Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age By now, it is nearly a commonplace observation to note that secularism – until quite recently simply assumed to be the basis of modern nation states and the public sphere – is a contested and even “beleaguered” cultural, social, and political formation.¹ Once regarded as the sine qua non of public democratic life and the requisite integument of international relations, the secular was taken to be unmarked ideologically, as the mere absence or negation of obsolescing “religion.” Linked to this regard for secularism as an unmarked, neutral category was the standard secularization thesis, according to which modernity itself was characterized by, if not understood as predicated upon, the progressive decline of religion – its relegation to the private sphere, its diminishing hold on individual belief, and its loss of authority in separate and increasingly differentiated spheres of discourse and activity. However, within the past two or three decades, both the status of secularism as a relatively unproblematic feature of modernity and the secularization thesis as a standing explanation for its regnant status have been deeply shaken. A crisis of secularism is widely recognized. Secularism is currently a vexed topic fraught with complex and difficult global implications and consequences. While scholarship on secularism has seen a dramatic upsurge, questions related to secularism have become increasingly urgent and involve enormous real-world implications. These include the battles over “Sharīʿah law” in Europe and the Middle East, and the renewed importance of religion in the politics of India and Turkey. They also include the challenges posed for and by laicism in France. One might also point to the emergence of the “new atheism” and its political meanings in the West, and the battles over the authority of science in the United States. At stake also is secularism’s supposed role for arbitrating armed religious conflict, and its place in political and legal struggles over the shape of the public sphere in multiple contexts. The questions involving secularism prove essential and significant. In recent years, secularism has been taken to task not only for its differential treatment of various religions within the state but also, and more fundamentally, for its putative imposition of cultural norms and values, political prerogatives,  Rajeev Bhargava, “Political Secularism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, eds. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ),  – . Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 2 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida and hegemonic impulses within and across political landscapes and the public sphere. As the chapters in this volume make clear, secularism has been far from a neutral arbiter of religious practices and expression in its various contexts. Including other charges, secularism has been seen as deeply implicated in colonial and imperialist projects. Meanwhile, the standard secularization thesis, once a staple of social science theory, has been called into question, if not outright reversed, even by some of its more prominent, erstwhile proponents. Some scholars question the assumption that the modern social order is undergoing, or indeed has ever undergone, the process of secularization.² In the late 1990s, pointing to the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States, the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the growth of fundamentalist movements and religious political parties in the Muslim world (even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the upsurge of ethno-religious conflict in international affairs, sociologist Peter Berger recanted his earlier faith in secularization and descried a new “religious resurgence” or desecularization.³ Similarly, Jürgen Habermas, a major social theorist and signal advocate of secularism in the public sphere, has attended to the persistence of religion and called for a new role for it in politics and public life, as well as adoption of the term “post-secularism” to describe the relations between the secular and the religious in the current era.⁴ Indeed, while important thinkers have reasserted versions of the secularization thesis, and others have attempted to retain it with significant revisions,⁵  See for example the title of a conference held at The New School for Social Research: “We Have Never Been Secular,” http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif////we-have-never-been-secularre-thinking-the-sacred/. Accessed August , .  In particular, Peter L. Berger, once an important secularization theorist, reversed his longstanding position on secularization in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, ), esp. at  – .  Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly . ():  – . In March of , Habermas delivered his now famous lecture on “post-secularism” at the Nexus Institute of the University of Tilberg, Netherlands. Habermas pointed to three factors that characterize modern social orders as post-secular: ) the broad perception that many global conflicts hinge on religious strife and the changes in public consciousness and weakening of confidence in the dominance of a secular outlook that such acknowledgement accedes; ) the increased importance of religion in various public spheres; and ) the growing presence in Europe and elsewhere of immigrant or “guest workers” and refugees with traditional cultural backgrounds.  For the persistence of the secularization thesis, see Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, ). For a significant revision, see Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, ). Norris and Inglehart advance the “existential security hy- Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 3 there is little doubt that it has been significantly weakened. Secularism and secularization, that is, are no longer regarded unquestionably as the vaunted pillars of modern democratic society, or modernity itself. On the other hand, some thinkers insist that secularism, despite post-secular claims to the contrary, represents the only means of negotiating sectarian strife and establishing and maintaining a democratic state. Secular humanists continue to insist that secularism is the best way to achieve real human flourishing. Yet the very meanings of the words “secularism” and “religion” have been questioned, and the secular/religious binary has been significantly troubled.⁶ For some, the crisis of secularism represents a significant potential loss. The questions at stake include whether secularism, promoted by the West as a universal doctrine and since debunked from its perch and understood as provincial and particularistic, can be recuperated and its incomplete universalism universalized, its secularism (re)secularized.⁷ Given the dynamic and shifting roles and meanings of secularism in contemporary societies, a brief review of its history may be in order. Etymologically, the notion of the “secular” was originally contrasted not to religion, but to eternity. Derived from the Latin, saeculum, the word secular is related to time, and the French word for century, siècle. The secular thus stood for occurrences in worldly time as opposed to otherworldly eternity, to temporal as opposed to spiritual power. From late thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, the secular came to refer to clergy who lived outside of monastic seclusion, serving parishioners as they sought to live Christian lives under secular conditions. The cloistered monks on the other hand were referred to as “religious.” Thus, the word secular signified the worldly or mundane, and also became closely associated with the profane in contrast to the sacred. From the designation of a lesser state of religiosity within the western Christian imaginary, the secular eventually came to refer to that which stood outside of the Church altogether, as an antipode to the religious. Secularization, meanwhile, first referred to the expropriation of pothesis” as the explanation for secularization or the lack thereof. According to this thesis, as populations become relatively secure economically and otherwise, religiosity tends to decline. The denizens of post-industrial societies are demonstrably less religious than those living in agricultural or industrial economies. Meanwhile, although secularization is increasing as regions become post-industrial, religious populations are growing relative to secular ones, owing to the fact that in traditional societies the birthrate is much higher than in secular societies.  Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Introduction: Times Like These,” in Secularisms, eds. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham: Duke University Press, ), esp.  – .  See especially, Étienne Balibar, Saeculum: Culture, Religion, Idéologie (Paris: Éd. Galilée, ). Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 4 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida church property during the Protestant Reformation, and later was extended to designate any transference of religious authority to persons or institutions with non-religious functions. In contemporary parlance, secularism has connoted the separation of church and state, a supposedly neutral space for arbitrating religious and other claims, or a successor to disappearing religion(s). Secularization has signified the (progressive) decline in importance and influence of religion in the political sphere, public life and private commitment, and has become nearly synonymous with modernity itself. Secularism received renewed scholarly attention with the publication of Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age in 2007.⁸ In this arguably paradigm-shifting study of secularism and secularization, Taylor undertook a complete revision of the accounts of secularization, taking the secularization thesis to task for its reliance on what he called “subtraction stories,” or narratives of the progressive loss and compartmentalization of religious belief attendant upon the rise of science, industrialization, urbanization, and so forth. Drawing on Max Weber’s notion of pre-modern enchantment and modern disenchantment, Taylor argues that, as a consequence of disenchantment resulting from religious reformism that began before the Protestant Reformation, faith was ultimately undermined as a default position, requiring that “belief” become a matter of positive declaration. Against the subtraction stories of the standard secularization thesis, Taylor advances his notion of “secularity 3,” which describes a condition comprising both belief and unbelief, and everything in between. Unbelief ultimately became a distinct possibility for a growing number, including non-elites, for the first time. According to Taylor, the secular age is marked not by the progressive rise of unbelief or decline of religion or religiosity, but rather by a condition under which choices are opened up for belief, unbelief, a suspension between the two, as well as other creedal commitments. Secularity in Taylor’s third sense is a new “naïve framework” for all those living within modernity, indeed representing a space opened up for unbelief but also amounting to an overarching optative state that comprehends unbelief and belief and the irresolution and continuing challenge that they pose to one another. But secularity also embodies a “fully exclusive humanism,” which greatly pressures religious belief and conditions its fragility. This conception of secularity significantly challenges the standard secularization thesis and redefines secular modernity in terms of a new “social imaginary” or background condition of lived experience. Quite apart from sociological  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, ). Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 5 accounts of church attendance and other indices of secular ascendance or putative religious decline, Taylor’s study obviates or skirts such quantitative evidence in favor of a historical narrative that arrives at an existential-phenomenological predicament characterizing modernity. Against the positing of a new desecularization or post-secular dispensation, Taylor’s conception of secularity theoretically accounts for the fragility and vacillations of religious belief and unbelief, perhaps even making sense of the putative “religious resurgence” observed by Peter Berger and others.⁹ Certainly, causal factors would need to be located for such resurgences, but secularity comprehends such fluctuations as possibilities in advance. Furthermore, the notion of secularity as developed by Taylor may help us to comprehend the nature or quality of religious commitment under modernity. For Taylor, not only is belief “fragilized” by unbelief but also its very structure is changed, since believers, along with unbelievers, all operate under the “immanent frame” of secularity. The question becomes whether or not belief – in transcendence in particular – is any longer what it once was. The answer to this question may prove important for how we regard the various forms of religiosity across the globe today. Taylor’s work prompted several significant responses, including Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Rethinking Secularism, and The Joys of Secularism, among others.¹⁰ Given its exclusive focus on the West, A Secular Age has been faulted not only for its apparent provinciality or ethnocentrism, but also, and more importantly, for its intra-Christian understanding of the development of western secularism. Although Taylor provided an explanation for this exclusivity – the task at hand already threatened to exceed the compass of a single work; other studies might address the historical development of secularism in various regions – Taylor’s internalist perspective, it has been argued, misses the role played by non-Christian societies. Like Taylor, Talal Asad also figures the secular as a social formation that developed initially within Latin Christendom in particular.¹¹ However, unlike Taylor, Asad sees western secularism’s development as  Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), : “[B]ecause [Taylor’s] third sense of the secular comprehends precisely those forms of religiosity that are now most widely mobilized, resurgence of religion is not evidence of a new post-secular dispensation.”  Warner, et al., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age; Craig J. Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Rethinking Secularism (Oxford/N.Y.: Oxford University Press, ); George L. Levine, The Joy of Secularism:  Essays for How We Live Now (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, ).  Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 6 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida contingent upon the West’s interactions and exploits in the Middle East and elsewhere. According to Asad, in its management of colonies, the West encountered diverse belief systems and cultural practices that it came to understand in terms of “religion.” Its understanding of these beliefs and practices was conditioned upon Protestant Christianity as the context for the development of western secularism. For Asad, secularism is far from a neutral or innocent formation; rather, it is fully implicated in colonial and imperialist projects. Yet Asad does not figure secularism as simply a colonialist imposition. Rather, secularism developed differently as it interacted with different religious and regional contexts. Secularism is not the mere unfolding of an Enlightenment universal within particular local situations. The secular and the religious are co-constituting formations and secularism is always contingent upon its relationship with the particularity of its religious other. Thus, while Asad, and Saba Mahmood, whose work follows in his paradigmatic footsteps, treat secularism as a western construct that is not easily transported and transposed onto other contexts, those contexts nevertheless condition the development of secularism. Likewise, secularism should always be understood as plural and variable. Along similar although not identical lines, the political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has argued for the existence of a distinctive (although not “unique” or conceptually novel) Indian secularism that developed outside of the reach of European colonialism and which he argues currently provides much needed lessons for western democracies.