pluralist societies, is an essential means of eliminating

conflict and suffering and establishing peace and prosperity in the modern world, lacks the

plausibility that is often afforded to it unreflectively. In turn, it lacks the force for which it is

deployed in legitimations of secularism.

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 Chapter Five

Secularism II
Neutrality, public reason, freedom and equality

Secularism is the neutrality of the State.

— French President Emmanuel Macron, Oct 2020

Secularism is a code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely human.
— George Jacob Holyoake, English Secularism: A Confession of Belief, 1896

Charles Taylor (2011) presents an interesting example from early nineteenth century America of

a political system in which religion is given a place that no one would accept today (38):

For Judge Joseph Story, the goal of the first amendment was “to exclude all rivalry among Christian
sects,” but nevertheless “Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state.” Christianity
was essential to the state because the belief in “a future state of rewards and punishments” is
“indispensable to the administration of justice.” What is more, “it is impossible for those who
believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is a special duty of
government to foster, and encourage it among the citizens.”

Consider, in contrast, the remarks of Justice Laws in twenty-first century America:

The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins,
sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the
cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which
is of necessity autocratic.171

It is true that the former approach to law, or governance more generally, is disagreeable to modern

secular sensibilities. One religious tradition using state power to enforce or extend its values is

roundly condemned as autocratic, as articulated in the latter approach. From one perspective, the

former is an example of a state straightforwardly presenting its fundamental principles as the

articulation of a normative worldview asserted as true. Contemporary analogues of such political

or judicial commentary wherein the truth or self-evidence of liberal fundamentals—human rights,

171
[2010] EWCA Civ 880, §24, cited in Billingham and Chaplin (2019), p. 129.

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democracy, equality—is asserted or announced and the state justified in supporting and fostering

these, are numerous. This would be something much more acceptable to the sensibilities of our

secular age, no doubt. However, it is worth asking here whether there is any substantive difference

between these approaches except in the pretence of neutrality, in the assertion that somehow the

liberal fundamentals are not ideological or controversial.

Neutrality: Secularism’s Elusive Punctum Archimedes

Self-representations of the secular aim at the self-characterisation of neutrality and pragmatic

common sense. Notably, the terms ‘secularism’ and ‘secularist’ were first used in English by

‘freethinkers’ in the mid-nineteenth century, such as George Jacob Holyoake. They adopted this

language in order to carry an agenda that, while opposed to theology and seeking the privatisation

of religion in favour of exclusively ‘naturalist’ principles adjudicating public life, did not want to

be perceived as anti-religion. Holyoake adopted the label to differentiate his position from the

atheistic and more explicitly anti-religious pronouncements of Charles Bradlaugh and others also

associated with the freethought movement (Waterhouse 1921, 348). Holyoake’s secularism was

premised on ‘the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism or

Christianity’ (1871, 11) as a ‘code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely

human’, and was intended for those who found theology ‘indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or

unbelievable’ (1896, 34). In a roughly contemporary French context, Jules Ferry (Minister for

Public Education, 1879-1883) executed a systematic program to replace religious with secular

(laique) school education based on a secular morality presumed to be neutral (Bauberot 1998). In

his famous ‘Letter to Teachers’, Ferry stressed that they must keep their teaching within the

bounds of a ‘basic’ morality that could not offend ‘a single honest man’ (112).

The connection of secularism to neutrality here is critical to its basic sense and

legitimation, but it is also simply asserted or presupposed, as opposed to being rigorously

substantiated. Secular morality is practically sufficient because it is simply asserted to be

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‘natural’, ‘basic’, or ‘purely human’, standing apart, purportedly, from any thick worldview or

particular dogma. This move is common even today in secularist discourse. Kosmin and Keysar

(2007, 10), for instance, argue that it is precisely the ‘deeply religious nature of a significant

proportion of the American public’ that necessitates a secularist state and public because

‘[f]irmly held but divergent religious beliefs and ties need a neutral playing field’. What it means

for a morality or politics to be natural, basic, or purely human, or how a secularist state provides

for a neutral playing field is not considered in any depth.

A similar appeal to neutrality persists in the contemporary liberal models of Taylor and

Habermas, as we have seen, and Rawls, who we come to presently. According to these models, the

secular as an epistemic category and secularism as a political doctrine emerge with the modern

nation-state and are related by their common neutrality: the epistemic secular is a neutral mode of

knowing independent of religious or moral commitments, and the political secular establishes a

neutral political ethic independent of any such commitments. These are cornerstone premises of

what we have termed the ‘mainstream narrative’ since it is this claimed neutrality on whose basis

liberalism asserts a unique ability to organise diverse societies. These claims are made concrete

through a number of the political, epistemic, and moral characters that make up its cast: the nation-

state, public reason, freedom and equality between individuals and state neutrality between

religions. In this chapter we consider each of these in depth, with Asad, Brown and others, and build

on their work to show that these characters do not make good on the claim to neutrality. Rather, all

the models proffered merely recharacterise normative secular, liberal fundamentals as neutral and,

in some cases, universal. ‘Public reason’ in the above-mentioned models, we argue, is in actuality

secular, liberal reason and is no less tied to particular forms of life than any religious or non-liberal

reason. Secularism privileges its own set of fundamental interpretations of world and self, and

associated normative premises, through the lens of which other positions are judged, approved, and

condemned. As such, it falls short on its claim to secure freedom and equality for all as well.

Demonstrating as much is the burden this chapter takes upon itself.

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Rawlsian Merely ‘Political’ Liberalism

The claim of having located some neutral ground from which it is possible to both maintain

equal distance from all worldviews and manage the modern fact of their diversity is at the core

of most justifications of secularism, and of some forms of liberalism. In the case of John Rawls—

as good a paradigmatic example for this as anyone—the very idea of ‘political liberalism’ is

arrived at in search for this neutral ground.172 In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls develops his

‘justice as fairness’ as a systematic social-contractarian account of justice superior to

utilitarianism. He subsequently realises that the ‘well-ordered society’ that justice as fairness

envisages is unrealistic because it requires all citizens to endorse its morally substantive

principles on the basis of the doctrines they adopt.173 However, the ‘fact’ of pluralism means that

no doctrine is affirmed by citizens generally, making this requirement unrealistic. In adjusting

the moral philosophy of ‘justice as fairness’ to the fact of pluralism, Rawls arrives at the idea of

172
‘Political’ liberalism insists that liberal commitments for society should not depend on any particular
theory of what gives values or meaning to human life. It is contrasted with ‘comprehensive’ liberalism, which
maintains that adequately defending such commitments is impossible without invoking the deeper values
of liberal philosophy (Waldron 2004, 91). In other words, political liberalism presents liberal political
principles as freestanding, untethered from liberal conceptions of the good, while comprehensive liberalism
denies that this is possible or desired. Most comprehensive models are also ‘perfectionist’ in that they
allow/encourage state advocacy of comprehensive doctrines. Political liberal models start with Larmore
(1987) and find their classical statement in Rawls (1996). Examples of comprehensive liberal articulations
are Berlin (1998) and Raz (1986), and of course classical liberal models, abashedly perfectionist as they were,
such as the utilitarian liberalism of Bentham and Mill or the Hegelian-Aristotelian liberalism of Green. For
a beneficial overview, see Waldron (2004). For a more detailed analysis and an argument for political against
comprehensive-perfectionist liberalism, see Nussbaum (2011).
173
Originally, Rawls (1971) presented his principles of justice as neutral insofar as they are chosen by
individuals from an ‘Archimedean point’ (261) behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that supposedly levels everyone
and makes them impartial. He refers to justice as fairness in terms of an ‘Archimedean point’ on five
separate occasions. The later Rawls (1988, 1996), to his credit, acknowledges that his ‘justice as fairness’
comprises substantive moral values; specifically, he sees in it five ‘ideas of the good’: goodness as
rationality; the ‘primary goods’ (rights, liberties, opportunities, material resources, and self-respect);
‘permissible’ or ‘reasonable’ conceptions of the good; the political virtues that mark the ‘good citizen’
(willingness to cooperate, tolerance and justice); and the well-ordered society. The partiality of the
primary goods to liberal lifestyles, as opposed to more traditional family-oriented or religiously-centred
conceptions of the good, is part of what leads him to accept them as substantive but still instrumentally
necessary for living an autonomous life (Dimock 2000, 195).

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‘political liberalism’ articulated in his second major work bearing that name. The motivation or

grounding of the move from a comprehensive doctrine to a political conception is ‘reasonable

disagreement’ and ‘respect for persons’.174 People understandably disagree on questions of moral

value and good due to the ‘burdens of judgment’.175 We ought to afford them space to search for

their own values and projects, even if this search might lead them to what we consider wrong.

Given the fact of reasonable disagreement and the ethical requirement of respect for

persons/conscience (not doctrines), we must ground our political principles in moral ideas that

most citizens can accept for their own reasons. To do otherwise would entail imposition and

unequal treatment of citizens whose autonomy is being curtailed.

Notably for our purposes here, the basic strategy Rawls employs is to locate a purportedly

neutral ground from which people of diverse doctrines can endorse his moral framework as a

political conception. To this end, Political Liberalism (1996) basically refigures ‘justice as

fairness’, with substantively intact content, as a ‘freestanding’ political conception.176 It literally

transmutes from being a comprehensive doctrine to a freestanding political conception.177 What

174
This is contra Berlin and Raz who ground toleration in the liberal ethical ideal of autonomy, tied to the
notion of moral pluralism (many incompatible forms of life are morally valuable) asserted as true against
monism. Thus, for Raz, autonomy is valuable not of itself but when spent in pursuit of valuable moral
projects, which, in turn, government should create and foster a range of (likewise, it should eliminate
repugnant options). For Rawls, as for Larmore, the principle of moral pluralism is controversial: many
people will not ascribe objective moral value to forms of life they deem incorrect. Requiring them to do
so is to (unfairly) require a change in their beliefs.
175
The burdens of judgment include: the difficulty of assessing often conflicting and complex evidence;
the difficulty of assigning requisite weight to evidence deemed relevant; the judgment and interpretation
required because of the indeterminacy of our concepts; the influence of discordant subjective factors such
as life experience; different normative considerations on both sides of an issue; and the need to prioritise
between moral-political values given limited social space (1996, 56-57).
176
This is done by introducing a host of new distinctions: ‘comprehensive doctrines’ contrasted with ‘political
conceptions’; comprehensive doctrines distinguished as ‘reasonable’ or ‘unreasonable’; reasonability
contrasted with truth; the idea of an overlapping consensus; and public reason. For a summary of the changes
made by Rawls as described here see his Introduction to Political Liberalism (1996), pp. xv-xxiii.
177
Similarly, Nussbaum (2011) notes that Rawls intended to change the terms ‘practical reason’ and ‘principles
of practical reasons’ in Political Liberalism because they suggest a comprehensive Kantian doctrine of reason,
whereas the idea was to appropriate Kantian ethical notions for political purposes (18, note 37). This
approach, however, also reveals the construction of ‘freestanding’ notions as more semantic than substantive.

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makes ‘justice as fairness’ a mere ‘political conception’ and not a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ is the

circumscription of its scope to the political—the political, social, economic institutions, or ‘basic

structure’, of society—and political values, as opposed to all values and all parts of life.178 It is

thus ‘political, not metaphysical’ (Rawls 1985); it ‘leaves philosophy as it is’ (Rawls 1995, 134).

What makes it ‘freestanding’ is that while still a (liberal) moral and normative conception, it is

one derived, expounded, and presented as standing alone from all comprehensive doctrines—

and thus endorsable as such, with reference to multiple reasonable comprehensive doctrines,

which it purportedly does not oppose on their own ground, thus paving the way for an

‘overlapping consensus’.

This clutch at a neutral ground quite evidently rests on a severing of the political from the

metaphysical, a matter already controversial with reference to opposing comprehensive

doctrines.179 Rawls avers that political liberalism ‘leaves untouched all kinds of [comprehensive]

doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral’ (1995, 134). However, relegating comprehensive

doctrines to the wilderness of the political is not to leave them as they are when many of them

have much to say about the political in their own distinctive way. To render mute parts of

doctrines that are, in their own self-understanding, important is not to leave them untouched;

it is to change and disable them in significant ways. Further, the artificiality of the separation of

178
‘[T]he distinction between a political conception of justice and other moral conceptions is a matter of
scope: that is, the range of subjects to which a conception applies and the content a wider range requires’
(Rawls 1996, 13).
179
‘I think of political liberalism as a doctrine that falls under the category of the political. It works entirely
within that domain and does not rely on anything outside it. The more familiar view of political
philosophy is that its concepts, principles and ideals, and other elements are presented as consequences
of comprehensive doctrines, religious, metaphysical, and moral. By contrast, political philosophy, as
understood in political liberalism, consists largely of different political conceptions of right and justice
viewed as freestanding.’ (Rawls 1995, 133) Such a reformulation of political philosophy can only be done
from outside its domain since the question of what counts as political philosophy and how the political
relates with the non-political cannot be answered from within the domain of the political itself but is
already a broader epistemological and ontological question. As Habermas (2000) notes, it is hard to see
how Rawls can explain the epistemic status of a ‘freestanding’ political conception without taking a
position on philosophical questions which, while not metaphysical, nevertheless reach well beyond the
domain of the political (76).

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the political from the moral and metaphysical is drawn out in how Rawls affirms explicitly

secular humanist moral and epistemological positions—that moral knowledge is universally

accessible; that it is autonomously derivable by human reason or feeling; and that human nature

suffices for moral motivation—as being part of comprehensive, but not political, liberalism, only

to say that political liberalism also affirms them but only with respect to a political conception

of justice (1996, xxix). That they are applicable to a limited domain of life (‘the political’) does

not take away from the fact that they are specifically affirmed, and in being so affirmed, negate

the positions of opposing (non-humanist/non-secular) comprehensive doctrines. This is

directly so in the domain that they apply to and, on the view that no domain of human life is

completely independent from others, indirectly in all other areas to which it connects.

As an example of the difference between the moral values of a comprehensive doctrine

and those of a political conception, Rawls distinguishes between two forms of autonomy (1996,

xliv, 77). Political autonomy is the legal independence and political integrity of citizens in their

sharing of political power. Moral autonomy is expressed in a certain mode of life and reflection

that critically examines one’s ends and ideals—as in Kant or Mill. The latter, Rawls argues, fails

to satisfy the criterion of reciprocity required of reasonable political principles and is also

rejected by many ‘citizens of faith’ as part of their way of life. Thus, it properly belongs to

comprehensive doctrines not political conceptions. Yet, one may inquire, what of the fact that

political autonomy too is rejected by many citizens of faith, for the same reasons that they reject

moral autonomy? Many people see autonomy as problematic in that it secures for people the

right, in their view, to act foolishly or immorally, which, from the lens of holist social ontologies,

becomes a problem for the collective good. They would argue based on their normative

worldviews that liberty and autonomy for people to commit the immoral should be denied, not

facilitated. Further, what of the fact that the many citizens of faith (and non-faith), as a matter

of their respective comprehensive doctrines, do not admit the very distinctions upon which

Rawls severs political conceptions from broader normative worldviews?

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 We would assert that Rawls’s ‘political’ liberalism is always already operating within a

comprehensive liberal doctrine even as it tries—unsuccessfully, if admirably—to move outside

the latter. It does this by taking the basic normative parameters of liberal, constitutional

democracies—the ‘essentials of a democratic regime’ (Rawls 1996, xviii; 1995, 134), or the ‘basic

ideas implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society’ (Rawls 1996, 43)—as the

privileged starting point from which the ‘original position’, and in turn ‘justice and fairness’ as a

political conception of justice, is constructed.180 Liberal traditions are here privileged as

foundational while non-liberal ones are marginalised (Waldron 2004, 90).181 Political liberalism

refuses to even engage with those who preference a political philosophy that adopts a different

political relation than that of constitutional democracy (free and equal citizens sharing political

power) (Rawls 1997, 766)—for whom, as per Rawls’s own examples, the political relation may be

that of friend or foe (Schmitt, for example), or in terms of membership of a particular religious or

secular community, or it may be a relentless struggle to win the world for the whole truth.

Many of these parameters are neither justified on their own merits nor subject to the

requirement of state neutrality between worldviews. They are simply asserted as the defining

180
This speaks to another explicit manoeuvre in Rawls whereby his preferred conceptions of justice aim
to be suitable not for all human societies but for liberal societies like the United States, and are in turn
legitimated based on this suitability: ‘What justifies a conception of justice is not its being true to an order
antecedent to and given to us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our
aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it
is the most reasonable doctrine for us’ (1980, 518–19). Such a move amounts to the trivial notion that ‘we
are a liberal society because we are a liberal society’. More importantly, it would seem to defeat the
purpose of arriving at a conception of justice for diverse societies which respects cultural and ethical
plurality—a plurality comprising people of non-liberal persuasions. Instead, it bolsters ‘our’ majority
culture to the exclusion of minorities, who are by definition othered as outside the ‘us’ and ‘our’—a good
example of what we will describe presently as liberal secularism’s majoritarian bent (see pp. 307-313).
181
Some versions of public reason liberalism take this approach, building on Rawls, more explicitly. In
Liberalism Without Perfection (2011), for instance, Quong argues for an ‘internal conception’ of public
reason liberalism, per which it is a response to reasonable disagreement that would exist in a ‘well-ordered
society’, not to disagreement that actually exists. In such a society, citizens already, by construction,
accept a set of basic liberal values; those that don’t are simply not part of holding views that count as
‘reasonable’ disagreement. Such a view conveniently evades a number of criticisms that stick to other
versions of public reason liberalism but at the expense of defeating the purpose; it has understandably
been dubbed ‘sectarian’ political liberalism (see Gaus 2012; Vallier 2018).

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and exclusionary parameters of political liberalism that form the content of what it deems

‘reasonable’. The ‘reasonability’ of comprehensive doctrines is thus tied to secular concepts of

reciprocity and freestanding (purportedly non-metaphysical) politics, and to liberal notions of

individuality and the priority of the right over the good—and what it presupposes of the priority

of the political over non-political values (Rawls 1996, 176).182 It then marks those doctrines that

do not agree to these as unreasonable or irrational, and indeed to be politically ‘contained’ using

state power.183 As Habermas (2000) notes, the expectation of ‘reasonableness’ is here imposed

on competing worldviews; it is not defined by standards internal to them (93-94). Evidently, on

this view, the purported neutrality of secular liberalism turns, in circular fashion, on the

privileging of secular ideological positions vis-à-vis those that oppose them.

182
Rawls’s crucial definition of the ‘reasonability’ of comprehensive doctrines also oscillates between
ethical and theoretical conceptions, as Nussbaum (2011, 24-28) notes. A ‘reasonable’ person, out of respect
for others, is willing to propose fair terms of cooperation and recognise the burdens of judgment and its
implications of not imposing one’s doctrine through law. A ‘reasonable’ doctrine, however, is marked by
theoretical or epistemic features such as comprehensiveness, consistency, coherence, intelligibility, and
sensitivity to evidence. For Nussbaum, some of these requirements are too onerous, excluding doctrines
Rawls himself would want to include. For us, the point worth noting is that even the theoretical
requirements lean on normative positions. In turn, the exclusionary aspect of political liberalism is not
sufficiently neutral to secure the autonomy for all people that is central to its aims.
183
This was precisely Rawls’s complaint against traditional ‘metaphysical’ politics: ‘When there is a
plurality of reasonable doctrines, it is unreasonable or worse to want to use the sanctions of state power
to correct, or to punish, those who disagree with us.’ (1996, 138) Yet when it comes to worldviews not
agreeable to political liberalism, ‘the problem is to contain them so that they do not undermine the unity
and justice of society’ (Rawls 1996, xix).

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Dissecting Neutralities: Procedure, Aim, Effect, Justification

Most liberal accounts of (secular) politics maintain the requirement of state neutrality.184 From

one perspective, liberal neutrality may be seen as a generalisation of religious toleration into the

realm of ethical choice generally (Waldron 2004, 92). Where the early modern liberal state

treated religion as a special case—it privatised religious choice and used religious ‘toleration’ as

a way of dealing with religious conflict—the late modern liberal state deals with ethical and

cultural diversity generally. It is no longer required merely to be neutral between religious

confessions but between conceptions of the good generally, religious or secular. The

‘constitutive political morality’ of liberalism is an equality that requires a form a governance

‘independent of any particular conception of the good life’ (Dworkin 1978, 127). This raises an

obvious problem that liberal political theorists have sought to address at least since the 1970s:

if the state is to be neutral between all conceptions of the good, how are its liberal qualities to

be justified if not on the basis of liberal conceptions of the good?

The type of state neutrality required of the liberal state is differed on significantly among

theorists. Rawls’s elaboration on this point distinguishes between neutrality of procedure, aim,

and effect (1996, 190-194).185 Procedural neutrality aims at grounding politics not in culturally or

ideologically substantive moral values but in procedures (of establishing a constitution and/or

legislating law) that can be legitimated without appeal to any moral values, or, on a weaker

rendition, with appeal only to neutral values such as impartiality, consistency, equal opportunity,

and the ‘principles of free rational discussion’. Neutrality in the aims of political institutions and

184
Some influential accounts include Ackerman B 1980, Social Justice in the Liberal State, Yale University
Press: New Haven; Kymlicka W 1989, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, Oxford University Press:
Oxford; Dworkin R 1985, A Matter of Principle, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. For examples
of ‘perfectionist’ liberal accounts that do not see neutrality as essential, see Raz J 1986, The Morality of
Freedom, Oxford University Press: Oxford; and Sher G 1997, Beyond Neutrality, Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, England.
185
For a critical discussion on liberal neutrality based on a different typology see Dimock (2000).

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public policy with respect to comprehensive doctrines means that they must not favour some of

these over others. The state is to ensure for all citizens equal opportunity to advance their

respective conceptions of the good and not do anything intended to favour or promote any

particular ones. Finally, neutrality of effect or influence would have the state not do anything that

makes it more likely for an individual to accept any one conception of the good vis-à-vis others.

Rawls sets aside neutrality of effect as impracticable, if not outright impossible. His ‘justice

as fairness’ also does not aim at procedural neutrality. As we have seen, he accepts that its

principles of justice and its political conceptions of society and self are substantive.186 Rather,

the neutrality of his model lies in its neutrality of aim and, more importantly, in the common

(neutral) ground of its political conception as the focus of an overlapping consensus that can be

endorsed on a public (hence neutral) basis of justification.187 Yet this common ground is not

procedurally neutral ground; it comprises some substance. Even with neutrality of aim, Rawls

can affirm it only in qualified form: the state is to ensure for all citizens equal opportunity to

advance any permissible conceptions of the good, where permissibility is determined by meeting

the requirements of his morally substantive principles of justice. Further, and in revealing some

of the connections between these different types of neutrality, while the state may not intend,

186
For a good discussion on the merit of the very distinction between procedural and substantive justice,
see Cohen (1994). Cohen argues, against this distinction, that if pluralism is consistent with procedural
consensus, then it is consistent with substantive, overlapping consensus (of the Rawlsian type), because
the two are part of a package. This is contra the likes of Hampshire (Innocence and Experience, 1989,
Harvard University Press) who—closer to Habermas—argues that the only consensus pluralist societies
can hope for is restricted to the rules and procedures of the democratic political process by which
disagreements on questions of substantive justice are to be addressed. This is because substantive justice
(questions of fairness, distribution, morality) depend for their justification on comprehensive worldviews.
We agree with Cohen that procedural justice, like substantive justice, is not neutral with respect to
competing worldviews, but to the opposite effect: if neutrality to competing worldviews is to be
maintained for genuine pluralism, then neither substantive nor procedural consensus will do the job.
187
This speaks to another type of neutrality that Rawls does not categorise as a separate type but is at the
core of his model. Dimock (2000) does explicate it distinctly as ‘justificatory neutrality’, the requirement
per which is that state action must be justified with reasons independent of different conceptions of the
good (198). For Rawls, as for Habermas, ‘public reason’ is the means by which this can be achieved. We
explore this below; see pp. 275 ff.

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in legislation and public policy, to favour or promote any particular comprehensive doctrine, it

already does so by virtue of its being grounded in the substantive moral values of a particular

doctrine. This is precisely why it makes sense for Rawls to raise the question of how citizens of

faith might endorse a system that does not favour their way of life (1997, 781). The same question

about liberal citizens does not arise in the same way for the simple fact that the system, in all

its major parameters, affirms the comprehensive doctrine of liberalism, and in doing so, favours

and promotes it above opposing doctrines.

We would concur with Galanter (1971) that no secular state is, or can be, merely neutral

or impartial among religions, let alone worldviews more broadly. This is because the state

defines the boundaries within which neutrality must operate. The apparent neutrality required

by the US First Amendment, for instance, is purely formal because the First Amendment is a

charter for religion as well as for government. It is the basis of a regime that is congenial to those

religions that favour private and voluntary observance rather than those that favour official

support of observance. It favours, again, those religions that prefer social and spiritual sanctions

over those which would employ official force to support their social and ritual prescriptions. It

is not congenial, indeed it is hostile, to those religions that purport to supply obligatory

principles for governance of society. After all, the secular state propounds, and cannot but do

so, a charter for its religions that fundamentally leans on a normative view of religion. In turn,

certain aspects of what is descriptively claimed to be religion are given recognition, support,

and encouragement, while other aspects are treated indifferently, and others yet are curtailed

and proscribed (479). In other words, ‘religion’ is not a mere datum for secular/liberal political

theory (any less than it is for secular constitutional law). It is rather of product of that theory

(or that law). To brush all of this aside by suggesting that these are mere effects and that

neutrality of effect is not what is sought, is to miss the point. Namely, that even when construed

as effects, these divergent responses to different types of religion are the result of features built-

in to any secular system. They result directly from the underlying parameters of secular liberal

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ideology and theory, such as the adoption of a normative view of religion. Neutrality of effect,

then, cannot be so easily cut clean from neutrality of aim, procedure and justification.

The problem with all this should be clear: if state power is repressive when partial to any

particular conception of the good, and only legitimate when impartial to all such conceptions,

then secular liberal state power is also repressive and illegitimate, because it too is partial to

certain (liberal) conceptions of the good. Rawls can, at best, claim that his model is less

repressive than those that are more thoroughly based on normative worldviews—or are more

thoroughly ‘perfectionist’—but he cannot claim for it complete legitimacy.188 This is in part why

his model is not acceptable to Habermas, who aims at the requirement of procedural

neutrality—his model is ‘postmetaphysical, not freestanding’ (2017, 197).189

Habermasian Procedural Neutrality

Expectedly, there have been attempts at theorising models that secure procedural neutrality.

