Abstract
Jacques Berlinerblau, author of Secularism: The Basics, responds to his nine critics in this edition of the Journal of Secular Studies. He focuses on definitional issues and what he calls the POMOFOCO school and its critique of secularism.
I wish to express my appreciation to the nine scholars who have written here about my recent book, Secularism: The Basics. Each gave me something to think about. Each pointed me in intriguing bibliographical directions. Each criticized my work in ways I find very helpful.
In what follows, I want to incorporate their learned insights into a discussion not only of my book, but, more broadly, the field of “secular studies.” That would be the burgeoning academic field devoted to the scrutiny of the distinct, but sometimes imbricated, concepts of secularism, secularization, secularity, secular humanism, separationism and atheism. My intent is to collate my nine interlocutors’ important insights in a manner that lets us reflect on some basic enigmas, confusions, controversies, and coming challenges for the many scholars who labor in this area.
That said, I want to specify that I work in a subfield of secular studies which addresses a narrower concept referred to as “political secularism” (see below). Professor Bangstad, in his contribution, had this to say about the copious scholarly literature devoted to this subject: “secularism as featured in many of these contributions was either yet another late-colonialist instrument of Western state regulation and oppression of Muslims, or the very fix to the challenges posed by multicultural and multireligious societies across the world.”1 I am in accord with his description, as I am with his desire to generate less rigid lines of analysis which probe the spaces between these poles.
Our ability to do precisely that will equip us with the tools to collectively contemplate the most important question we can ask about political secularisms today. Namely, are they a viable strategy of just democratic governance in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith societies with growing numbers of religiously non-affiliated citizens? I can’t, obviously, answer that question here. Rather, I see this contribution as a way of re-centering a conversation which, for better or for worse, has become intimidatingly sprawling and, to a certain extent, incomprehensible—even to professional academicians. I hope this piece serves as a “cheat sheet” of sorts—a quick way into the current debates, flashpoints and conundra that those who study political secularism need to confront.
Last, although my footnotes will cite a rather large number of scholarly pieces, they won’t cover a fraction of the important writings on this subject. For what it’s worth, I feel that the Journal of Secular Studies should produce a “bibliography issue” devoted to the field named in its title. It would be a very thick volume.
1 S-words
Secularism: The Basics starts off with a plea for definitional clarity. There’s nothing new there; I have always made a point of obsessing over the meanings of the term “secular” and its derivatives. Some scholars have implied that the concerns that I and others have about definitions amounts to a “panic” about the standing of secularism itself, “as if getting control of the words might alone hold back history and provide a foundation for the reconstitution of the political order.”2
Fair enough. Many of us live in countries where political secularism is collapsing; the consequences of that collapse for religious and sexual minorities, nonbelievers, not to mention expressive liberties, civil rights, and public safety, worry us majorly. The contributions of Professors Igwe, Shook and Zuckerman articulate these fears quite strikingly.
I have often argued that this ongoing collapse is not separate from, but inextricably bound to, our inability to clearly define S-words, be it “the secular,” “secular humanism,” “secularism,” “secularity,” “secularization” and “separationism.” In other words, there is a link between not being able to agree on what these terms mean and the conditions inducing the state of “panic” that some of us are experiencing. As we will see in a moment, the blurriness and disagreement surrounding these words is unfortunate for scholarship, but devastating for discussions of public policy by those experiencing that aforementioned “panic.”
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We must first understand that questions of definition play a large role in secular studies. The claim that references to “the secular” have “multiple semantic valences” is surely correct, as is the complaint that the word has become “hopelessly inflated in public discourse.”3 The failure to recognize that may lead scholars to speak right past one another. As Nader Hashemi put it, “Discussion about the topic of secularism eventually grounds to a halt over confusion surrounding the meaning of the concept. Often the same word is invoked to describe a different social phenomenon. Those involved in the discussion assume they are talking about the same idea when in reality they have rather distinct concepts in mind.”4
In the spirit of achieving analytical clarity, and presaging my argument that the confusion Hashemi alludes to has deleterious effects, let’s revisit the basic terms we use in secular studies.
1.1 Political Secularism and (Skinny) Definitions
It took me decades to develop a plausible conception of what I have now come to call “political secularism.” My progress was slow. I made mistakes. There were setbacks along the way.
I have renounced the first definition I advanced twenty years ago in The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.5 There I centered the S-word’s meaning on an ethical commitment to “criticizing all collective representations” yoked to an ethos of omnidirectional critique.6 In retrospect, this approach was better suited to literary criticism (especially biblical literary criticism).7 It offered little traction, however, for the more politically oriented dimensions of this subject matter.
In How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms to Religious Freedom (2012), I razed my previous conception to the ground.8 My new understanding was more attuned to the distinctly political dimensions of the term: “Secularism is a political philosophy, which, at its core, is preoccupied with, and often deeply suspicious of, any and all relations between government and religion. It translates that preoccupation into various strategies of governance, all of which seek to balance two necessities: (1) the individual citizen’s need for freedom of, or freedom from, religion, and (2) a state’s need to maintain order.”9
It’s a plausible definition, though I now see a flaw. Some secular “frameworks” as I call them, are far more suspicious of religion/government relations than others. The French laïcité model and Soviet Atheist secularisms are suspicious and paranoid, respectively. The Indian accommodationist framework, as I described it in the present book, harbors neither of these attitudes.
Via a study that was published in the The Oxford Handbook of Secularism edited by Professor Zuckerman and Professor Shook (2017), I decided to intentionally start using the term “political secularism,” so as to distinguish it from all the other connotations of the S-word, especially atheism (see below).10 That article tried to identify the intellectual architects of political secularism. Parenthetically, I repeat my contention that there are many—likely dozens—of other architects about whom we still know very little; this is a huge growth area for future research.
That study of secularism’s genealogy helped me to arrive at the conception I advanced in Secularism: The Basics. It started with a “skinny definition”: “Political secularism refers to legally binding actions of the secular state that seek to regulate the relationship between itself and religious citizens, and between religious citizens themselves.”11
I think there is much value in scholars offering such “skinny definitions” and then building upon them. Permit me to note a few examples of this offered by other researchers. Three decades back, in an underappreciated volume entitled Questioning the Secular State, Carl Hallencreutz and David Westerlund defined secularism as “the pursuit of politics irrespective of predominant religious interests.”12 The political theorist Cécile Laborde offered this rendering of the word: “I take secularism to be a political position about the proper relationship between the state and religion and, more specifically, one that singles out religion for both special protection and for special restrictions.”13 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd observes: “Secularism refers to a public settlement of the relationship between politics and religion.”14
There is not, as all these theorists know, a one-sentence definition of political secularism that could capture the term’s complexity. It is for those reasons that I argued that a given political secularism “stacks” or “prioritizes” any combination of 10 key principles as it performs its regulatory function. This approach (i.e., skinny definition + 10 principles that can be weighted differently) provided a certain flexibility in trying to account for what political secularisms are and why they may differ from one another, often radically. My respondents seemed to almost uniformly like that approach. I hope others will refine it and render it more precise.
1.2 (Political) Secularism and Atheism
In my work on political secularism I have tried to execute a friendly delinking between the terms “secularism” and “atheism.” I will explain why the move is “friendly” below.
