Secularisms:

Jos Casanova
The fundamental question is
how the boundaries are drawn
and by whom.

Recap
The secular has been conceived in
three ways across its historical
development
This development is contingent on the
historical processes of western Europe
A secular world is a particular way of
experiencing and conceiving of the
universe and the self
Disenchantment
The buffered vs. the porous self
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The Emergence of the

Secular
(Taylor)
Early religion sanctified the social order, such that it could be
impossible to conceive of oneself outside the social matrix,
accepted the order of things.
Embedded in both society and the cosmos
Durkheim & Eliade

It was celebrated by and for the community, and asked for

wellbeing and worldly flourishing
Weber

Pagan emphasis on human flourishing has much in common with

modern exclusive humanism

Postaxial religions (esp. Buddhism and Christianity) reject the

world in the name of a higher truth
The order of things is called into question and delegitimized
Strong emphasis on individual thought and practice relative to
preaxial religion
But the forms of preaxial religion (communal rituals, identities,
etc.) remained, in tension with the implicit individualism of
postaxial faiths (44-47)

The Emergence of the

Secular
(Taylor)
In the long reforming process that took place in Latin

Christendom, individual practice was emphasized at the

expense of ritual, which was disregarded as magical
The world itself would come to be seen as constituted by
individuals.
Efficacy of ritual comes to be inner: it doesnt transform the
world, it leaves the participant with a changed inner state

Social life was to be purged of its connection to an

enchanted cosmos and all vestiges removed of the old
complementaries between spiritual and temporal, between
a life devoted to God and life in the world, between order
and the chaos on which it draws.
Social institutions come to be seen not as divinely ordained,
but as human constructs enacted by free actors (47-49)
Secular good order comes to be viewed as the function of
religion, meaning that it becomes possible to imagine a
purely nonreligious world
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The Emergence of the

Secular
(Taylor)
Multiple interacting vectors: personal commitment

and disenchantment, reform and disembedding

(individualism)
The crucial change here could be described as the
possibility of living within a purely immanent order;
that is, the possibility of really conceiving of, or
imagining, ourselves within such an order, one that
could be accounted for on its own terms, which thus
leaves belief in the transcendent as a kind of optional
extrasomething it had never been before in any
human society.
For this to happen, there had to develop a social order,
sustained by a social imaginary that had a purely
immanent character, which we see arising, for instance, in
the modern forms of the public sphere, market economy,
and citizen state. (50-51)
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The Secular, Secularization,

Secularism (Casanova)
The secular
A central modern epistemic category
Differentiated from the religious and so
mutually constituted with it

Secularization
actual or alleged empirical-historical
patterns of transformation and
differentiation of the religious and secular
spheres

Secularism
A range of views and ideologies, may
become political projects (54-55)
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Secularities
One may distinguish three different ways of
being secular:
A) that of mere secularity, that is, the
phenomenological experience of living in a secular
world and in a secular age, where being religious
may be a normal, viable option
B) That of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity,
that is, the phenomenological experience of living
without religion is a normal, taken fore granted
condition, and
C) That of secularist secularity, that is, the
phenomenological experience of not only being
passively free but also of actually having been
liberated from religion as a condition for human
autonomy and human flourishing. (60)
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The Secular
A residual category, whats left when religion is subtracted
But theories that posit this as a universal destiny attempt to
universalize the particular Western European experience

Two kinds of Christian secularization:

The first aims to spiritualize the temporal and to bring the
religious life of perfection out of the monasteries into the
secular world, so that eveyone may become a secular
religious monk. and transcending the secular/religious
dichotomy by blurring the boundaries
Typical of Reformation, especially the Puritans

The second, almost opposite approach rigidly maintains the

dichotomy, but aims to push the religious into the margins,
aiming to contain, privatize, and marginalize everything
religious, while excluding it from any visible presence in the
secular public sphere, aiming to emancipate all secular
spheres from clerical-ecclesiastical control.
Typical of the French-Latin-Catholic cultural area, laicization and
lacit, the basic subtraction narrative (56-57)

But secular may more

narrowly mean devoid of
religion
Will modernity lead to universal irreligion as a default condition?
There are the US & South Korea, which are fully secular in the sense
that they function within the same immanent frame yet their
populations are also at the same time conspicuously religious
Modernization in non-Western societies is often accompanied by
religious revival. Thus, secularization, in the sense of devoid of
religion is hardly an inevitable or linear historical process

So it is Western Europe that appears to be the exception. Why?