One such worthy attempt is Rainer Forst’s Contexts of Justice (2002), which provides a

Habermasian account more developed than any proffered by Habermas himself (who we come

to presently). Forst aims at a critical-constructive position ‘beyond liberalism and

communitarianism’ based fundamentally on a move to differentiate four distinct yet cohering

normative community contexts comprising four conceptual types of persons: an identity-

188
Granting even this turns on granting many of Rawls’s controversial assumptions. For an argument on
how Rawls falls significantly short of the radical implications of liberal political neutrality, see Gaus
(2009). On our reading, Gaus’s argument renders Rawls’s attempt at neutrality of aim as impracticable as
attempts at neutrality of effect.
189
The critique here—that Rawlsian-type liberal models unsuccessfully aim at neutrality and, as such, fail
on their own criteria of legitimation—is distinct from the well-known ‘communitarian’ critique of such
models, namely that they abstract from concrete social contexts and emphasise individual liberties over
substantive, communally-constituted values and norms. For influential articulations of the latter see
MacIntyre A 1990, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame;
Sandel M 1982, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; and Taylor
C 1989, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Rosenblum N (ed.), Liberalism and the
Moral Life, 159-182, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

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constituting ethical community comprising ethical persons; a legal community that protects

this ethical identity of a person as a free and equal legal person; a political community of

mutually responsible citizens as authors and addressees of the law; and a moral community of

all human beings as moral persons bearing the right to universal moral respect (3-5).190 The

principle of liberal neutrality, for Forst, is the idea that disputed ethical values cannot serve as

the foundation for general norms and this requires ‘a special mode of procedural justification

for such norms’ (35). In this model—following Habermas—both the determination of general

moral norms and the ‘reasonability’ criteria of which doctrines are tolerable are tied to a

procedure of public justification, instead of substantive values. The difference between

subjective ethical values, which are inextricably tied to particular forms of life, and objective

moral values, which are universal, is not just shown in public justification but is constituted by

it (38).191 The criterion of impartiality (or neutrality) is thus located in intersubjective-general

acceptability that is established discursively through ‘shared reasons’. Only those norms that

can be justified reciprocally and generally can claim general validity. Neutrality, in this sense,

distinguishes a criterion for the justification of the validity of norms and refers to the moral

impartiality (with respect to ethical values of opposing worldviews) of the justification (46).

While such a model does not explicitly reference substantive notions of the good, it does

however rely on them. It relies inextricably on substantive epistemological, moral and political

190
These four ‘contexts of justice’, for Forst, go beyond ‘context-forgetful’ liberal theories and ‘context-
obsessed’ communitarian theories by being dialectically context-bound and context-transcending at
once, insofar as these various normative dimensions are considered but no one of them is made absolute.
On our reading, Forst does not so much go beyond liberal and communitarian theories as much as he
provides a defence of the former that tries to account for critiques of the latter.
191
Forst contrasts this with the view—such as in Nagel (1987)—that locates impartiality in the higher
‘objectivity’ of general moral norms that requires peoples to step outside of themselves, as it were, in
order to critically reflect on their subjective convictions. While intersubjective-general public justification
may not require a questioning of the validity of ethical convictions ‘from the outside’, it does require their
suspension or bracketing when considering moral norms, by the mere fact that a clear separation is made
between the two modes of justification. This intersubjectvist view is thus arguably as artificial—and
contrary to at least some ethical conceptions—as the objectivist view.

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positions, such as the separation of personal ‘ethical’ values from public ‘moral’ values—which

presupposes a separation of both the private and public as well as the ethical and moral,

subjected as they are to completely different modes of justification and validity—the

requirement of reciprocity, and of course the idea of ‘public reason’. It also relies—as do most

liberal models—on the distinction between the right and the good and the primacy of the

former over the latter. The primacy of what is morally right or obligatory over what is ethically

desirable or preferable is assumed, and this entails a prior determination against the possibility

of construing morality as one aspect of a more comprehensive ethics of the good (Habermas

1993, 69). Indeed, it also makes the arguably stronger assumption that whilst the good is always

particular, context-dependent, and tied to cultural traditions, the right rises to the level of

generality, independence/neutrality, and universality (91-92). Further, as Habermas notes,

deontological approaches that take the normative validity of moral commands as the

phenomenon in need of explanation presuppose that moral prescriptions are oriented to the

consensual resolution of conflicts of action (70-71). This entails further assumptions about

morality: that it is tailored to social relations between subjects who act and not to goods; that it

relates to interactions regulated by binding norms and is thereby restricted to what admits of

normative validity and invalidity (rights and duties), as opposed to axiological (non-binding)

norms about what is preferred and optimised; that it is the peaceful alternative, without

equivalent, to violent resolution of action conflicts; that it is fundamentally based on consensual

justification of rights and duties through discursive argument and the cogency of good reasons

and not on religious/metaphysical worldviews.

Moreover, even a putatively very basic and neutral norm like ‘rational dialogue’ is not

philosophically neutral (Benhabib 1989, note 17, 278). It may be thought of as such only when

philosophical neutrality is conflated with political neutrality. Politically, the norm of rational

dialogue is neutral when conceived in a way that allows for a plurality of competing conceptions

of the good to be discussed and pursued. Philosophically, however, a norm of rational dialogue

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is based on strong assumptions; it is not some ahistorical, universal norm. We would further

qualify this by saying that political neutrality too requires not only the admittance of competing

worldviews but their admittance as equals. If any one conception is given the position of

sheriff—as liberalism is in liberal models—then political neutrality too is compromised.

Habermas’s own proceduralist model also relies on and makes the claim to justificatory

neutrality, while equally leaning on all the substantive viewpoints noted above. Habermas’s

discourse theory of morality aims at a middle ground between the abstract universalism of

Kantian ethics and the relativistic implication of contextualist positions in the tradition of

Aristotle and Hegel (Cronin 1993, xi-xii).192 It shares with ‘liberals’ a deontological understanding

of freedom, morality, and laws that stems from the Kantian tradition, and with

‘communitarians’ an intersubjective understanding of individuation as a product of socialisation

that stems from the Hegelian tradition (Habermas 1993, 91). While Kantian in its cognitivism

and universalism, it is fundamentally critical of the central role Kantian ethics affords to

individual reflection. In trying to better this, discourse ethics is based on the conviction that, in

the wake of the irreversible shift in philosophy from individual consciousness to language (from

the ‘philosophy of the subject’ to the ‘philosophy of language’), monological reflection can no

longer be foundational as it is in Kant. If consciousness and thought are linguistically-structured

social accomplishments, the deliberating subject must be relocated from the domain of

Cartesian or Kantian monologue to the domain of intersubjective dialogue, the social space of

communication where meanings are matters of communal determination through public

processes of interpretation, à la Heidegger and Gadamer.

This paradigm shift does not, for Habermas, however, call for a devaluation of the role of

rational autonomy in ethical thought by subordinating the individual will to an encompassing

192
Habermas develops his ‘discourse theory of morality’ most fully in Moral Consciousness and
Communicative Action (1990), particularly Chapter 3, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of
Philosophical Justification’, pp. 43-115.

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communal ethical life (Sittlichkeit), as done in Aristotelian and Hegelian traditions (Cronin

1993, xii-xiii). Autonomy is fundamental for Habermas given his commitment to the social and

political Enlightenment project of modernity. Indeed, with the historical transition from

traditional to modern societies, religious and metaphysical worldviews lose their capacity to

provide consensual justification of social norms and the autonomous individual becomes the

centre of the moral universe. However, discourse ethics seeks to reconceptualise autonomy and

practical reason within a dialogical framework with specific theoretical orientations: a

communicative theory of meaning, rationality, and validity based on a pragmatic view of

language; a transcendental-pragmatic elucidation of the validity-basis of moral judgment; and

a procedural approach to moral justification. It also seeks to prioritise democracy over liberal

rights, contra the Rawlsian approach that prefers the opposite configuration.193 Notably, for our

purposes, these are all very specific epistemological and moral views, emanating from specific

worldviews, that stand in opposition to the views of other moral paradigms (traditional,

contextualist, utilitarian, voluntarist relativist).

Habermas is not ignorant of such a basic fact; he explicitly engages and critiques all these

views in establishing the validity and strength of his own. How does he then claim neutrality for

his model? He does so by drawing a distinction between ethical and philosophical neutrality.

Kantian conceptions, he notes, claim neutrality vis-à-vis comprehensive doctrines in the sense

of ethical, though not of philosophical, neutrality (Habermas 2000, 99-100). The elucidation of

the moral point of view in terms of procedure that claims to be context-independent is not

normatively neutral in an absolute sense because any such procedure cannot be free of

193
Thus, Habermas on this intra-liberal disagreement: ‘Liberals begin with the legal institutionalization
of equal liberties, conceiving these as rights held by individual subjects. In their view, human rights enjoy
normative priority over democracy, and the constitutional separation of powers has priority over the will
of the democratic legislature. Advocates of egalitarianism, on the other hand, conceive the collective
practice of free and equal persons as sovereign will-formation. They understand human rights as an
expression of the sovereign will of the people, and the constitutional separation of powers emerges from
the enlightened will of the democratic legislature.’ (1996, 472)

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normative implications. It is intertwined with a concept of autonomy that integrates ‘reason’

and ‘free will’. However, Habermas wants to make an exception for this type of normative

content. Because autonomy is mediated by reason it is not, he argues, like other values and

hence its normative content does not impair the neutrality of the procedure. Stated differently,

a procedure that operationalises the moral point of view of impartial judgement is neutral with

respect to ‘arbitrary constellations of values’ but not with respect to practical reason itself and

the normative content it presupposes. This comes across, however, as a semantic move more

than anything else. What makes other constellations of values ‘arbitrary’ and the judgments of

autonomous reason ‘impartial’ other than a particular philosophical frame, attached to

particular worldviews? Can such a position be sustained from outside the perspective of these

philosophies and worldviews? The singling out of autonomy as a special value that does not

impede normative neutrality is a convenient claim but one that lacks substantiation. Likewise,

the casting of reflexivity as inevitable is one position taken amongst others.

What we get with Habermas, then, is a picture of modernity as a political project based

on the twin pillars of self-reflexivity and autonomy as the most fundamental moral goods, which

are simply recast as universal, inexorable, and uncontroversial. Thus, while Habermas is aware

that his procedural morality is not normatively neutral, he does not sufficiently account for the

role of the normative content—the ‘thick’ ideological inflection they benefit—when it comes

specifically to asserting the neutrality of his political model as a marker of its secularity and a

legitimating factor of its superiority to other models.

It is worth noting that while neutrality is crucial to both these two broad models, they take

different approaches to it. The Rawlsian approach attempts to bracket metaphysical/philosophical

disputes to establish a ‘freestanding’, but partially substantive, political conception of justice,

whose justification ultimately rests on the respective competing worldviews but whose

presentation and operation floats free of them. The Habermas approach, by contrast, attempts to

abstract from competing worldviews completely by appealing to an epistemic authority—specific

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to the moral domain as distinct from the ethical—that is purportedly independent of them all,

and whose more modest task is only to establish fair procedures of discourse. While we may agree

with Habermas that Rawls finds himself in a counterintuitive position, whereby the justification

of a political conception depends on the non-public reasons of competing worldviews, it must be

noted that Habermas can only avoid such a conundrum by attempting to abstract more fully from

all such worldviews. This, of course, is a harder move with a more onerous burden of establishing

and grounding a completely independent moral framework, which we assert Habermas fails to

discharge as a function of its inherent impossibility.

Bilgrami: From Archimedean to ‘Emergent’ Secularism

A different approach that takes the critique of claims to secular neutrality seriously but seeks to

salvage a form of secularism, is offered by Bilgrami (1998). Bilgrami accepts the critique of what

he calls ‘Archimedean’ secularism, which sees itself as standing outside the substantive arena of

political commitments (394). He proposes instead a ‘negotiated’ and ‘emergent’ secularism that

sees itself as one among contested and substantive political commitments and is willing to get

its hands dirty in, and emerge, from a process of negotiation ‘on the ground’ with other

substantive commitments (as opposed to being imposed from on high, as it arguably is in

Habermas, Taylor, and Rawls). Secularism must start in the political arena, as an equal to other

substantive worldviews, owning its substantive commitments to secular principles instead of

masking these as somehow neutral or merely procedural. From here, it seeks to convince

adherents of these other worldviews of its principles based on their evaluative frameworks, not

its own, in a sort of immanent critique. In other words, its task is to give them confidence to

embrace its principles from their own premises and to show that this is possible.

Bilgrami relies here on a distinction between internal and external argument or reasoning.

External reasoning is to argue against an opposing view from one’s own commitments. It is the

hallmark of Archimedean secularism, of the standard liberal tradition from Mills to Rawls

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because it rests on the externally established truth of liberal doctrine and has no place for

internal argument (405). Internal reasoning is to argue against an opposing view from the

commitments of one’s interlocutor. It is where parties in a disagreement give reasons in favour

of their own position by showing that the other side could also embrace this position by the

lights of their own commitments since there is tension or conflict within these (404). For

example, writes Bilgrami, the common liberal response to the Rushdie affair was a form of

external argument: to marshal standard liberal arguments for free speech. Instead, they would

have been better off engaging in internal argument, that is to show why Muslims should be

against censorship based on premises found in Islamic traditions. As noted above, the notion of

internal reasons relies on the assumption of tension within the values of one’s interlocutor, a

tension that is leading to discord between their current position and the position one is arguing

for. It ‘necessarily seeks to find the other’s moral-psychological economy inconsistent’ and

entails convincing the other that one of their inconsistent set of values should trump another

(409). The possibility of such reason-giving is a permanent one because the desires and values

of agents and communities are often in actual conflict and always in potential conflict since they

live in ever-changing environments.

While this sort of ‘emergent’ secularism starts on par with other politico-religious

commitments—Bilgrami’s examples, given the contemporary Indian context in which he

speaks, are Islam and Hinduism, but his point is general and applicable to other contexts—it is

not exactly like them. What makes it different—indeed, what makes it a form of secularism at

all—is not an assumed or asserted Archimedean/non-substantive status, as per standard

models, but rather that it is the outcome of a negotiation among various specific commitments

(400). If secularism transcends religious/ideological politics, it does so from within the set of

such politics, not because it has from the outset a distinct philosophical existence separate from

politico-religious commitments. Rather, it climbs up the ladder of dialectical engagement with

such politics first before it is in a position to kick that ladder away. It is the result of a Hegelian

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synthesis—as opposed to a Kantian transcendental argument that the ‘liberal fantasy’ of

Archimedean secularism relies on—in which a doctrine (of negotiated politics) emerges from

its opposite (ideological politics) (401).

This approach does well to recognise that secularism too bears substantive commitments,

that no political orientation has access to an Archimedean position of self-evident objectivity such

that it need only enter the political fray as procedural mediator. However, it suffers from two

major problems that are, in our view, fatal. First, it still privileges secularism in an arbitrary

manner. This is seen most clearly in that the ‘negotiation’ to be undertaken via internal argument

with various (non-secular) communities is unmistakably geared towards secular outcomes. What

emerges from this negotiation is and emergent secularism. That this is determined a priori renders

the genuineness of the negotiation suspect. Bilgrami is rather clear on this point, even if he does

not account for it. Different substantive internal reasons, he says, are to be given to different

communities ‘for a common secular outcome’ (409, 411), for ‘the thicker brew of a fully secular

outcome’ (411). What is sought is a revision in communitarian commitments ‘toward secularism’

(412), ‘toward progressive and secular commitments’ (414), such that ‘the progressives among

them could emerge as the representative voice’ (416). One is well-justified here in asking what sort

of ‘negotiation’ it is, starting out between ostensibly equal parties, that the direction and outcome

of which is predetermined? Indeed, why can internal argument not work in the other direction,

with communitarian perspectives effecting a revision in secularism by revealing tensions in the

moral-psychological economies of secularist perspectives?

William Connolly’s (1999) ‘decentred pluralism’ makes a similar move whereby secularism

is refashioned, stripped of its conceit that has itself providing a single basis for politics, and

converted into one perspective amongst several in a genuinely pluralistic culture.194 However,

here too the secular is still privileged. Secularism is both a unique political arrangement (now

194
Review the outline of Connolly’s (1999) basic idea in Chapter Four, p 221.

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refashioned to exemplify the ‘ethos of engagement’) and also a metaphysical perspective. As a

political arrangement, it makes cultural pluralism operate as a supposedly neutral framework,

masking the fact that it is, as a political doctrine, already a product of secular reason. Thus, the

presupposition that pluralism is not the product of a metaphysical perspective is problematic,

and already the distinction between secularism as arrangement and perspective breaks down

(Goldstone 2006). Indeed, the stipulation that everyone affirm the contestable character of their

worldview (without resentment, too) is also a markedly secular stipulation that appeals to the

unmistakably modern, secular virtue of scepticism. It is in the very tradition of liberal

secularism, which, as Asad notes, requires that beliefs should either have no direct connection

to the way one lives or be held so lightly that they can easily be changed (2003, 115).

For Connolly, appreciating the profound contestability of the competing fundamentals

we honour does not mean forfeiting faith in those fundamentals. It only means that we come to

terms with our respective inabilities to secure these so tightly that all reasonable people must

place one or another at the centre of public life (1999, 8). Yet the demand that people hold their

faith in such a light (flimsy?) manner—similar to Habermas’s demand that people of faith

change how, not what, they believe—makes sense only with respect to some worldviews as

against others. Further, the requirement that one come to terms with their inability to ‘secure’

their faith is, again, a very modern epistemological approach that speaks to more a Cartesian or

Kantian framework than say a Heideggerian one. Why should one have to experience the world

from this perspective as opposed to any other? The greater issue, still, is not these stipulations

themselves, but the grounds on which they are asserted. Are these grounds some particular

metaphysical perspective or some neutral ground? We would assert it is the former; Connolly’s

own ‘nontheistic faith in the plurovocity of being’ seems the best candidate on this count.

Connolly seems to be claiming the latter. Indeed, he must, otherwise he would have centred

one metaphysical perspective over others. However, in doing so—in claiming some neutral

ground on which his arrangement of the political space is based—he is guilty of the very charge

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he levelled against presently dominant forms of liberal secularism. Connolly does not appear to

recognise that all the normative judgments his refashioned secularism stands upon—charges of

‘immodest demands of transcendental narcissism’, demands that everyone affirm the

contestability of their fundamentals, the ‘reasonable human’ test on which we measure the

securing of those fundamentals—are not and cannot arise from any neutral basis. They are

inevitably arising from some normative worldview or metaphysical perspective, which, in turn,

is being privileged.

The Historicity and Ideologicality of Secularism

The non-neutrality of modern secularism can be apprehended not only from a direct engagement

with its arguments for neutrality, as considered above, but also through an appreciation of its

thick historicity and ideologicality. That is, the fact that it rests on various fundamental and

contested ontological premises about the reality of the world and moral premises about how

humans ought to live in the world, or on contest interpretation of world and self. Various

particular, albeit not fixed, concepts comprise the web that represents the liberal secular

worldview, or the project of secular modernity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century

these included the likes of humanism, nationalism, liberalism, capitalism. In the late twentieth

and twenty-first century, we have multiculturism, globalisation, neoliberalism, financialised

capitalism. All of these are ideological, in the above-mentioned sense.

Nationalism, for instance, is not some natural, empirically deduced understanding of how

the human family is, or should be, organised. Nationalism imagines the world as a universe of

nation-based societies in which individual humans live their worldly existence and align their

loyalty directly and exclusively to the nation (Asad 2003, 193-4). Even when the nation is said to

be ‘under God’, it exists only in ‘this world’—a special kind of world. The people of each nation

make and own their history. ‘Nation’ and ‘culture’—categories that do not precede but rise with

nationalism in early modern Europe—together form the conditions in which the nation uses

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and enjoys the world: man dominates nature and each person fashions his or her individuality

in the freedom regulated by the nation-state. Asad cites Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis

about ‘imagined communities’ to note that the ‘worldliness’ of secular nationalism, far from

being some common sense truth, is a construct no less ideological than the one it replaced.195 It

includes in the present an imagined realm of the nation as a community with a worldly past,

and it employs highly abstract concepts of time and space to tell a particular story about the

nation as a natural and self-evident unity whose members share a common experience.

The central principles of Liberalism—individual autonomy, equality, and rights—likewise

rest on controversial and contested philosophical anthropologies and social ontologies with

specific assumptions about the nature of the human being and of society. Margaret Canovan, a

liberal political theorist, argues that a secular, liberal state depends for its public virtues (equality,

tolerance, and liberty) on political myth (Asad 2003, 56-58).196 She notes that in the eighteenth

century the ideas that eventually formed the core of liberal thinking were based on a conception

of nature as deep reality. Later, liberal thinkers found grounds to be optimistic about political

change in invoking nature as a realm more real than the social world. Natural rights came to refer

to not only what men (and, much later, women) should be afforded but what they do in fact

195
See Anderson B 2006, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, revised
edn, London: Verso.
196
Asad provides a helpful outline of how the meaning of ‘myth’ changes and develops in the Western
tradition. What we know of today as the binary opposition of myth and reality has its origins with the
classical Greek binary of mythos and logos. Mythos was the powerful speech of heroes associated with
truth (alethea) where logos was speech associated with lies and dissimulation usually designed to placate,
in acts such as dissuading warriors from combat. Poets tended to authorise their speech by calling it
mythos—an inspiration from the gods. Later, the Sophists taught that all speech originated with humans.
As such, the mythoi of poets are lies in so far as they speak of the gods, although they have a morally
improving effect. Plato takes this line—in his attack on poets—and asserts that philosophers, not poets,
were responsible for moral improvement, changing the sense of myth to signify a socially useful lie. For
thinkers of the Enlightenment, the study of myth (Greek ‘mythology’ in particular) became the site of
reflection on human error (within the framework of a newer binary of imagination and reason) through
which the psychology of human passions could be explored. It also became the object of cultural
cultivation. Myths allowed writers and artists to represent contemporary events and feelings in the new
mode of ‘fiction’. See Asad (2003, 26-29).

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possess as a function of their inner human nature that lies beneath the distorted world as it

appears. The moral value of ‘natural rights’ was grounded in their claimed ontological reality. Only

by invoking an alternative ‘natural’ world in which freedom and equality prevailed could the

manifest regnant social inequalities and constraints be condemned as ‘unnatural’.197

For Canovan, this is the redemptive myth of liberalism, as a project to be realised not an

account of the world. The ‘nature’ of early liberalism and the ‘humanity’ of today are talked

about as if they exist, but the point is that they are still to be created. An ‘imaginary construction’

of human rights is asserted precisely because they are not built into the structure of the universe

in any self-evident way (Asad 2003, 59):

The frightening truth concealed by the liberal myth is, therefore, that liberal principles go against
the grain of human and social nature. Liberalism is not a matter of clearing away a few accidental
obstacles and allowing humanity to unfold its natural essence. It is more like making a garden in a
jungle that is continually encroaching…But it is precisely the element of truth in the gloomy
pictures of society and politics drawn by critics of liberalism that makes the project of realizing
liberal principles all the more urgent. The world is a dark place, which needs redemption by the
light of a myth.198

The weakness of these assumptions about the natural world, Asad argues, emerged most fully

at the turn of the nineteenth century with the rise of sociological realism and the emergence of

a new vision of nature as essentially violent and conflict ridden. The eventual resurrection and

triumph of liberal natural rights came off the back not of more effective theorisation, but of

Europe’s experience of its own horrors in the form of Nazism and Stalinism in the first half of

197
Canovan M 1990, ‘On Being Economical with the Truth: Some Liberal Reflections’, Political Studies, 38,
p. 16, cited in Asad (2003, 59).
198
Asad perceptively notes the striking nature of these metaphors and their implications in terms of
violence (2003, 59). They explain and justify the violence at the heart of a political doctrine that has
purportedly disavowed violence on principle. It is a translucent violence, the violence of a universalising
reason. For to make an enlightened space, which is constantly under threat of encroachment by the
darkness of the outside world, this outside must be continually attacked, restrained, and, eventually,
annexed by conquest. The garden itself too needs constant weeding. We thus have not one but two
legitimated violences: a violence required by the cultivation of the liberal enlightenment that is an
expression of law, and a violence of the dark jungle that is an expression of transgression. Political and
legal disciplines that forcefully protect sacred things (individual conscience, property, liberty) against
whatever violates them are thus underwritten by the secular liberal myth.

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the twentieth century. This gave rise to the entire project of human rights that brings with it an

evident moralism wrongly asserted to be uncongenial to secularism as a system of political

governance.

It is also not difficult to see that in practice secularism is not some neutral background

frame that allows all other worldviews to express themselves. As ideological as any other

worldview, it insists on the positions required by its fundamental commitments and disallows

expression of whatever contradicts these. A recent example of this noted by Asad (2003, 139) is

the insistence of the Greek government that religious affiliation be removed from Greek identity

cards—as required by the European Charter of Human Rights—despite popular opposition

which saw this move as a threat to a collective (Christian) religious identity. Even the suggestion

by the church of a referendum to decide on the proposed change was rejected by the

government on grounds that such methods cannot apply to issues of human rights. A further

compromise by the church that old forms be retained on an optional basis was also dismissed.

Such examples poignantly reveal secular power not only as imposing and exclusionary but also

as resting on certain ‘sacred’, metaphysical fundamentals, such as the modern concept of human

rights, that are prior to other fundamental secular principles such as democracy. These human

rights achieve such a level of inviolability that they are beyond even being put to those who are

otherwise asserted as collectively sovereign in deciding how they live their lives.