Professor Zuckerman, in commenting on how I use the term “secularism,” makes a criticism of me which I think is valid. He writes: “In the past, my biggest beef with Berlinerblau’s work has always been that he seems to want to force the word “secular” to mean something that he believes it means—or ought to mean—rather than accepting that words only have meaning through popular use and within social context, and thus “secular” generally means whatever meaning people give it through on-going, prevalent usage.”15
In colloquial, journalistic and even academic usage, as Zuckerman points out, the equation between nonbelief and secularism is widespread.16 Zuckerman, for his part, does tend to use the term secularism as a stand-in for atheism, agnosticism, irreligion, and nonreligion. In his groundbreaking Society Without God, he speaks of “secular life as it is actually lived by nonbelieving men and women.”17 Professor Zuckerman and I jousted on this issue back in 2014 in Secularism on the Edge.18
This coupling between nonbelief and the word “secularism” is widespread. An example of this elision is Philip Kitcher who in his introduction to The Joys of Secularism writes “secularism, as I shall understand it, claims that there are no supernatural entities.”19 My own studies of the civilizational trajectory of the concepts secularism and atheism lead me to state, with conviction, that these two -isms had little or nothing to do with another until the mid 19th century.20 Atheism and secularism have very different intellectual, political and even theological genealogies.21 After all, John Locke in his 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration (a blueprint for political secularism) spends long passages trying to justify the expulsion of atheists from the magistrate’s polity!22
In Secularism: The Basics, I speculated as to when two terms that historically had little to do with one another became conjoined. This “swerve” as I called it, occurred during the Victorian Era.23 I have also argued that much more research needs to be conducted on how these nouns came to be virtual synonyms. Yet try as I might, I have never been able to disentangle secularism from atheism in contemporary colloquial usage. So “political secularism” it is!
But now that nomenclatural peace has been achieved between Zuckerman and me, I want to state a second reason for properly defining terms. In public discourse, I have often noted that confusions about the word “secular” are weaponized. Fundamentalists, who use the S-word “as a word of opprobrium toward those who do not meet their standards of piety,” are more than happy to view political secularism as identical to atheism.24 The danger of this unfriendly misrepresentation is evident. To call a secular state an atheist state is a demagogic masterstroke given the (unjustified) unpopularity of atheists among certain groups.
Professor Abbink in his response notes this linkage and writes: “This rhetorical figure is likely meant as intimidation and complicates the public debate.”25 Similarly, Professor Bangstad observes: “conservative Christian lobby groups in the USA, state Islamists in Turkey, or the Hindutva movement in power in India, are with great deliberation using mischaracterizations of secularism as a form of atheism in cultural wars about the control of women’s and LGBTQ persons bodies, lives and sexualities.”26 Professor Igwe identifies analogous modalities in Africa “Religious actors … frame secularism as atheistic, antagonistic, and inimical to religion.”27 This framing has been devastatingly effective and it explains why some of us “panic” about the confusions that surround the definition of secularism.
Gordon Stein once remarked “not all secularists are atheists, but all atheists are secularists” (all, except the one Swedish woman interviewed by Professor Kasselstrand along with a few other peculiar folks like that whom I too have met in my wanderings).28 This meshes with something I have noted in much of my research; it is often the case that those within a polity who prefer secular governance are religious citizens, especially those who belong to a minority group. Still, for the reasons noted above I employ the term “political secularism” as a friendly way of delinking it from atheism (which is wrongly anathematized by Fundamentalists).
1.3 Secularization
The endemic conceptual confusions between secularism and atheism occur among politicians, journalists, and the population at large. Fundamentalists, I suspect, often know better, but insist on rendering the two terms into synonyms for purposes of political mobilization.
The confusion between secularization and secularism, by contrast, is mostly confined to scholars conducting research in academic fora. Once again the problem lies in the drawing of an equation between two words which connote very different things.29 Let’s familiarize ourselves with some standard definitions of secularization—a concept with its own well known definitional chaos:30
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“(a) The declining importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and institutions such as the state and the economy; (b) a decline in the social standing of religious roles and institutions; and (c) a decline in the extent to which people engage in religious practices, display beliefs of a religious kind, and conduct other aspects of their lives in a manner informed by such beliefs.”31
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“A theory that describes the historical contraction of the power of ecclesiastical institutions and the authority of Christian belief in relation to secular institutions (especially the nation state) and secular belief (especially natural science).”32
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“A process of decline in religious activities, beliefs, ways of thinking, and institutions that occurs primarily in association with, or as an unconscious or unintended consequence of, other processes of social structural change”33
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“The historical process in which religion loses social and historical significance”34
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“A decline or marginalization of religion in public life”35
With those basic conceptualizations rendered, please let me note that I have tried to keep the discussion of the secularization hypothesis far away from my discussion of political secularism. Professor Kasselstrand observed that I hardly even used the term “secularization.” She is correct.36 I did so self-consciously for reasons of analytical clarity—and even sanity; I find discussions of secularization to be like a conceptual cannibal galaxy that devours everything around it and leads to massive confusions about political secularism. Permit me to identify some of the key differences.
Secularization is a hypothesis. It is a hotly and endlessly contested hypothesis, one that has stimulated a torrent of scholarship across more than half a century. It is also a hypothesis that has often been pronounced to be a failure.37 Political secularisms, by contrast, are not mere theories (though they have often been pronounced failures). We can point to actual governments which impose actual policies, on actual citizens, from France to the People’s Republic of China, to Senegal.38 I sometimes notice that those who feel the secularization hypothesis was proven wrong, then imply that political secularism is somehow also a failed project.39
The next crucial difference between political secularism and secularization has to do with agency. The hypothesis in question depicts the secularization process as occurring across the broad sweep of civilization. When did secularization begin? For Weber it was in biblical antiquity as triggered by an alleged rationalization of consciousness.40 Most set the advent of secularization in early modernity, with especial attention to the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment.41
This transhistorical happening, at least in its classic Weberian formulation, occurred without any particular type of agency, intention or central planning. There was no fourth or fourteenth century “architect” of secularization. There was no individual or movement in the Renaissance that imperiously proclaimed a need to induce a decline in “the importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and institutions such as the state and the economy.”42
We can’t find a pre-19th century architect of secularization. Yet I have identified numerous pre-modern architects of political secularism. None of these thinkers imagined that their intuitions about relations between the ecclesiastical and civil authority would eventually wind up in the 20th century as something known as “political secularism” and espoused by religious minorities and atheists and the like.
In Secularism: The Basics I go to pains to observe that these thinkers were deeply religious themselves. Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Martin Luther, and Roger Williams certainly did not want less religion in the lives of citizens.43 Such a conceit would have been viewed as absurd within their social context. Instead, they wanted to—note this—reconfigure relationships of political power within societies that were pervasively Christian. Their interest was mostly with how Christendom would regulate itself politically (Fascinatingly, Nader Hashemi notices a similar clergy-driven push for political secularism in modern-day Iran).44
Put differently, none of them wanted to “secularize” in the sense of the definitions above. They didn’t even want to reduce religion’s role in society. Please recall that Martin Luther’s famous “On Secular Authority” (a staple on the syllabus of political secularism) is an instruction manual for a Christian prince, John of Saxony. John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration does not advocate reducing the role of religion in any department of life save the office of the magistrate. These theorists were not hellbent on secularizing. They were preoccupied with the aforementioned act of regulating and recalibrating the relation of government to religion. As such, they were crafting the base intuitions that centuries later would come to be known as political secularism.
Let’s also recall that there can be secularization without political secularism. Here one thinks of the UK, Finland, and other non-constitutionally secular states which are highly secularized. Professor Kasselstrand adds the proviso that highly secularized countries with state churches (i.e., Sweden, Norway) are moving in the direction of greater “church-state autonomy.”45
Too, there can be political secularism without a long process of indigenous secularization. The People’s Republic of China comes to mind. Mired in feudalism and tradition until The Great Leap Forward, the country seemed impervious to secularization’s effects for most of its history. Then it suddenly became an example of the Soviet Atheist framework I discuss in the book. Professor Kasselstrand rightly observes that secularization can surge ahead in a given country, while its political secularism falls behind (her example is the contemporary United States). She also remarks that African countries with robust secular constitutions which I discussed (like Ethiopia) might have seen fewer of secularization’s effects.46
Perhaps this answers Professor Abbink’s polite query as to why I have not cited the work of José Casanova. Professor Casanova is a secularization theorist and a formidable one at that. As regards political secularism, however, I needed to turn to a very different bibliography. I was intrigued not by social theory (Casanova’s forte) but case law. For that I have always relied on figures such as Noah Feldman, or Martha Nussbaum or even a critic of separationist secularism such as Philip Hamburger.47
Over the past centuries, in some parts of the world, secularization has been a cause of political secularism. Elsewhere, secularization may be an effect of political secularism. Sometimes the relation between the two is unclear or nugatory. No matter how we look at it though, the two are not the same, but two distinct variables whose relation varies across time and space. When scholars elide the two concepts the aforementioned “sprawl” sets in and severely confuses our discourse.