According to Casanova, as a legacy of the specific political and social
changes of the Enlightenment, Europeans developed a stadial
consciousness, which understands [the] anthropocentric change in
the conditions of belief as a process of maturation and growth, as a
coming of age and as progressive emancipation.
The experience the disappearance of religion as a natural consequence of
modernization
In places where this ratcheting, stadial consciousness is less present,
processes of modernization are unlikely to be accompanied by processes of
religious decline. (58-60)

Secularizations
Secularization is talked about like its one thing, but it can be
disaggregated into 3 related components:
A) Differentiation of secular spheres (politics, economy, science, etc.)
from religious norms & institutions
B) Theory that religious beliefs & practices decline as modernization
progresses
C) Theory of privatization of religion as a precondition of modern
secular & democratic politics

In Europe, these 3 things went together, so they have been

presumed to be a single, teleological process
But the US is a paradigmatic case of A, while B & C have not occurred.
Indeed, modernization there has often been accompanied by religious
revivals
Though the separation between church & state is much stricter in the US than it
is in most European societies, this does not imply the rigid separation of religion
and politics

Understanding that Europe is not a universal paradigm of

secularization & modernization lets us understand that there can
exist multiple modernities, even within the West, and certainly in
the non-West (60-61)

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Secularizations
To make broad statements about the relationship of
religion to modernity is problematic because its difficult
to say even what a religion is
Ironically, at the moment that scholars of religious studies
begin to critique the category, it has become an
indisputable global social fact.

While the religious/secular system of classification of

reality may have become globalized, what remains hotly
disputed and debated almost everywhere in the world
today is how, where, and by whom the proper
boundaries between the religious and the secular ought
to be drawn.
Exactly as Europes secularization during modernization
was historically contingent, so will non-Western modernities
also be particular and contingent refashionings and
transformations of existing civilizational patterns and social
imaginaries mixed with modern secular ones. (62-64)
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Secularizations
The fundamental question for any theory of
secularization is how to account for the differences
between the US and Western Europe
There is a need to provincialize Europe. It is not the US
that is the exception in the modernization story
Even in the West, the modern secular is by no means
synonymous with the profane, nor is the religious
synonymous with the modern sacred.
The sacred remains identical with the religious only in
Durkheimian terms (ex: human rights)

What we are repeatedly observing in the glocal media

of the global public sphere can be best understood not
so much as clashes between the religious and the
secular but, rather, as violent confrontations over the
sacred, over blasphemous and sacrilegious acts and
speeches, and over the profanation of religious and
secular taboos. (64-66)
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Secularisms
Secularism as statecraft doctrine
Some principle of separation between religious and
political authority [... This] neither presupposes or needs
to entail any theory, positive or negative, of religion.
If it does have such a theory, it moves into the arena of ideology

Secularism as ideology
Type 1: Philosophical-historical: secularist theories of
religion grounded in some progressive stadial philosophies
of history that relegate religion to a superseded age.
Marx

Type 2: Political: theories that propose that religion is

either an irrational force or a nonrational form of discourse
that should be banished from the democratic public
sphere (66-67)
Early Rawls, early Habermas

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Ideological Secularism
Western Europeans
tend to embrace a stadial view of history, in which to be
modern is to leave religion behind, to emancipate
oneself from religion, overcoming the nonrational forms
of being, thinking, and feeling associated with religion.
It also means growing up, becoming mature, becoming
autonomous, thinking and acting on ones own. It is
precisely this assumption that secular people think and
act on their own and are rational autonomous free
agents, while religious people somehow are unfree,
heteronomous, nonrational agents that constitutes the
foundational premise of secularist ideology. (68)

Americans, less influenced by the stadial view of

history, see little conflict between religion and
modernity (68)
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Political Secularism
Does not tend to make the same set of
assumptions about religion as
ideological secularism, and may even
value it as a positive force
But political secularism would like to
contain religion within its own differentiated
religious sphere and would like to
maintain a secular public democratic
sphere.
But the fundamental question is how the
boundaries are drawn and by whom. (69)
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Political Secularism
Political secularism falls easily into secularist
ideology when the political arrogates for itself
absolute, sovereign, quasi-sacred, quasi-transcendent
character or when the secular arrogates for itself the
mantle of rationality and universality, while claiming
that religion is essentially nonrational, particularistic,
and intolerant (or illiberal) and thus a threat to
democratic politics.
In western Europe in 1998 (pre-9/11), more than 2/3 of
every country agreed that religion is intolerant and
creates conflict
Ahistorical: none of the ideologies that wracked western Europe
in the 20th century were religious
This idea has the function of positively differentiating modern
secular European from the religious other (premodern,
religious Europeans, modern non-Europeans, esp. Muslims) (6970)

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Religion & Democracy

The First Amendment has two clauses: no
establishment and free exercise of religion
Both of these are necessary for a coexistence of
religion and democracy. Where there is no
established (i.e. state, compulsory) church,
politics and religion can have a friendly, rather
than hostile separation of religion from
democratic governance
Disestablishment becomes a necessary condition for
democracy whenever an established religion claims
monopoly over a state territory, impedes the free
exercise of religion, and undermines equal rights or
access to all citizens. (71-72)

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Religion & Democracy

Ultimately, the question is whether
secularism is an end in itself, an
ultimate value, or a means to some
other end, be it democracy and equal
citizenship or religious (i.e., normative)
pluralism.
If it is not an end in itself, then it ought to
be constructed in such a way that it
maximizes the equal participation of all
citizens in democratic politics and the free
exercise of religion in society. (72)
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