The case of the Muslim woman’s hijab serves as another example of the imposing nature

of secular liberalism. Despite claims to religious freedom and expression, the hijab has been

banned or policed in several secular liberal states. In France, it is banned for students at public

schools. In certain German states, pupils can wear it but not teachers. In the UK and elsewhere

individual schools have the right to decide to impose restrictions. Such examples, of which there

are many, render problematic the sharp juxtaposition of religious politics as imposing and

exclusionary against a secular politics as liberating and inclusionary. As Asad notes, it is often

pointed out that secularism, purportedly as a function of its inclusive, non-imposing nature,

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does not require citizens to be identical but rather encourages them to develop their

individuality. What is missed in such accounts—which represent another way of claiming

neutrality—is the determinative ideological background. The flowering of individuality that

secularism encourages is, in fact, founded on positivist, humanist, and liberal presuppositions

(Asad 2006, 519)—which is precisely why even quotidian matters like dress code and self-

identification can be policed via legislative force. It is a particular kind of individuality that is

sought. Further, this particular kind of individuality is not just sought passively; it is actively to

be formed, foremostly through state education. This is partly why the hijab being worn in public

schools became so controversial. In the words of the influential French ‘le Comité Laïcité

République’199:

The school is the sacred place of the Republic, where one learns to become a citizen, where all
children are taught to become free women and men, equal in rights and interdependent, regardless
of their color, their origin, and their religious, philosophical, or cultural belonging. It is there that
liberty, equality, and fraternity acquire their full, concrete meaning. That is why the school must
remain a protected sanctuary, and with regard to it secularism should never allow commercial,
communitarian, or dogmatic interests to intrude.

The school is sacred because proper formation is integral to the founding myth of the secular

Republic. Ironically it is not religious schools that are said to be sacred but secular schools,

hence they should not be exposed to contamination by worldly interests (Asad 2006, 521).200

199
The ‘le Comité Laïcité République’ (CLR) is a think-tank and activist association inspired by the
positivist philosophy of Comte and his followers, especially Emile Littre. Its purpose is to defend and
further the principles of French secularism. Some of its members were also members of the Stasi
commission which advised the French President to ban the hijab on secular grounds. See Asad (2006,
520) for this quotation and more on the CLR. We discuss more on the Stasi commission and the hijab
affair below, see pp. 317-318.
200
The current French President Emmanuel Macron recently reiterated this view in the following terms: “Schools
are our republican crucible. They completely protect our children in the face of all religious symbols, religion.
They are central to the notion of laïcité [secularism], and are where we form consciences so that children become
free, rational citizens able to choose their own destinies. Schools are therefore a collective treasure. They make it
possible to build the Republic that we share.” Fight against separatism – the Republic in action: speech by
Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic, on the fight against separatism, 2020, Élysée, accessed 20 May 2022,
<https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2020/10/02/fight-against-separatism-the-republic-in-action-
speech-by-emmanuel-macron-president-of-the-republic-on-the-fight-against-separatism>

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This does not mean it is the protected space of imagination and fantasy, as might be expected.

Rather, the public school is a pedagogic structure that the secular republic presents as a space

of emancipation. A space that sustains contradictory demands: that the individual define herself

but also be bound by an unconditional obedience to the nation-state, to school teachers and

officials, and to a pre-determined educational syllabus that is by no means ideologically neutral.

According to Henri Pena-Ruiz, a member of the Stasi Commission, secular schools do not deny

difference, they simply take care that difference is asserted in a way that is compatible with the

universalism of rights and personal freedom not tied down by group loyalty: ‘An attitude of

inquiry and of open-mindedness to knowledge is incompatible with the peremptory assertion

of an identity more fantasized than freely chosen, especially at an impressionable age’ (Asad

2006, 521). The ‘fantasy’ here is a nod to religion because, according to the positivism that

informs this sort of view, fantasy is the very essence of religion since it asserts the existence of

other worlds and the possibility of existing in them. Only the disciplined subject, one taught

what is real and rational and how to discriminate between the real and the fantastical, can

choose freely by breaking away from inherited traditions.

It is not, we may say therefore, that secularism ensures some neutral equality and freedom,

but that particular ideological versions of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ ensure secularism. Secularism

is the mode in which the state teaches its subjects about what counts as real, what they themselves

really are, in order to better govern them by letting them properly govern themselves. More

important than the individual’s desire or right to decide for herself is what is to count as

knowledge of reality on the basis of which the autonomous self can make a truly free choice (Asad

2006, 521-522). On this liberal view, ‘free choice’ gives way to coerced behaviour only when

individual sovereignty is invaded by something other than the state (which represents the

individual will collectively)—and, not insignificantly, its dominant civil partner in the capitalist

market with its imposed conditions of work and profitability and manipulative advertising (523).

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Public Reason: a Universal Human Reason?

‘Public reason’ is an essential component of Habermas’s conception of how moral-political

positions are decided in liberal democracies. Indeed, the notion, or some analogue of it, is crucial

to any secular liberal model of politics because it provides the putatively common language in

which a diverse citizenry can discourse and deliberate. Without such a common language, we are

left with an array of incongruent languages associated with opposing cultural forms of life that

comprise modern pluralist societies. Just as the opposing conceptions of the good of these forms

of life must be bracketed at some level from political life, so too their languages. Since each

language is only accessible to those whose forms of life it attaches to, its use in the political life

would disadvantage those of other forms of life since it is inaccessible to them. Liberal theory

characterises these as ‘private’ languages or reasons, contrasting them to a ‘public’ language that

is by this very juxtaposition constituted as the privileged language of public discourse.

Originally an Enlightenment concept with roots in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant,

‘public reason’ is most readily associated in contemporary discourse with Rawls.201

Notwithstanding notable differences, the early modern social contract theorists all adopt some

notion of a common human reason that transcends ‘private judgments’ and is thus appealed to

in trying to ground the political order in a non-sectarian way. For Hobbes (1994, 299, 300), all

people must set aside their private judgements in favour of public reason, ‘the reason of him

who has sovereign power in the commonwealth’. Rousseau’s ‘general will’ is formed by the

exclusion of ‘private reasons’. He draws a sharp distinction between the self-interested reason

of private individuals and the ‘public reason’ of the society at large which aims at the common

201
For his own detailed articulation on public reason, see Rawls (1996, 212-254), and Rawls (1997) where
he revisits the idea.

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good and is reflected in its ‘general will’.202 For Locke (2003, 137), it is by the exclusion of all

private judgments that the community comes to be umpire and decides on all differences

between members concerning any matter of right. For Kant (1996, 18), the ‘public use of one’s

reason’ is its use by a scholar before the entire literate world, as opposed to the ‘private use of

one’s reason’ that a person makes in a civic office entrusted to him. The former demands

freedom—including, contra Hobbes, from the sovereign—for the pursuit of enlightenment,

while the latter is properly compliant to the requirements of the given civic office. In a sense,

private reason is delimited by the recognition of an authority to which it is tied, in contrast to

public reason which knows no authority except reason itself. The contemporary liberal

discourse on public reason is closer to how it is used in Kant but goes further in focusing on

what the public use of reason comprises.203 Here the ‘publicity’ of public reason is not a function

of sovereignty (Hobbes), being directed at the common good (Rousseau), or freedom from

external strictures (Locke). Rather, it is a function of reasoning by (ostensibly) common/shared

standards and values.

In Rawls (1997), the diversity of incommensurable and irresolvable comprehensive

doctrines held by people in a pluralistic society means that citizens cannot reach agreement or

even approach mutual understanding on the basis of these conflicting doctrines.204 In turn, the

202
‘What is one to think of an interaction where the reason of each private individual dictates to him
maxims directly contrary to those that public reason preaches to the body of society, and where each
finds his profit in the misfortune of another?’ (Rousseau 2011a, 90)
203
According to Vallier (2018), the idea of public justification based on public reason is laid to rest for a
century after surfacing in Kant as social contract theory is displaced by utilitarianism, Hegelianism and
Marxism. Social contract theory only makes a return in the post-war United States, with its dominant
strand being the Kantian version articulated by Rawls in which public justification plays an explicit and
central role. In turn, the ‘public reason’ and ‘public reason liberalism’ discourse is a relatively recent one
coming to full light only in the 1990s.
204
It is perhaps instructive to contrast this late modern liberal view about the relation of freedom and
convergence on truth with its early modern counterpart. According to the traditional view, as expressed
in Milton and Mills, freedom of thought, speech and inquiry leads to increasing agreement on truth, and
convergence on moral and political views, because truth appeals to our universal, shared reason (Gaus
2003, 2, 6). The contemporary liberal view, as represented here by Rawls, is the opposite: the free exercise
of reason leads to inevitable difference and diversity of beliefs and opinions.

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best we can aim for in public deliberation on moral-political rules is to leave aside ‘background’

and ‘private’ reasons (particular to each comprehensive doctrine) and seek an ‘overlapping

consensus’ on ‘foreground’ principles (affirmable by all doctrines) that speak in the language of

public reasons, reasons that are purportedly shared by all citizens. Such a political order is based

not on ultimate but on penultimate truths (Ferrara 2009, 81). Since every citizen is free and

equal, rules can only be imposed when justified by reasons that everyone can both understand

and accept.205 This requires a common language of reasoning neutral to all comprehensive

doctrines, a role served by public reason. ‘I propose’, writes Rawls (1997), ‘that in public reason

comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable

addressed to citizens as citizens’ (766). The ‘politically reasonable’ makes reference to the ‘values

of public reason’ (773), to ‘premises we accept and think others could reasonably accept’ (786),

to political values that others, indeed everyone ‘can reasonably be expected to endorse’ (Rawls

1996, 226, 241), or to ‘presently accepted general beliefs’ (224).206 Public reasons are thus reasons

that every citizen could in principle recognise and affirm as having normative force (Billingham

and Chaplin 2019, 131). They are not grounded in comprehensive doctrines but transcend all

such doctrines (Tyndall 2019, 1062). Rawlsian public reason is about ‘espousing a common point

of view for settling the terms of our political life’ (Larmore 2003, 368). The content of this public

reason is not fixed, although it is given exclusively by a family of ‘reasonable’ liberal political

conceptions of justice which circumscribe its boundaries (Rawls 1996, xlix-l).207

205
This applies, for Rawls, only to fundamental political questions (constitutional essentials and matters
of basic justice) and to public discourses that occur in the tripartite ‘public political forum’—comprising
the discourse of judges, government officials and legislators, and candidates for public office—not to the
‘background culture’, the discourse of civil society where non-public reason is welcome (Rawls, 1997, 767-
8). The ‘publicity’ of public reason is thus given in three ways: it is the shared reason of the public; its
subject is the public good concerning fundamental political justice; and it is expressed in public reasoning.
206
In an earlier perhaps more crude formulation Rawls refers to ‘presently accepted general beliefs and
forms of reasoning found in common sense’ (Rawls 1995, 224).
207
Notably, as with political liberalism more broadly, these ‘reasonable’ political conceptions, whose
limiting feature is the criterion of reciprocity, are marked by substantive liberal parameters: a list of basic
rights and liberties familiar to liberal constitutional regimes, an assignment of priority to these rights over

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 This notion of public reason presupposes a basic principle of modern, secular liberal

politics, namely, that the exercise of legitimate state power must take place in secular, that is,

worldly, common and neutral, terms—as opposed to metaphysical, particular, and ideological

terms. In Eberle’s (2012, 285) helpful gloss:

[T]he only kind of rationale that can justify coercion in a pluralistic liberal polity is one constituted
by premises that are shared by, or that can be shared by, a diversely committed population. But
the only shared or sharable premises are secular: only the secular is the universal, natural and
common; the religious is invariably particular, sectarian, and idiosyncratic.

Habermas agrees with the basic principle of Rawlsian public reason. The self-

understanding of the constitutional state developed, he argues, in the context of a philosophical

tradition that relies on ‘natural’ reason, that is, on public arguments that claim to be equally

accessible to all persons (Habermas 2008, 120). Only with the advent of a self-governing

association of free and equal citizens founded on legal norms—the modern liberal state—does

the point of reference arise for the use of public reason, which requires citizens to justify their

political positions and attitudes before one another in light of valid constitutional principles

(122). Autonomous, self-determined governance, as opposed to externally given laws, requires

that legislation, or the exercise of power more generally, be mutually-acceptable to all citizens

or at least to a majority—or, with Kant and Rousseau, freedom requires that we obey only those

laws we could rationally legislate for ourselves. The constitutional state must not only act

neutrally towards worldviews but must also rest on normative foundations that can be justified

neutrally with respect to opposing worldviews, and thus in ‘postmetaphysical’ terms (Habermas

2010, 21). This in turn requires their justification by reasons in a generally accessible language

that others can understand and be expected to find convincing.208 The reciprocity of

against claims of the general good and perfectionist values, and measures ensuring adequate all-purpose
means to make effective use of their freedoms (Rawls 1997, 774).
208
Habermas disagrees, however, with Rawls’s partial fixing of the content of public reason in the form
of certain liberal principles. In doing so, Rawls ‘generates a priority of liberal rights which demotes the

278
expectations among citizens is what sets a constitutional liberal polity apart from a community

segmented along the divisions of competing worldviews (136).

The assumption here of a common human reason presents the epistemic basis for

legitimating a secular state (and, simultaneously, delegitimating non-secular states). The

exercise of power must be justified in an impartial manner; it is otherwise illegitimate because

it would then reflect one party/group/community forcing its will on another.209 Legitimate law

is compatible only with a mode of legal coercion that does not negate the rational motives for

obeying the law in the first instance: it must remain possible for everyone to obey legal norms

‘on the basis of insight’ (Habermas 1996, 121). All coercively enforceable political decisions must

be formulated and be justifiable in a language that is equally intelligible to all citizens and able

to be evaluated in the light of shared standards (Habermas 2008, 134). The only way political

power can shed its otherwise repressive character is through citizens providing each other with

reasons that they can all comprehend and be expected to endorse (122).210 This, in turn,

constitutes a condition of possibility for the institutional separation between church and state.

democratic process to an inferior status’ (Habermas 1995, 128). Habermas prefers that public reason be
more radically open and subject more fully to democratic determination.
209
From here we get the notion of ‘public reason liberalism’—the dominant brand of liberal political
theory today—whereby only public justification via public reasons can justify the coercion that is basic
to all governance and law (Vallier 2011, 367).
210
Habermas thus uses intelligibility (comprehensibility) and shareability (ability to endorse on a shared
basis) as the criterion that distinguishes public from private, or secular from religious, reason. He does
not expand on this much even though this is a controversial and critical point in the debate on public
reason. In the public reason liberalism literature, the epistemic qualities by which we are supposed to
separate ‘the public wheat from the private chaff’ (Eberle 2002, 14) are numerous and subject to strong
disagreement. Vallier (2014) provides a helpful typology of the most common qualities: ‘intelligibility’
(able to be justified by one’s own evaluative standards, and thus understood by others as legitimate
reasons); ‘accessibility’ (able to be justified by common evaluative standards, thus able to be endorsed by
others); and ‘shareability’ (able to be justified by, or integrated into, the subjective evaluative standards
of all reasonable people, and thus properly ‘shared’ reasons) (104-110). Eberle (2002) proffers a more
elaborate typology of eight classes—intelligibility, public accessibility, replicability, rejection of inerrancy,
external criticisability, independent confirmability, and provability—and, following a thorough
discussion of each, concludes that they are not adequate to the task for which they are marshalled,
namely, the differentiation of admissible secular/public and inadmissible religious/private reasons. They
are either too weak, failing to rule out various kinds of religious reasons, or too strong, disallowing various
types of secular reasons that are in practice accepted by all (234-293). We would go further than Eberle—

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 For Habermas, this ‘democratic public reason’ is ‘secular reason’ whose secularity is

marked by its being ‘in principle universally accessible’ or couched in ‘worldview-neutral’

language (2010, 16, 21).211 The criterion of its publicity is that all statements ought to be

defendable ‘towards an unlimited circle of addressees’ (2017, 141). As such, it allows for

democratic deliberation ‘in ways that are neutral toward the cognitive claims of competing

worldviews’ (2011, 24, emphasis added). Without the presumption of a background consensus

on constitutional essentials, citizens of a pluralistic society could not seek judicial redress,

appeal to specific rights or make arguments with reference to constitutional clauses with the

expectation of getting a fair decision (Habermas and Taylor 2011, 65). Indeed, for Habermas, as

soon as the cognitive dissonances of competing worldviews and religious doctrines penetrate

the foundations of the normative regulation of citizens’ social interaction, the political

community fragments into irreconcilable religious and ideological segments based on a

precarious modus vivendi (2008, 135). Thus a background consensus is indispensable in order to

establish a uniting bond of civic solidarity.212 This, however, can only be settled within a space

of neutral reasons, reasons that can be accepted by religious citizens, citizens of different

who still maintains the distinction between secular and religious reasons and encourages, but does not
stipulate, that people strive to utilise the former when able—to posit that without a clear distinguishing
factor, upholding an inherent epistemic distinction between secular and religious reasons, particularly
one that privileges the former, becomes not only untenable but also a means of undercutting the very
logic for which the distinction is made, namely, to treat all citizens equally.
211
Cf. Rawls (1997) who distinguishes public reason from secular reason, defining the latter as reasoning
in terms of comprehensive non-religious doctrines such as a Kantian or Utilitarian morality (775).
212
This ‘background consensus’ in Habermas serves a similar role to Rawls’s (and Taylor’s) ‘overlapping
consensus’ but the two have significantly different features within the respective models to which they
belong, particularly in terms of how they are grounded or justified. Habermas’s consensus, like all other
matters of public deliberation, abstract entirely from any ‘ethical’ worldviews and justify themselves
independently in the intersubjective public discourse of public reason. Rawls’s overlapping consensus
maintains an internal connection between political justice and comprehensive worldviews, the latter
ultimately justifying the former, which, even as ‘freestanding’, has no source of validity of its own. This
represents a valid avenue of critique for Habermas (2000): “From the point of view of validity, an uneasy
asymmetry prevails between the public conception of justice that raises a weak claim to reasonableness
and the nonpublic doctrines with their strong claims to truth. That a public conception of justice should
ultimately derive its moral authority from nonpublic reasons is counterintuitive. Anything valid should
also be capable of public justification.” (86)

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religions, and secular citizens alike (2010, 20); reasons that, for Habermas, are ‘secular’ in both

the active sense that they are neutral with respect to comprehensive worldviews, and in the

negative sense that they do not appeal to religious discourse in particular.213 ‘Secular reasons’,

says Habermas, ‘do not expand the perspective of one’s own community, but push for mutual

perspective taking so that different communities can develop a more inclusive perspective by

transcending their own universe of discourse’ (Habermas and Taylor 2011, 66).214

Habermas thus maintains an epistemic distinction between secular and religious thought,

privileging the former as uniquely sufficient to arrive at the normative conclusions we need to

establish a political ethic and the legitimacy of the liberal democratic state. As we saw in Chapter

Three, for Habermas, secularity is fully reflexive and open to critique—which makes it ideal for

213
Such exclusion of ‘religious reasons’, as with Rawls proviso we encountered earlier, of variously figured
‘religious restraint’ are quite standard in the models of public reason liberals. However, they are not
universal. A minority of public reason liberals disavow such a condition. For examples, see Waldron (2012)
and Chambers (2010). There is also an intermediate position, occupied by the likes of March (2013),
whereby it is not all religious reasons that are to be excluded, only a subset thereof. Building on Waldron
(2012), March (2013) distinguishes between different types of religious arguments based on their form and
content into broadly ‘theocratic’ ones that make direct appeals to revelation or are entirely dependent on
theistic foundations, and ‘democratic’ (non-authoritarian, non-scripturalist) ones that are more loosely
derived from or based on revelation. Only the former are to be excluded, argues March, because they are
authoritarian and inaccessible to outsiders; they subject others to ‘one’s own extra-political epistemic and
moral authority’ (533). The latter are acceptable because they are less about justifying moral knowledge
than providing moral motivation or ‘enlarging the moral imaginations’ of religious people. This typology
brings a beneficial nuance to the otherwise monolithic category of ‘religious reasons’. However, the
import of how it is deployed is effectively a mirroring of the requirement of Habermasian translation and
its motivation. It is to say that religious reasons that can take a secular form are welcome; those that
cannot are to be shown the door.
214
There are apparent similarities between ‘public reason’ and the older—but ever-returning (Contreras
2013, ix)—‘natural law’ tradition insofar as both seek to identify moral-political principles common to
people across multiple traditions/doctrines, independent of the specific scriptural/ideological authority
of each. It is beyond the scope of this work to explore this connection sufficiently. For an introductory
assessment see Vallejo (2013) who argues that notwithstanding some obvious differences—public reason
works with a procedural morality, grounded in language and factical pluralism and within a sceptical and
constructivist philosophical frame, that aims only at political consensus, whereas natural law seeks a
substantive morality, grounded in human nature and within a realist and objectivist frame, aiming also
at truth—public reason (as in Rawls and Habermas) can be considered a secular reformulation of natural
law theory. It may be further argued that public reason is a more secular formulation of natural law,
which, at least since early modern thinkers like Grotius, is already secular to the extent that it seeks to
erect morality independent of scriptural authority.

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our ‘post-metaphysical’ age—while religion rests on a dogmatic core. When untranslated,

religious contents refer to this core in an authoritarian manner—they subject other human

beings to their own ‘extra-political epistemic and moral authority’ (March 2013, 533)—which

makes them unfit for post-traditional, pluralist society. While the later Habermas affirms the

possibility that religious discourse carries ‘truth contents’, extractable via translation, this is only

in its capacity as a vehicle. The basic epistemic distinction still holds for him. He asserts that

whereas at a general cognitive level, there is only one and the same human reason, there are

differences in kind between religious and secular reasons (Habermas and Taylor 2011, 50, 61-62;

Habermas 2004, 307-312). The latter can be expressed in a ‘public’ language, that is, a generally

shared language; the former appeal to an inclusive membership in a corresponding religious

community and are therefore exclusionary with respect to non-members:

Only if one is a member and can speak in the first person from within a particular religious tradition
does one share a specific kind of experience on which religious convictions and reasons depend …
[T]he evidence for religious reasons does not only depend on cognitive beliefs and their semantic
nexus with other beliefs, but on existential beliefs that are rooted in the social dimension of
membership, socialization, and prescribed practices.

From the critical standpoint, there are multiple issues to consider here on what is a crucial

premise—the epistemic gap between secular and religious reason—in Habermas’s overall

position on the relation between secularity and religion. First, the figuration of religious

discourse as ‘held together in ritualized praxis’ and religious convictions as inextricably tied to

experience is a very particular one, that may be true of some religions but cannot be presumed

as applicable to religion as such, universally. Yet it is used for exactly this type of universal

epistemic demotion of religious reason. Second, Habermas’s epistemic demotion of religious

reasons relies on a circular logic. He argues, first, that religious discourse is closely tied to a

ritual praxis, to acknowledge, second, that theology is able to stand outside this praxis in

interpreting it and to provide reasons of a more generally accessible nature, only, however, with

the use of metaphysical concepts. With the collapse of metaphysics, though, third, theology also

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collapses by not being able to rise to the thresholds of post-metaphysical thought (Habermas

2004, 310). Thus, the decidedly post-metaphysical requirement that only certain types of reasons

are admissible in the liberal public sphere is justified by the post-metaphysical contention that

metaphysical concepts no longer make sense. This is a good example as any of instances wherein

Habermas’s strict proceduralism is betrayed by being undergirded by contentious substantive

moral, political, or, as in this case, epistemological claims.

Thus, there is a more fundamental problem with Habermas’s promotion of secular

language and reasons to the status of universally or generally accessible, shared language. What

is relevant in considering the possibility of a generally shared language is the accessibility of

that language to people of different worldviews. In this regard, religious language—

Catholic/Protestant/Jewish/Islamic languages more precisely—is indeed particular and not

immediately accessible to those who do not share in these traditions. Yet surely this is not a

distinguishing mark of religious traditions; it is true of all traditions, worldviews, or forms of life,

religious and non-religious alike. Is liberal language, we may ask, any more naturally accessible

to a communist or Hindu than Christian language is to a liberal or a Muslim? All traditions,

religious or secular, arise within history and give rise to an ‘internal’ language, a particular idiom

and a conceptual grammar that is embedded within its inevitably historical cultural forms of

life. No human worldview can give rise to a neutral language that is somehow more universally

accessible than others, or is simply ‘generally shared’. Since reasonable people disagree about

which religion is correct, if any, argue public reason liberals, then reasons specific to any one

tradition will be inaccessible to those outside (Vallier 2011, 373). But of what secular traditions?

Is there any secular tradition or ideology that reasonable people do not disagree about? If not,

what makes them any more accessible or ‘public’ than religious traditions?

Further, are there any secular discourses that are extra-hermeneutical, simply accessible

to everyone’s understanding without the need for interpretation and translation? As Dallmayr

(2012) pointedly asks, in casting the Habermasian view of ‘generally accessible’ secular discourse

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as Enlightenment myth: are not modern rationalist texts, from Kant to Rawls, exceedingly

difficult texts in constant need of interpretation and reinterpretation? Do the judgments of

secular courts not always comprise the interpretation and ‘translation’ of earlier legal texts and

juridical precedents? Is not such interpretation and translation, the effort to distil the meaning

of texts, utterance, events, to render them accessible to understanding, everywhere in modern

secular life—including, as ‘post-empiricist’ epistemology attests in the knowledge production

of natural science? (968). We would assert, with Dallmayr, that this secular figuration of secular

reason and language as simply transparent to human understanding fails to account for or

adequately address the Gadamarian (1976) insight of the universality of the hermeneutical

problem. The mistake in this narrative, then, is not in identifying religious particularity but in

missing or masking secular particularity, in assuming secular universality. It is in the (mis-

)characterisation of public reason as a neutral and sanitised form of transcultural reason, not

embedded in particular traditions or philosophical frameworks (Parekh 2008, 22).

We would do well here to separate considerations of understanding and conviction. I do

not need to share someone’s experience or practice to understand their argument, although I

would perhaps appreciate their argument more if I did. What I require to understand their

argument is knowledge of the language in which it is articulated. The better my knowledge of

this language (and its associated forms of life, conceptual grammar), the better I can understand

its arguments. The commonality of a discourse in terms of its intelligibility, in turn, is a function

of how widespread and established it is, of the power it yields, not of any inherent epistemic

distinctions. Secular human rights discourse is now commonly understood in modern Europe,

whereas the same arguments would have been unintelligible in Medieval Europe. The

conditions that would make its intelligibility possible were simply not available. The opposite

is true, to some extent, of theological discourse. This is a function of the relative hegemony of a

discourse, not its inherent epistemic characteristics.