1.4 Secularity and Secular Humanism
Professor Bangstad wondered why I did not cite Charles Taylor’s “doorstopping.”48 A Secular Age. Here again, my preoccupation with definitions was at play. Taylor offered three definitions of “secularity,” one of which somewhat approximates our understanding of political secularism. This would be his first definition, or Secularity I, where the political sphere is one in which “the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God.”49
Yet that is not the definition which interests Taylor for the remaining 800 pages of the tome. Instead, his focus is on Secularity III–“a 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 frequently not the easiest to embrace.”50 Taylor’s project, in my opinion, proffers a theological spin on the secularization hypothesis. What happened to God? What have we lost? How did this regrettable thing happen?
Construed as such, secularity has little to do with what a secular state does. The latter doesn’t concern itself with the question of how and why belief in God became optional. It possesses no ministry or department that scrutinizes that dilemma. It doesn’t fret about God-optionality. Secular states take the existence of people who believe in God as a given. Secular states don’t brood about Secularity III. They start from the premise that there are religious citizens and groups whose rights vis a vis the state need to be carefully stipulated.
And since we are on the topic, what about non-religious citizens and groups? My concern is that political secularisms do not take the existence of people who don’t believe in God as a given. Soviet versions notwithstanding, all political secularisms were birthed in environments where non-belief was rare, aberrational, and even liable to prosecution. The American separationist framework, for example, isn’t built on legally binding texts that acknowledge non-believing citizens. In the United States, Congress explicitly guarantees free exercise of religion, but it does not guarantee free exercise of non religion. Where are nonbelievers in all of this?
Secular states are just beginning to deal with the legal and policy implications of citizens who don’t believe in God. Their fundamental rights, I stress, don’t seem to be assured in foundational documents. With the number of “Nones” growing across the globe, theorists of political secularism and activists should start thinking about this and in particular how statutory law impacts the religiously unaffiliated.51
This is why in Secularism: The Basics, I proposed a “trinary,” to replace political secularism’s traditional binary. To wit, future theorists are going to have to think of: 1) a state, 2) religious groups, and, 3) the religiously unaffiliated. Professor Verma charges that I “fai[l] to concede whether the broad liberal perspective can survive the degree of accommodation that [I call] for and continue to be counted as a liberal doctrine.”52 I would respond that secularism is a balancing act, an endless set of negotiations and compromises made by all parties. Any secularism of the future is going to have to figure out how to accommodate believers and non-believers alike.
I share, then, Professor Gutkowski’s hope that: “Perhaps the most promising arenas of future theorization by those committed to “more” secularism lie in mining the seamline between those who hope the world will be more friendly to non-religious ethical commitments and those seeking richer recognition of religion’s virtues for building the common good.”53
Professor Gutkowski defines secularity in a manner I find interesting. “There are,” she writes, “so far limited attempts among scholars to fully theorize connections between private commitments, attitudes towards religion’s role in public life, and systems of political organisation and governance.”54
Construing secularity as the study of how agents think about the secular—that’s a very intriguing suggestion (it is also very different from Professor Kasselstrand’s conception: “secularity is a neutral umbrella term that refers to the opposite of what is religious”).55 Many of my interlocutors called attention to this. Professor Igwe, noting the anti-hijab protests in Iran, seems to be conforming to Professor Gutowski’s conception of secularity. He notes that in response to state overreach there is a “demand by citizens for change and revision of outdated faith based state policies and regulations.”56
Professor Abbink offers a methodological approach calling for: “more intensified comparative field research on peoples’ opinions on and experiences with secular (state) policy; this could be done along the lines of the Pew Research surveys, but then augmented with more context study, in-depth interviews, and case studies.”57 We need, then, to understand how people think about all of the terms related to secularism, be it separationism, atheism, secular humanism. That “verstehen” or subjective approach might be understood as “secularity.”
Returning to Taylor, he evinces little curiosity about nonbelief.58 One reads the footnotes of A Secular Age in vain to glean much reference to the subject, even though the optionality of belief in the divine is central to his understanding of secularity. Along the way, Taylor alludes to secular humanism, but never cites any works which discuss that school of thought.
By now I do not need to address the obvious point that the secular humanist school is not the same thing as political secularism. There is, of course, overlap. I’m fairly positive most secular humanists would prefer one of the four frameworks of political secularism I adumbrated in the book, separation in particular.59
Professor De Nutte is surely correct in noting there are many types of secular humanisms and I should have paid more attention to them.60 Secular humanism comes with a broad and diverse philosophical platform.61 Some of these concepts (i.e., a preference for public policy driven by materialist assumptions) mesh well with political secularism.62 Others, such as the movement’s very socialist-tinged globalist bent, do not.
“We deplore,” wrote the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II, “the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds.”63 This emphasis on “world community” or “planetary humanism” raises an interesting point: political secularisms are almost always national, not transnational (as opposed to the Conservative Religious Anti-Secular (CRAS) actors with whom they contend).64 As Profesor Gutkowsi notes this “is the perennial problem of geopolitics hampering transnational solidarity.”65
1.5 Separationism: Three Problems
An author in the recent Oxford Handbook of Politics and Religion writes that secularism: “In institutional terms … is typically understood as meaning a commitment to upholding the separation of church and state.”66 In his important chapter on “Political Secularism” Rajeev Bhargava refers to secularism as “the doctrine of the separation of state and religion.”67 Similarly, Charles Taylor often routs his understanding of secularism through “some kind of separation of church and state.”68
In Secularism: The Basics I wanted to identify reasons to be cautious about drawing too tight a connection between secularism and separationism. The former is often assumed to be a synonym of the latter. Once again, this has the effect of creating a good deal of confusion in both policy and academic circles. Separationism, I have argued, needs to be interrogated more carefully, both by scholars and activists.
The term “separation of church and state” is deeply problematic, both in and of itself and in relation to the concept of political secularism.69 As regards the latter, it is crucial to recognize that there are non-separationist forms of political secularism. French laïcité involves, as Olivier Roy has observed, the state’s very strenuous effort to manage, as opposed to separating from, religion.70 “The unspoken thought of laïcité à la française” writes Roy, “is … the control of the religious by the political sphere.”71 One cannot separate from something that one is trying to control.
In terms of other non-separationist secularisms, India’s constitution, as Zoya Hasan shows, is not constitutionally separationist.72 It emphasizes equality, not separation. The Soviet Atheist versions of political secularism that I discuss in the book tend to manage, dominate, bully, and abuse religious groups. So, by design and by deep ideological conviction, some secularisms have no intention of walling themselves off from the task of managing their citizens of faith.
Nor do they have any intention of being transparent about that! This leads us to a second problem with separation of church and state: States are wont to invoke separation in their foundational documents, even when they actually do not practice separation in real life. One thinks of this line from the USSR 1936 ARTICLE 124. “In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is recognised for all citizens.”73 Those familiar with the Soviet Union’s manhandling of its religious citizens will instantly see the artifice of this construction.
