Secularism, Nation-State, Religion

I have tried to follow aspects of the secular indirectly—through ideas of myth and the sacred, through concepts of moral agency, pain, and cru­elty—and also more directly through the notion of human rights as well as the idea of religious minorities in European states that claim to govern themselves according to secularist principles.

Volumes have been written on the idea of secularization and its al­leged centrality for modernity. Is it worth saving? The secularization thesis in its entirety has always been at once descriptive and normative. In his im­pressive book on the subject,^[115] Jos6 Casanova points to three elements in that thesis, all of which have been taken—at least since Weber—to be es­sential to the development of modernity: (i) increasing structural differen­tiation of social spaces resulting in the separation of religion from politics, economy, science, and so forth; (2) the privatization of religion within its own sphere; and (3) the declining social significance of religious belief commitment, and institutions. Casanova holds that only elements (1) and (3) are viable.

Many contemporary observers have maintained that the worldwide explosion of politicized religion in modern and modernizing societies proves that the thesis is false. Defenders of the thesis have in general re- totted that the phenomenon merely indicates the existence of a widespread revolt against modernity and a failure of the modernization process. This response saves the secularization thesis by making it normative: in order for a society to be modern it has to be secular and for it to be secular it has to relegate religion to nonpolitical spaces because that arrangement is essen­tial to modern society. Casanova’s book attempts to break out of this tau­tology in an interesting way.

The argument is that whether religious deprivatization threatens modernity or not depends on how religion becomes public. If it furthers the construction of civil society (as in Poland) or promotes public debate around liberal values (as in the United States), then political religion is en­tirely consistent with modernity. If, on the other hand, it seeks to under­mine civil society (as in Egypt) or individual liberties (as in Iran) then po­litical religion is indeed a rebellion against modernity and the universal values of Enlightenment.

This is certainly an original position, but not, I would submit, an en­tirely coherent one. For if the legitimate role for deprivatized religion is car­ried out effectively, what happens to the allegedly viable part of the secu­larization thesis as stated by Casanova? Elements (i) and (3) are, I suggest, both undermined.

When religion becomes an integral part of modern politics, it is not indifferent to debates about how the economy should be run, or which sci­entific projects should be publicly funded, or what the broader aims of a national education system should be. The legitimate entry of religion into these debates results in the creation of modern “hybrids”: the principle of structural differentiation—according to which religion, economy, educa­tion, and science are located in autonomous social spaces—no longer holds. Hence element (1) of the secularization thesis falls. Furthermore, given the entry of religion into political debates issuing in effective policies, and the passionate commitments these debates engender, it makes little sense to measure the social significance of religion only in terms of such in­dices as church attendance.

However, this doesn’t mean that the secularization thesis must either be accepted in its original form or dismissed as nonsense. Its numerous critics are right to attack it, but they have generally missed something vital. I’ll try to oudine what that is later on. For the moment I simply assert that neither the supporters nor the critics of the secularization thesis pay enough attention to the concept of “the secular,” which emerged historically in a particular way and was assigned specific practical tasks.

I begin by examining the kindestreligion that enlightened intellectu­als like Casanova see as compatible with modernity. For when it is pro­posed that religion can play a positive political role in modern society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever, but only to those re­ligions that are able and willing to enter the public sphere for the purpose of rational debate with opponents who are to be persuaded rather than co­erced. Only religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal dis­course are being commended, in which tolerance is sought on the basis of a distinctive relation between law and morality.

Ever since Habermas drew attention to the central importance of the public sphere for modern liberal society, critics have pointed out that it sys­tematically excludes various kinds of people, or types of claim, from seri­ous consideration. From the beginning the liberal public sphere excluded certain kinds of people: women, subjects without property, and members of religious minorities.² This point about exclusions resembles the objec­tion made many years ago by critics of pluralist theories of liberal democ­racy.³ For these critics the public domain is not simply a forum for rational

2. See, for example, Mary R Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Pol­itics in Nineteenth-Century America,” and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Po­litical Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” both in Craig Cal­houn, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

3. Robert Wolff, for example, wrote in 1965: “There is a very sharp distinc­tion in the public domain between legitimate interests and those which are ab­solutely beyond the pale. If a group or interest is within the framework of accept­ability, then it can be sure of winning some measure of what it seeks, for the process of national politics is distributive and compromising. On the other hand, if an interest falls outside the circle of the acceptable, it receives no attention what­soever and its proponents are treated as crackpots, extremists, or foreign agents” (R. P. Wolff, “Beyond Tolerante,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by R. P. Wolff, debate but an exclusionary space. It isn’t enough to respond to this criti­cism, as is sometimes done, by saying that although the public sphere is less than perfect as an actual forum for rational debate, it is still an ideal worth striving for. The point here is that the public sphere is a space neces­sarily (not just contingently) articulated by power. And everyone who en­ters it must address powers disposition of people and things, the depend­ence of some on the goodwill of others.

Another way of putting it is this. The enjoyment of free speech pre­supposes not merely the physical ability to speak but to be heard, a condi­tion without which speaking to some effect is not possible. If one’s speech has no effect whatever it can hardly be said to be in the public sphere, no matter how loudly one shouts. To make others listen even if they would pre­fer not to hear, to speak to some consequence so that something in the po­litical world is affected, to come to a conclusion, to have the authority to make practical decisions on the basis of that conclusion—these are all pre­supposed in the idea of free public debate as a liberal virtue. But these per­formatives are not open equally to everyone because the domain of free speech is always shaped by preestablished limits. These include formal le­gal limitations to free speech in liberal democracies (libel, slander, copy­light, patent, and so forth), as well as conventional practices of secrecy (confidentiality) without which politics, business, and morality would col­lapse in any society. But these examples do not exhaust the limits I have in mind.