¹² Bhargava serves to underscore the multiplicity and substantive content of secularism, but also its contingent and variable character. Secularism is not an empty container or timeless wall between the state and the public sphere on the one hand, and religious belief and practice on the other. Rather, it is purposive and content-full, with “positive” values of its own, which change depending on the context. If anything, Bhargava sees secularism as a flexible and necessary concept of modernity, and one that we should work to refurbish and support. Following the work of Bhargava, as well as Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini,¹³ in this volume, the editors take as a point of departure the fact that secularism is plural, that various secularisms have developed in various contexts and from various traditions around the world, and that secularism takes on different social and cultural meanings and political valences wherever it is expressed. Further, in accord with the first volume in this series, we hold that  See especially Rajeev Bhargava, “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,” in The Future of Secularism, ed. T.N. Srinivasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, ),  – .  Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Secularisms. Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 7 “[u]niversalist theories of secularization are singularly ill-suited for exploring secularities beyond the West.”¹⁴ At the same time, however, we acknowledge the hegemonic desiderata of secularism’s universalizing claims. That is, we see the importance of recognizing secularism as an Enlightenment legacy that exhibits universalizing ambitions. Thus, it is necessary to keep in mind both the doctrinal claims of secularism – its supposed difference from religion(s), its association with “progress” and modernity, its assertions of rationality and neutrality, its claims of exclusivity in connection with public life – as well as how this doctrinal logic unfolds in various contexts. Given this conception of secularism as both universalizing doctrine and particular instantiation, the chapters in this volume provide numerous points of contact between theoretical/historical reflection and empirical case studies on secularisms in context. With this anthology, we aim to fill a chasm between sweeping theoretical analyses of secularism on the one hand and accounts relating to the lived experiences of the formations as they have evolved in different parts of the world on the other. We believe it is unlike any another work in the field for its delivery of both theoretical scope and empirical granularity on a global scale. Recognizing that secular traditions have developed differently around the world and that this multiplicity must necessarily inform and complicate the conceptual theorization of secularism as a universal doctrine delivered wholesale from the Enlightenment, we have sought to gain clearer and more nuanced appreciations of the complexities of the concept of secularism from empirical case studies. Analyses of different regions, we believe, enrich our understanding of the meanings of secularism, providing comparative range to our notions of secularity, while adding dimension to our understanding of regional conditions and conflicts themselves. We maintain that theoretical and historical reflections over the meanings of secularism benefit from such empirical studies, serving to illustrate theories while also challenging traditional understandings that otherwise may remain unchallenged from within the more or less purely theoretical debates. At the same time, theoretical/historical treatments of secularism, we believe, help to inform our understanding of secularisms in context, enabling us to discern the principles at stake in the various regional expressions of secularity and/or religiosity globally. Theoretical and historical accounts help us to refine, contextualize, and revise our understandings of contemporary empirical findings.  Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Matthias Middell, Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in a Global Age (Boston: De Gruyter, ), . Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 8 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida We also take for granted that secularism is currently a contested category – not only in terms of its definition and its political and social meanings but also in terms of its clear and unproblematic opposition to religion(s). This is not at all to suggest that secularism is simply another religion; it is, in fact, a distinct social formation with its own characteristics and histories. But the secular has always defined itself as against religion(s), and, in the process, has defined religion(s) as such. Our point is that this definitional process is variable and context contingent and that while secularism is always content-full, its content is not fixed or stable; the secular is an adaptable category that takes its shape, content and meaning in connection with and in distinction from the religions with which it interacts and against which it defines itself. In fact, several chapters in this volume complicate and challenge the stability, meaning and universality of the secular/religious binary. The question becomes whether or not secularism can be more or other than an opportunistic formation serving particularized ends in different contexts. While it certainly has served and may continue to serve democratizing functions, while also posing as a solution for non-particularistic education, secularism, per se, can no longer be understood as a fixed idea and simply posited as “progressive” as against religion(s) understood as “conservative.” Likewise, while inclusive of defenses and elaborations of secularism, this collection has also aimed to register recognition – in the title and in many of the chapters as well – of the post-secular understanding. A polyvalent and contested term, post-secularism may signify a skepticism and/or antagonism toward secularism in recognition of the persistence or “resurgence” of religion. Connected with post-colonialism, post-secularism may regard secularism as a legacy of colonialist enterprises and a disguise for the domination of a particular (Christian/western) order. While recognizing these significations, by post-secularism, we refer especially to “an attempt to overcome the antinomy of secularism/religion.”¹⁵ Post-secularism accords to religion an enduring value – a place at the table in politics, a voice in the public sphere, and an abiding role in private life. Post-secularism recognizes the persistence of religion and marks an acknowledgement of religious and secular pluralisms. It recognizes the ethical resources and community-building efficacy that religious systems and practices can offer and acknowledges the function of religion in constructing and defending cultural identities. Further, post-secularism may amount to a refutation of the standard secularization thesis. According to post-secularism, the secularization thesis  Vincent Geoghegan, “Religious Narrative, Post‐secularism and Utopia,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy . –  ():  – , at . Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 9 has been empirically disproven. Rather than a descriptive characterization of modernities, the secularization thesis, post-secularism suggests, is a normative imperative and a (failed) self-fulfilling prophecy of secular advocates. Yet, rather than taking sides with either secularists or post-secularists, this anthology focuses on the debates themselves – in relation to the new, global understanding that the volume facilitates – aiming at a more or less inclusive representation of the controversies surrounding secularisms globally. The “global” designation in this volume’s title not only registers the inclusion of a broad representation of secularisms from around the world but also the fact that virtually every region’s version of secularism has been affected by global Others, or “globalization.” While the majority of the chapters in the volume recognize and account for the “global” in this latter sense, we should note that a few do so hardly at all. This is largely due to the fact that in such chapters, the authors either treat a particular historical moment of secularism when its global content was less apparent or merely incipient, or they examine secularism in the abstract. But, as most of the volume’s chapter make clear, the developments of actually-existing, contemporary secularisms and religions have “benefitted” from globalization and the circulation of global capital, as well as from the political impacts of nation states or other regional actors promoting or responding to global capital or military aggression. In the context of globalization and secularity, it is important to note that fundamentalism, far from being the reestablishment of traditional religiosity, is a modern formation dependent for its very existence on secularisms and their challenges to traditional religion. Likewise, globalization has impacted secularisms and religiosities and their viability or lack thereof in various contexts. In terms of political secularism, in the dichotomy between secularism as the absence of religion from the political and public spheres on the one hand, and the more pluralistic notion of secularism as multi-religious co-existence on the other, the world’s rapid globalization, particularly since the last quarter of the twentieth century, has played a key role. The political and economic pressures of globalization have impacted national ideologies in struggles over just what kind of secularism, if any, would emerge victorious in particular nation states, often as individual nations have vied for international acceptance as “modern,” where modern almost invariably had been recognized as secularist – until quite recently, that is. Turkey’s positioning for inclusion in the European Union is a classic case in point of the role that global context can have on matters of secularity and religiosity. Kemal Attaturk’s modernization project was aimed at drawing Turkey into the international fold, within which westernized ideas of enlightenment, progressivism and rationality were placed in tandem with the religious observance of its predominantly Islamic population. But events surrounding September Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 10 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida 11, 2001, and perceptions of Islamic orthodoxy in its aftermath, led to western suspicion of overt signs of Islamization in public space, so that the wearing of the hijab, for example, came to be associated with fanaticism. As Turkey struggled to declare its modernity in the rush for inclusion in the EU (largely for strategic economic advantage), its notions of secularism were redefined and rearticulated for the post-9/11 era. Turkey represents a clear case study of the way that nationalist ideology with regards to secularism has been impacted by a globalization that made international bilateral cooperation paramount in the zeitgeist following glasnost and perestroika in the former Soviet Union, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The erasure of European geographical boundaries and the creation of Schengen Area plurality led, willy-nilly, to new conditions for the admission or, conversely, the exclusion of nation-states. At a time when growing Islamic influence in government was perceived as having a negative impact on the country’s democratic secularist image, Turkey hastily proffered to the international community its supposed commitment to religious pluralism. Thus, its inclusion in the EU depended upon an emphasis on a pluralistic secularity, as against the recent (re)assertion of Islamic heritage. China, too, in its bid to gain international approval as it surges ahead toward global financial dominance, is at pains to underscore perceptions of religious tolerance. This preoccupation fuels a pan-western cultural revolution that is clearly visible in modern Shanghai, where just impatience with poverty and deprivation is interacting with the products of global capital to create what we may call a “brand secularism,” which is quite obviously globalized. Thus, as McDonald’s, KFC, the Gap, and Louis Vuitton represent the commodification of a traditionally frugal Chinese culture, rendering it rapidly consumerist, regard for religious practice is also undergoing a metamorphosis. Paradoxically, a thriving state-directed capitalist economy in China is developing a seeming hand-inglove relationship with a robust new religiosity. In the face of the actually existing communism that was China, Buddhist temples, for instance, had been relegated to the status of mere tourist attractions. But, the revival of religious services in Anglican churches in the urban metropolis and the large audiences they attract point to a renewed interest in organized religion as ironically synonymous with progress and modernization. While strict state economic regulation keeps the country on a disciplined march, the regime is determined to vitiate perceptions of its control in the daily lives of its burgeoning populace. And although the Communist Party still dominates political life, globalization and a new kind of secularism are tempering the party’s totalitarian rigidity. India is yet another paradoxical example of an altered national secularism – with the rejuvenation of Hindu enthusiasm within a climate of rapid technological and economic globalization. However, while in the case of Turkey, eagerness Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 11 to conform with western notions of secularism have determinedly kept Islamic influence at bay, in India, as in China, globalization has succeeded in reviving religious fervor. Represented as a secular nation for decades by the dominant Congress governments that shaped India’s Nehruvian vision, ironically, the country’s inclusion as an emergent giant in the BRIC nations has been concurrent with the adoption of an aggressively Hindu nationalism. Indeed, in the India of recently-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a younger generation, seemingly anxious to abandon Nehru’s socialism together with his secularist vision, yearns for a quasi-capitalist business environment in which the immediate financial rewards for individual ambition, enterprise, and risk-taking are seen as far more urgent imperatives than the maintenance of a climate within which religious and social minorities might co-exist without fear of Hindu hegemony. The elite intelligentsia that championed secularism in India has become stridently polarized in recent decades and has developed a profoundly left/right binary that is routinely contested by a powerfully emergent lower middleclass that seemingly has little regard for minority sentiment. It insists that altered definitions of secularism commensurate with the assertion of Hindu nationalism will in no way threaten India’s diverse minority communities. It is much too early to know the extent to which the political power of the rightwing Hindu-dominated parties will affect democratic secularism in India in the long run. The prevailing notion, however, is that just as long as India’s economy delivers, those hungry for the erasure of Nehru-Gandhian austerity in a New India will willingly sacrifice “academic” notions of pluralist equality and inter-communal fraternity. Indeed, since he achieved a landslide victory on promises of bringing prosperity to the greatest number of Indians, it would seem that, in Modi’s India, middleclass pecuniary interests will likely triumph over “elitist” and “western” notions of secularism. Turkey, China and India, while undergoing major transformations in terms of secularism, are just a few of the major areas where secularism is being challenged and/or redefined. 1 Mapping Global Secularisms: The Structure of the Book This anthology brings together theoretical and historical interventions, as well as empirical case studies from anthropology, cultural and literary studies, history, international relations, political science, religious studies, sociology and other fields, in order to illustrate the “on-the-ground” working out of secularisms as they interact with various religious, political, social, and economic contexts. Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 12 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida The central questions this anthology asks are the following: What is the state of secularism globally, and what are its prospects? This collection offers a synoptic introduction to the situation of secularisms in what has been called a post-secularist era (Part I), and detailed case studies of secularisms globally (Part II). Thus, it works to represent the state of the debate regarding global secularisms today, and to consider the prospects for secularisms under various conditions. Part I lays the historical, theoretical and philosophical groundwork for the rise and development of secularisms and post-secularism, including chapters that deal with the state of secularism and the kinds of secularisms that may be possible. This section provides a framework for the extensive discussions of the various expressions of secularism and post-secularism globally, which follow in the next section. Part I begins with a broader time frame for secularism’s emergence than is generally accorded it, as Stijn Latré explores the evolution of religion and politics in the “axial age,” when ancients such as Confucius and Lao Tse in China, the Upanishad texts and the Buddha in India, Zarathustra in Persia, the Jewish prophets in Palestine and the Greek philosophers presented concepts of secularism with which modern scholars continue to grapple. Latre compares the views of Marcel Gauchet and Robert Bellah on the axial dynamics of secularization and religious evolution before moving on to the German debate between Karl Lowith and Hans Blumenberg and touching briefly on Karl Jaspers’s interpretation of the axial. Modern discourse led, he says, to the loss of the concept of “transcendence,” which has always been linked to immanence. Gauchet, who dwells on transcendence in the axial period, states that it plays a key role on the path to a disenchanted world. Latre examines well-known passages from Shakespeare’s plays to determine the manner in which the concept of Providence was understood as playing a role in guiding human action. He ends his chapter with the conclusion that secular aspirations saw the light of day in the religious and philosophical reforms of the axial age. Interestingly, a resurgence in transcendence has recently emerged, and with it, a universal meaning – the spirit of free thinking that, as Jaspers believed, co-exists with the fruits of science and technology in the twentieth-first century. The section continues with an exploration of the history of Secularism proper, a movement founded by George Jacob Holyoake in Britain in 1851– 52. Michael Rectenwald characterizes Holyoake’s Secularism, which marks the first ever use of the term, and contrasts it with that of his rival for the control of the Secularist movement, Charles Bradlaugh. This historical exploration is motivated by concerns over the fate of secularism and the contemporary claims of post-secularism. Rectenwald asserts that Holyoake’s brand of Secularism represented “the co-existence of secular and religious elements subsisting under a common um- Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 13 brella,” not the negation of religion. Thus, Holyoake’s Secularism, he argues, anticipated Taylor’s notion of “secularity 3” by over 150 years, and obviates the need for a new post-secular dispensation. Rectenwald champions the kind of “positive,” pluralistic Secularism advocated by Holyoake, over the negative, “evacuative” Secularism of Bradlaugh. In his chapter, the prominent secularist philosopher Philip Kitcher brings the discussion of secularism as a “positive” program into the contemporary theoretical moment, drawing on his earlier proposals for an “enlightened secularism,”¹⁶ arguing here that a purely “negative” secularism is “at least intellectually incomplete.” In the vein of Holyoake, Kitcher argues that to be successful, secularism must provide “secular surrogates for religious institutions.” One of the most important secular surrogates is that for the grounding of value – or a secular ethics. Rather than adopting one of the several ethical systems that historically have been proposed as surrogates – Benthamite utilitarianism, a theory of moral sentiments, etc. – Kitcher proposes that we look to anthropology and primatology to see just how ethics have developed in human and human-like societies. When we do, we find that ethics are not transcendental value systems imposed from without, but rather historical developments of “agreed-on rules for joint living” derived from “human attempts to construct life together.” Kitcher extends his analysis on the development of ethics to the question of meaning, which secularism has often been deemed incapable of supplying. Again, meaning need not be leveraged on a transcendental object, but may be grounded in projects contributing to a more lasting and larger social body, projects that are nevertheless temporal. Such a notion of meaning should be an adequate substitute for religious systems based in the transcendental and the eternal. Shifting the discussion to the sociopolitical, Özlem Uluç Kucukcan undertakes an analysis of the emergence and development of a post-secular from a “pre-post-secular” public sphere. Kucukcan argues for the inadequacy of the earlier, secular public sphere for the representation of the rights of religious minorities in modern nation states, and details the conditions and requirements of the new post-secular public sphere as articulated by Jürgen Habermas. Kucukan argues that while Habermas’s post-secular public sphere is not a comprehensive answer for secular states as they face the challenges of a post-secular age, it nevertheless represents a significant improvement over its predecessor. More work is  See Philip Kitcher, “Science, Religion, and Democracy,” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology  ():  – ; “Militant Modern Atheism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy  ():  – ; and Science in a Democratic Society (New York: Prometheus Books, ). Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 14 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida needed to understand why religious formations and adherents find secular counterparts inimical to their very existence, and vice versa. In his study, centered on a theoretical framework inaugurated by Jürgen Habermas, Patrick Loobuyck examines the role of religious education in a post-secular world, with special reference to multicultural environments. Loobuyck grapples with the role of religious education from a Habermasian, postsecular perspective. Habermas’s work, he states, provides an important opportunity to enter the religious education debate from the perspective of political philosophy. Loobuyck considers the possible ramifications of a religious education program and its long-term impacts, while also explaining the paradigm shifts that brought important policy changes to western schools with multicultural demographics. He concludes that in post-secular societies, the aims of religious education are broad and include learning about different religions, contributing to students’ personal development, creating intercultural skills, attaining religious literacy, and preparing students for participation as citizens in a pluralistic world. As one of the leading lights in the debates over the role and significance of secularism in a (post)modern, “post-secular” world, in his chapter, Rajeev Bhargava subjects the meanings and implications of secularism and post-secularism to close scrutiny. Given the characterization of the term “post-secular” as putatively distinct from the “secular,” Bhargava argues that, while Europe and the North Atlantic might very well be transitioning from a secular to a post-secular condition, for other parts of the world, the historical narrative is inapt. Adapting (and inverting) Bruno Latour’s memorable, and for some, contemptuous title, Bhargava concludes that, according to the sense of the terms “secular” and “post-secular” that this narrative implies, in India at least, “we have always been post-secular.”¹⁷ Thus, the chapter questions not only the validity and relevance of a historical narrative more suited to Europe and North America but also the relevance of the term “post-secular” in connection with other contexts. Going further, we might add here that the notion of the post-secular can be understood as always already predicated upon the standard secularization thesis. That is, the post-secular designation only becomes necessary, or possible, given an at least implicit, prior acceptance of progressive secularization, which is subsequently subject to rejection or revision. If we have never been secularized in this sense, then we have never been secular (or post-secular) in the sense resulting from it.  