Even the 1905 French law (La loi du 9 décembre 1905 de séparation des Églises et de l’État), I have always felt, was not read with proper attention to nuance. It is often translated as the “1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State.” I wonder if it doesn’t connote something more like the disarticulation of a previously existing coupling. The 1905 law was not necessarily saying that church and state would be separate in the robust sense we now think of that concept. Its remit was to end once and for all deep historical entanglements between the Catholic Church and French state activated by Napoleon’s Concordat. The text is dictating to the former what the new rules of the game will be. And those rules involve state supremacy far more than any type of separation.
The final and most important difficulty has to do with the real-life impossibility of separation. How are states to “wall off” from faith communities, when so many citizens are religious, when a given nation might be pervaded by religion, when government officials might be religious as well?
There is no shortage of scholars who have noted the inherent shortcomings of separationism as a concept. Martha Nussbaum points out that “Nobody really believes in separation taken literally across the board.”74 Charles Fombad, observes that “the concept of separation of religion and state is quite artificial because it is incapable of easy implementation or logical achievement.”75 As Lamin Sanneh phrased it, the separation metaphor is “inadequate” because the state “is implicated in the effects and consequences of religious practice.”76
This is why in Secularism: The Basics I identified separationism as but one framework of political secularism (and let it be noted there are different types of separation).77 I went to pains to articulate what separation was not. It was not a synonym for secularism. It was not a synonym for disestablishment. After all, a neutral state (e.g., India) with no established religion can, in theory, support all religions equally.
Nor is separationism in particularly good shape. In my public-facing work, I point out that the courts in the United States seem to now concur with Justice Rehnquist’s famous manifesto in the Jaffree case: “The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.”78 Separation as a staple of secularism—that is a conversation that needs to be revisited.
2 The Postmodern Critique
Many of the commentators in this volume remarked upon my twelfth chapter, entitled “Anti-Secularisms of the Left.” Even in the pre-publication stage, this analysis of the POMOFOCO school (as I call it) was, by far, the most polarizing section of the book; readers and referees had widely divergent views on the merits of its arguments.
In this volume Professor Zuckerman called it “novel and enjoyable.”79 Professor DeNutte argued that the post-colonial and Foucauldian emphasis of my critique prevented me from seeing POMOFOCO as “applied postmodernism.”80 Professor Verma viewed it as “the weakest and most relevant chapter.”81
POMOFOCO’s political and institutional standing needs to be properly understood. A comparison with CRAS actors (discussed in my eleventh chapter) is helpful. The latter play a huge role in national politics and geopolitics. They possess considerable social capital, activist infrastructure, legislative acumen, and financial resources. The power position is often deepened by centuries of membership within, and even rule of, the society in which they operate. In some cases they possess access to instruments of coercion and violence—and a willingness to deploy them. Too, their transnational nature makes them formidable opponents for any government.
Unlike these anti-secularisms of the right, POMOFOCO is exclusively confined to scholarly seminars, conferences and monographs. The impressive complexity of their theoretical framework, not to mention their dense prose, obviates their ability to impact large-scale political processes. They lack the means to impact elections, or sway the masses with their ideas—and their ideas are usually opposed to those of their CRAS counterparts. They evince little or no “will to power” in terms of national and international politics. Theirs is, as Professor Verma cleverly put it, “a mere discourse.”82
In terms of the academic field of “secular studies” however, I submit that POMOFOCO is presently the dominant paradigm and has been for nearly three decades. On the basis of the peer-reviewed research I’ve encountered, I would venture that POMOFOCO-oriented researchers vastly outnumber those who work in different traditions. They practice in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, women’s studies, sociology, philosophy, legal studies, and beyond. They also hold the majority of the dwindling number of tenure-line positions at the prestigious universities where a subject like secularism might be seriously interrogated.83
POMOFOCO, in my estimation, vies with two competing “schools”–though “school” may be too strong a word to describe the “Liberal” and “Conservative” alternatives. The former consists of academicians who, while not uncritical of political secularisms, are not prepared to dispense with them altogether—and whether dispensing with secularism is an objective of POMOFOCO is a point I shall return to below. Within this Liberal column I would place (with the proviso that there are great differences among them) scholars such as Noah Feldman, Cécile Laborde, Martha Nussbaum, Tariq Modood, David Buckley, Philip Zuckerman, John Shook, Jean Baubérot, and myself.84
A third “school” is even smaller. It is composed of conservative-oriented scholars, such as Daniel Philpott, Wilfred McClay, Timothy Shah and Monica Toft.85 They exist in an interesting intellectual tension from both anti-secular POMOFOCO scholars, and pro-secular liberals. They tend to believe that there can be functioning, just secular states, though they correlate successful ones with the ability to secure robust religious freedom protections. In some cases, the protections they favor might be too robust for the liberals. Meanwhile, many in the POMOFOCO school have problematized the very notion of “religious freedom.”86
That there is little collaboration, or even communication, between the schools is a point I shall return to below. In what follows I want to identify the strengths and some of the shortcomings of the POMOFOCO approach.
2.1 The Lure of Order
I have argued that a pervasive fear about the breakdown of order via religious conflict is one of the underappreciated drivers of political secularism itself.87 This concern comes into sharpest focus in Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. His reading of history led him to recognize that free exercise of religion was a wondrous thing. But that same reading taught him unbounded free exercise, or what he called “Burning Zeal,” may imperil public order and destabilize entire societies.
The “order” principle, as I call it, maintains that a person or group’s free exercise cannot contravene public safety.88 In the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries this caution was explicitly articulated in countless constitutions (but strangely not in the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States). Professor Shook parses the Enlightenment rationale behind this smartly when he observes: “ ‘secular’ order … is rationally preferrable to religious disorder.”89
Noble as Locke’s sentiment might have been, a desire for order can be, and has been, put to dangerous use by secular states (and non-secular ones, as well). Ethical secular states aspire to maintain order, all the while granting maximal religious free exercise to their citizens. Unscrupulous ones, by contrast, exploit order provisions as a pretext to abuse and terrorize citizens.90
POMOFOCO, with its built-in suspicion of nation-states and their attendant “governmentality,” is quite adroit at identifying these transgressions.91 As Professor Abbink put it, these theorists “typically assume that all is guided by ‘power’ and that efforts to devise a reasonable social order via the political process are hypocritical.”92 John Shook remarks that these researchers denounce “secularism by implicating it with deleterious impacts of colonialism and globalization.”93 Their Foucauldian distrust of liberal-democratic regimes prevents them from ever succumbing to the lure of “order.”
This endows them with the clarity to immediately see through the self-serving justifications of malign secular states. Such states might include the USSR, to various Marxist-tinged regimes in the African space like Ethiopia’s DERG or Mozambique’s Frelimo.94 The regimes just noted were all wed, whether formally or informally, to atheistic worldviews. But secularism, as we noted above, is not synonymous with atheism. Much to their credit, POMOFOCO researchers rarely confuse secular “formations,” to use their preferred term, with nonbelief. We can conceptualize their approach in terms of form and content.
The form of political secularism, for POMOFOCO, is total domination. A secularism aspires to achieve the insidious and thoroughgoing subjugation of the citizen—one that extends to their thoughts, beliefs, mannerisms, ideation, etc. They view secular formations as capable of redefining, reordering and restructuring the contours of what religion is for religious believers themselves.
The form, then, of any given political secularism is always geared to hegemony. The ideological contents to which that hegemony subscribes, however, vary from formation to formation. The secular government in question might try to impose atheism, Catholicism, a certain variant of Islam, Judeo-Christian worldview, liberal Protestantism, etc.