Three questions follow. First: Given that historical forces shape ele­ments of “the public” differently, particular appeals cqn be made success­fully only to some sections of the public and not to others. If the perform-

B. Moore Jr., and H. Marcuse, London: Cape, 1969 [U.S. edition 1965], p. 52; em­phasis in original). William Connolly has pushed this criticism in new and more interesting directions in his The Ethos of Pluralism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 185 ance of free speech is dependent on free listening, its effectiveness depends on the kind of listener who can engage appropriately with what is said, as well as the time and space he or she has to live in. How have different con­ceptions and practices of religion helped to form the ability of listeners to be publicly responsive? This last question applies not only to persons who consider themselves religious but to those for whom religion is distasteful or dangerous. For the experience of religion in the “private” spaces of home and school is crucial to the formation of subjects who will eventually in­habit a particular public culture.⁴ It determines not only the “background” by which shared principles of that culture are interpreted, but also what is to count as interpretive “background” as against “foreground” political principles.

My second question is this. If the adherents of a religion enter the public sphere, can their entry leave the preexisting discursive structure in­tact? The public sphere is not an empty space for carrying out debates.

This brings me to a question about the law. Secularists are alarmed at the thought that religion should, be allowed to invade the domain of our personal choices—although the process of speaking and listening freely im-

4. An example of this was made dramatically evident in Turkey early in the summer of 1997, when the secularist army forced the resignation of the coalition government led by the pro-Islamic Welfare Party. The military-backed govern­ment that succeeded it has instituted major reforms in an effort to contain the growing resurgence of Islam in the population. A crucial part of these reforms is the formal extension of compulsory secular education for children from five to eightyears, a measure designed to stop the growth of Islamic sentiment in the for­mation of schoolchildren.

plies precisely that our thoughts and actions should be opened up to change by our interlocutors. Besides, secularists accept that in modern so­ciety the political increasingly penetrates the personal. At any rate, they ac­cept that politics, through the law, has profound consequences for life in the private sphere. So why the fear of religious intrusion into private life? This partiality may be explained by the doctrine that while secular law permits the essential self to make and defend itself (“our rights constitute us as modern subjects”), religious prescriptions only confine and dominate it. Yet even if we take as unproblematic the assumption that there exists a priori a secular self to be made, the question of coercion in such a construc­tive task can’t easily be brushed aside. For the juridification of all interper­sonal relations constrains the scope for moral suasion in public culture. In that context, far from becoming a source of moral values that can enrich public debate, deprivatized religion (where religion has already been defined essentially as a matter of belief) becomes a site of conflict over nonnego- tiable rights—for example, the parents right to determine his or her child’s upbringing, or the pregnant woman’s right to dispose of her fetus.

One old argument about the need to separate religion from politics is that because the former essentially belongs to the domain of faith and passion, rational argument and interest-guided action can have no place in it. The secularist concedes that religious beliefs and sentiments might be acceptable at a personal and private level, but insists that organized reli­gion, being founded oh authority and constraint, has always posed a dan­ger to the freedom of the self as well as to the freedom of others. That may be why some enlightened intellectuals are prepared to allow deprivatized religion entry into the public sphere for the purpose of addressing “the moral conscience” of its audience—but on condition that it leave its coer­cive powers outside the door and rely only on its powers of persuasion. In a liberal democratic society, as Charles Taylor puts it in his discussion of modes of secularism, citizens belonging to different religious traditions (or to none) will try to persuade one another to accept their view, or to nego­tiate their values with one another.

The public, however, is notoriously diverse. Modern citizens don’t subscribe to a unitary moral system—moral heterogeneity is said to be one of modern society’s defining characteristics (even if the modern state does promote a particular ethical outlook). The puzzle here is how a depriva­tized religion can appeal effectively to the consciences of those who don’t accept its values. And the possibility of negotiation depends on the prior

Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 187 agreement of the parties concerned that the values in question are in fact negotiable. In a modern society such agreement does not extend to all val­ues. The only option religious spokespersons have in that situation is to act as secular politicians do in liberal democracy. "Where the latter cannot per­suade others to negotiate, they seek to manipulate the conditions in which others act or refrain from acting. And in order to win the votes of con­stituents they employ a variety of communicative devices to target their de­sires and anxieties. I will return to the idea that deprivatized religion in a secularized society cannot be any different.

My conclusion so far is.that those who advocate the view that the de­privatization of religion is compatible with modernity do not always make it clear precisely what this implies. Is the assumption that by appealing to the conscience of the nation religious spokespersons can evoke its moral sensibilities? The difficulty here is that given the moral heterogeneity of modern society referred to above, nothing tan be identified as a national conscience or a collective moral sensibility. So is the assumption then that religious spokespersons can at least enrich public argument by joining in political debates? But even liberal politicians don’t merely engage in public talk for the sake of “enriching” it. As members of a government and as par­liamentarians they possess the authority to take decisions that are imple­mented in national policies. What authority do religious spokespersons have in this matter?