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 15 While Bhargava argues that (in India) we have always been post-secular, the prominent literary critic and broadly engaged intellectual George Levine suggests that in the United States in particular, we have hardly been secular and ought never to become post-secular. Levine asserts that for secularists like him, secularism is a deeply felt commitment, “a way of being in the world,” rather than, we may suppose, a mere doctrine or intellectual conviction. Levine claims for secularism what William Connolly calls the “visceral register;” lost in Taylor’s historicism and the challenges of post-secularism is the facticity of secularity as “a condition rather like breathing.” After arguing for this existential-phenomenological sense of secularism, Levine suggests that the secular is a historical achievement that coincides with evidence-based, scientific reasoning. In its concern for cultural sensitivity and pursuit of religious accommodation, Levine warns that post-secularism is “in danger of giving away the store.” Thinking particularly of the US context, he implies that post-secular concessions to religious sensibilities may be dangerous, pointing to the crisis of global warming and the religious obstructionism that may preclude effective responses to it. More pressing than our attention to “the religion/secular binary,” he argues, must be our commitment to a fair and just world achieved through ethical and legal practices that ultimately depend on secular principles – even as we simultaneously acknowledge that the latter “have developed out of religious traditions.” Literary historian and theorist Bruce Robbins ends this section with an argument against the oft-repeated saw: “there are no atheists in foxholes.” Acknowledging the difference between secularism and atheism, Robbins nevertheless implies that the atheist life has something to teach us about the importance and role of secularism. The claim that there are no atheists in foxholes is an argument not against atheism, Robbins cleverly asserts, but against foxholes. Foxholes are something that we can prevent, by preventing war. If we had more atheists, we would have fewer foxholes, and if we had fewer foxholes, we would have more atheists. Secularism, he argues, is perhaps our best means for preventing war. Robbins suggests that by acting in historical, linear time, human agents may exert control over some things, although not everything. Assuming the control humans may have depends on recognizing our own agency and forgoing, without replacement, transcendent aid and goals. Robbins argues for the very “subtraction” of value and meaning that Taylor rejects as an inadequate understanding of the development of secularism, in a sense obviating Kitcher’s call for secular substitutes for religious meaning. But only in a sense – for Robbins suggests that although transcendent goals and comforts must be “subtracted” with nothing necessarily posited to replace them, he implies that ethics and meaning are provided by our contingent circumstances and depend upon the immediate care of ourselves and others. Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 16 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida Part II draws on the expressions of secularism and post-secularism from around the globe, tracing in detail the interactions between religious and secular values, norms and practices in cultural production, education, politics, public ceremony, public policy, international relations, and more. Chapters represent the diversity and particularity of secularisms as they exist today on nearly every continent. This section is divided into two subsections: the political and the public sphere. Initiating the treatment of the political sphere, Rochelle Almeida’s chapter on the projected annulment of public or gazetted religious holidays in India points to the escalating fears of minority communities, particularly in light of the recent accession to power of a blatantly right-wing Hindu nationality party. She argues that minorities in India – whether religious-, caste- or gender-related – had already, since the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1947, suffered violations of their human rights by a gradual curtailment of their civil benefits (even while under successive so-called secularist Congress governments). Almeida thus expresses concern for what she sees as doubly vulnerable communities, such as Muslims and Christians, that privileges bestowed upon them might be swiftly revoked in the era of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At risk, Almeida argues, is a conception and variety of secularism that might protect such minorities. Arolda Elbasani and Murat Somer examine the evolution of secularism in Turkey and Albania. They argue that, having developed under European secular models, both nation states have regulated and disciplined Islam, while at times (especially in Turkey) harnessing it to state-directed ends. The authors examine the institutional devices through which state has controlled the visibility, function, and impact of Islam, while Islam itself has been “reformed” and “rationalized” in the process. Elbasani and Somer conclude that in contemporary Albania, secularism has been represented in terms of a relative interreligious equality, while in Turkey a dominant Islam has been endorsed for a cohesive national identity and social uniformity. Thus, in Turkey, the secular is in some sense “Islamic,” while in Albania the secular is more multi-religious. Under such differing national conditions, religious elements have had to negotiate, adapt, and compete for space and recognition within particularized secular forms. The chapter thus makes clear how secularism and religion have differentially shape-shifted in relation to one another in various contexts. The discussion should eliminate any notion that may remain in the secular imaginary of the possibility for the simple extension of a universalized secularism, at least under existing conditions. Ayşe Seda Müftügil examines the legislative introduction in 1982 of compulsory “religion education” in Turkey. Although the addition to the curricula of a Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 17 mandatory course in religion has been attributed solely to the discretion of the military junta, Müftügil argues that academics and civilian groups played a significant role both in shaping the content of religion education and pursuing its adoption and particular implementation by the state. Müftügil suggests that scholars of Turkish history have overlooked this partially determinative role. To remediate this lack, Müftügil interviewed Beyza Bilgin, the first professor of religion education and the academic most responsible for making it a compulsory subject. Drawing from the interview and previously unexamined textbooks, legal documents, and transcripts from scholarly debates, Müftügil explains how and why religion education was consolidated and became mandatory, despite the Turkish constitutional provision of secularism. She also examines how this mandatory course considered, or did not consider, the particular needs and interests of religious minorities. Thus, the chapter illustrates how particular religious objectives may be instituted and justified, even while drawing on secular state doctrines. Jonathan Beloff’s chapter represents an indictment of the role of the Catholic Church in Rwanda in connection with the notorious genocide of 1994 that killed 1.2 million Tutsis and Hutus in one hundred days. If anything positive has emerged from so dark a phase in recent African history, it may be the secularization of government and social institutions. As Rwanda attempts to recover from multiple horrors in its brief post-colonial history, its emphasis on secularism may ultimately enable it to create a place for itself within the vast post-secularist canvas of African diversity. Turning our attention to South America, Jonathan Scott addresses what he suggests should be considered a new Latin American secularism. In