This leads us to another very useful component of POMOFOCO critique. Secular states, they contend, boast about “neutrality” but never actually achieve it (and in many cases are at peace with, and aware of, that failure). Linell Cady writes secularism “is deeply implicated in configuring the domains that it purports to simply keep apart”.95 Saba Mahmood observed: “any national culture ends up privileging majoritarian religious norms.”96
POMOFOCO is not the only school that notices this but it is a major insight. I use the phrase “false neutrality” to describe this—the single most consistent shortcoming of political secularisms.97
We see “false neutrality” in Kemalist Turkey where the state established “a modern, nationalized version of pristine Islam.”98 In constitutionally secular Ethiopia a preference for traditional Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has been alleged by many other religious groups.99 In this volume, Bangstad argues anti-minority discrimination is baked into the cake of French secularism.100
2.2 Phantasmagorias
Theorists in the POMOFOCO tradition view secularism/s (which they rarely define and often explicitly refuse to define) as immense, impactful, world-historical and—note this—hidden.101
Winnifred Sullivan referred to secularism as “The defining mood of modernity.”102 Elizabeth Shakman Hurd called it “one of the most important organizing principles of modern politics.”103 For Jakobsen and Pellegrini secularism “invokes powerful moral claims and evinces manifold political effects.”104 Hussein Ali Agrama opines that “secularism … ideally a principle of peace … fosters political-religious conflict instead.”105 Political secularism, in POMOFOCO’s retelling, appears as a malign, unstoppable juggernaut, or what I once dubbed “a ideological Death Star, trawling the Post-Enlightenment Galaxy, mind set on malice.”106
Yet as monumental and powerful as secularisms are in POMOFOCO theory, they are simultaneously (and to me puzzlingly) not detectable to the naked eye. To quote Asad secularism “is best pursued through its shadows.”107 Linell Cady refers to it as “the unarticulated given, whose invisibility confers much of its power.”108 Secularism, in the words of one Asadian interpreter is “a phenomenon that emerges without origins.”109
This “hidden hand,” or what Professor Bangstad elsewhere has called a “deus ex machina” approach, presents secularism as haunting Euro-American, and subsequently global, modernity.110 Such an initiative works for me in the realm of fiction. It presents us with a fascinating thought experiment. Could entire civilizations be ruled, reconstituted and traumatized by an -ism whose source no one can actually recognize (except heroic theorists)?
In the domain of non-fiction, however, this all needs to be explicated lest it take on the appearance of a phantasmagoria. How did secularism remain on the down-low all of those centuries? How did it achieve its monumental effects—effects which as we saw above were so thoroughgoing that they allegedly penetrated to the physical and psychic core of every religious individual “producing a new political subject,” under the secular hegemon?111 Who were its malign operatives?
On this last question, Professor Zuckerman takes to task those academics “who deride “secularist discourse” without ever actually examining who specifically generates such discourse—their positionality, their activism, their identities, their politics—even their names.”112 I too have raised concerns about the absence of secular agents—POMOFOCO has very rarely told us who the “secularists” were in the 19th and 20th century.113
To the best of my present knowledge, we know of very few such agents. In the 19th century, self-professed secularists and their ilk were few, far between in any country I know of save, perhaps, France. Most importantly, “secularists” were nowhere near the levers of political power. Students of American history are familiar with the Freethinking groups such as the National Liberal League and the American Secularist Union.114 Those secular associations were small, poorly organized and un-triumphant. They eventually disappeared.
In the 20th century, depending on the country in question, “secularists” can sometimes be found. In the United States, I guess, mid-century separationist secularists might be Justice Hugo Black, President John F. Kennedy, the jurist Leo Pfeffer, major Jewish organizations, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.115 Hopefully the reader sees why calling these people “secularists” is an oversimplification; these actors possessed identities other than being “secularists.” Their commitment to secularism was situational and tactical.
I recently conducted a study of secular states in Africa with two colleagues and we became ensnared with the same problem.116 When many emergent African nations achieved independence from colonial rule, constitutional drafters inserted secular provisions into their founding documents (27 of Africa’s 54 present constitutions can presently be defined as secular in our typology). The new nations, it has been observed, tended to replicate their former colonizer’s legal prescriptions regarding relations between religion and government. For example, many French colonies adapted French laws, former Portuguese colonies, Portuguese laws, etc.117
That much was clear. What was rarely clear to us was the identity of the individuals who did this secular drafting. Much more historical research is needed. Too, there is no scholarly consensus as to what their particular motivations might have been. Were they elites trying to capture advantages for themselves? Were they secular elites who had an explicitly secular agenda? Were they pawns of the departing colonizers and hence pushing the agenda of the metropole? Were they earnest states persons trying to avoid the inter- and intra-religious implosion that might ensue after decades of colonial exploitation and misrule?
Agency is a huge area for future research in secular studies. It’s all well to speak of a secular “project,” but the next steps for the POMOFOCO school involve the study of who was behind the project and who carried out its prerogatives. They need to verify that those involved in the project saw themselves as acting on behalf of secular worldviews, or even knew what the project was. We need names and dates; a hidden hand theory just won’t suffice.
This would require deep historical investigation and here is another area where the POMOFOCO framework needs shoring up. As I noted above, to read these theorists is often to see a given secularism as obliterating everything in its path. Yet the historical record, as we now have it, clearly suggests something different. The opposition to even individual secular policies (e.g., separationism, state neutrality, the supremacy of the state), let alone full-blown secular states, has been fierce to put it mildly at every step of the way.
POMOFOCO writers tend to underestimate the power of secularism’s dialectical partner. “Religious illiberalism,” Professor Shook comments, has been something of a blind spot for this school. For Shook this is because “Religions have always been far more proficient and persistent than any government at imposing their own “in group–out group” boundaries and strict duties. Religions exerting political influence fulfill that potency more concretely than any secularist ideal.”118
As Stathis Gourgouris points out, this approach “dares not even pose the question of what is normative in nonsecular modes of rule.”119 All of which is to say, any historical reconstruction of political secularism must factor in its brawny adversary. Namely, the CRAS actors mentioned above. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they ferociously contested secular policies in almost every nation where they appeared. In France, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere, political secularisms have always been resisted. I feel POMOFOCO needs to better reckon with the power of these anti-secular formations.
William Connolly in Why I Am Not a Secularist famously declared “The historical modus vivendi called secularism is coming apart at the seams.”120 My observation is that secularism was far less “together,” coherent, and stable than many POMOFOCO theorists allege. I prefer to view most secular states as fundamentally wobbly. Their weakness might have been because of the pushback of CRAS actors, or the internal deficits of vision and leadership. Or maybe even of the weakness of secularism as a strategy of governance itself.
Yet it is the fragility of various secularisms, in part, that accounts for why they came apart at the seams in countries like the United States and even India (see Professor Verma’s account of this unraveling; Professor Bangstad offers his own view) under pressure from CRAS actors. Other secularisms in Iran, or Turkey or Syria or Ethiopia completely capsized due to the same weaknesses. Put differently, it takes a long time for a secular formation to form, to achieve solidity and durability. Most secularisms are not there yet because of external resistance and internal flaws.
A final concern, related to all of those above, has to do with what we might call scholarly best practices.121 Many POMOFOCO scholars fail to cite relevant scholarship that addresses the issues that interest them, but from a different ideological standpoint. (Above, I noticed this in Taylor’s A Secular Age–a work that makes a great deal out of non-belief, secular humanism, etc but does not engage with the plentiful scholarship on this subject).
Scholarship improves when it confronts what Max Weber called “inconvenient facts.” The self-siloing of POMOFOCO has the effect of rendering their ambitious critique somewhat static; across nearly three decades of being the dominant paradigm in secular studies, and expanding into more and more empirical spaces, the theory has not changed much.
3 Conclusion
An issue that has yet to garner consensus among students of secularism concerns the Western provenance of political secularisms. Are they all tinctured by a European Christian (some would insist, Protestant) bias that figures as a brute, alien imposition upon all non-Christian and/or non-Western peoples?122 If so, political secularism—which regards itself as “neutral,” even referee-like—would be an illegitimate strategy of governance, an insidious ideology of Occidental domination.