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 As for conviction, naturally one would need to hold the deeper reasons on which the

argument ultimately rests to find it convincing. However, this too is not a point of distinction.

It is no truer of a religious worldview than it is of a secular one. If I need to affirm the existence

of God to find convincing a moral position that rests on scriptural text said to be revealed by

God, so too do I need to affirm the self-sufficient nature of Reason or the ontological reality of

something called ‘human rights’ to find convincing a moral position that rests on an article of

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter is no more inherently endorsable or

convincing than the former, except only as a function of the hegemony one discourse enjoys

relative to another at any given historical time. The idea that appeals to Biblical authority cannot

count as moral reasons because they close off any possibility of public assessment or

interpretation (Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 70) can only be consistently maintained if we say

the same of appeals to the UNHDR or any other ‘secular’ epistemic authority. Otherwise, it is

not clear what makes the former any less accessible to human reason. Indeed, Vallier (2011)

shows that at least some arguments from natural theology215 and even some arguments from

religious testimony (appeal to scriptural or religious authority)216 meet reasonable

interpretations of the accessibility requirement because they appeal to natural or pure reason

(375-385). They can be evaluated, accepted, or rejected on rational grounds alone.

Habermas insists, nevertheless, that the line between secular and religious utterances

cannot be blurred (2017, 107). Religious claims to validity remain particularistic. Even the

presumptively universal claims of the major world religions resemble the centred universalism of

215
Vallier presents and discusses a traditional Catholic argument against abortion and a Lockean
argument against the moral permissibility of suicide to show that all of their premises are evaluable by
reason and thus such arguments are accessible, whatever we may think of their correctness. That they
may be inconclusive is not sufficient grounds to exclude them since most arguments advanced in the
public square are likewise inconclusive.
216
This is on the basis that the claim of a scripture’s being revealed by God—as with the God’s existence
itself—can be argued based on appeal to reason alone, as well as on considering religious testimony as
comparable to moral testimony.

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ancient empires. Both seek to extend their political and cultural domination (108). In contrast,

secular post-metaphysical universal claims sketch the formal standpoint of an inclusive ‘we’ which

obliges all parties to engage in mutual perspective-taking without prejudicing the outcome in

advance. A dogmatically fixed religious standpoint only allows others to be incorporated into the

perspective of one’s own community. In a word, religious universality is about conversion and

assimilation to a fixed core, whereas secular universality is about the willingness to decentre one’s

own perspective and be open to reciprocal learning in a genuine process of discursive will-

formation. Secular discourse is about values ordered transitively; religious discourse about truths

that observe a binary code (108). In turn, argues Habermas, religious citizens in a secular state

must justify secular constitutional principles within the context of their own faith, and they must

recognise the difference between ‘fallible public reasons and the infallible truths of faith’. With

these ‘musts’, however, he falls into a performative contradiction, revealing the ‘dogmatic’ core of

his secularism. Stated differently, if Habermasian secularism was as fluid and non-dogmatic as the

above claims suggest, it would not be able to place non-negotiable demands in advance of the

discursive procedure of democratic will-formation, even, technically of the necessity of this

procedure. No philosophically or reasonably contestable point could be fixed. Yet the effectively

fixed secular, liberal fundamentals, and associated demands, abound—not to mention the non-

democratic imposition of a discursively constructed set of ‘shared reasons’ by which secular reason

is privileged in the first instance.

Whence Commonality in Diversity?

Enlightenment liberal assumptions belong to specific (contingent) kinds of reasoning—albeit

kinds that have largely shaped our modern world; they are not a neutral, universal ground from

which understanding of all other traditions must begin (Asad 1993, 200). The liberal way of life

is historically contingent and embedded in a particular culture or form of social self-

understanding; it is not underwritten by history, mandated by human nature, or grounded in

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universal reason (Parekh 2008, 25). Fundamental liberal premises do, however, operate with

this sense of self-assumed universal reference point, wherein lies the problem. Liberalism

requires the assertion of public political truths and that the first among these truths is that the

individual’s freedom must be guaranteed (Gaus 2003, 17). These can be seen as representing its

own ‘dogmatic core’. While in theory, as a secular ideology, all of its premises should be open

to critique and revision, all of the models we have considered encode such liberal premises at

their foundations. These are not open to revision in any substantive sense, and as such, the very

distinction by which Habermas and others privilege secularity over religion appears to falter.

It does not take much reflection to see that there is nothing distinctly self-evident about

basic liberal normative claims, such as the premise of individual freedom. It makes a lot of sense

within certain normative universes but not in others. In an Enlightenment-inspired

anthropocentric frame, individual freedom taken as a fundamental normative position makes

sense. Yet in other equally ‘secular’ frames, such as some Marxist ones where different social

self-understandings prevail, it may be taken to be far less self-evident, if not outright false.

Equally reasonable arguments for a priority of community can and have been made. In a

theocentric frame, however, the idea of human freedom, including from God, would seem non-

sensical, if still subject to debate by those who adopt such a frame. The point here is not about

which position is correct but that any claims of self-evidence are necessarily frame-dependent.

To merely dress an ideological position in a garb of self-evident universality is philosophical

naïveté at best and authoritarian hubris at worst—all the more problematic when done precisely

in the name of opposing authoritarianism.

There is here, then, a tension in Habermasian and Rawlsian liberal models worth teasing

out. They purport to take seriously the ‘fact’ of pluralism and respect the diversity of competing

worldviews—indeed their very claim to legitimacy and superiority rests on this claim. Yet the

modus operandi by which this is to be done—something called ‘public reason’—simply

presupposes, and relies on, the availability of shared or common values. One is warranted to

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ask: whence the commonality in the sea of difference? Whence the ‘common point of view’

(Larmore) in radically diverse societies? From where do common moral-political values arise

that cut across strongly divergent competing worldviews? This movement of first recognising

plurality as a problem only to second, almost simultaneously, find a shared basis with which to

solve it, is a typical one in contemporary liberal political theory. And it has a strong genealogical

liberal pedigree, going way all the way to John Locke. As Fish (1997) has shown, this move is

crucial in Locke’s project of settling the ‘just bounds’ between church and state. In settling these

just bounds, Locke (2003a) asserts that ‘every church is orthodox to itself’ but also that some

opinions go ‘contrary to human society’ and are ‘condemned by the judgment of all mankind’

(225, 244). What he fails to explain is how and whence such self-evident, universal moral rules

arise if every particular religion or culture has a self-legitimating orthodoxy.

Updating to the new language of ‘public reason’, contemporary liberal theorists make the

same incoherent move. Public reason is, however, inadequate to the purpose for which it is

deployed. This is because if the content of ‘public reason’ is defined empirically, then we have

to accept that there are few, if any, substantive values that are universally shared (even when

restricting ourselves to Western liberal democracies as opposed to the whole world). Public

reason would thus be without content, an empty set. If, on the other hand, it is defined

normatively, then it has to refer to the sorts of substantive values of controversial worldviews

that for its very constitution it is meant to transcend. It is not difficult to notice from the above

analysis that the content of liberal public reason is in fact determined normatively and that the

purportedly ‘common values’ to which it is said to refer are only discursively made available

through a concurrent three-step move. First, pluralism is qualified by ‘reasonability’ such that

some worldviews are deemed, on ideological terms, beyond the pale. Second, the ‘reasonable’ is

explicitly tied to fundamental liberal values. Third, public reason, as the articulation of what is

common between reasonable worldviews, is characterised by a family of liberal values. As such,

however, it is only diversity within broadly liberal doctrines that are respected—everyone else

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is subjected to secular liberalism’s own ‘extra-political epistemic and moral authority’—while

the claim to respect diversity per se remains an empty claim. Indeed, it can be argued that there

is hardly a serious attempt to take the fact of pluralism seriously.

Stated differently from a related standpoint, with Vatter (2008), liberal theory opposes

the ‘strong’ reasons of the public—the reason of the strongest, that is, the public reason of the

liberal state—with ‘weak’ reasons of the weakest, which are excluded from political life because

they can never rest at the basis of public right or political justice. The reasons of the powerless

are minoritarian or immature reasons, reasons not sufficiently ‘enlightened’ to obtain the assent

of a majority. In turn, the very idea of public reason, rather than being the antidote to the ‘fact

of oppression’ of minorities, may be instrumental in preserving it (259-260).

In arguing for the possibility of a ‘generally shared’ language, Forst (2001) argues that the

translation of particular values and arguments into a general language should not be understood

as a process of unification or sublimation, as with the transformation of individuals or the

complete fusion of perspectives (128-129). Rather, it is to be understood as an agreement on the

basis of commonly shared or tolerated reasons. It is not an all-encompassing language but one

that is at all times criticisable and inclusive, one that can always still be generalised further. It

sublimates difference not in the sense of negating it but by taking it up in a way that individuals

can still recognise themselves as individuals in the generality of the language. A ‘general political

language’, argues Forst, is not a ‘pure’ language; it remains tied to the idiomatic contexts of

particular identities: ‘that it becomes “more” general as an inclusive language means not that it

moves away from these contexts but that it takes them into consideration by revising and

differentiating its vocabulary’.217 Habermas gives a nod to this argument as a ‘specification of the

demand for reasons in a “generally accessible” language’ (2008, 122). Yet his own idea of a

217
This argument is a response to feminist critiques Habermas takes seriously, namely that inherent in
every language is the potential violence of excluding those who do not speak in it, but in whose name
others speak. He is thus after a public reason that can speak with more than one voice, instead of one
that silences voices of difference.

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generally accessible language is not all-inclusive given that it excludes religious language and

reasons from important domains of the public sphere.

It is worth noting here that not all accounts of public reason liberalism rely on the

conception of shared reasons or a generally shared language. It is specifically those models, as

with Rawls and Habermas, in which the structure of public reason comprises a consensus on

the reasons used to justify a law or political principle. In contrast to such ‘consensus’ models,

which predominate among public reason liberals, we also have ‘convergence’ models whereby

the logic of public reason is satisfied by each citizen having their own reasons by which they

find a particular law or principle justified.218 On this view, people holding competing worldviews

converge on the same rule, not by the lights of any shared reasons, but for entirely different

reasons. This is not a problem, however, since the essential point of liberalism, and public

reason liberalism in particular, as seen by those who take this view, is that the coercive laws

citizens are subject to are justifiable to them such that they are not being forced against their

will. It does not matter whether that justification is based on shared or private reasons. As long

as there is justification for each citizen, their respect as free and equal is upheld. On such an

account, religious reasons need not be left out or translated; they can enter ‘into a network of

justificatory relations, crisscrossing and overlapping diverse reasonable viewpoints to secure an

overall public justification’ (Gaus and Vallier 2009, 61). 219 Convergence models thus make room

for ‘non-public’ reasons in the justificatory process, while, however, still operating on the logic

of a clear distinction between public and non-public reasons. They can be said to take diversity

seriously, unlike consensus models, but their feasibility relies on the strong—arguably wishful—

218
For influential accounts of ‘convergence liberalism’ see Vallier (2014) and Billingham (2017).
219
This sets the threshold of justification quite high because each law is to be justified for every citizen
referring to their own evaluative standards. Religious citizens can lean on religious reasons to support a
law, but if non-religion citizens find it unjustifiable by their own standards, the law stands defeated.
Likewise, if religious citizens find a law objectionable it will not be justified. It is not difficult to see why
such an approach can frustrate the legislative process.

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assumption that there exist sufficient areas upon which all the diverse conceptions of the good

in modern societies converge.

Epistemic Hierarchies of the Ordinary and Extraordinary

Charles Taylor agrees with Rawls and Habermas on the premise that diverse democracies cannot

revert to a shared conception of social and political life. We are condemned to seeking an

overlapping consensus of some sort.220 However, he disagrees on the claimed necessity of public

or secular reason as a common language (Taylor 2011, 49). Hence, whilst he affirms the need for

neutral reasons, he is strongly against referring to them as ‘secular reasons’ to the extent that

this makes a special case of religious discourse. Indeed, the very idea of secular reason, Taylor

argues, is underpinned by an unjustified epistemic distinction (of the sort Habermas posits).

This distinction juxtaposes ordinary secular reason as a common language which everyone can

use and deliberate in with extraordinary special languages, which introduce extra assumptions

and are much more epistemically fragile: you won’t be convinced by them unless you already

hold them. In turn, religious reason either comes to the same conclusions as secular reason, but

then it is superfluous, or to contrary conclusions, in which case it is dangerous and disruptive

and hence to be sidelined.

220
Rawls, Habermas, and Taylor all insist that there is no other way for diverse societies to operate except
through locating some allegedly free-standing and neutral conception of justice via something like an
overlapping consensus. There are of course alternative models. Stout (2004), for instance, seeks to
consider the possibility that ‘a person can be a reasonable (socially-cooperative) citizen without believing
in or appealing to a free-standing conception of justice’. Viewpoints grounded in contradictory
background justifications can come into conversation through ‘immanent criticism’—akin to Bilgrami’s
(1998) ‘internal argument’—an internal critique that, rather than arguing from a purportedly common
basis of reasons either tries to show that their opponents’ religious views are incoherent or to argue
positively from their opponents’ religious premises to the conclusion that the proposal is acceptable (68-
69). Only such an approach to political discourse, for Stout, shows the requisite respect for the particular
beliefs and practices of its diverse people. Anything less is to pay lip service to genuine pluralism. This
approach has an affinity to the convergence models noted above. There would one presumes be other
models too, enumerating or assessing which, however, is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

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 At the core of this epistemic distinction is the notion that religious thought is less rational

than secular (non-religious) thought. Religion is a faulty mode of reason. For Taylor, this

position has its source in a myth of the Enlightenment (2011, 52). A fairly common view sees the

Enlightenment as a passage from darkness to light: a move from a realm of thought full of error

and illusion to one where the truth is revealed. Importantly, truth is revealed precisely because

the shackles of religious thought are thrown off in favour of ‘secular’ science and philosophy.

Marquis de Condorcet (1988), in his account of the progress of the human mind, is paradigmatic

of a significant strand of Enlightenment thought (225)221:

It was finally permitted to resolutely proclaim this right, so long unrecognized, to submit all opinions
to our own reason, that is to say, to employ, for seizing on the truth, the sole instrument that we have
been given for recognition. Each man learned, with a certain pride, that his nature was not absolutely
destined to believe in the words of others; the superstition of antiquity and the abasement of reason
before the delirium of a supernatural faith disappeared from society as from philosophy.

The classic statement, of course, not long after de Condorcet wrote, is that of Kant (1968, 13:33):

Enlightenment is the emergence of human beings from a state of tutelage for which they were
themselves responsible, a self-incurred nonage. The slogan of the age was sapere aude! Dare to know.

Kant’s definitional statement on the Enlightenment announces a sounder epistemic mode as

the means to progress. The move from religion or revelation to reason alone (Kant’s Blosse

Vernunft) is posited as a self-evident epistemic gain of our setting aside considerations of

dubious truth and relevance and concentrating on matters of obvious relevance that we can

definitely settle. Reason emerges as autonomous and self-sufficient. It is freed from the

‘delirium’ and ‘tutelage’ of religious and metaphysical thought. As reason is emancipated, and

secular reason emerges, humanity comes of age. This self-understanding is a core aspect of the

‘stadial consciousness’ we encountered earlier in Taylor and Casanova.

This type of thinking is implicit in both Rawls’s and Habermas’s privileging of secular

reason as a universal language. The assumption is that secular reason is better, in some way, at

221
This citation and the following one from Kant are cited in Taylor (2011, 55-56).

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resolving moral-political issues. We would assert, with Taylor (2011), that such a distinction in

the rational credibility of religious and secular discourse is without foundation (53-54). There is

no a priori reason for a greater suspicion of the former. There are, of course, purely rational

arguments that suffice to establish certain descriptive propositions, in particular those of

mathematics and science. However, the foundational principles we need to establish our basic

normative political morality are not amongst these. The two most widespread secular moral

philosophies, utilitarianism and Kantianism, are as controversial and debatable on their

foundational premises as any transcendent philosophy or religious tradition.

It is also worth thinking about the specific notion that religious or metaphysical disputes

are uniquely intractable or irresolvable, and hence need to be bracketed out of the public realm

in favour of ‘merely’ political disputes. This notion is implicit in Kant, as noted above, and is

more thoroughly expounded by Locke (2003a, 225). It reappears in contemporary thought in

Rawls (1996, 4) and, more implicitly, in Habermas (2008, 251ff.). For Locke, conflicts over

religious doctrines were incapable of resolution with certainty, whereas everyone could agree

that such things as social unrest and political persecution were sources of harm to life, limb,

and property in this world (Asad 2004, 286). The realm of legitimate politics should, the

argument goes, be delimited in attending to the harms of this world about which we can all be

certain, rather than those of the next world, on which we shall never agree. The plausibility of

this argument was important in facilitating the subordination of the religious domain to the

practical and ideological power of the early modern state. By the twentieth century, however, it

became increasingly evident that even the political truths of this world evade us with any

certainty. What we have, rather, is increasingly widespread argument over how contestable

knowledge of a commonly shared social world is to be politically interpreted. In modern liberal

societies, public arguments over the economy, racial discrimination, multiculturalism, medical

ethics, pornography, gender identity, religious education, and a host of other questions are not

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only endless but nigh impossible to settle with certainty, if at all. This fact, however, has not

been regarded as a good reason for declaring them ‘outside politics’ (Asad 2004, 286).

We agree, therefore, with Taylor’s critique of any epistemic distinction that a priori

privileges secular over religious reason. However, while Taylor would rather do away with any

such distinction, he is still given to locate some neutral ground and hence falls in the same

problem as Habermas. Taylor affirms the need for a neutral language in some ‘zones’ of a

democratic state (2011, 50). It is only that the domain in which he would have religious reason

and language excluded is smaller, and the reasons therefor are different, vis-à-vis Habermas.222

In contrast with the latter, Taylor allows religious reason in parliamentary debates and does not

place the condition of translation in citizen deliberation either. He would have the exclusion

limited to the ‘official language of the state’: the language of legislation, administrative decrees

and court judgments. However, this is not on grounds of it being religious reason, but rather on

grounds of the neutrality of the state. Thus, where religious justifications for a position are

excluded, so too are those of non-religious worldviews. The state is not to privilege Marxist,

Kantian or utilitarian frameworks just as it is not to privilege Christian, Muslim or Jewish ones.

Yet what of liberalism? The problem with this narrative—both that of Habermas and

Taylor insofar as they both seek and claim neutral ground upon which an allegedly free-standing

liberal political ethic is erected—should, given the preceding discussion, be apparent. It

privileges liberalism and secular reason whilst claiming neutrality. As to the former, we have

shown that the ‘basic goals’ of the state that both affirm—human rights, democracy, equality—

are markedly normative liberal positions. They are not normatively neutral. Likewise, ‘secular

reason’, ‘reason alone’, ‘secular language’—none of these are neutral. ‘Secular reason’ appeals to

its own normative grounds just as religious reason does. It appeals to human rights and

222
‘I am not sure whether I am disagreeing with Habermas or whether the difference in formulation really
amounts to a difference in practice. We both recognize contexts in which the language of the state has to
respect a reserve of neutrality and others in which freedom of speech is unlimited. We differ perhaps
more in our rationales than in the practice we recommend’ (Taylor, 2011, 58).

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democracy. If ‘Whereas the Bible tells us…’ or ‘It is our obligation to God that we…’ are religious

reasons used to justify moral-political positions, then the secular equivalents are ‘Whereas the

Constitution states…’ or ‘It is obligation of upholding human rights that we…’—neither are

normatively neutral.

It is worth highlighting here that for political liberalism, public reason undergirds a

politics that is supposed to be rational, as opposed to moral or ideological. The well-regulated

modern polity depends on the provision of optimum amounts of social welfare and individual

liberty, not on developing individual virtue (Asad 1993, 233). Its primary task is not the moral

disciplining of individuals—morality having been privatised for self-determining individuals—

but the rational administration and care of entire populations.223 However, the assumption that

modern liberal politics precludes direct commitments to particular moral norms or ideological

positions is mistaken (234). To the extent that the concept and language of rights is fundamental

to modern liberal politics, ideological principles are central to it. Civil and human rights are not

neutral legal facts, they are profoundly moral and moralising values. Thus, while the individual

citizen is not required by the political community to be virtuous, he is required to be the bearer

of rights that define his moral capacity.

Basic liberal moral-political positions, such as human rights, then, are not by any stretch

self-evident or definitively established. Arguably, the ontological grounds of ‘inalienable’ human

rights is extremely shaky, particularly in the context of a naturalist/materialist ontology. How,

we may ask, in the larger frame of a world fashioned purely by the evolution of material

substances, a world without grounds in any sentience or intelligence, do any ‘rights’ arise? How

223
For some, rational (non-ideological) politics is the mark of a mature modern society, while ideology
moralising the domain politics is typical of societies that have yet to transition to modernity—as Geertz
wrote of Indonesia: ‘It is a loss of orientation that most directly gives rise to ideological activity, an
inability, for lack of usable models, to comprehend the universe of civic rights and responsibilities in
which one finds oneself located. The development of a differentiated polity…brings with it conceptual
confusion, as the established images of political order fade into irrelevance or are driven into disrepute’
(Geertz 1973, 219 in Asad, 1993, 233).

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do notions of duty, oughtness, or values arise? The proposition is hardly intuitive, let alone

evident. Normative rights, in such a frame, can only be postulated, in a ‘regulative’ Kantian

sense. The point here, to be sure, is not to argue against the notion of liberal human rights. It is

only the much weaker claim that the notion is contestable and controversial, not self-evident.

Taylor comes closest to what we would assert is an inevitable realisation that it is impossible

to abstract from differences in the deeper reasons of normative worldviews, religious and secular

alike, when establishing the political ethic of a society. No normative assertion can be made from

mere empirical or descriptive observations. The ‘is’ does not lead us to the ‘ought’ as Hume would

remind us. As such, any political ethic is necessarily grounded in one worldview or another, in

some normative claims, in some assertion about how the world should be. The particular political

ethic defended by Habermas and Taylor is markedly liberal, yet they are unable to admit this

whilst still maintaining the coherence of a chosen political framework that is built on the premise

that the best way to organise diverse societies is on some common, neutral ground.

Public reason, then, is a prototypical example of the secular move to claim superiority

through its supposedly exclusive ability to locate a neutral ground. Public reason, it is claimed,

is reason acceptable to all citizens because it is free, unlike private reason, from any religious,

moral or ideological commitments. To the extent that this claim is not true, as we have argued

above, what we are left with is the secular privileging itself by creating an artificial distinction

between public and private reason, deeming the former superior and giving itself a monopoly

therein. The aforeconsidered criticisms of public reason, it should be noted, take for granted its

presumption of a clean distinction between the private and public sphere and that the latter is

a neutral space for debates that equally welcome all voices. In the next section, we interrogate

these and related premises further.

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An Imposing Secular Triad: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Equality is only interesting and valuable politically so long as it has substance, and for that
reason at least the possibility and risk of inequality.
— Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 1923

Freedom (liberty, autonomy) and equality are central concerns of secular liberal political

organisation, which claims for itself the aspiration and, to a large extent, the achievement of a

free and equal citizenry, in contrast to the subordination of some to others in pre-modern

polities. The simple juxtaposition of religious subordination and unfreedom to secular freedom

and equality, however, is called into question upon closer inspection. Equality understood as

treating people in the same way in the same situation is a normatively vacuous tautology (Asad

2018, 27). Any concrete notion of equality is inevitably filtered through a normative lens: it is

framed ideologically and embedded in historical contingency. This is true of modern secular

equality and freedom—in theory and practice—which does not so much eliminate inequality

and subordination as it shifts its parameters, figuring it in different ways. The notion of

fraternity—emphasised in some liberal models more than others—is more explicitly in need of

normative content, thus complicating the securing of freedom and equality further still.

In this section, we interrogate this secular triad to show that it represents a different

configuration of subordination. This is done through the exposition of five specific aspects of

late modern secular liberal political theory and practice. First, the ideals of secular freedom and

equality gain content from (liberal) ideology and (state) power: in concrete form they are

necessarily ideologically- and politically-inflected—individually and when tensions between the

two ideals are resolved at the expense of one or the other—in ways that can and do proliferate

unfreedom and inequality. Second, the secular public sphere is constituted as a liberal space by

liberal ideas and sentiments and is therefore exclusionary. Third, the adoption of an atomist

social ontology affords priority to the abstract individual only by relegating the consideration

of concrete, historical communities, especially minorities. Fourth, the majority culture,

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underwritten by a particular historical culture and identity—despite the rhetoric of

‘multiculturism’—is constituted as the ‘national identity’ and ‘common way of life’, and is thus

privileged against all other cultures. Fifth, the liberal state engages in the active formation of

citizens—and sometimes of entire communities—based on the secular liberal ideas and values

that it authorises. In what follows, each of these is considered in turn.

Which Liberty? Whose Equality?

The principles of liberty and equality are of themselves formal principles. As with all such

principles, they require not only connection to some conception of the good to give them

substance but also call for further principles by which they can be ordered in terms of various

types of each and as against each other. The secular liberal notion of freedom or equality is by no

means universal or self-evident and can often clash with different cultural iterations of these

ideals. Saba Mahmood’s pioneering The Politics of Piety (2005) is instructive on this point.

Through the study of a grassroots Islamic revivalist women’s movement in Egypt, Mahmood

shows that even well-meaning feminist critiques of the presumably compromised agency of

religious women in patriarchal contexts can work to obscure rather than illuminate the status of

that agency. This is because in examining this status, secular liberal notions of freedom and

agency—those that emphasise atomistic ideals of autonomy, self-fulfilment, self-empowerment,

and resistance to secure rights—are instated as the (unacknowledged) reference point. Religiously

defined subjectivity or agency—in terms of virtue, the struggle for piety, the cultivation of bodily

comportment, spiritual fear and hope in everyday life—is erased before it has the chance to make

a case for how it may be an equally legitimate way of expanding the agency of women in a given

cultural context. But why should a Kantian agency of autonomy, free will and choice be

preferenced in advance over an Aristotelian agency of virtue ethical life or habitus?