Latin America, Scott argues, geo-political unity and the rejection of neoliberalism are fostering an economic revolution of sorts, which is either ignored or utterly misrepresented in the North American media. A broad contingent of Latin American countries have successfully resisted North American financial hegemony, within a space where oil reserves allow formerly colonized nations to assert their global significance. As they attempt to shed the legacy of imperial dominance and the influence of Wall Street, Scott argues, a new form of secularism is emerging – based not so much on opposition to Christianity as upon the objective of addressing the needs of the poor and propertyless, who stand to gain by more equitable distribution of the region’s rich natural resources. Scott’s chapter should remind us that secularism, at least as initially founded by Holyoake, was first and foremost a movement for the amelioration of the material and cultural conditions of the laboring classes. Despite the religious symbolism of its domestic politics and the religious rhetoric of its international affairs, US foreign policy expertise has been essen- Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 18 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida tially secular in orientation. That is, notwithstanding public pronouncements, foreign policy experts have regarded other political actors, especially other nation-states, as behaving according to their putative secular interests. However, as Gregorio Bettiza shows, that too has changed. Bettiza surveys multi-disciplinary developments among foreign policy experts in academia and think tanks since 9/11. Bettiza asserts that talking about religion is no longer considered taboo within the arenas of policy elites in the United States. In fact, religious considerations have not only been integrated into discussions of US foreign policy – they have been emphasized. While secularism is integral to the US Constitution and the political sphere, in international affairs, a sea change has been wrought through (at least a perceived) “desecularization” of the global political landscape. The result is that US foreign policy has been re-conceptualized in post-secular terms. Turning to the public sphere, in a cross-cultural study, Roberta Newman compares the mortuary memorials in Nanjing, China, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania – the Memorial Hall to the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, and the Gettysburg National Military Park, respectively. Newman notes that such monuments were developed as sites for the articulation of a national spirit that encompasses what she terms “spiritual magnetism.” Such memorials speak to the anguish of loss and healing power of remembrance, regardless of global location. Thus, Newman argues, although such sites of pilgrimage may have been intended to have strictly secular-national significance, given the solemnity of their occasions and their recollection of ancestors, it is perhaps inevitable that they have acquired a sacred status. Newman’s chapter thus represents a troubling of the secular/religious binary. In her chapter on the intersections of politics, religion and economics, Chika Watanabe notes similar tensions in contemporary Japan between religion on the one hand and development on the other. She focuses on a Japanese NGO, the organizational product of a Shinto-based new religious group called Ananaikyo. Its founder, Yonosuke Nakano, spoke of the “Great Spirit of the Universe” and “Great Nature” as the source of all life and beings – supposedly as an alternative to traditional religion. Yet, as Japan has struggled with diminished global status in the post-World War II era, Watanabe explains, organizations such as Ananaikyo have altered their mission statements so as to obscure their religious legacies. Although it is eligible to receive government subsidies, in recent years, Ananaikyo has become suspect, its legacy considered “fishy” and “cultish.” A blurring of the religious/secular binary has characterized the politics of development and environmental science. As environmentalism continues to take priority in Japan, Watanabe states that such projects are both hopeful and hazardous, for while promising a sustainable future, the renewal of Shinto politics is reminis- Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 19 cent of the nationalist and imperialist aspirations of the early twentieth century. Watanabe thus reminds us not only of the blurring of the secular and the religious but also the possibilities for the religious to be mobilized for secular ends. Elayne Oliphant examines an unconventional art exhibition space, the College des Bernardins in Central Paris, and its implications for the secular/religious binary. As a traditionally sacred space owned and operated by the Catholic Archdiocese, visitors have been dismayed that such an iconoclastic modern artist as Claudio Parmiggiani was permitted to display his work as the first exhibitor. The response to modern art in the College exemplifies a French public reluctant to relinquish the sacred associations of both Catholic religious spaces like the Cathedral of Notre Dame and museum spaces for traditional art such as Palais de Versailles or the Centre Pompidour. Indeed, they are reluctant to see their churches reduced to museums, especially when the exhibitions housed within them contest notions of what is meant by “art” and “French” culture. Yet, Oliphant argues, the Catholic Church is paradoxically able to produce secular spaces precisely by mobilizing the tension between its religious history in France and the contemporary secularity that has emerged from that history. At stake is a contradiction within secular France such that only Catholicism can be rendered “secular” and “French,” while Islam, in particular, remains hopelessly “religious” and other-than-French. Thus, Oliphant’s study represents a sophisticated analysis of the differential construction of the “religious” by the “secular,” and vice versa. In the United States, the attainment of secular political power has necessarily required the display of religious, particularly Christian, belief. In his chapter, Charles Louis Richter shows how irreligion came to be regarded as anathema to national interests, and thus, by implication, how religion came to be regarded as essential to the same. Richter provides a cogent genealogy of the production of equivalence between North American nativism and an animus toward irreligion. Richter shows how a nineteenth-century public sphere relatively free of religious intolerance was transformed such that a conspicuous religiosity became a shibboleth of national loyalty. In 1898, an epitaph could unreservedly and proudly declare Lewis Knapp “thoroughly infidel to all ancient and modern humbug myths.” Within a few years, however, irreligion would be synonymous with atheism, anarchy, and eventually, communism. Two events inaugurated this sudden shift in public judgment: the death of the “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll, and anarchist/atheist Leon Czolgosz’s assassination of President William McKinley. Not far behind, the specters of fascism, socialism, and communism lurked – “foreign” ideologies perceived as un-American and anti-America. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, a near century-long association of irreligion with foreign, existential threats was extended to Islam. Richter’s Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 20 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida chapter thus demonstrates the sense in which the US brand of political secularism is compatible with a requirement that Christian belief, at least on the part of national political figures, be declared in the public sphere, and that nationalist ideology be draped in quasi-religious symbolics. It is this apparent contradiction between political secularism and religious expression in the public sphere that causes so much confusion where the secularism of the United States is concerned. In the final chapter and one connected primarily with secularism in the US, James McBride draws on Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish to argue that while largely displaced and disarticulated from traditional cult objects, religious consciousness has found a new locus in the commodity. McBride traces the role of advertising in the activation and promotion of commodity fetishism. The implication is that contemporary capitalist society – in the US and throughout the global capitalist marketplace proliferating from it – remains religious in character. Thus, for McBride, secularization, at least as described in the standard secularization thesis, never happened; rather, modernity is marked by re-enchantment through the products of capitalist production and consumption. 