POMOFOCO researchers usually answer this question in the affirmative. Asad located the origin of secularism in “modern Euro-America.”123 Tracy Fessenden speaks of the “complication of Christianity and secularism.”124 In this volume Professor Verma construes secularism as “bound to a pure European genealogy or a Judeo-Christian history.”125 This -ism, in her view, is inflicted upon the Global South and reshapes and recalibrates the lives of religious believers.
I too tended to set the development of political secularism within a strictly occidental context. It was while working on Secularism: The Basics that I came across research which changed my mind. For instance there is a sturdy tradition among Indian scholars of identifying indigenous taproots of the nation’s secular traditions.126 The possibility of proto-secularism in China and the Middle East has also been raised.
Professor Abbink opines that “reducing the debate on secularism to a Western pedigree or problematic is wrong.” To illustrate the point he adduces the following: “in Somali society there was an important distinction (binary) between the religious leaders (wadaad) and the political/war leaders (waranle), and in precolonial Igbo society (Nigeria) where the offices and functions of the ‘king’ (Eze) were distinct from those of the priests (dibia afa or dibia mmuo); i.e., there was a ‘separation of powers’.”127
In a similar vein, Professor Igwe writes that “the pervasive notion … that secularism is an exclusive western property alien to other cultures” is a “flawed idea in western scholarship patents and westernizes universal norms, presenting in freakish and culturally condescending forms if at all such manifestations elsewhere.” Igwe has made some arresting suggestions for further research in another contribution.128 I second his observation that, “The tension between religion and state is not a western particularity but a cultural ubiquity that lurks in various forms within and without religious mix with politics.”129
In the ensemble, these considerations redound to perhaps the most crucial issue for students of secular studies: are political secularisms worthy systems of governance? This is a major fault line among those who write about secularism. Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman comment in their important 2010 volume Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age that among their contributors there was a fissure between those who want secularism to open itself up to “new perspectives and practices” and those who seek “a more profound series of transformations.”130 Similarly, Rajeev Bhargava points out a divide between those who want “alternatives to secularism,” and those who seek “alternative conceptions of secularism.”131
The POMOFOCO school gravitates to one of these poles. I have a slight disagreement with Professor Bangstad who argues that “Asad himself has been adamantly clear that his concern is an intellectual critique of the flaws, contradictions and contingencies of secular and liberal formations, rather than to actually do entirely away with those formations.”132
My reading of Asad and those influenced by him suggests that their approach is both descriptive and prescriptive. There is a tendency in their work to be so witheringly critical of secularisms and their essential inbuilt malignancies that the theory can only lead them to do away entirely with these formations. This is coupled with little in the way of proposed alternatives. I feel it is not improper to ask those who are so critical of secularisms to articulate better replacements. For the problem of the relation between religion and government will not go away, no matter how many theorists confidently posit that we are in the “post-secular” age.
I close by quoting Professor Abbink who writes of Secularism: The Basics: “What the author ultimately argues … is that there are no clear or convincing alternatives to secular state orders: few living under secularism would probably want to go (back) to a pre-20th century theocratic order or to a state with a ‘state religion’. It would also mean reverting to undemocratic forms of politics, loss of freedom of speech, and decline in open public debate—a situation in which admittedly many (non-secular) countries today are stuck in.”133
Sindre Bangstad, this volume. “Approval and Dissent”.
Winnifred Sullivan, Robert Yelle, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, “Introduction,” in After Secular Law, Eds. Winnifred Sullivan, Robert Yelle, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2011), p. 1 (pp. 1–19).
Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell, “Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: An Introduction,” in Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age, Eds. Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015). p. 2 (pp. 1–15). Cécile Laborde, “Justificatory Secularism,” in Religion in a Liberal State Eds. Gavin D’Costa, Malcolm Evans, Tariq Modood and Julian Rivers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) p. 164 (pp. 164–186).
Nader Hashemi, “The Multiple Histories of Secularism: Muslim Societies in Comparison,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 36, 3–4 (2010) pp. 325 (pp. 325–338). Reflections on the terms’s wide and unwieldy semantic range can be found in Rex Ahdar and Ian Leigh, Religious Freedom in the Liberal State (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2013) pp. 92–100; Joseph Blankholm, “The Political Advantages of a Polysemous Secular,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 53, 4 (2014), pp. 775–790; Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity: An Introduction,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010), pp. 3–24; Badrinath Rao, “The Variant Meanings of Secularism in India: Notes Toward Conceptual Clarifications,” Journal of Church and State, 48, 1 (2006), pp. 47–81. Jacques Berlinerblau, “Introduction: Secularism and Its Confusions,” in Secularism on the Edge: Rethinking Church-State Relations in the United States, France and Israel, Eds. Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1–16.
Jacques Berlinerblau, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 7.
Ibid., pp. 7.
The interplay between secularism and literature is explored in Jacques Berlinerblau, “What Is Secular Literature? Philip Roth as Case Study,” Philip Roth Studies, vol. 14, 2, 2018, pp. 66–89.
Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
Ibid., pp. xvi.
Jacques Berlinerblau, “Political Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, eds. Phil Zuckerman and John Shook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) pp. 85–102. Also, for important studies of political secularism see Rajeev Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Eds. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 636–655. Rajeev Bhargava, “Giving Secularism Its Due,” Economic and Political Weekly, 29, 28, July 9, 1994, pp. 1784–1791; Ahmet Kuru, Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009); Tariq Modood, “Rethinking Political Secularism: The Multiculturalist Challenge,” Patterns of Prejudice 55 (2021), pp. 115–124.
Jacques Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2021), p. 5.
Carl Hallencreutz and David Westerlund, “Anti-Secularist Policies of Religion,” in Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics, Ed. David Westerlund, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 1 (pp. 1–23).
Cécile Laborde, “Justificatory Secularism,” pp. 165.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) p. 12.
Zuckerman, this volume “Commentary on Secularism: The Basics.”
P. Deletter, “Secularism,” in Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, Ed. Paul Meagher, Thomas O’Brien, Consuelo Maria Aherne, (Philadelphia: The Sisters of St. Joseph of Philadelphia, 1979) p. 3241. No author, “Secularism,” in The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Ed. Richard P. McBrien, (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 1180. J.G.R. Forlong, “Secularists. Secularism.,” Encyclopedia of Religions in Three Volumes, (New Hyde Park: University Books, 1964) p. 261. For an example of a secularization theorist noting a difference between the terms, see Bryan Wilson, “Secularization,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 13, Ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 159 (pp. 159–165). For an example of the confusion in practice, see the entry on “United Secularists of America,” in J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 7th ed., (Detroit: Gale, 2003), pp. 1305.
Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, (New York: New York University Press, 2008) p. 96. Phil Zuckerman and Jacques Berlinerblau, “Secular America: Nones, Atheists, and the Unaffiliated,” in Secularism on the Edge, p. 56 (pp. 51–69). Also see Phil Zuckerman, “Introduction: The Social Scientific Study of Atheism and Secularity,” in Atheism and Secularity, Vol. 1: Issues, Concepts, and Definitions, ed. Phil Zuckerman, (Santa Barbara, CA: Prager, 2010), pp. vii–xii.
Phil Zuckerman and Jacques Berlinerblau, “Secular America: Nones, Atheists, and the Unaffiliated,” pp. 51–69.
Philip Kitcher, “Challenges for Secularism,” in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, Ed. George Levine, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 24. A book like Graeme Smith’s A Short History of Secularism, makes a different move defining secularism as “Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine.”A Short History of Secularism, (London: I.B Tauris, 2008), pp. 2.
Jacques Berlinerblau “Political Secularism”; Jacques Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 88–98.
There is no greater study of the theological dimensions of atheism’s genealogy than Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
“Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God.” John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983) p. 51.
Jacques Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics pp. 88–98.