In a similarly insightful vein, Brown (2015) shows that secular liberal ‘freedom’, while

posited as a universal, unambiguous category, is a particular figuration of freedom as against

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others. Liberalism figures freedom as a matter of self-sovereignty, of individual autonomy

circled out by drawing boundaries around the individual from all other ‘heterogenous’ sovereign

powers—including, prominently, the religious powers of God and Church224—to create the

‘place where the authority of society ends’ (Mill) (324-325). In contrast, for Socrates and Martin

Luther King—iconic symbols of freedom in the Western tradition—freedom materialises

through proximity to (different notions of) the divine and thus attunement to religious

authority. It entails becoming free from ‘lower’ worldly constraints, care of the self and its

interests, in favour of ‘higher’ concerns such as living a life of ethical virtue, becoming

enlightened, and delivering worldly justice, all connected to serving God and having little to do

with self-sovereignty in the liberal sense (327-328). Such a contrast reveals the liberal figuration

as particular, ideological, and contestable.

Even as ideologically-inflected, the ideals of liberty and equality do not always work in the

same direction. Sometimes they clash, calling for a reconciliation at the expense of one or the

other. Some liberal models prioritise liberty, others equality. For instance, Rawls’s influential

work—from A Theory of Justice (1971) to Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)—gives priority

to liberty and justice at the expense of equality (Asad 2018, 17). His ‘second principle’ (fair

equality of opportunity) qualifies the ‘first principle’ (equal basic freedoms for all) in a way that

countenances inequalities on grounds that they benefit the least well off in society. This is a

seemingly noble objective but who decides that the least well off are optimally benefited by a

particular structure of inequality and by what criteria? This is highly ambiguous, leaving much

to the discretion of the state.

The prioritising of political equality over economic equality—equally, the allowance of

economic inequality—is also basic to modern liberal political theory. From its inception, the

224
Brown’s (2015) basic thesis is that on this liberal model, freedom (cast with reason, agency, choice, and
responsibility) and religion (figured with faith, authority, submission, and fate) pertain to different,
opposing dimensions, giving the notion of ‘religious freedom’ an ‘oxymoronic edge’.

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modern state problematised political inequalities while legitimising economic inequalities,

regardless of how inequitable their historical cause, by rendering the right to property

fundamental. The underlying ideological separation between economic inequality from political

equality—and therefore from justice as a secular political good—has proven to be an effective

defence of privilege (Asad 2018, 21). To the extent that unequal wealth and power are not

regarded as critical, what this discourse of equality seeks is not the elimination of hierarchy but

its invisibility (31). Given its inability or unwillingness to deal effectively with economic

inequality, its leniency to political corruption, its inherent desire to missionise a particular form

of life globally, and its commitment to ‘national security’ in an ever-expanding sense, liberalism

can in fact manifest in very authoritarian ways (34). ‘Justice’ in secular liberal discourse

increasingly refers to a sense of belonging (and being recognised as such) to the abstract

category of ‘human being’, who is afforded equal rights before the law, regardless of one’s actual

conditions of life and of how power and resources are actually distributed in the world (32). This

in fact veils the unequal structures of power enabled by the modern secular state.

The interests of power are also determinative. The early and middle modern periods, of

course, see secularism accommodate, facilitate, manage, and preside over all sorts of

inequalities and inequitable subordinations. Indeed, these historical realities serve to fashion

latter aspirations of more equitable politics. The British empire, as a liberal democracy, ruled

over subordinate populations abroad. This fundamental inequality allowed secularisation to be

constructed differently in the metropole—driven as it was by the inequalities of industry and

leading, eventually, to a recognition of the rights of workers and a movement for social justice—

as compared to the colonies—where it was driven by the inequalities of empire and led to the

eventual independence of colonised states (Asad 2018, 36). In Germany, equality and dignity for

‘Aryans’ meant worthlessness for Jews and Roma, a dynamic of dealing with ‘minorities’ that

played out across Europe albeit in less extreme ways. In the secular liberal polity of eighteenth

century North America, the self-governing community of equals developed its ideological

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formation and acquired its material resources by insisting on inequality: African Americans

were included as unfree labour excluded from civil society while Native Americans were literally

excluded by an advancing civilisation through massacre and expulsion (37). Both instances of

exclusion and subordination were not simply examples of racial separation but also, more

significantly, different strategies of managing and exploiting inferior populations.

All of this indicates that equality and freedom—likewise tolerance, as we saw with Brown—

are not essential to the secularising project. What is more consistent and arguably essential is the

concentration of state power and the nation-state’s overriding priority to what it determines as its

vital interests. The secular state gives substance to the otherwise formal notions of equality and

freedom and it deploys these as substantive notions—that figure and utilise inequality and

unfreedom—to the ends of securing its interests. Given God’s absence from the world, the secular

inheritors of Christianity cannot appeal to his equal love for all human beings but to the vital

interests of the nation-state: equality is conditional, and human dignity and rights limited by

international borders (Asad 2018, 36). God’s presence in medieval Christendom was of course no

guarantee of equitable politics. The point of note is that the transformation in the very notion of

politics and its practice is much more significant in apprehending the effects of secularisation

than simple claims to political superiority on grounds of equality and freedom.

The ‘Thick’, Exclusionary Liberal Public Sphere

The post-secular posture that makes room in the public sphere for a ‘deprivatised’ religion is a

significant revision from the insistence that the proper locus of religion is the private sphere

alone—a position that presupposes a quite artificial siphoning of the public from the private

sphere, as if human life is compartmentalisable into neat self-contained divisions. As if what is

held most dear to people of their very conception of the world and the normative lens through

which they view it—or how they most deeply experience the world—can be contained within

the four walls of the home and hung on the coat rack whenever they venture out—or, with

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Taylor, left in the ‘vestibule of the public sphere’. The apparently generous impulse to allow

religion entry in the public sphere of liberal democracies, however, claims more to its credit, on

the face of the general allowance, than ought to fairly be granted on interrogation of what

exactly is being allowed. Asad’s (2003) critique here has been instructive (183):

[W]hen it is proposed that religion can play a positive political role in modern society, it is not
intended that this apply to any religion whatever…[o]nly religions that have accepted the
assumptions of liberal discourse are being commended, in which tolerance is sought on the basis
of a distinctive relation between law and morality.

The liberal public sphere systematically excludes various kinds of voices or claims from serious

consideration. Robert Wolff pointed out long ago that the public domain operates on a sharp

distinction between interests that are legitimate and acceptable and those that are not. Only

the former can expect winning some measure of what it seeks. The latter receive no attention

and ‘its proponents are treated as crackpots, extremists, or foreign agents’ (Wolff 1965, 44 cited

in Asad 2003, 183). From the onset the liberal public sphere excluded women, those without

property, and members of religious minorities.225 It is not simply a forum for rational debate but

an exclusionary space. Or, we might say, it is a forum for rational debate where ‘rational’ is

referenced to certain fundamental liberal assumptions. This is so, not merely contingently, but

necessarily as an articulation of power and ideology. Anyone who enters this public sphere must

address power’s disposition of people and things and must speak the language of power and

accept its ideological boundaries or else be excluded from serious consideration by being

characterised as ‘extremist’ and a threat to the public order (184).226

225
For trenchant feminist critiques of modern secularism’s unequal and ideological distribution of
freedom and representability along gender lines, see Scott JW 2018, Sex and Secularism, Princeton
University Press: Princeton; Idem 2007, Politics of the Veil, Princeton University Press: Princeton;
Mahmood S 2005, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University
Press: Princeton; Cady LE and Fessenden T (eds.) 2013, Religion, the Secular and the Politics of Sexual
Difference, Columbia University Press: New York; and Butler J 2008, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular
Time’, British Journal of Sociology, 59(1): 1-23.
226
On this same logic, Jews, Communists, and Asians have been excluded in Western liberal democracies
by being figured as extremists, foreign agents, or a fifth column. The quintessential ‘extremist’ of our day
is the Muslim.

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 The public sphere, far from being an empty space for carrying out debates, is constituted

by the sensibilities—memories and aspirations, fears and hopes—of speakers and listeners

(Asad 2003, 185). The introduction of new discourses may disrupt established assumptions

structuring debates. Indeed, they may have to do so to be heard. The ‘positive contribution’ by

religion is that contribution which does not disrupt these structuring assumptions or threaten

dominant values. In turn, the dilemma facing the religion that wants to enter the liberal public

sphere—utilising its sacred privilege of ‘free speech’—is that it can only enter in a manner that

does not allow it to be heard on its own terms. It must remould (‘reform’) itself in the liberal

image in order to be heard. This requirement to reform—effectively to change—is explicit in

the models we outlined in Chapter Four. Rawls admits only ‘reasonable’ religions amongst those

who are welcome in the public sphere. Habermas demands reform by religious citizens on the

‘triple reflection’ we encountered earlier. Casanova illustrates how Catholicism in fact reformed

to become more acceptable. Taylor cites this example with optimism that a similar ‘evolution’

is possible with Muslim communities (2011, 36). It should make little difference that the hope or

expectation is that the religion ‘opens itself up’ and reforms for ‘reasons of its own’ (Habermas

2010, 21), instead of reform being imposed from outside. This is because such a hope

accompanies the requirement that such reform is necessary if religion is to find a place in the

liberal public sphere. The choice of ‘reform or be excluded’ can hardly be considered a choice.

Where in theory secular liberalism is dealing with individuals abstracted from any history,

culture or worldview, in practice it deals with real people and communities constituted of

different histories, cultures and worldviews in ways that raise concrete problems. In the case of

Europe, the idea of European identity is not merely a matter of how legal rights and obligations

can be reformulated. Rather, the discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about

non-Europeans tied to a deep history defined by key particular moments and its site is

suppressed fear (Asad 2003, 169). The abstract Rawlsian or Habermasian political theory does

not even account for this, yet it is so powerful that large groups are effectively not just

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unrepresented but unrepresentable. The only way they can be made representable is by de-

essentialising them in order to remake, or ‘translate’, them in the European image. Indeed, the

de-essentialisation of the ‘non-European’ is at the core of attempts to assimilate non-European

peoples into European civilisation. The idea that people’s historical experience is inessential to

them, that it can be shed at will, facilitates the Enlightenment claim to universality. Beliefs too

should either have no direct connection to the way one lives or be held so lightly that they can

be easily changed. Otherwise, secularism as a political arrangement cannot work well (115). In

the case of Islam, for instance, Muslims as members of the abstract category ‘humans’ can be

integrated or ‘translated’ into the universal European civilisation once they have left behind

what many of them mistakenly regard as essential to themselves.227

Using the example of Muslims in Europe, Asad (2003) shows how European self-

conception means that Muslims are not and cannot be represented as Muslims (159-166). This

is because Europe has conceived itself in a very particular way: positively, as a distinct

civilisation, in terms of specific historical moments such as the Roman Empire, Christianity, the

Enlightenment and industrialisation, and negatively, in contradistinction to certain non-

European others—Muslims featuring prominently in these latter. The fear of Islam and Muslims

persists, as seen in the drawn-out saga over two decades of failed Turkish attempts to enter the

European Union. Although this fear is explained, sometimes justified, with reference to

historical encounters between Muslims (the Ottoman Caliphate in particular) and Europe, it is

227
The same sort of logic has dominated Australian political discourse of the last two decades in the post-
9/11 era. Peter Costello, then Federal Treasurer, perhaps put it most poignantly in February 2006 when,
after listing a number of ‘Australian values’ that Muslim leaders should adopt and preach, he said: ‘[I]f
you go to a mosque you will be asked to take your shoes off as a sign of respect. Now if you don’t want to
take your shoes off then don’t go to the mosque. And when you come to Australia you will be asked to
subscribe to certain values—Australian values. If you don’t want to subscribe to those values, don’t come
to Australia. This is what we ask of people. We have to preserve a way of life which makes us the greatest
country in the world’ (Costello P 2006, Australian citizenship - Interview with John Laws, 2UE, 24 Feb,
accessed 03 Jun 2022, https://www.petercostello.com.au/transcripts/2006/3158-australian-citizenship-
interview-with-john-laws-2ue). Leaving behind values and taking on new ones is presupposed to be as
easy as a change of old clothes for new ones or taking off one’s shoes.

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more a matter of ideological self-conception than historical fact. The far greater violence

exhibited by Nazi Germany, for instance, in its attempts to conquer Europe does not figure in

the same way. The historical violence of the ‘Turks’—which was against Christendom, not

secular Europe—brings into question their inherent ability to ever be truly European. The

historical violence of Germany, in stark contrast, does not at all cast doubt on whether it belongs

in Europe. On the contrary, as Tony Judt argues, the idea of Europe stands as a convenient

suppressor of collective memories of widespread collaboration with Nazi crimes across the

continent (162). Thus, the threatening historical violence of some affirms their place outside of

Europe, whereas the equally, if not more, threatening historical violence of others reaffirms their

place on the inside. Once constituted as outsiders, the Europeanness of all Muslims is

questionable, both those who migrate and have lived in Europe for decades and, still more

remarkably, those Muslims who are native to geographical Europe.228

Not only are Muslims constituted as outsiders, Europeans themselves are not open to

transformation in encounters with the outside. In Europe’s Encounter with Islam (2012), Luca

Mavelli conceptualises European secularity, drawing on Asad (2003) and Taylor (2007), as an

epistemic mode of knowledge that deems transformation of self in the encounter with the other

as a potential loss of autonomy. The political implications of this, he argues, in the context of

Europe’s approach to Muslims has been two main attitudes (6). First, Europe has been unable

to see the encounter as a reciprocal process of adaptation, transformation and learning,

requiring Europeans—not just Muslims in Europe—to become other than themselves. Second,

Europe’s knowledge of Islam has lacked any attempt to grasp the latter’s alterity through a more

critical attitude towards the secular tradition. On the contrary, it has seen a further

entrenchment into the secular episteme whereby Muslims are only ever portrayed as a defective

228
Such as Bosnian Muslims, who during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s were commonly spoken about by
European politicians and intellectuals in terms of ‘coexistence’ between ‘us’ Europeans and ‘them’
Muslims (Asad 2003, 164-165).

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projection of secular Europeans—less rational, less self-critical, less able to appreciate

democracy, freedom of expression and gender equality, and less able to uphold basic

distinctions between knowledge and faith, morality and law, politics and religion.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2008) has relatedly made the case that more than any other

tradition, Islam has come to represent the ‘non-secular’ in European discourse (490-491).

Modern European traditions of secularism have been consolidated in part through opposition

to the conception of an anti-modern, anti-Christian, theocratic (improperly religious), Islamic

Middle East. Such representations of Islam are not a coincidental by-product of an inert, pre-

given secular political authority—they help to constitute it in the first instance. It follows from

this view of Europe, Asad asserts (2003, 168), that:

real Europeans acquire their individual identities from the character of their civilization. Without
that civilizational essence, individuals living within Europe are unstable and ambiguous. That is why
not all inhabitants of the European continent are “really” or “fully” European. Russians are clearly
marginal. Until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too, but since that break the
emerging discourse of a “Judea-Christian tradition” has signaled a new integration of their status into
Europe. Completely external to “European history” is medieval Spain. Although Spain is now defined
geographically as part of Europe, Arab Spain from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries is seen as
being outside “Europe,” in spite of the numerous intimate connections and exchanges in the Iberian
peninsula during that period between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

There is, this, as Mahmood (2015, 32) perceptively notes ‘an irresolvable tension’ in the secular

liberal concept of ‘minority’:

on the one hand, a minority is supposed to be an equal partner with the majority in the building of
the nation; on the other hand, its difference (religious, racial, ethnic) poses an incipient threat to the
identity of the nation that is grounded in the religious, linguistic, and cultural norms of the majority.

One must conclude that the ‘national’ self-conception here is primordial and thus determinative,

with serious implications that we might raise as a question: With an inevitably culturally- and

historically-thick social self-image or self-conception, is it even possible for a society to form a

neutral political space that can genuinely represent citizens constituted by different cultures and

histories? Alternatively stated, is the secular liberal quest for ‘transcendent mediation’ even

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possible? Or does it only aggravate tensions by forcing people to shed some of what is important

to them, or else accept what is practically, if not legally, second-class status?

(Mis)Representing Minorities, Privileging the Majority

Asad goes further still to make a more basic critique of liberal political theory, arguing that the

ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it virtually impossible to

represent minority groups as themselves (using the example of representing ‘Muslims as

Muslims’) (2003, 173-177). This is because of an irreconcilable tension between the concept of

the abstract citizen and the concept of the ‘minority’. In theory, citizens who constitute a

democratic state are defined by what is common between them, namely, their abstract

(numerical) equality with respect to each other. Since they are equivalent units, formally

distinct but without qualitative differences, representation means issues are decided by their

summation. The side with greater weight on any issue is authoritative over all lesser parts; the

former is considered statistically representative of the whole body. Thus, nothing distinguishes

the members of a minority group as citizens except their fewer numbers. However, a minority

is not a purely quantitative concept. The concept of a ‘minority’ arises from a specific European,

Christian history following the dissolution of the bond that formed after the Reformation

between the Church and early modern state. The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the

state’s role to secure religious uniformity within the polity was abandoned in favour of ‘minority

rights’ as a central theme of national politics.

The point to note is that the political inclusion of minorities means the recognition and

acceptance of groups or communities formed by specific historical narratives. Minority rights—

at their core the right to maintain and perpetuate themselves as collectives—are not derivable

from general theories of citizenship, since their status is connected to membership in a specific

historical group, not in the abstract class of citizens. This is also true of the ‘majority’, no less a

historically constituted group. What we have today across the secular liberal world is,

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unmistakably, a politics of a majority that claims to represent the ‘national identity’ and several

minorities who are summoned to integrate into that national identity. As such, it is not a

political ethic decided by the collective through negotiation and persuasion but the cultural

identity of a historically constituted group, inclusive of its normative conceptions of the good,

that becomes the reference point by which politics is conducted and discourse in the public

sphere takes place. Far from ‘feed[ing] off the resistance of minorities’ (Habermas 2003a, 42),

liberal democracy is not able to cater for their genuine representation. Universal citizenship, in

this context, not only threatens the distinct identities of minority groups by forcing everyone

into a single homogenous cultural mould, but it also disadvantages them to the exclusion of the

majority because the authorised mould is not a neutral one; it is invariably the culture of the

dominant group (Chatterjee 1998, 369). In such a context, secular ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ mean

very different, qualitatively differentiated, things for citizens who belong to the majority as

compared with those associated with minorities.

Further, the narratives that define the national identity—‘being French’, ‘Australian

values’, ‘America’—and the practices they authorise cannot, in this political dynamic, be regarded

as inessential (Asad 2003, 176). That is, the majority cannot be de-essentialised. The minorities

must make the requisite changes to secure the sanctity of the national heritage. This view, shared

by much of the left as well as the right, does not accord with the notion that the citizen is nothing

more than an abstract quantity, separate from his or her social identity, added up and then

divided into groups that have only numerical value. The upshot of this analysis is that the only

way minorities can be represented is after they make the relevant adjustments to accord with the

national identity. They cannot be represented as themselves but only as ‘translated’ to fit a mould

fashioned by the national identity, which is the identity of the majority.

Notwithstanding that they are part of the normatively-inflected and historically-particular

culture of the majority group, various aspects of the secular ‘national identity’ can tend in practice

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to be passed off, or simply presupposed, as neutral—to the explicit disadvantage of minorities. A

number of recent cases in the European Court of Human Rights are illustrative in this respect.

In Dahlab (2001), the Court upheld the dismissal of a Muslim teacher who wore the

headscarf at a Swiss primary school on the grounds that doing so contravened the principle of

‘denominational neutrality’ in public education required by the secularity of the state (63); that

as a precept imposed on women by the Quran, the headscarf was difficult to square with the

principle of gender equality (85); and that it was a ‘powerful’ religious symbol that could

influence vulnerable children by way of a potential—no actual harm was claimed or found on the

part of students or parents—proselytising effect, compromising their freedom of conscience and

religion: ‘Experience showed that such children tended to identify with their teacher, particularly

on account of their daily contact and the hierarchical nature of their relationship’ (69).229

The notion that young children are open to influence by authority figures like teachers is

arguably uncontroversial. Likewise, the idea that the Islamic headscarf can operate as a signifier

that refers back to a particular normative worldview or form of life (in this case Islam) is fair.

What stands out in this case, however, is the presupposition operating between the lines that

unveiling does not operate in the same way but is rather a neutral choice. Yet we are surely

justified in asking that if the headscarf might nudge vulnerable students in the direction of a

religious lifeform, will not its removal have the same impact only in a different direction? It may

be cogently argued that while individuals may make decisions of what to wear, or not to wear,

for a whole host of personal reasons, at the level of communal or cultural forms of life, no choice

is freestanding or neutral. No human practice stands outside or above the (complex) matrix of

cultural signification. Just as the headscarf, or women (or men) covering more of their body in

229
Dahlab v Switzerland [2001] ECHR, no. 42393/98. In-text citations refer to paragraph numbers in the
judgment. In a similar case a few years later, Ebrahimian v France [2005] ECHR, no. 64846/11, the Court
upheld the dismissal of a Muslim assistant in a Paris hospital for wearing a headscarf on the grounds that
it ‘marked her as belonging to one religion’ and was ‘an ostentatious manifestation of her religion
incompatible with the neutral space demanded in public service’ (51, 62).

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public more generally, is tied predominantly to various religious forms of life, and therefore

bears the potential to signify these forms of life, so too the move to cover less is tied

predominantly to various secular forms of life and has routinely been portrayed in popular

liberal cultural discourse as part of the secular liberation of women (and men) from the onerous

strictures of religious tradition. Recall that in Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s sketch, taken as the

Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie in 1772, Reason and Philosophy’s attempt to ascertain Truth is

represented, per Diderot’s explication, by the unveiling of a woman.230

Be that as it may, the point here is not about any normative judgment on any particular

choice of dress, but the descriptive observation that any choice—in this case, the choice to cover

the head or not—relates to some broader cultural form of life, with its attendant moral, social

and political legitimating narratives. The attire of a nun or priest is not in principle different in

this regard than that of a university professor or corporate CEO, all of whom tend towards some

‘ritual’ attire (likewise, attitudes, practices, sensibilities). Yet there is an unmistakable tendency

in authoritative secular narratives, as with those of the ECHR, to treat religious lifeforms as

normative and controversial while simply presupposing secular lifeforms to be neutral. The

former, in turn, are invested with the unique potential of contravening denominational

neutrality in a way the latter purportedly do not. But why should religious denominations (sub-

groups) be treated any differently to their secular counterparts?

This line of argument may legitimately be countered by the observation that headscarf-

wearing Muslim women (or the fully-covering Christian nun) stands out, in the prevailing

context of Europe for instance, in a way that those not covering their hair do not.231 The latter

have become the norm and thus do not stand out in the same way as the former, while in origin

230
Frontispice & Explication, ARTFL Encyclopédie, Morrissey R and Roe G (eds.), accessed 29 Jun 2022,
https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/content/frontispice-explication
231
Notably, the attire of Christian nuns although similar to the Muslim female dress has not been the
object of European secular anxiety or critique, arguably because Christian practice finds a place within
the cultural identity of Europe while Muslim practice is firmly on the outside, as discussed above.

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both may be part of normative and controversial forms of life. This much may be conceded, but

such a retort only affirms the basic argument: majoritarian norms gain an authoritative status

against which minority norms are assessed. As such, minorities are placed at a disadvantage.

Further, it is worth noting that signification, even powerful signification, does not require the

signifier to stand out. A cultural artefact can be commonplace but still operate as a ‘powerful’

symbol. The Marianne is a good example of this, as a ubiquitous and powerful French national

icon, as is any national flag or emblem. What of such ‘secular’ symbols, then? Do the authorised

secular narratives of secular states or courts have room to consider the role and impact of secular

symbols in the way they do religious symbols?

In Lautsi (2011), the ECHR once more found itself combing through (or splitting hairs in)

the sinuous terrain of ‘religious symbols’.232 In this case, a parent complained that crucifixes

displayed on the walls of a state school in Italy infringed the principle of secularism and her

children’s right to be free of undue religious influence enshrined in the Italian constitution. The

ECHR Chamber upheld her claim, arguing that the presence of the crucifix, a predominantly

religious sign, may make students feel that their school environment is marked by a particular

religion. This may encourage some pupils but be emotionally disturbing for those of other or no

religions (31). It emphasised that the ‘negative’ freedom from religion required by article 9 of the

European Convention on Human Rights extended to symbols and that the display of religious

symbols infringed confessional neutrality required of state institutions. The Grand Chamber,

however—following uproar across Italy and Europe more broadly—reversed this judgment by

reframing the problem of religious symbols in terms of passive and active symbols.233 It found

232
Lautsi & Others v Italy [2011] ECHR, no. 30814/06. In-text citations refer to paragraph numbers in the judgment.
233
Notably, the Italian Government had used a similar argument from the beginning, that the crucifix is
not only a religious symbol but also a cultural symbol, ‘the symbol of principles and values which formed
the basis of democracy and western civilisation’ (36) and a passive symbol incapable of influencing
students merely by its presence.

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that the crucifix is a ‘passive’ symbol which ‘cannot be deemed to have an influence on pupils

comparable to that of didactic speech or participation in religious activities’ (72).

The difference in the Court’s reading the symbolic modality of the Christian crucifix vis-

à-vis the Muslim headscarf is worthy of note. More worthy, for our purposes, is the absence in

the entire narrative of secular symbols, their modes of expression, confessional/denominational

valence, influencing capacity, how they may emotionally disturb those who do not subscribe to

a secular worldview, and so forth. This absence is significant in particular because the logic

appealed to only holds water on the assumption that secular symbols do not infringe

‘confessional’ neutrality in the way religious symbols do. Yet there is no assessment of the basis

on which such an assumption is upheld. Indeed, there is no attempt even at substantiating it; it

is simply taken for granted. What Brown noted of secular tolerance discourse is true also of

secular ‘denominational neutrality’ discourse: it is used to police the differences that

characterise minorities, while hegemonic groups and practices operate under the cover of

normalcy.234 The ‘unmarked-because-hegemonic’ is presumed to be universal and relatively

neutral. The marked-because-minoritised is supposed to be particular, partial, and

controversial. None of these qualities, however, are natural or given; they are the discursive

constructions of power attached to a normative order.

In a similar vein, certain liberal assumptions are taken for granted in these secular

discourses, such as the liberal conception of the individual or self. For example, in 1985 the US

Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut statute guaranteeing sabbath observers a right to

not work on their sabbath (Sandel 1988, 88).235 It found a lack of religious neutrality, as required

by the constitution, in that while the law gave all workers the right to a day off each week, it

gave sabbath observers a unique right to designate their day, allowing them exclusively to take

234
See the discussion on secular tolerance in Chapter Four, pp. 224-230.
235
Thornton v Caldor, Inc., 474 US 703 (1985).

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a prized weekend day off. As Sandel argues, however, this objection confuses the right to

perform a duty with the right to make a choice. Sabbath observers do not select a day of the

week to rest; their religion enjoins the day upon them. To consider this duty a choice is a

consequence of the underlying liberal premise that considers people to be ‘unencumbered

selves’, a conception of persons as freely choosing selves, unencumbered by antecedent moral,

religious or communal ties (91). Only such a view can uphold the notion that religious beliefs

and duties are the products of free and voluntary choice, flattening, in turn, any distinction

between claims of conscience and personal preferences or desires.

Fraternity, Shared Values, and Citizen Formation

As a concrete example of the irrepresentability of minorities in the liberal public sphere, the

aftermath of the Rushdie affair of 1989 in Britain is illustrative—and serves as an early case since

repeated across the liberal democracies of the West, more assertively and routinely in the ‘War

on Terror’ context in the post-2001 era. The Rushdie affair saw the British Government—to the

applause of the British liberal elite—take the opportunity to lecture its Muslim communities

about the importance of ‘Britishness’, integration, checking where their loyalty lies and refraining

from violence.236 For Asad, the disproportionate response, going well beyond mere reiteration or

enforcement of the law, is not explicable in terms of any real danger to law and order or as a

defence of freedom of speech. In fact, the demonstrations against Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’

barely registered any threat to law and order, particularly in context of the history of violent

demonstrations in Britain—by anti-racists and fascists, feminists and gays, abortions rights

236
Thus John Patten, then Home Minister responsible for ‘race relations’, through an open letter to ‘The
Muslim Community in Britain’ and another document through the Home Office entitled ‘On Being
British’, reminds Muslims of the need to learn some essentials—a fluent command of English, an
understanding of British democracy, its laws, government, and history. He urges ‘cultural minority
communities’ to aspire to the norm that is effectively the white majority culture represented in terms
‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’. This ‘common’ culture, marked by the above-noted essentials, is what defines
being British. See Asad 1993 (pp. 239-248) for a more thorough outline and analysis.

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activists, trade unionist, students—which saw actual violence and arrests. Rather, the perceived

threat was to a particular ideological structure, a cultural hierarchy organised around essential

‘Englishness’ (the values, codes, and sensibilities of the English governing classes) which defines

British identity (Asad 1993, 241). It was yet another symptom of post-imperial British identity in

crisis: the anxiety caused by the confrontation with immigrants from the (previously dominated)

ex-colonies who instead of falling in line with ‘Britishness’ were challenging it.

In particular, Muslim politicisation of a religious tradition—a politicisation that has no

place within the secular cultural hegemony that defines modern Britain—served to question the

inevitability of the absolute nation-state, of its demands for exclusive loyalty and its totalising

cultural projects (Asad 1993, 266-268). In such situations, the perceived threat is one to

authority: the existence of political activity within the body politic that seeks authority for its

difference in its own religious traditions, which appear to disrupt, spatially and temporally, the

ideological unity of the nation-state. In this context, what is vital for the secular state is not

homogeneity instead of difference, but its own authority to define crucial homogeneities and

differences—not unlike the concern of the medieval church to retain the authority of

determining truth and its boundaries as against ‘heresy’. What is unsettling to the status quo is

the fact that people who do not accept the secular liberal values of the governing classes are

able to use the liberal language of equal rights in rational argument against the secular elite,

and to avail themselves of liberal law for instituting their own strongly held religious traditions

(267). The point of note for our purposes is, with Asad, that a particular culture and ideological

structure, articulated as a common way of life, defines both the substantive values of a secular

identity (in this case, the secular British identity) and the formal basis of a diversified and

rationally justifiable society (248).237

237
See Asad 1993 (248-253) for the related argument that ‘culture’ is employed as a project of the modern
state as part of a language of controlled reconstruction. Culture, in the distinctively modern sense of a
common life, becomes the means of civilising people abroad, of transforming subjects and not merely
repressing them, and the defining hue of national (majority) identity, by which all ‘minorities’ are measured.

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 The tension in secular liberal political theory and practice is thus salient. On the one hand,

the self-representation would have us believe that freedom and toleration are central pillars.

Any and all people are welcome to become equal citizens and retain whatever beliefs and values

they hold so long as they obey the law. Their beliefs will be respected, or at least tolerated. In

fact, part of these rights enjoyed, in theory, by all citizens is the ability to work, struggle, agitate

for change to regnant laws, norms, culture. Nothing, after all, is ‘sacred’ or beyond critique in

the secular polity, and a celebrated part of liberal democratic politics is resisting the excesses of

power—protesting against conditions thought to be unfair, intellectually and politically

challenging laws and privileged norms seen to support unjust social conditions. Any citizen has

not only the right to keep their own culture but also the privilege to contribute to substantive

change in the prevailing culture. On the other hand, however, it is commonplace for modern

liberal democracies to operate on the notion that a successful nation-state requires a dominant

‘national culture’ that encapsulates ‘shared’, ‘common’, or ‘core’ values, which, in turn, all

citizens are expected to subscribe to. And if they don’t subscribe of their own accord, various

insidious, soft power policies are deployed to nudge them in that direction. The ‘commonness’

of the national culture, after all, is not something that just happens in a diverse society; it has

to be created and recreated. Indeed, the secular liberal state engages in the active formation not

only of citizens but also entire communities, as shown by Fernando (2014) and Mahmood (2006)

in the French and American context respectively.

Notably, the sought homogeneity defines the nation as a community of sentiment

(‘fraternity’) rather than the state as a structure of law (Asad 2006, 495). Where joining the state

as a structure of law would require only obedience to that law, joining the community of

sentiment has more onerous burdens. At least for those not already part of the majority, it

requires adjustments to one’s beliefs, values, and culture. This can be seen most poignantly in

the case of the French Republic, marked strongly by laïcité, and starkly recognised by the defining

image of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. The first two notions of this triad refer to the legal-

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political status of citizens, but fraternity is more a matter of affect, of one’s bond with the nation

or with fellow citizens, who, together, are supposed to form a community of sentiment (Asad

2006, 509). Yet France, like many other modern liberal democracies, is hardly a place where its

people form one nation that is a community of shared sentiment in any real sense. Rather they

are constituted by a majority that is in some substantive sense a community of sentiment—yet

still highly agonistic, ravaged as it is by ‘culture wars’238—and disaffected minorities.239 The latter

by definition (as religious or ethnic minorities) do not automatically share the collective culture

of the majority, or whatever minimal part of that culture is supposed to be the basis of forming

a fraternal national community—nor are inter-minority relations always fraternal. Indeed, the

demand that they subscribe to the majority culture is, in part, the cause of disaffection, precisely

because it does not allow a free and equal expression of individual or communal agency—hence

a clear strain in the triadic image of the lay Republic. There is a conceptual problem that lies

beyond the friction between different segments of French citizenry concerning the idea—on

which laïcité is premised—that secular citizens are committed to a single nation and therefore

to a bounded culture (Asad 2006, 511). Precisely because secularism is a state doctrine devised for

state unity, it does not fit well with a world of multiple belongings and porous boundaries.

‘Fraternity’, then, is too simple a sentiment—even as a secular ideal—for the densities of

national politics. All modern states are built on complicated emotional inheritances that

determine relations among their citizens, and various communities are animated by different

collective memories and sensibilities, to the state and to each other. Guilt, contempt, fear,

resentment, virtuous outrage, sly calculation, pride, anxiety, compassion, intersect

ambiguously, as a complex web of emotions, in the secular Republic’s collective memory and

238
One may well ask whether the ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’, or even less extreme ends of the political
spectrum, can in any meaningful sense be said to form a fraternal community of sentiment.
239
Vincent Geisser documents the growing tide of hostility toward Muslims and Arab living in France
today, which he locates in a bitter colonial history—French relations with Algeria in particular—kept
alive in the present by a million immigrants from former colonies (Asad 2006, 509).

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inform its attitudes toward its different citizens (Asad 2006, 513). For instance, it is suspicious

of some (Muslims) because of what it imagines they may do, while being ashamed in relation to

others (Jews) because of what they suffered at its hands—at a time when they were the object

of negative sentiments. The desire to keep some under surveillance while making amends with

others are emotions that sustain the integrity of the state otherwise characterised as ‘neutral’.

‘Shared’ values, a common basic culture, and fraternity, then, have to all be activity

created and nurtured by the modern liberal state. The same tension within secular liberal

political theory and practice—expressed above from the perspective of the space given to

citizens to express their own agency—can thus be viewed from a different angle, from the

perspective of the state’s role vis-à-vis the formation of its citizens: is the secular state to

withdraw from all matters of (now privatised) religion or is it to actively form enlightened

secular citizens? There is a basic incongruity between the notion that the state is neutral, and

therefore inactive, with regard to religion, and the notion that the state must foster secularity,

which requires an active disposition in relation to religion. In practice, modern liberal states

have strongly inclined to operate on the latter approach to varying degrees.

The Islamic headscarf affair in France (l’affaire du foulard) is instructive in this respect. It

reveals the structure of political liberties—the relations of subordination and immunity, the

authorisation of a particular kind of self—on which the secular state is built, and the structure

of emotions that underlie those liberties (Asad 2006, 500). The dominant position in the public

debate—as articulated in the media and, more formally, in the Stasi commission‘s report240—

assumed that in the case of conflict between constitutional principles, the state’s right to defend

its personality takes precedence over any rights held by the abstract individuals it represented.

240
The Stasi commission of inquiry, appointed by the president and headed by ex-minister Bernard Stasi,
submitted its report in December 2003. It recommended a law prohibiting the display in public schools
of any ‘conspicuous religious signs [des signes ostensibles]’—veils, kippas, large crosses—as opposed to
‘discreet signs’—small crosses, stars of David, miniature Qur’ans—which were authorised. The law was
passed by the National Assembly in February 2004 by almost unanimous vote. See Asad (2006) for a
detailed outline and critique of the report.

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The headscarf worn by Muslim women was deemed to be ‘religious sign’ conflicting with the

secular (inviolable) personality of the French Republic and the ‘common values’ it is supposed

to consolidate.241 It did not matter that for many Muslim women (and the vast majority of

Muslim scholars) the headscarf is not primarily a sign but an obligatory act of piety; it is part of

an orientation, a way of being. Likewise, it did not matter that for some Muslims, the headscarf

is a mere cultural artefact having nothing to do with religion. For the commission, by contrast,

it was religious and it was a sign—a displaceable one at that—and the secular state ‘cannot be

content with withdrawing from all religious and spiritual matters’ (501, 525). We have here the

secular state deciding not only whether a particular act counts as religion or not, but also on its

particular religious valence. It must authorise one among multiple interpretations in order to

claim that the principle of laïcité is being breached, and since laïcité is non-negotiable, the veil

must be removed. To the extent that this work of identifying ‘religion’, in order to confine it to

its proper place, becomes a matter of law, the Republic acquires the theological function not

only of defining religion and its signs, but also the power of imposing these determinations on

its subjects (Asad 2006, 524).242

The upshot of this analysis should not be mistaken: far from being the solution to

discriminatory treatment of religious minorities, the secular state is part of the problem. In turn,

the deprivatised religion of a revised secularism falls quite short of its claim of providing

241
Thus the Stasi report declares that, ‘The state’s vocation is to consolidate the common values on which
the social bond in our country is based.’ (Asad 2006, 516)
242
More starkly still, the secular republic goes beyond active citizen formation as individual to active formation
of desired religion as community, even if it means overseeing the (forced) reformation of a whole religion.
Efforts to form a ‘moderate’ or ‘enlightened’ Islam are well-known across Euro-America and Australia in the
War on Terror context of the last two decades. French President Emmanuel Macron, to suffice with one
example, recently declared that a strategic focus of the ‘republican reawakening’ he was administering is the
forging of an ‘Enlightenment Islam in France…an Islam particular to France’. Such a strategy would include
things like ‘training and promoting in France a generation of imams but also intellectuals who uphold an Islam
fully compatible with the Republic’s values’. Fight against separatism – the Republic in action: speech by
Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic, on the fight against separatism, 2020, Élysée, accessed 20 May
2022, <https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron/2020/10/02/fight-against-separatism-the-republic-in-
action-speech-by-emmanuel-macron-president-of-the-republic-on-the-fight-against-separatism>

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freedom and a fair hearing to all citizens as equals. The liberal public sphere is not simply a

forum for rational debate amongst voices of all persuasions. It is an exclusionary space that has

little genuine room for those voices that do not subscribe to fundamental liberal positions.

Minorities in particular cannot be represented as themselves. It is not that individuals or groups

are not welcome in the public sphere, but that they either enter reformed in the liberal image—

leaving their deepest convictions about the world at home, speaking the liberal language of

public reason, preserving the national identity, and being careful not to disrupt or interrogate

the prevailing narrative—or be satisfied at best with ‘outsider’ status.

*****

What might we conclude then about the claims of neutrality made for liberal secularism? It

does genuinely aim for a certain sense of neutrality, it should be granted, but only in a limited

and qualified way. In a way that makes that neutrality trivial in light of the role it is made to play

in claiming superiority and a positive advance over non-secular models of governance. This is

because its normative neutrality applies only to a limited (political) domain and in a way

cushioned by strong normative foundations that, far from being neutral, are as ideologically or

culturally-inflected as those of other worldviews. Thus, the neutrality of aim and/or justification

between competing worldviews that the liberal state is burdened with, only comes into effect

after the secular, liberal contours of the state are firmly established. Further, it only applies to

‘reasonable’ worldviews, those that sit comfortably within these contours.

This is all very much understandable from within the perspective of the liberal tradition. It

fails, however, to justify superiority, whether philosophical (epistemic or moral) or political, from

a substantially reflexive perspective, that is, from a perspective that attempts to critically assess

the tradition from outside of itself, or with reference to the perspective of opposing worldviews—

the sort of reflexivity that is said to define secularity and is demanded of other traditions.

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 Expressed differently, liberal neutrality is precisely that: liberal neutrality; it allows non-

liberal views, practices, languages, and reasons a space in a way that accords with the liberal

worldview (‘comprehensive liberalism’) and disallows or disadvantages those that do not. This

is, however, exactly what other worldviews and forms of life do. It is not that the Marxist

worldview, for instance, or the Catholic or Islamic, does not allow any space for views and

practices that contradict their own commitments. They do allow for them, but only on their

own terms—terms that in some respects allow for less space, relative to liberalism, and in others

more. What is different, in the final analysis, between these other forms of life and liberalism

are these ‘own terms’, which in turn are based on the different fundamental philosophical

premises of each worldview—their respective interpretations of self, world, human, life, and

how these relate to each other.

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 Conclusion

From Separation to Superordination

Secularism as the (Epistemic and Political) Subordination of Religion

‘One might wish that there had been recourse to secularization’, writes Paul-Henri d’Holbach

in his entry on secularisation in Diderot and D’Alembert’s famous Encyclopédie of 1765, ‘to take

from the hands of the clergy properties which ignorance and superstition had once made

available to men whom temporal power and grandeur lead away from the duties of the holy

ministry, to which they ought to devote themselves entirely’.243 The Encyclopédie played a

crucial role in articulating Enlightenment critiques of religion, which albeit a minority position

at the time, only gained in influence thereafter. Many popular views and sensibilities across the

secular Western world even today find their roots in these critiques. Religion is said, at best, to

be a personal matter of belief that ought not mix with politics or public life and, at worst, a

disruptive remnant of primitive times we would do much better without. It is the realm of

superstition and passion, prone to violence and disharmony if it intrudes into public and

political life. Secularity, in contrast, is the domain of enlightened reason, science and tolerant,

rational politics that aims at securing freedom and equality for all. It is what liberated us from

the worst aspects of heteronomous theocentric life.

Holbach got his wish in the form of the French Revolution, although he did not survive

to witness it. Following the revolution, the clergy in France were forcibly secularised in heavy-

handed ways by the new secular regime. Many secular regimes in France thereafter have upheld

this strong hand approach to keeping religion and religious authority in check. In more recent

times, in the wake of post-colonial immigration, Islam has been the primary religious target of

243
D’Holbach PH, ‘Secularization’ in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation
Project, Lightfoot D (trans.), Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2021, accessed May
13 2022, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.851. Originally published as ‘Sécularisation’, Encyclopédie
ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 14:883 (Paris, 1765).

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state discipline. In January 2021, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (Conseil français du

culte musulman—CFCM)—the ‘official’ representative of Muslim faith federations to the French

government—adopted an ‘Imam Charter’ at the behest of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron had tasked the Council with drafting a charter of allegiance to republican values in

October 2020 as part of efforts to produce an ‘Islam of France’. All imams would be expected to

subscribe to the charter, which would also be used by a new ‘National Council of Imams’

responsible for training home-grown imams and vetting their compliance to the charter. The

general tenor of the Imam Charter eventually produced was that Islam and French Republican

values are perfectly compatible. Among the declarations enunciated in it were that Islam in

general and places of worship in particular are not to be used for political purposes; that no

religious conviction can be invoked as an exemption from the duties of citizenship; that there

is no such thing as state racism in France; and that certain allegedly Muslim cultural practices

are not Islamic.244 Such policies by the secular French state towards Islam form part of a broad

contemporary agenda—incisively examined by Fernando (2014)—in which ‘openness’ is offered

to it on condition that it be made open.

This type of secular state-led construction or reformation of an entire religion is not

specific to France, even if French secularism is generally more intrusive and heavy-handed than

Euro-American counterparts. Similar policies have been deployed by the United States.245 In

Australia, then Prime Minister John Howard assembled Muslim leaders from around the

country in August 2005 to ‘remind’ them that ‘our common values as Australians transcend any

other allegiances or commitments’ and to reiterate that, ‘We're not in the business of

renegotiating the values of this country to accommodate any minority’.246 Former Prime

244
‘Macron hails French Muslim council charter to combat extremism’, France 24, 18 Jan 2021, accessed 05 May 2022:
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210118-french-muslim-council-draws-up-charter-to-combat-extremism.
245
For an excellent analysis of a particular set of such policies, see Mahmood (2006).
246
‘Doorstop Interview Salvation Army Blacktown City Corps’, PM Transcripts, 22 Aug 2005, accessed 05 Jul
2022, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-21875; ‘Muslim group unveils plan to tackle

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Minister Tony Abbott, then Federal Minister for Health, published an editorial reflecting on

why Islam, not having had an Enlightenment of its own, was in need of adjustments to line up

with Enlightenment values of pluralism and secularism. This political groundwork was followed

up with a spate of policies designed to construct an ‘Australian Islam’. Such policies were quite

common across the Western world in the ‘War on Terror’ age. What is remarkable about them

is how such interventionist policies by the secular state that seek to reconstruct religion in

radical ways can be maintained along with the imaginary that secularism is only a benign matter

of separating various spheres of life while securing freedom of religion. This dissertation goes

some way in reflecting on the conditions of possibility of this predicament within the context

of the ‘post-secular’ problematic.

Enlightenment critiques of religion, from Holbach and Diderot to Locke and Kant, formed

the basis upon which the social sciences for over a century asserted—and elevated to the level

of a paradigm—a secularisation thesis that had religion withering away into oblivion as

modernisation took hold. However, the persistence of religion despite increasing

modernisation, empirical studies in sociology, and more recent critical interventions in social

and political theory, have shown this thesis to be untenable. In turn, many of the premises that

informed it have been challenged in an ongoing debate on what we have called the ‘post-secular

question’. For some, the secularisation thesis is salvageable if we realise that it consists of

multiple sub-theses, only some of which are wrong (Casanova 1994). On this view, the theory is

comprised of a core differentiation thesis, which is accurate, and two sub-theses of privatisation

and religious decline, which are mistaken.247 As Asad (2003) argues, however, the secularisation

thesis may not be as amenable to this type of partitioning as it seems (182). For if religion can

legitimately be deprivatised and enter the public sphere, it will not be indifferent to debates on

radicals’, ABC News, 22 Aug 2005, accessed 05 Jul 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-08-22/muslim-

group-unveils-plan-to-tackle-radicals/2085900.
247
This view is elaborated at length in Chapter Two, pp. 90-93.

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the economy, culture, education, and foreign policy. This, in turn, compromises the autonomy

of these differentiated social spaces—an autonomy that is arguably first and foremost from

religion before it is from each other—that is crucial for the core of the thesis. Unless, of course,

the deprivatisation is qualified with strict stipulations about which sort of religion may enter

the public sphere and how it may do so. Any such qualifications, however, rest on normative

premises, revealing both the force and the weakness of the secularisation thesis, which, as a

whole, ‘has always been at once descriptive and normative’ (181). The contours of this particular

question indicate upon the contours of the broader post-secular debate.

‘The twenty-first century is proving to be a time of profound crisis’, writes Matthew

Scherer (2013), ‘within the modern secular imaginary, and its cornerstone, “the separation of

church and state”, is under assault from all sides’ (223). This ‘assault’ begins on a revisionary

impulse—with the formidable likes of Charles Taylor, who ‘appears poised to supersede Rawls

as the new authoritative philosopher of modern secularism’ (224)— seeking to make minor

corrections to an older standard narrative of liberal political philosophy that is content to accept

religion only as a privatised affair that steers clear of the public sphere. It proceeds, however,

with the cautious concession of allowing religion entry into the public sphere, to reveal more

profound problems with this narrative. All the thinkers chosen as primary interlocutors in this

dissertation—Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad and Wendy Brown—find problems,

in their own ways, with how religion and secularity are conceived as fixed and opposite

categories and with the notion that the secular age is simply one that sheds off religion as it

comes of age in a march to progress. They seek to move away from a negative conception of

secularity, as the absence or opposite of religion, to a positive conception of it as a modern

formation in its own right, one that relates to religion in more complex ways and gives rise to

distinct subjectivities and social imaginaries.

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Revised Secularism: Habermas, Taylor

Jürgen Habermas corrects a previous neglect of religion by finding a place for it within his

political theory of state and society. Secularity, for Habermas, is marked by a ‘post-metaphysical’

subjectivity and (ideal) social disposition that is reflexive, self-consciously fallible, open to

plurality, and radically self-critical. It takes science as epistemically authoritative and morality

as profane and intersubjectively mediated. It considers religion epistemically inferior because

of its dogmatic nature, and politically inferior because of its imposing, autonomy-denying

nature, but also politically and socially useful because of a restorative potential. Given religion’s

genealogical relation to secularity, it can play a part in salvaging the ‘faltering project’ of

modernity. Notably, however, it is not any religion that has such a restorative potential and can

play such a salvaging role; it is only a certain type of reformed religion—on the pattern of

modern Christianity—that adopts key elements of secular post-metaphysical subjectivity.

The challenge, for Habermas, is to salvage the moral intuitions and inspiring power of

such religion by divulging their profane truth contents. ‘Translation’, as the mode of this

revelatory process, is therefore critical to his conception of secularism as a political doctrine.

That conception figures secularism as a form of political organisation defined most starkly by

neutrality: the state is neutral with respect to competing religious worldviews and political

discourse is conducted in the neutral language of ‘public reason’. Secularism, on this view, is an

essential requirement to politically organise societies that are diverse with respect to the

worldviews adopted by its citizens, and state neutrality is the internal connection between

freedom and pluralism. Secularism is justified simply as a necessity of pluralistic society.

Autonomous, self-determined governance, as opposed to externally given laws, requires that

legislation, or the exercise of power more generally, be mutually-acceptable to all citizens—

freedom requires that we obey only those laws we can rationally legislate for ourselves in a

process of unimpeded intersubjective discourse.

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 Secularism is necessary, for Habermas, for securing religious freedom and managing

clashes on socio-political questions in a non-violent way by affording public epistemic authority

to secular reason. The constitutional state must not only act neutrally towards opposing

worldviews, but must also rest on normative foundations that can be justified neutrally with

respect to these worldviews. This in turn requires their justification by reasons in a ‘generally

accessible’ language that others can understand and be expected to find convincing. The

assumption here of a common human reason presents the epistemic basis for legitimating a

secular state (and delegitimating non-secular states). The exercise of power must be justified in

an impartial manner; it is otherwise illegitimate because it would then reflect one community

forcing its will on others. All coercively enforceable political decisions must be formulated and

justified in a language that is equally intelligible to all citizens and capable of being evaluated

in the light of shared standards. This is the language of secular ‘public reason’.

Secular constitutional liberalism thus secures the public autonomy of citizens to equally

participate in self-legislation geared towards the facilitation of their diverse ethical projects of

personal self-determination. Such equal and equitable participation requires abstracting for

substantive normativity (conceptions of the good) of all comprehensive doctrines and resorting

for moral underpinning to procedural justification, wherein manifests the neutrality of secular

governance. Habermas asserts a need for mutual learning between the religious and secular on

the practical grounds of having to deal with religion given its persistence; on the realisation of

the genealogical relation of the two—the historical role of religious reason in the formation of

secular reason—and on the epistemic grounds of what he now accepts as religion’s potential of

carrying truth content. Religious content is thus allowed in the public sphere but should be

translated into secular language that everyone can understand and engage.

For Charles Taylor, secularity is primarily to be considered in terms of a background frame

within which people think and act, and more specifically, pursue their (religious or secular)

‘spiritual’ lives, searching for a ‘fullness’. As detailed at length by Taylor in A Secular Age (2007),

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secularity is a frame of immanence within which people at large experience the world. This

immanent frame is marked by a social imaginary that sees the world as a constellation of

differentiated, self-sufficient orders: a ‘natural’ cosmic order fully open to our understanding by

science; a moral order that is exclusively humanist and accepts no final goals other than human

flourishing; and a social order that is fully open to human construction and reconstruction. The

immament frame eclipses transcendence as the dominant social imaginary, the dominant mode

of experiencing the world, but is not closed to transcendence at the level of the individual. On

the contrary, the secular age fosters and secures new forms of religion. Taylor is wont to show

that our secular age is the result of a series of transformations that begin with internal changes

within Medieval European Christianity itself, and which result not in the decline of religion per

se, as much as its transformation and recomposition.