See James Wellman Jr., “Secularism” in Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism, Ed. Brenda Brasher (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 439 (pp. 439–442) On the perception of secularism as equivalent to atheism or godlessness among some Nigerian Muslim leaders, see Sam Amadi, “Squaring the Circle: Freedom of Religion and Secularism in the Nigerian Constitution,” in M. Christian Green (ed.), Law, Religion and Human Flourishing in Africa (African Sun Media, Stellenbosch, 2019), p. 11 (pp. 3–23). Roman Loimeier, “The Secular State and Islam in Senegal,” in Questioning the Secular State pp. 188–189 (183–197).
Jon Abbink, This volume. “Understanding ‘Secularism’: New Insights. Review Article.”
Bangstad This volume. “Approval and Dissent”.
Leo Igwe, This volume “Secularisms Beyond the West.”
Gordon Stein, “Secularism,” in The Encyclopedia of Unbelief; Vol. 2. L–Z, Gordon Stein (ed.) Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1985, pp. 613 (pp. 613–614). Kasselstrand, this volume.
Walter Jaeschke in Encyclopedia of Christianity: P-SH, eds. Erwin Fahlbusch et. al, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdnams, 2005), pp. 899–901. For those who have noticed this confusion, see Paul Cliteur, The Secular Outlook: In Defense of Moral and Political Secularism (Maiden, MA.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) p. 3; Bryan Wilson, “Secularism,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, eds. Alan Richardson and John Bowden, (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1983), pp. 533–534; Humeira Iqtidar, “The Difference between Secularism and Secularisation,” The Guardian, 06/29/2011,
The canonical discussion is José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pp. 11–39. On the multiplicity of the understandings of secularization, see Hans Joas, “Society, State and Religion: Their Relationship from the Perspective of the World Religions: An Introduction.” Secularization and the World Religions, eds. Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009) pp. 1–22.
Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2002), pp. 3.
Bryan Turner, “Introduction,” in Secularization, Volume 1: Defining Secularization, The Secular in Historical and Comparative Perspective, Ed. Bryan Turner (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010) pp. xxi–xxv.
Bryan Wilson, “Secularization,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 13, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1987), pp. 159 (pp. 159–165).
Frank Lechner, “Secularization,” in The Encyclopedia of Protestantism, Vol. 4, S–Z, Index, ed. Hans Hillerbrand (New York: Routledge, 2004) pp. 1701 (pp. 1701–1707).
C. John Sommerville, “Secularization,” in Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, 2nd Edition, ed. Robert Wuthnow (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2007) pp. 796 (pp. 796-pp. 800).
Isabella Kasselstrand, “Secularism in Relation to Secularity and Secularization: A Commentary on Berlinerblau’s Secularism: The Basics” This volume.
Frank J. Lechner, “The Case against Secularization: A Rebuttal.” Social Forces, vol. 69, no. 4, 1991, pp. 1103–1119. Also see Jonathan Fox, Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 16–38. Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999): 249–273.
On Senegal see Mamadou Diouf (Ed.) Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
T.N. Madan, “Indian Secularism: A Religio-Secular Ideal” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age pp. 182–183 (pp. 181–196); Linell Cady, “Reading Secularism through a Theological Lens,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global age (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010), p. 247 (pp. 247–264).
Steve Bruce, Secularization In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 28–29.
Philip S. Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000), pp. 138–167; Casanova Public Religions, pp. 21–25. Jacques Derrida, and David Newheiser, “Christianity and Secularization,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 1 (2020): pp. 138–148.
Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West, p. 3.
Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics, pp. 27–38.
Nader Hashemi, “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Secularization from below in Iran,” in Eds. Mirjam Künkler, John Madely and Shylashri Shankar, A Secular Age beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018) pp. 185–212.
Isabella Kasselstrand, This volume.
Isabella Kasselstrand, This volume.
Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality, (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Bangstad This volume. “Approval and Dissent”.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2007), p. 2.
Ibid., pp. 3. On Secularity III see Mirjam Künkler and Shylashri Shankar, “Introduction,” in A Secular Age beyond the West, pp. 1–32.
Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050, April 2, 2015,
This volume, Verma, “Review essay”.
Gutowski, this volume.
Gutowski, this volume.
Kasselstrand, this volume.
This volume, Igwe, “Secularisms beyond the West”.
This volume, Abbink, “Understanding ‘secularism’: new insights. Review article.”
Jacques Berlinerblau, “The Crisis in Secular Studies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 09/18/2014,
See for example, Paul Kurtz (Ed.) A Secular Humanist Declaration (Amherst, NY. Prometheus Books, 1980) p. 12 Paul Weber, “Separation of Church and State in Political Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, 2nd Edition, ed. Robert Wuthnow (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2007), pp. 809 (808–811).
This volume, De Nutte.
See Randall Balmer, “Secular Humanism,” in Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), p. 516. D.W. Gill, “Secularism, Secular Humanism,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984), pp. 996–997. Leo Pfeffer, “The ‘Religion’ of Secular Humanism,” Journal of Church and State, 9, no. 3, (1987) pp. 495–507. Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith. “Secular Humanism and Atheism beyond Progressive Secularism.” Sociology of Religion 68, no. 4 (2007): 407–424.
An excellent opening statement is Paul Kurtz’s In Defense of Secular Humanism (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1983).
Paul Kurtz (Ed.) Humanist Manifestos I and II (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1973) p. 21.
Paul Kurtz, Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011) p. 31.
Gutowski, this volume.
Steven Kettell, “Secularism and Religion,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, Volume 3, R–W, Eds. Paul Djupe, Mark Rozell and Ted Jelen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) p. 1649 (1648–1660).
Rajeev Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” p. 636 (pp. 636–654). Though later in the article Bhargava reverses course, p. 642. For an example of this linkage in the study of Africa see Dhammamegha Annie Leatt, The state of Secularism: Religion, Tradition and Democracy in South Africa (Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2017). p. 64. Also see the discussion of Michael Driessen who explores the relationship of separationism to democracy. “Religion, State, and Democracy: Analyzing Two Dimensions of Church-State Arrangements,” Politics and Religion 3 (2010): 55–80.
Charles Taylor, “Foreword: What is Secularism?” in Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship Eds. Geoffrey Levey and Tariq Modood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. xi (pp. xi-xxi1). Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) p. 20. For the same routing see Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell, “Multiple Secularities Beyond the West” p. 4.
See Paul Weber, “Separation of Church and State in Political Theory,” p. 809.
Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 17–18.
Ibid, p. 26.
Zoya Hasan, “Not Quite Secular Political Practice,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age pp. 201, 203 (pp. 197–214); Secularism in India, as T.N. Madan notes “does not stand for the separation of religion/church and the state in India, but rather for a nondiscriminatory state, which is constrained to treat its citizens in certain contexts … differentially rather than uniformly.” “Indian Secularism,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age 183 (pp. 181–196).
U.S.S.R, “1936 Constitution of the USSR,” adopted December 1936,
Martha C. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, p. 11.
Charles Manga Fombad, “State, Religion, and Law in Cameroon: Regulatory Control, Tension, and Accommodation,” Journal of Church and State, 57,1 (2015), pp, 32–33 pp. 18–43; Douglas Laycock, “The Many Meanings of Separation,” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 70, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1667–701. The argument has been made, plausibly, that even a figure such as John Locke did not endorse strict separation. See David McCabe, “John Locke and the Argument against Strict Separation,” The Review of Politics 59, 2 (1997) pp. 233–258.
Lamin Sanneh, “Church and State Relations: Western Norms, Muslim Practice, and the African Experience: A Comparative Account of Origin and Practice,” in Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa, ed. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʾim (Maryknoll: New York Orbis Books, 1999), 78. On the oversimplifications inherent in the term see Chidiebere Onwutuebe, “Constitutional Crisis, Religious Interpretations, and Nigerian Secularism.” Peace Review 32, no. 3 (2020): pp. 392, pp. 392–400.
Paul Weber, “Separation of Church and State in Political Theory.”
Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 107 (1985); Jacques Berlinerblau, “Separation of Church and State? Let’s Get Real—That’s Over. So What Do We Do Now?,” Salon, 02/12/2022,
This volume, Zuckerman, “Commentary on Secularism: The Basics”.
This volume, DeNutte.
This volume, Verma, “Review Essay”.
This volume, Verma.
For a discussion of the plight of tenure and higher education, see Jacques Berlinerblau, “They’ve Been Scheming to Cut Tenure for Years. It’s Happening,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 02/01/2023,
Noah Feldman, Divided by God: Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: Phil Zuckerman and John Shook (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, Cécile Laborde, “Justificatory Secularism,” Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: the Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Cécile Laborde, “Minimal Secularism: Lessons for, and from, India,” American Political Science Review 115, no. 1 (2020) pp. 1–13: Cécile Laborde, “Comment peut-on être laïque?” Esprit 447, September 2018, pp. 108–118; Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) pp. 58–79; Tariq Modood, “Muslims, Religious Equality, and Secularism,” in Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship pp. 164–185. Tariq Modood, “Multicultural Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, pp. 354–368; David Buckley, Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); John Shook, Systematic Atheology: Atheism’s Reasoning with Theology, (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Daniel Philpott, “Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?,” Annual Review of Political Science 12, 1 (2009), pp. 183–202; Daniel Philpott, “The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations,” World Politics 55, no. 1 (2002): pp. 66–95; Wilfred M. McClay, “Secularism, American-Style,” Society 44, no. 6 (2007): 160–163; Wilfred M. McClay, “Two Concepts of Secularism.” Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 47–72; Timothy Samuel Shah, and Monica Duffy Toft, “Why God Is Winning,” Foreign Policy 155, no. 155 (2006): pp. 38–43; Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah., “Religion’s Political Resurgence.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 57, no. 33 (2011).
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
For more see, Jacques Berlinerblau, How to be Secular.
Jacques Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics p. 35.
This volume, Shook, “The Time Has Arrived for Post-Post-Secularism”.
On the danger of “illiberal interpretations” of public order provisions see Daniel Nsereko, “Religion, the State, and the Law in Africa,” Journal of Church and State 28, 2 (1986), p. 287 (pp. 269–287). Makau Mutua, “Returning to my Roots: African ‘Religions and the State,’ ” in Proselytization and Communal Self-determination in Africa (Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1999), p. 177, (pp. 169–190). Mutua makes the unique suggestion that the public morality and public order clauses which are staples of African secular constitutionalism were “most likely aimed at elements of indigenous African religions which many colonial states regarded as abominable.”
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2007).
This volume, Abbink, “Understanding ‘Secularism’: New Insights. Review article.”
This volume, Shook, “The Time Has Arrived for Post-Post-Secularism”.
G.J. Rossouw and Eugenio Macamo Jr., “Church-state Relationship in Mozambique,” Journal of Church and State 35, 3 (1993), p. 538 (pp. 537–546); Peter Costea, “Church-state relations in the Marxist-Leninist regimes of the third world,” Journal of Church and State 32, 2 (1990), pp. 281–308; On the DERG’s formulaic but fundamentally false promise of religious freedom see Article 46 (1): “state and religion are separate.” People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, “The Constitution of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia,” Review of Socialist Law, 14 (1988), p. 192 (pp. 181–208),
Linell Cady, “Reading Secularism Through a Theological Lens,” pp. 248 (pp. 248–264).
Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture, 18, 2 (2006), p. 327, (pp. 323–347).
Jacques Berlinerblau, Secularism: The Basics p. 45.
Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey,” in Secularisms, p. 67.
Jon Abbink, “Religious Freedom and the Political Order: the Ethiopian ‘Secular State’ and the Containment of Muslim Identity Politics,” Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8 (2014), pp. 346–365. Tony Karbo, “Religion and Social Cohesion in Ethiopia,” International Journal of Peace and Development Studies, 4 (2013), p. 45 (pp. 43–52),
This volume, Bangstad, “Approval and Dissent”.
On definitions see Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity: An Introduction,” p. 12 (pp. 3–24). Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular p. 16. Celebrating this refusal to define is Jon Wilson, “Subjects and Agents in the History of Imperialism and Resistance,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors, Eds. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006) pp. 199 (pp. 180–205).
Winnifred Sullivan, “Varieties of Legal Secularism,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age p. 109 (pp. 107–120).
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations p. 23.
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Introduction: Times Like These,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 7 (pp. 1–38).
Hussein Ali Agrama, “Sovereign Power and Secular Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or Religious State?” in After Secular Law, p. 196 (pp. 181–199).
Jacques Berlinerblau, “Introduction: Secularism and its Confusions,” in Secularism on the Edge, p. 5.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, p. 16.
Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity” p. 5.
Jon Wilson, “Subjects and Agents in the History of Imperialism and Resistance,” p. 199.
Sindre Bangstad, “Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Feminism after Virtue,” Theory, Culture, Society 28, 3 (2011) p. 37 pp. 28–54.
Partha Chatterjee, “Fasting for Bin Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors, p. 60 (pp. 57–74).
This volume, Zuckerman, “Commentary on Secularism: The Basics.”
Jacques Berlinerblau, “The Crisis in Secular Studies,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 09/08/2014,
For an interesting study of a local group see Patricia Brandt, “Organized Freethought in Oregon: The Oregon State Secular Union,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 87, 2 (1986) pp. 167–204. Also see Lori Ginzberg, “ ‘The Hearts of Your Readers will Shudder’: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,” American Quarterly 46, 2 (1994) pp. 195–226. See Jerome Copulsky American Heretics (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).
Bethania Michael, Alexander Lin, and Jacques Berlinerblau, “ ‘Secular Africa?’ Making Sense of Non-Compliance to Secular Constitutions in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Church and State 2023 (forthcoming).
Daniel Nsereko, “Religion, the State, and the Law in Africa,” p. 271. Also see: Charles Manga Fombad, “Constitutions and Religion in Africa,” p. 159. Rosalind Hackett, “Regulating Religious Freedom in Africa,” Emory International Law Review 25 (2011), p. 860 (pp. 853–879). However, it should also be noted that there are other taproots of the secular provisions we find in African constitutions. The “African Charter on Humans and Peoples’ Rights” contains many articles that appear to have been grafted into continental constitutions vis a vis religion (see for example, Articles 2 and 8). In addition, verbiage from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is present. Also relevant is the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, “African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,”
This volume.
Stathis Gourgouris, “Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood,” Public Culture 20, 3 (2008) p. 456 (pp. 453–459).
William Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) p. 19.
Jacques Berlinerblau, “Bibliographic Quarantine is Blurring our Understanding of Secularism,” Times Higher Education, 02/06/2022,
Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Introduction: Times Like These,” argue secularisms are entwined with one particular religion p. 1,3 (pp. 1–35).
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 1.
Tracy Fessenden “Disappearances: Race, Religion, and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism,” in Secularisms, p. 139 (pp. 139–161).
This volume, Verma, “Review Essay.”
Rajeev Bharhava, “An Ancient Indian Secular Age?” in Beyond the Secular West, Akeel Bilgrami (ed.) (Columbia University Press, New York, 2016) pp. 188–214.Rajeev Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” pp. 652–653. T.N. Madan, “Indian Secularism,” p. 187 (pp. 181–196). Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
Abbink, This volume.
This volume, Igwe, “Secularisms beyond the West.” Leo Igwe, “Whence secularism in Africa?” National Secular Society, October 2017,
This volume, Igwe, “Secularisms beyond the West.”
Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity: An Introduction,”, p. 23 (pp. 3–24).
Rajeev Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” p. 638 (pp. 636–655).
This volume, Bangstad, “Review Essay”.
This volume, Abbink, “Understanding ‘Secularism’: New Insights. Review article.”