Taylor finds merit in thinking of religion and the secular in terms of the immanence-

transcendence distinction, where the immanence of secularity is to experience the world as a

free-standing self-sufficient order whose workings we can understand and organise on its own

terms, and wherein human flourishing is the final goal. The transcendence of religion is its

affirmation of a ‘beyond’ in terms of higher powers, an extension of life beyond this world, and

goods beyond worldly human flourishing. The advent of a secular age represents the

transformation of Euro-America from a state where people naïvely experience the world in such

a way that value, meaning and fullness lie in something transcendent/beyond it, to a state where

this experience, no longer able to be held naïvely, is one amongst many other options. In fact,

it is an embattled option now since the dominant mode of experiencing the world is one where

value, meaning and fullness are immanent/within it. Importantly, for Taylor, secularity is not

inimical to religion. Believers can fully pursue their religious forms of life if they so choose, just

as non-believers can pursue secular forms of life. It is the role of secularism to facilitate this

freedom of choice.

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 Secularism, as political framework, avers Taylor, needs to be redefined, turned away from

its fixation on religion or on some pre-given and fixed institutional arrangement, to being

understood and practised in terms of the goods it commendably seeks: political freedom,

equality, and fraternity. Secularism is not about the relation of the state with religion per se; it

is about the correct response of the democratic state to diversity. With this adjustment,

secularism is justified, for Taylor, as with Habermas, because it is required to fairly manage

diverse societies. It is not simply needed or preferable but inescapable, in virtue of the

requirements of democratic legitimacy for modern states whose societies have become direct-

access and temporally homogenous. Democracy requires secularism because popular

sovereignty demands a cogent, deliberative unit of citizens bound together by a common

political ethic, instead of the substantive religious or secular ideological differences that define

only some subset of the citizenry.

On the more animating normative question of the place of religion in a secular age,

Habermas and Taylor can be said to represent a ‘revisionist’ camp, which wants to smooth some

of the rougher edges of the standard narrative that accepts only a privatised religion. They

uphold the core of this narrative by affirming the legitimacy and preferability of secularism on

the claim that its epistemic and political neutrality is the only way to equitably manage diverse

societies. The revision they seek is to have religion deprivatised, admitted legitimately into the

secular public sphere—or, more accurately, since it is and was already there, to have its presence

legitimated and fostered—but only on a conditional basis, some of the details of which they

differ on. Not content with secularism as facilitating a modus vivendi, they seek a secularism

that allows for some sort of overlapping consensus.

Taylor’s account of secularisation—likewise Habermas, if to a lesser extent—reveals the

mutual-imbrication of secularity and religion; it emphasises ‘the intimacies between secularism

and religion’ (Hurd 2008, 486). He wants to emphasise their capacity to gel and work together.

Habermas too favours a functionally co-operative approach, while maintaining a more basic

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essential difference that figures the secular as a normative and epistemic advance on religion.

Taylor, who finds any such epistemic distinctions untenable—grounded as they are in

Enlightenment notions of religion as a faulty mode of reason and the ‘stadial’ idea of historical

progress from the religious to the secular—would have us go a little further by understanding

secularism not in terms of how we deal politically with religion in particular, but with diversity

in general. This would seem a sensible approach in theory, since there is nothing peculiar about

religious worldviews as opposed to non-religious ones that warrants the former being made a

special case. In practice, however, this change makes little difference because politically both

Habermas and Taylor admit religion into the public sphere in a qualified, restricted manner, the

requisite qualifications being determined by secular liberal parameters. Both also seek to perch

secularism on some neutral ground that simply does not exist.

The religion that is allowed into the public sphere in these models is a subordinated religion.

Habermas demands that religions and religious citizens change how they believe. Taylor argues

that such reflexivity of belief structures the immanent frame within which people experience the

modern world. How might we reconcile the normative demand of one view that the descriptive

observation of the other claims is already the case? One way is to suggest that the reflexivity Taylor

speaks of describes a dominant social imaginary but not the chosen mode of belief of every

believer or every religion. Individual persons and institutions can choose to go their own way,

against the grain as it were. Indeed, the Catholic Church itself arguably did so up until the Second

Vatican Council in 1965, when she by and large embraced liberalism and democracy.

Be that as it may, what is common to both models is the fact that only a religion that ticks

the boxes of a checklist determined by secular reason and power is welcome in the liberal public

sphere. That is, a religion that is subordinate to secular reason and power and is effectively

willing to embrace some set of secular liberal fundamentals. Habermas is quite explicit about

this. Taylor takes a more roundabout route by suggesting that the changes religion has

undergone, that were necessary for secularism, were in large part self-initiated. Such a story,

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however, fails to account for the fact that the internal ‘drive to reform’ of Latin Christianity only

took us so far in the changes required by secular reason and power. The rest of the way was

enforced as manifest in long historical struggles across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In some ways then, the Catholic Church is a ‘conscript of secularism’, who was obliged to

respond to the categories and norms of secular modernity, as everyone else was. 248 Even if it is

granted that the required reform was internally initiated and motivated, this applies only to

Latin Christianity. It does not change the fact that for secularism the requirement is the change

itself, regardless of whether it is internally activated or externally enforced, or some

combination of the two. The subordination is non-negotiable; the expectation of change is

‘uncompromising’. How it is achieved is a secondary matter of better and worse modes.

Critical Secularism: Asad, Brown

The notion of internal self-initiated reform speaks to another crucial part of the secularism

debate, namely, the genealogical relation of modern secularity with pre-modern religion

(‘genealogies of the secular’). In Chapter Two, we saw on this front that various positions are

taken. It has been argued that modern secularity is a break from medieval Christianity on the

basis of some defining feature of modernity: post-metaphysical subjectivity that overcomes

religious-metaphysical worldviews (Habermas 2019); the will to human self-assertion as a new

and better secular response to old theological problems (Blumenberg 1985); or rationalist

disenchantment that de-spirits the world (Weber 1946). It has also been proffered, in an

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Asad (1992) develops the notion of ‘conscripts of western civilisation’, in an essay bearing this name,
whereby non-European cultures are obliged to respond to the categories and modes of European
modernity. This is directly inspired by Stanley Diamond’s (1974) ‘conscripts of civilisation’ which
articulates the idea that ‘acculturation has always been a matter of conquest’ and ‘refugees from the
foundering groups may adopt the standards of the more potent society in order to survive as individuals’
but they do so as conscripts not volunteers. While both Diamond and Asad are speaking in a European-
non-European context (and Diamond more explicitly in a civilisation-primitive society frame), we adapt
the notion here in an intra-European/Western context of intellectual-political conquest.

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opposing direction, that modern secularity is a continuation of Christianity, whereby its

medieval form is transformed into a modern form that is more reflexive but equally spiritual

(Taylor 2007), or more ethical and less doctrinal (Smith 2007). In something of a combination

of the above two positions, it has been suggested that the transformation of religion is internally

generated but leads to an exit from religion (Gauchet 1997). Finally, it has been contended that

modern secularity represents the displacement and dissemination of Christian ideals and logics,

by way of an illegitimate appropriation (Schmitt 1925, Löwith 1949), or as a proliferation of

(different) conditions of unfreedom (Brown 2014, Marx 1978).

There is of course overlap in many of these positions, but they are also distinct in their

emphasis on which historical moments are more decisive for the advent of modern secularity.

Some emphasise various ideas: the disembedding, transcendentalising thrust of Axial religiosity;

early medieval Gnosticism; late medieval theological nominalism; early modern Reformation

individualism. Others emphasise various material formations: the rise of the political in

antiquity (the ancient ‘state’); post-Reformation religious plurality and interminable conflict;

the advent of the modern state. What stands out is the myriad of ways in which the genealogical

thread can be weaved. Although some threadings might be more convincing than others, the

cogent possibilities are numerous. What ought to be of concern then, one might argue, is not

getting the threading right—assuming that doing so is possible in the first place, given the

complexities of history across multiple temporalities and spaces, and the retrospective nature

of genealogy—but, closer to the Asadian approach, trying to understand modern secularity as a

complex formation on its own terms in a historically informed way.

With such a posture, Talal Asad adopts a more critical stance with respect to the standard

narrative. He is less interested in mere revisions of secularisation theory than in interrogating

its underlying notion of what ‘the secular’ is. He argues that secularity is the domain of

sensibilities, experiences, and embodied concepts which orient people’s sensorium and guide

public understandings of truth. It’s development through historical processes of secularisation,

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however we weave the genealogical thread, comprise tectonic ontological and epistemological

shifts, not mere political reconfiguration. Humans become the self-conscious makers of History

and the foundation of universally valid knowledge about nature and society. Along with its twin

concept of religion, the secular is critical to ‘modernity’ as a new way of living in the world.

However, the religious-secular distinction is not one that can be illuminated in terms of

rational-irrational or sacred-profane. Secularity does not eliminate the sacred, it relocates it on

its own terms. These terms are authorised by historically-specific powers in historically-specific

ways. Asad is thus focused on carefully reading the formation of these categories and their terms

of authorisation within their historical contexts, to the end of showing modern secularism as

the construction of a new normative, sovereign power.

Secularism is not, argues Asad, contra Habermas and Taylor, merely a matter of fairly

organising diverse societies, as if secularism is itself outside or above this diversity. Modern

secularism is a process of establishing a new form of normative power over the modern subject,

to which end it distinctively presupposes new concepts of religion, politics, state, ethics, law,

public, private, and new imperatives and rationalities associated with these. This power seeks

to transcend the concrete differentiating forms of being and knowing among people—‘race’,

‘ethnicity’, and in particular, ‘religion’—by backgrounding these in favour of constructing

‘citizenship’ as the primary political marker of their identity. In doing so, it fosters distinct

sensibilities and moralities, and generates new experiences of space and time. It represents a

very particular mediated experience of the world. Although the political medium of citizenship

is said to form a deliberative unit of ‘the people’ who decide on socio-political questions through

deliberation and persuasion, these questions are decided more so by the state and its powerful

institutions—commonly, given imbalances of power, to the disfavour of weaker parties. Far

from a neutral, merely procedural, inclusive space for citizen discourse, the liberal public sphere

is an exclusive space dominated by the substantive sensibilities, norms, aesthetics and ethics of

the (secular liberal) majority culture and identity.

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 Asad goes further in showing how religion and secularity are mutually-implicated, and in

problematising the binaries of sacred and profane, natural and supernatural, even

transcendence and immanence, as breaking down on interrogation. None of these are stable,

universal categories with fixed essences. On the contrary, secularity undergoes a remarkable

inversion from being a residual category of medieval theology to a central category of modernity

that makes theology and religion residual. In this extraordinary transposal, ‘religion’ is

completely re-constructed in modernity as a personal, (apolitically) institutionalised,

epistemically suspect, politically dangerous, supernatural belief. It is given a subjectivist or

cognitivist makeover. From being a concrete set of practical rules grounded in belief as a

constituting activity in the world and attached to processes of knowledge and power, religion is

universalised and abstracted as a matter primarily of disembodied, personal belief (as a state of

mind), opposed to knowledge and separated from power. From being an overarching paradigm

that flows into and above all aspects of human individual and social life, it is rendered into a

distinct realm of individual existence through social-scientific surgery.

Taylor too recognises this radical inversion even as he insists on conceptualising the

religion-secularity dyad in terms of transcendence-immanence. This does not contradict Asad’s

position, however, because Taylor does not assert this reading as universal or fixed. It rather

marks a very particular ‘Western’ experience and allows us to speak meaningfully about our age.

Further, to the extent that his transcendence is a particular kind of beyond, Taylor’s assertion

that modernity brings an eclipse of transcendence does not contradict Asad’s insight that

modernity relocates, rather than eliminates, transcendence. The key here is to avoid

equivocating between different kinds of transcendence. The ‘beyondness’ of transcendence only

makes sense in reference that which it is beyond; that which it transcends. The same is true of

the ‘withinness’ of immanence. The ‘transcendence’ of religion and the ‘immanence’ of secularity

are both with reference to the material world, with its spatial-temporal limits in thought. Just as

one can conceive of a ‘beyond’ this world and a ‘within’ it, one can also conceive of beyond that

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remains within. Such a ‘secular transcendence’ is, paradoxically if still meaningfully, an

immanent transcendence: a beyond (some concrete aspect of the world) that is still within (the

broader frame of) this world. Secular ‘citizenship’, for instance, as a form of ‘transcendent

mediation’, marks the attempt to go beyond the differentiating forms of concrete human

existence, but only with reference to worldly predicates (politics, state, nation)—as opposed to

possible otherworldly predicates (God, revelation, afterlife). These twain predicates do not, to be

sure, form an opposing binary, but they can be rendered such, which is precisely what secularity

aims at. We recall further examples of this peculiar ‘immanent transcendence’ shortly.

A crucial point of difference in this debate is on the pedigree of secular freedom and

equality and the nature of the liberal public sphere. Taylor, like Habermas, understands the

liberal state and the public sphere in ways that Asad has lucidly shown to be inaccurate

representations of how they operate. As elaborated in Chapter Five at length, an interrogation

of the secular triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity shows that it represents a different

configuration of the same phenomena (subordination, inequality, and hierarchy) that secular

liberalism seeks to overcome. This is seen in multiple interrelated yet distinct ways.

First, secular ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ are ideologically- and politically-inflected—

individually and when resolving mutual tensions—in ways that can and do proliferate

unfreedom and inequality. Secular liberal freedom is conceived in terms of autonomy, self-

sovereignty, free will, and choice, geared towards self-fulfilment and ‘authenticity’, as against

other conceptions of freedom in terms of comportment with divine will or living the virtue

ethical life. Further, secular liberal equality chooses to focus on political-legal sameness, in

terms of rights, while turning a blind eye to economic difference, in terms of material life. More

essential to the modern secular state than freedom and equality is its concentration of power

and prioritising of interests it deems vital.

Second, the secular public sphere is not an empty space in which all voices can discourse

on equal terms. It is constituted as a liberal space by liberal ideas and sentiments and is therefore

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exclusionary. Some voices, interests, and groups are welcome because they are deemed

legitimate and acceptable; others are not because they are considered disruptive to this space

and therefore illegitimate. Some religions are welcome to make ‘positive’ contributions; others

are told to reform or else stand out in the cold. The political and cultural determination and

drawing of the line of legitimacy and acceptability is made necessarily as an articulation of

power and ideology, not the articulation of any neutral, self-evident principles of reason alone.

Third, the adoption of an atomist social ontology affords priority to the abstract

individual, at the expense of relegating the consideration of concrete, historical communities,

especially minorities, to their detriment. Historical communities cannot be explicitly

considered by most liberal notions of political representation, but they do a lot of work

implicitly. Some minority groups are in practice rendered unrepresentable as themselves

because the authorised identity is constituted in part through their othering. Jews were a

prominent example of this in the not too distance past. Muslims are a prime example today.

Fourth, the majority culture, underwritten by a particular historical culture and identity,

is constituted as the ‘national identity’ and ‘common way of life’—as a community of sentiment,

not just a structure of law—and is thus privileged against all other cultures. Other communities

are called on to adopt aspects of this discursively and politically authorised culture in its

capacity as the glue which holds ‘multicultural’ liberal democracies together. ‘Multiculturism’

here is the effectively hierarchised coexistence of multiple cultures. In contrast to the privileged

majority culture, the historical identities of minorities are deemed inessential, able to be shed

at will, to facilitate Enlightenment notions of universality and the political demand for

integration. Liberal ‘fraternity’ is also structured by different minorities being subject to

different ideational and affective reactions by the state and its national culture.

Fifth, the liberal state engages in the active formation of citizens in line with the secular

liberal ideas and values that it authorises. Through schools, universities, through legal and

political discourses, particular epistemological, social, political, and moral positions are actively

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promoted over others. For this purpose too, the liberal state goes to the extent of wearing a

theological hat in defining religion and its signs and practices, in order to set their proper

boundaries and police these in line with such ideas and values. It goes further still, more

remarkably, in deploying various policies to actively form not only individuals, but entire

religious communities.

Wendy Brown is closer to Asad in most respects, particularly in the view that secularism is

a non-neutral normative power, and in the above-contoured critique of the liberal public sphere.

She differs, however, in reading religion-secularity in the Marxian terms of imaginary-real or

inversionary-pragmatic. For Brown, secularity, as an analytical-descriptive category, is the

eschewing of imaginary ideals and engagement with pragmatic realities as they are. This is on the

view that religion, leaning on Marx, is a modality of escape from pragmatic realities into the realm

of imaginary ideals. Religion is based in specific social arrangements of unfreedom, whereby

alienated human powers are attributed to sovereign Others. However, secularity is the always

ongoing and fallible human attempt to engage pragmatic realities as they are, without—contra

more triumphalist-rationalist accounts of secularity—the claim to having accessed ‘reality’ as it is.

Secularism, however, is ideology, that claims neutrality and masks normativity to extend

its power. Generating a specific model and meaning of religion and politics, church and state,

public and private, it is a form of governmentality, à la Foucault, that mobilises a Christian

Protestant theology by which all religion is disciplined. It operates ideologically through a

number of self-conceits about religious neutrality, tolerance, and freedom. Brown pursues the

conceits of secularism that arise precisely from its lack of religious neutrality. It is not, she argues,

equally available to all religions; it is not culturally neutral; it does not generate tolerance, mutual

respect, or gender freedom and equality. Secular liberal ‘tolerance’, for instance, poses as a

universal, norm-free virtue and impartial practice of enlightened, secular capaciousness. In fact,

it iterates the normalcy of the powerful and the deviance of the marginal, in order to tame both

unruly domestic identities and affinities, as well as non-liberal transnational forces that challenge

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the universal standing of liberal precepts and power. It does this, in part, by liberalism presenting

itself as acultural, above culture, and thus neutral— à la Habermas—and able to serve as the

regulating force for all other forms of life which are decidedly cultural.

Secularism thus, for Brown, is the currently hegemonic form of political organisation that

extends secular liberal ideology, while deploying its own religious modalities, to proliferate

conditions of unfreedom. On this view, religion is always alienating and thus tied to conditions

of unfreedom. Where traditional religions alienate human powers by projecting them unto God,

liberal capitalism projects them on to the state. Brown excavates a Marxian account of modern

secularism as a tool in the capitalist order, an instrument of empire. Capitalism secularises the

world, that is, profanes it, only to lay bare a different historical order of unfreedom, one that

violates holiness and humanism at once. And it does so while exercising a ‘religious’ power. It

does not do away with religious modalities of consciousness—as per the secularisation thesis; it

rather displaces them into secular forms: money, the commodity, the state. Like Asad, Brown

presents a trenchant critique of liberal secularism, even as, unlike Asad or Taylor, she sees

religion, in both traditional and secular forms, ultimately as a regressive force. Where Habermas

sees a deficit in religious reason, Brown sees it in religious consciousness.

Superordinate Secularity, Subordinate Religion

Our interlocutors bring various insights and take different positions in the secularism debate.

In thinking with them about the various aspects of this debate, we can now proceed to elaborate

and reflect on our own answers to the two guiding questions noted in the Introduction. This is

not, we hasten to add, without the trepidation of knowing that one is stepping beyond their

appropriate limits by adding their twopence worth among far more sophisticated, informed,

and erudite voices. The audacity of doing so is tempered by the realisation that what is proffered

is only made possible by standing on their shoulders, as it were. Indeed, our answers are a

combination of their insights. If anything is original, it is the selection of these insights and the

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way they are brought together and elaborated. In particular, we seek to highlight the notion of

superordination and subordination inherent in the secular-religion relationship, which, in our

view, cogently treats the descriptive-analytical assessment of secularity, secularisation, and

secularism, and is decisive in the critique of the latter’s normative legitimation.

This dissertation argues that the modern secular is best conceived as pertaining to the

worldly or the immanent in the specific sense that renders religion—conceived as pertaining in

some sense to the otherworldly or transcendent—subordinate and secondary. The key notion

here is of subordination, as opposed to simple negation. The secular and religious—as

hegemonic modern Western categories, to be sure, not as transcultural or transhistorical

universals—are not simple opposites such that the former negates the latter or that the

hegemony of the former leads to the extinction of the latter. Rather, the relationship is one of

subordination and hierarchy. Modern secularity, at its core, maintains a hierarchical

relationship between the superordinated secular and subordinated religious. Superordination

and hierarchy here are primarily, if not exclusively, about the ability to define, manage, govern,

legitimate (and de-legitimate) that which is subordinated, which is precisely what modern

secularity does with religion—and what most pre-modern religion did with theologically-

defined secularity: worldly concerns were governed by religious authority and determinations

and (variously) interpreted in light of higher otherworldly ends. Modern secularity inverts this

paradigm: the worldly ends of human flourishing attain priority and otherworldly concerns of

religion are subjected to the requirements of secular reason and power. In fact, with regard to

public life, immanent human flourishing is secularity’s ultimate and exclusive good.

‘Worldly’, in this rendition, marks all that relates to individual and social human existence

in our finite, temporal world, considered separate from any relation these may have to realities

beyond this world—to God, revelation, an afterlife. As with the immanent-transcendent

discussion in the previous section, this sort of more precise understanding is important because

various renditions are possible. Hans Blumenberg emphasised long ago the dubiousness of

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‘setting up worldliness and unworldliness as a pair of alternatives that are tipped now one way

and now the other in history, so that when transcendent ties and hopes are abandoned, there is

only one possible result’ (1985, 9). This was in response to Hannah Arendt’s suggestion that

‘modern secularity is not worldliness but the intensification of world alienation’ (1958, 253). For

Arendt—as for Taylor—secularisation (understood as separation of church and state) implies a

return to the early Christian attitude of such a separation, not the loss of faith or transcendence.

Such a position presupposes both what proper Christian doctrine in this respect is, as well as a

particular understanding of what counts as alienation from the world. The point here is not to

dispute this—Arendt’s critique of modern secularity is insightful—but to note that notions of

‘world’ and ‘otherworld’, as we all dualistic categories, can be figured in various ways. For our

argument here, we work with the above-mentioned figuration, which maps nicely unto the

immanent-transcendent binary, again in the more precise rendition of a ‘within’ and ‘beyond’

with reference to the temporal world. With this in mind, we can proceed to develop our

(re)conceptualisation of secularity, secularisation, and secularism.

As the abstract noun that labels an epistemic category, secularity is better conceived, we

have posited, as pertaining to ‘worldly’ phenomena (objects, practices, people, ideals,

sensibilities, dispositions, doctrines, subjectivities) that make a secondary reference to religion

at best. ‘At best’ here does the work of allowing two possibilities: a peripheral reference to

religion or none at all. Secularity marks individual and social modes of being in the world

structured by a prioritising of ‘worldly’ concerns and relegation of ‘otherworldly’ concerns. As a

social mode it uniquely structures modern life in the West. As a mode of being, it can thus

describe objects in the world and the like but only with reference to a framing subjectivity.

Hence, the focus on subjectivities and social imaginaries in the accounts of our interlocuters, as

noted in the concluding section of Chapter Three.

Secularisation, in abstract conceptual terms, is the process by which something becomes

worldly in aforementioned sense. In more concrete historical terms, it labels the transformation

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of Europe—drive by internal and external engagements—to its modern secular age where

precisely this sort of ‘worldlification’ (Verweltlichung) takes place (and from where it is exported

to other parts of the world). The immanent frames eclipses transcendence, in Taylor’s sense,

and religion is relegated to the margins of social life, rendered a secondary matter at best. More

exactly, secularisation marks the transformative reconstruction of religion in a way that it can

be, and is, subordinated by the secular state, which in turn results in its declining social

significance. It becomes the object of discipline and management. It is transformed to become

a mostly private, interior concern, that is properly essentially about belief and conscience, and

specifically not about, or separated from politics, science, education, art and culture. This

figuration of religion has normative force in the West, even if there are strong contestations on

the boundaries of some of these aspects.

This conception of secularisation works well with both the etymology of the word and the

reality of modernity. The ‘secular’ (from saeculum) is the worldly; to secularise is to make

worldly, to transfer to worldly status. This begins in Western Christendom with the transfer of

clerics, then property, then political authority, and then eventually the complete transfer of

social life, as it were. That is, the immanentisation of human society: its circumscription within

the ‘natural’ bounds of secular (worldly) space and time. This does not mean that religion is

banished or even necessarily completely privatised. Secularisation as a process, particularly in

service of liberalism, cannot and need not proscribe religion. It need only be in the master’s

seat, defining (and re-defining as needed) the place of religion in society, indeed the very

meaning of ‘religion’ itself. The place of religion is always to be marginal and secondary, and its

meaning is always to be in accordance with, and in the service of, the secular perspective and

project. It is not to challenge or interrogate the boundaries set by this perspective and project.

The mistake in the sociological secularisation thesis then, is in the simple and inevitable

relation it posits between modernisation and religious decline, as is now widely acknowledged.

Modernisation entails the subordination of religion, not its extinction. While subordination can

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be expected to, and usually does, result in decline—because that which is subordinated loses

power and influence—this is not a decline in religion per se. It is a decline in particular (pre-

modern) forms of religion, while other forms persist, if uncomfortably, and yet other ‘secular’

forms, flourish. This calls for attention to the particularity of religious forms, as it does to the

phenomenon of subordination. Indeed, the secularisation thesis is only salvageable if the

‘deprivatised’ religion that revised versions (such as that of Casanova, but also Habermas and

Taylor) allow for is of this subordinated and contained nature. Its subordination is a necessary

condition of the cogency of the thesis. Otherwise, deprivatisation places the ‘core’ differentiation

sub-thesis at risk as well, as indicated above, leaving nothing of the overall thesis intact. More

specific to the diagnosis of why the secularisation thesis was mistaken, the decline in the relevance

of religion has not been a ‘natural’ product of forces of modernisation such as industrialisation,

urbanisation, bureaucratic rationalisation, instrumental rationality, the rise of science and

technology, and greater social and geographic mobility. The force that is most relevant is the

differentiation of the secular spheres but this phenomenon itself is not a natural product of any

of these other forces. It is a result of the political and epistemic subordination of religion by which

it was made largely irrelevant to the spheres of politics, economics, culture, science, each of which

is constructed as differentiated and autonomous from religion via this subordination.

There is on this view, to be sure, an opposition between the secular and religious, albeit

one that is neither simple nor inevitable; it is complex and historically contingent. Modern

secularity does not theoretically necessitate nor practically lead to the negation or extinction of

religion. However, it does necessitate the remaking of religion—‘religion-making’ in Dressler

and Mandair’s (2011) sense—such that pre-modern religion must take on a modern, secular

form. This form is secular because the changes required of religion are determined by secular

thought and power. It is motivated by modern secularity’s view of religion as epistemically and

politically unfit, suspect or weak—a view developed in the Enlightenment that subsequently

becomes hegemonic—and this is the root of the opposition or tension between modern

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secularity and religion. Secularity requires that religious epistemology (‘theology’) give way, in

the public realm at least, to a secular epistemology/ontology grounded in naturalism and

science, and that religious politics (‘theocracy’) give way to secular politics grounded in a

purportedly independent or neutral morality. This requirement is non-negotiable. Without it,

we do not get modern secularity as we know it. In turn, at this level at least there is a mutual

contrariety that is zero-sum: either religious epistemology and politics predominate or its

secular counterparts do. However, this means neither that religion cannot exist in a secular age

nor even that the grounds of tension—epistemological/ontological and political—are not

mutually-informed or constituted. Indeed, secular and religious categories have imbricated,

sinuous histories and religion may not only survive in a secular age, it can also flourish, as it

presently does in many parts of the Western world. However, this is a religion that has

undergone secularisation; it is domesticated, customised, as it were, to fit in a secular age.249

Stated differently, secularity as a modern category is tied to immanence in the sense

outlined above—of restriction to worldly predicates. Secularisation is the immanentisation of

ontology and epistemology and, in turn, ethics and politics—even if historically this occurs in

reverse order. It is the conception or experience of the world—of what exists, how we should

act, what we can know and how we should organise society—in terms of human determination

alone and for the end of worldly human flourishing alone. It is the transformation of the

theocentric pre-modern story of God, in which humans are a footnote, into an anthropocentric

story of a self-asserting, enlightened humanity, wherein God is rendered a footnote. Or, more

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This is one way of framing the conception and relation of the religious and secular. Here, secularity is
seen specifically as a modern phenomenon, whereas religion—conceived generally as pertaining ‘in some
sense’ to the otherworldly or transcendent—has pre-modern and (secularised) modern varieties (still
within the delimited cultural sphere of Euro-America, hence not universal). Another equally valid framing
would be to define ‘religion’ in the specific sense that renders the secular/worldly subordinate. That is,
religion would determine the legitimate meaning and place of the secular—as was the case in pre-modern
Christianity. On this framing, religion proper would only be pre-modern religion and modern ‘religion’
would cease to qualify as religion, or at least would need to always be qualified as ‘secular’ religion. A
third strategy would see both religion and the secular pertaining in the general sense to the transcendent
and immanent. This last option is conceptually possible but historically non-existent.

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accurately, the latter story while formally about ‘humanity’ is actually about European secular,

propertied man and his religious, racialised, unpropertied, and gendered Others.

Finally, secularism is the modern immanentising worldview, comprising concomitant social

and political organisation, that creates the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’ (along with attendant

categories) as differentiated spheres in order to hierarchise them, that is, to subject the authority

and reason of the former to that of the latter. Far from merely separating religion from politics, it

makes religion the object of politics, the object of state discipline and management through the

subordination of religion and the concentration and expansion of secular state power—the

concrete expression of the newfound sovereignty of ‘humanity’. Alternatively, it is the

worldview—or more narrowly the political doctrine thereof—that advocates for, and gives effect

to, the predomination of the worldly through the subordination of religion. Again, the key notions

here are of subordination and hierarchy, as opposed to notions of neutrality and mere separation,

on the one hand, and those of simple negation or opposition, on the other.

Notably, there are various forms secularism can take, from more interventionist like the

French model, to more independent like the American, to mixed models like the Indian.

However, what is common to these models is that they are all different arrangements of how

the state (the political domain) ought to relate to the religious domain, much more than some

mutually-arrived at forms of how the two ought to relate to each other. It is one side deciding

for the other, mostly passive object of discipline. The secular state is in the driver’s seat deciding

the fate the religion. While the secularism of Continental Europe might exact a harsher whip to

keep religion in a more restricted sphere in comparison to Anglo-American secularism where

(a certain kind of) religion finds ample expression even in the public sphere, the commonality

is that the secular is thoroughly dominant. It has taken the King’s seat at the table. Secularism

stipulates the way religion can and cannot be manifest and seeks to reform any religious

sensibilities considered incompatible with the norms of liberalism. The place of religion, in a

secular age, is always peripheral.

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 In turn, the ‘freedom of religion’ that secularism offers and attempts to secure is not of

religion as it is, or as it manifests in different actually-existing religious traditions, but of religion

as it ought to be according to a particular authorised view. In other words, it is a normative

rather than descriptive view of religion that is upheld as free to express itself. Indeed, it is the

normative view of a specific Western, early modern, Protestant religion, taken up by liberal

thinkers and the secular liberal state and authorised as ‘proper’ religion. This modern ‘religion’

turns the tables on pre-modern ‘religion’ but without explicitly acknowledging that a radical

transformation has taken place. The pre-modern relationship is hierarchical: the religious

encompasses the secular. Theology defines the place of the temporal world in a theocentric,

enchanted cosmos. The modern relationship is also hierarchical but in the opposite direction:

the secular encompasses the religious. Secular state power defines the place of religion in a

anthropocentric, socially constructed polis. The pre-modern hierarchy, however, is apparent

and acknowledged while the modern hierarchy is masked and, in fact, in an ingenious move,

presented as itself part of the flattening and end of hierarchy.

Freedom of religion in this context is thus a very particular freedom tied to certain

compulsions. It is freedom of conscience, belief, and association but does not include the

freedom to live life according to the precepts of a given religion. On the contrary, there is a

desire to eliminate various religious practices from public life as archaic, superstitious and

incompatible with secular liberal progress, morality, and human rights. The secular state is

called upon, not to maximise presently desired freedoms, but to foster a particular, authorised,

‘enlightened’ freedom with its own exclusions.

The Legitimacy of Modern Secularism

Hans Blumenberg’s famous reply to Löwith and Schmitt speaks of the cultural and conceptual

‘legitimacy’ of modernity—its living up to its name and claim of ‘newness’, which is perhaps

more apparent in the German (Neuzeit, the new age/time) than the English. We have considered

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a different, moral-political, sense of the legitimation (justification) of secularism: why is

secularism a superior form of political organisation in the modern world? In Chapter Four, we

saw that contemporary liberal political theory broadly proffers four reasons. It is asserted that

secularism secures individual autonomy (freedom of conscience, choice, religion), democratic

citizenship (equal and equitable participation by all citizens in self-rule), the public authority

of secular reason, and civil peace. The last of these is least emphasised, arguably because it

stands on soft ground: Secularism does not solve the problem of violence vis-à-vis religion, it

merely shifts the dynamic and deploys different types of violence, commonly far worse types in

its modern partnership with the modern state. The power of the remaining three ‘core’

justifications leans crucially on secularism’s purported ability to secure state neutrality. Both

individual autonomy and equal, equitable political participation of all citizens requires state

neutrality, while public reason itself comprises an appeal to epistemic neutrality of secular

language and reason.

From Holyoake to Habermas, representations of the secular make a claim, at some level,

to neutrality, commonality or universality. It is secularism’s purported unique ability to provide

for such political and epistemic neutrality that is said to make it not just legitimate or superior,

but necessary and inevitable in modernity. The epistemic secular is presented as a neutral mode

of knowing, independent of any religious or moral commitments. The political secular is said to

establish a neutral political ethic, independent of any such commitments. In other words,

secularism as statecraft is legitimated through appeals to its exceptional ability to uphold

approaches to knowledge and politics that are in some significant sense neutral to all the

competing worldviews that define the various individuals and communities which make up

modern Western societies. This claim is crucial to its legitimation. Securing this neutrality is

attempted in two broad ways. The Rawlsian approach attempts to bracket

metaphysical/philosophical disputes and establish a ‘freestanding’ but partially substantive

political conception of justice whose justification ultimately rests on competing worldviews, but

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whose presentation and operation does not. The Habermasian approach attempts to abstract

from competing worldviews completely by appealing to an epistemic authority—specific to the

moral domain set apart in advance from a separate ethical domain—that is purportedly

independent of them all and whose more modest task is only to establish fair procedures of

discourse. Both moves, however, fall significantly short.

Rawlsian political neutrality is only secured through a reformulation of political

philosophy itself—as pertaining only to political conceptions of the right, understood as

untethered from comprehensive doctrines or conceptions of the good—and a constitution of

the ‘political’ as cut off from the metaphysical and the moral. Even after all this heavy

philosophical lifting, the resulting political conceptions differ from moral conceptions only in

scope and application, not in their lack of substantive content.

Habermasian procedural neutrality likewise relies on substantive epistemological, moral,

and political positions: the separation of personal ethical values from public moral values, and

the underlying divisions of public-private and ethical-moral; the separation and primacy of the

right from/over the good; the moral-epistemological goods of reciprocity, reflexivity, and rational

dialogue; the controversial notion of ‘public reason’, itself erected on an epistemic privileging of

secular over religious reason; the idea that morality is related to social relations, not to goods,

that it is restricted to binding norms, and that its validity is tied to conditions of discourse and

cogency of reasons, not worldviews; and that consciousness and thought are linguistically

structured social phenomena, which necessitates moving moral reflection from the realm of

subjective monologue to intersubjective dialogue. Further, in its prioritising of democratic over

liberal values, as against liberal models that do the reverse, it is still dealing in moral substance

and privileging certain conceptions of the good over others. Habermas justifies all this by

claiming that his model claims only ethical, not philosophical neutrality. Such a response is

insufficient, however, because the very reason for seeking neutrality in the first place—that

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otherwise some controversial and partial doctrines get privileged over others, failing to treat all

citizens as equal and free—applies as much to ethical as to philosophical doctrines.

We argue, therefore, that the very claim to neutrality is the sword on which the

legitimation of secularism falls. This is because the appeal to neutrality is crucial but weak. All

liberal models of secularism privilege and authorise controversial secular liberal positions as

against, and to the disadvantage of, competing positions of opposing worldviews. In summarising

the many instances of this discussed throughout this dissertation, it helps to enumerate and

classify them. We note at least six ways in which this non-neutral privileging operates.

First, the non-neutrality of modern secularism is apprehended through an appreciation

of its thick historicity and ideologicality. Nationalism imagines a particular type of world in

which a particularly figured ‘nation’ has ontological and political priority. Humanism figures

the world and our place within it in a specific, contestable way. Liberalism asserts certain

principles of individual autonomy, equality, democracy, and human rights, relying on its own

founding and orienting myths. Likewise, more recent doctrines such as multiculturism,

globalisation, and neoliberalism assert particular figurations of how we ought to live in the

world. Such moral-political doctrines are authorised as defining the political ethic of the state,

yet they are all closely linked to ultimate ideals or conceptions of the good, the like of which

secularism is supposed to be bracketing in order to secure neutral governance. Secularism, tied

to these and other ideologies, is therefore as ideological as any other worldview or form of

political organisation, with its own basic, ‘sacred’ commitments. Stated differently, there is

nothing distinctly self-evident about basic secular liberal ideals, such as the premise of

individual freedom. It makes a lot of sense within certain ontological universes, certain images

of the world, but not in others. Any claims of self-evidence are necessarily worldview-

dependent. To merely dress an ideological position in a garb of self-evident universality is

philosophical naïveté at best and authoritarian hubris at worst—all the more problematic when

done precisely in the name of opposing authoritarianism.

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 Second, particular philosophies of self and society, particular conceptions of language

and politics, ethics and law are all presupposed by the liberal positions that undergird the state

and its governance. For instance, many liberal models of secularism presuppose or adopt

notions of unencumbered selves, atomist social ontologies, politics as merely procedural and

unconnected to conceptions of the good, ethics as separate from law, and so forth. Yet none of

these positionalities are self-evident, impartial, or universal, as against opposing ones.

Third, a particular conception of religion is also presupposed. This is an instance of the

last point but deserves separate mention because secularism lays a more specific claim to the

neutral treatment of all religion, its quintessential Other. In fact, a particular (broadly

Protestant Christian) model and meaning of religion and of religious subjects, practices, and

sensibilities is authorised and thus privileged, as against the corresponding models and meaning

of other Christian and many more non-Christian religions.

Fourth, this authorised religion becomes the standard against which all other religions

are governed, disciplined, and transformed. That is, secularism actively forms religion in a

particular mould. Secularism’s quite explicit governance of religion is partial and ideological,

based on the authorisation of a normative concept of proper religion. Certain aspects of what is

descriptively claimed to be religion are given recognition, support, and encouragement, while

other aspects are treated indifferently, and others yet are curtailed and proscribed. ‘Religion’ is

not a mere datum for secular liberal political theory (or for secular constitutional law). It is

rather a product of that theory (and law).

Fifth, secular reason is privileged as universal and common, despite the fact that

secularism accounts for distinct ways of being and knowing, ‘disenchanted’ modes of being and

knowing that claim immediate or superior access to reality stripped of myth, magic, and dogma.

It is also privileged as more amenable to rational discourse, less controversial and intractable

than its religious counterpart. Yet secular moral philosophies, such as utilitarianism or

Kantianism, are as controversial and debatable on their foundational premises as any

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transcendent philosophy or religious tradition. Likewise, religious or metaphysical disputes are

no more intractable and irresolvable than secular moral or political disputes. Despite this,

secularism operates on the logic that the former, because of their intractability, controversiality,

and/or irrationality, need to be bracketed out of the public realm in favour of the latter. ‘Public

reason’, as a subset of secular reason and the authorised language and reason of secular liberal

politics, is also hardly neutral. It is a liberal reason no less tied to particular forms of life than

any religious or non-liberal reason.

Some version of ‘public’ reason is crucial to any secular liberal model of politics because it

provides the purportedly common language in which a diverse citizenry can discourse and

deliberate. Public reasons are thus reasons that every citizen could, it is claimed, in principle

recognise and affirm as having normative force because they speak in a universal, human tongue

accessible to all. However, this relies on an epistemic distinction between secular and religious

reason and language that is asserted but hardly substantiated with any rigour. The problem here

is not in identifying religious particularity but in missing or masking secular particularity, in

assuming secular universality. It is in the (mis-)characterisation of public reason as a form of

transcultural human reason, not embedded in particular traditions or philosophical frameworks.

Sixth, the liberal public sphere is constituted by secular liberal sensibilities, ideas, and

practices that represent the majority culture and identity, as noted above in summarising Asad’s

critique. It is thus an exclusionary space that affords some people advantages over others. The

further removed a people are from the authorised identity, the greater the difficultly they have

in being represented in the public sphere as themselves.

It is only because of all this—secularism’s privileging its own non-neutral, particular,

ideological fundamentals, philosophies, languages and reasons—that it can legitimately, in its

own eyes, render religion secondary to political identity, ban the hijab in public settings, regulate

the display religious signs (and decide which ones count as religious), privilege certain school

syllabi over alternative models, actively form citizens in a certain mould through soft power

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policies, authorise the majority culture as defining and essential to the state’s identity, demand

that minority communities reform their belief/value systems in order to integrate, and the like.

Thus, secularism privileges its own set of fundamental interpretations of world and self,

and associated normative imperatives, through which others are judged, approved, and

condemned. As such, it falls short on its claim to secure freedom and equality for all as well.

Secularism does not ensure some universally acceptable or neutral equality and freedom for all.

Rather, particular ideological figurations of equality and freedom undergird secularism. Far

from being the solution to the discriminatory treatment of religious minorities, then, the secular

state is part of the problem. In turn, the deprivatised religion of a revised or ‘post’-secularism

falls quite short of its claim of providing freedom and a fair hearing to all citizens as equals.

Individuals and communities are welcome in the public sphere, to be sure, but they must enter

reformed in the liberal image—leaving their deepest convictions about the world in the

‘vestibule of the public sphere’, speaking the language of liberal public reason, upholding and

integrating into the national identity that is not organically theirs, and being careful not to

challenge prevailing authorised narratives—or be satisfied at best with pariah status.

While the starting point of secular liberal models is the claim to take seriously the ‘fact’

of pluralism, the modus operandi by which this is to be done—a ‘political’ ethic and ‘public’

reason—presupposes the availability of shared or common values. The ‘common point of view’

is discursively carved out of, and imposed on, radically diverse societies. Shared political values

and a common public reason is asserted as a descriptive fact, but is only secured as a normative

ideal with reference to the sorts of substantive values of controversial worldviews that for its

very constitution it is meant to transcend. As such, it is only diversity within broadly liberal

doctrines that are respected—everyone else is subjected to secular liberalism’s ‘extra-political

epistemic and moral authority’. The claim to respect diversity per se remains an empty claim.

The lack of genuine respect for diversity and the non-neutrality of liberal secularism is

also borne out by the fact that all its various models—Rawls, Taylor, Habermas—require,

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demand, expect, non-negotiably, that religious communities change the way they practice their

religion to bring it in line with an authorised model of (effectively secularised) religion.

Otherwise, they are dubbed ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘unreasonable’, and have no place in the secular

state or its public sphere. If the fundamentals of liberal secularism were universal and neutral,

such a demand would not have to be made. That it needs to be made indicates that its domain

is the ideological conflict of opposing particular, cultural forms of life.

It has been suggested that there are in fact good reasons for ‘immigrants and minority

cultures’ to meet the expectation of ‘reform’ because they would be the first victims of ‘political

domination by a sectarian majority culture’ enabled by the abolition of ‘religiously and

metaphysically neutral state power’ (Habermas 2017, 156). Reform is thus cast as of mutual

benefit, tempering the sense of imposed obligation that its ‘uncompromising’ expectation

otherwise bears. This suggestion is fair and has resonance in particular contexts, in Europe

perhaps more than elsewhere. (In the United States, the pendulum of political domination may

swing in the other direction, against secular, and non-Christian religious, minorities—but that

does not attract any like expectation of change on part of secular liberal communities.)

Nevertheless, it misses the point, namely, that the secular state is not religiously and

metaphysically neutral, and therefore already represents an iteration of political domination by

a ‘sectarian’, that is, partial majority culture.

Modern secularism, then, far from being neutral or universal, is a particular normative

worldview as controversial and contestable as any other. It subordinates religion—just as, in

principle, pre-modern religion subordinated the (theologically-defined) secular—as a function

of its thick normativity that determines its conceptions of the just and the good, not as a

function of any self-evident universal principles. If all of this true, then secularism is left bare

without any clear or robust legitimation, and we are left in search of more theoretically coherent

and practically just ‘post-secular’ forms of political organisation.

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 This approach to secularity and secularism, in which we have sought to underline the

inherent element of superordination and hierarchy, covers the failings of standard narratives

and incorporates the insights of recent critical interventions. First, it moves away in a more

pronounced manner from the notion that secularism is the mere separation or independence of

religion from politics (and attendant separations of ethics from law, public from private, state

from church), which afford these categories an unwarranted natural status instead of making

explicit that they do not even exist (in the form secular thought and power remakes them) prior

to any purported separation. From Locke to Rawls, the attempts cast as boundary management

between presumably pre-existing phenomena are in fact, as we have seen, reconstructions and

transformations of these phenomena. Second, explicating the notion of subordination denies

the appeal to neutrality and universality. Third, by speaking of subjecting the religious to the

political, it gets to the core of the matter, and thereby relegate the prioritising of how much

separation or integration/entanglement actually occur as a secondary concern of modality. At

the same time, it caters for the various modes and models of modern secularism by highlighting

what is common to them all. Fourth, it provides an explanation for why some forms of ‘proper’

religion flourish in a secular age while other ‘fundamentalist’ forms are aggressively policed and

coercively managed.

In view of this approach, how might we read the balance sheet of the ‘post-secular’

sensibility of revised secularism, then? It definitely has much to its credit. From acknowledging

the overdeterminations of the secularisation thesis to checking secularist excess in its wholesale

dismissal of religion, and from seeking out the affinities of the religious and secular and the

genealogical debts of secular reason to religion, to allowing for greater space in the public sphere

for religious citizens. All of these represent an advance on the previous state of affairs defined

as they were by a secular prejudice. However, while this prejudice is breaking up under strain

from multiple sides, it remains strong enough for the post-secular disposition to not go far

enough. This is so, most basically, because the particularistic features of modern secularity

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remain unacknowledged and, in turn, it remains perched atop religion in an epistemic and

political hierarchy. It remains understood and presented as the only way for people in late

modernity to collectively reason and organise, rendering the affinities sought, debts

acknowledged, and greater space made for religion largely instrumental for a modern secular

project whose core structures remain uncompromised and uncompromising.

Implications for Collective Political Futures

It is worth reflecting, in closing this dissertation, on the implications of this critique. If state

power is repressive when partial to any particular normative worldview or conception of the

good, then the secular state’s reliance on liberal norms, fundamentals, and conceptions of the

good renders it repressive and illegitimate. It fails the test of legitimacy by the lights of its own

theory. In turn, its legitimation has to be reconsidered at its roots. Advocates can at best claim,

perhaps, that this model is less repressive than those that are more thoroughly (or more

forthrightly) based on normative worldviews, but they cannot claim for it complete legitimacy

without a radical reworking of the basic theory.

From another angle, an implication of this critique may be that all power is subordinating

along ideological-normative and political lines. But this is a truism, hence trivial, it may be

thought. What then is the point of articulating such a case at length? Well, the point is that this

is a truism for those who acknowledge it as such, but not everyone does. Clearly, the formidable

leading contemporary theorists of secularism—Habermas, Rawls, Taylor—do not. Hence, so

much of their legitimation rests on appeals to neutrality, impartiality, independence, freedom.

Precisely because this secular, ‘post-metaphysical’, imaginary is not only prevalent but

hegemonic, the point needs to be made. In making it, the idea is not, to be sure, that we ought

to put effort into imagining politics without subordination, without the hierarchising effects of

ideology, culture, normativity, history, and contingency. We take for granted that this is not

possible. Rather, the idea is that it is important to render all of these explicit and to allow for

353
their consideration, contestation, and mutual cultivation. What should not be acceptable is that

one cultural form of life or worldview be privileged simply by means of masking its cultural and

ideological shape in the garb of neutrality.

What of the suggestion implied above that while secular liberalism is another form of

traditional (inevitably subordinating) politics, it is however less repressive? By virtue of its

central focus on freedom, it may be argued to be a relative advance in degree—if not in kind, as

its leading advocates claim—in this respect. This is a potential line of argument that can be

taken as part of the reworking of secularism’s legitimation, although not a line currently taken

by leading advocates, as we have seen. As a potential case, however, even the notion that it is

less repressive would require further examination. It cannot be taken for granted. Many recent

studies, in part pushed by the enormous conflict and violence accompanying the modern

secular nation-building process,250 reflect appreciatively but critically on the extensive religious,

ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of pre-modern empires (Sun and Zhao 2018, 240).251

Other studies detail examples of pre-modern (non-secular) multi-confessional contexts where

tolerance reigned and the art of life excelled, and of thriving ‘minority’ communities within a

society defined by an opposing worldview.252

We also know that in some cases pre-modern forms of governance in fact allowed greater

room for minorities to live by their own commitments in some respects, as compared with the

250
For one account, see Wimmer A 2002, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity,
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
251
Examples include Lavan M, Payne RE, and Weisweiler J 2016, Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal
Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, Oxford
University Press: Oxford; Bang PF and Kolodziejczyk D (eds.) 2012, Universal Empire: A Comparative
Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge; Burbank J and Cooper F 2010, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference,
Princeton University Press: Princeton; and Barkey K 2008, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in
Comparative Perspective, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
252
For an example of each respectively, see Dodds JD, Rosa MM, and Balbale AK 2008, The Arts of Intimacy:
Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, Yale University Press: New Haven; and
Shaw SJ 2016, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, Palgrave Macmillan: UK.

354
modern secular state, such as the case of heterogeneous multinational regimes consisting of

diverse self-governing or semi-independent religious and cultural communities (Walzer 1997,

14). They were open to legal pluralism: the accommodation of multiple moral-legal codes for

different communities, with a qualified autonomy that operates within the umbrella codes of

the state.253 In contrast, late modern liberal states, who otherwise claim a greater respect for,

and recognition of, pluralism, disapprove of such legal pluralism, in favour of a legally monist-

centralist approach. This indicates, again, that centralisation of state power is more essential to

the modern secular state than the facilitation of plurality or freedom. It shows also that some

non-secular forms of politics are potentially better in some respects in this regard.

Critical reflection on such examples of pre-modern forms of politics may allow us to move

beyond ‘the trap of conceiving one master civilizing process that takes societies from

persecution to toleration’ (Barkey 2014, 207) that still dominates the secular imaginary with its

Eurocentric focus on medieval Europe and the Reformation as the unique historical sources of

toleration. We noted above with Scherer (2013) that the naïve-reflective belief division between

modern and pre-modern worlds is likely more nuanced and unevenly distributed than Taylor’s

(2007) narrative of the rise of secular modernity suggests. Something similar could be said about

the corresponding division of toleration and persecution, or equitable and unequitable modes

of dealing with difference.254

The point, to be sure, is not that we need to think about reverting to or reproducing pre-

modern models of politics and governance. That most likely is not possible—some pages once

turned in the book of world history cannot be flipped back. The point, rather, is that these

examples provide resources about and with which we can think more critically about our late

253
Benton L and Ross R 2013, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, New York University Press: New York.
254
For a critical comparative appraisal of prospects of toleration between pre-modern empires and
modern nation-states, see Barkey (2014).

355
modern predicament. They are sources of ‘semantic potentials’, in the Habermasian sense, that

allow thinking beyond the confines set by the breaking-but-still-strong modern secular

prejudice. Except, unlike Habermas, this use is best considered not in merely instrumental

terms, for peripheral adjustments to dominant models of politics and governance, but in ways

that open them up to more critical interrogation and change—the higher threshold that secular

reason is supposed to cross. All of this is foreclosed, however, by the secular insistence that it is

the only way and its premature demotion of non-secular forms of politics and governance. That

is why critiques of secularism, such as the one articulated in this dissertation, are still needed.

They open up opportunities, within a broader frame of reference, for imagining fairer political

futures in an increasingly globalised, diverse, and volatile world.

356
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