2 Secularism: Diagnosis and Prognosis As stated above, this volume takes as its central purpose the investigation of two questions: What is the state of secularism globally, and what are its prospects? Given the collection’s theoretical and historical treatments of secularism and its explorations of secularisms globally, we hope to arrive at least a diagnosis, if not a prognosis, for global secularisms. A diagnosis necessitates the kind of open and sometimes conflicting reports that Part II of this volume represents. A prognosis depends upon predicting the unfolding of circumstances in secularism’s several contexts and assessing its viability within and as part of those circumstances. Thus, a prognosis depends on both sections of this volume. However, while diagnosis may be within our grasp at present, prognosis will be necessarily more difficult. As Jacques Berlinerblau suggests in his Introduction to Secularism on the Edge, “[t]he academic discipline of secularism needs to experience a ‘discovery’ period. Simply put, more data is necessary before conclusions can be drawn.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, having presented and examined additional  Jacques Berlinerblau, “Introduction: Secularism and Its Confusions,” in Secularism on the Edge: Church-state Relations in the United States, France, and Israel, eds. Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, ),  – , at . Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 21 data, we can confirm with a degree of confidence that secularism is indeed “beleaguered” – both theoretically and politically. We point to the chapters in Part II for evidence of this embattlement. With an even greater confidence, however, we can assert that secularism’s prospects are not entirely beyond its control. That is, the fortunes of global secularisms hinge not solely on the cultural, political, regional, and religious environments in which they are embedded. Rather, successes will depend largely upon the efficacious articulation of secularism’s value, both as idea, and as political apparatus. This badly needed articulation, however, appears to be encumbered by conceptual and terminological difficulties owing not only to secularism’s provincial provenance but also to its mobilization by foes and friends alike. Likewise, the theoretical/historical explorations that we have included here are not mere speculative jaunts. As a philosophical idea and a political tool, secularism depends upon well-articulated definitions and demarcations. And the implications of such definitions and demarcations need to be explored. This volume represents, we hope, a contribution to such definitions, demarcations, and explorations. Furthermore, the contexts of secularism will need to be understood in order to address the situation of secularism(s) in particular cases. Such contexts include not only the role(s) that secularism has played historically within various nation states and across regions but also the composition and character of secularism’s historical religious partners and opponents. The sometimes historically biased, divisive, and even oppressive character of secularism in various settings must be acknowledged and attended to. In order to assert a role within and across states, secularism’s fraught relationships –including its tacit endorsement of particular religions (as against others) in various settings – will need to be taken seriously and redressed. Generally, some form of what Habermas calls “post-secularism” will be necessary for the successful articulation and promotion of secularisms. In stating this, we are not recommending the supersession of secularism as such. Nor do we mean to take a normative stance with reference to particular forms of secularism. Rather, we make this observation based upon the broad conditions for secularism in multiple contexts, and based on what we see as the best chances for secularisms globally. Thus, our use of the “post-secular” designation echoes Habermas’s insistence that even for secular ends, recognition and sensitivity is best yielded to religious expression in the public and political spheres. Further, we suggest that the translation of religious language into a secular (or perhaps post-secular) discourse will be a vital component of secularisms in the future. Additionally, we suggest that some types of doctrinal secularism will likely be non-adaptive in many post-secular contexts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM 22 Michael Rectenwald and Rochelle Almeida refer here to the “hard naturalism”¹⁹ that Habermas describes as scientistic secularism, a secularism that attempts to justify itself and its polemical stance with regards to religion strictly on scientific grounds, despite the fact that the claims of the hard naturalist “cannot be scientifically justified”²⁰ as such. Scientistic secularism²¹ anticipates the extirpation of religions and religiosity from public life. And, drawing on reason and the presentation of scientific evidence, it also actively works to accomplish this end. It asserts that the co-existence of the secular and the religious is virtually impossible, or at least highly undesirable. However, as a dialectical other of religion under secularity, scientistic secularism appears to consolidate that which it aims to eliminate. At the same time, it derives its own identity and solidity from the religion that it reifies and subsequently opposes. We consider it an unfortunate circumstance that some western organizations for the promotion of secularism apparently commend forms of hard naturalism or “hard secularism.”²² Basically, we see such “eliminationist”²³ secularisms not only as inefficacious for the promotion of secular ends in many contexts, but also as positively obstructive of the same. Other forms of hard naturalism are not institutionalized so much as proliferated culturally. For example, the “new atheism” is a scientistic, hard secularism that adheres to the standard secularization thesis and that “suffers no [religious] fools.”²⁴ Accusations of Islamophobia, racism, and the cheerleading of western imperialism in the Middle East render the new atheism extremely unlikely to travel far beyond its rather narrow scope in North America, Great Brit-  Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” .  Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society,” .  Massimo Pigliucci, “New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy . ():  – , at : “Scientism here is defined as a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.”  See, for example, “One Law for All,” at http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/. Accessed September , . For the notions of “hard” and “soft” secularism and “hard” and “soft” secularity, see Barry A. Kosmin, “Introduction: Contemporary Secularity and Secularism,” in Barry A. Kosmin, and Ariela Keysar, eds. Secularism & Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives (Hartford, CT: Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, ),  – .  Colin Campell, Toward a Sociology of Irreligion (London: Macmillan, ), .  Razib Khan, “The Selfish Genius, Mind Your Manners Dr. Dawkins!” Discover Magazine (August , ). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp///the-selfish-genius-mindyour-manners-dr-dawkins/. Accessed September , . Brought to you by | Stockholms Universitet Authenticated Download Date | 10/7/15 8:07 PM Introduction: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age 23 ain, and presumably, parts of continental Europe.²⁵ But even within its native environs, the new atheism has been sharply criticized by secular, atheist theorists.²⁶ Actually existing global secularisms thus would do well to reject such forms of secularism as the new atheism and other variants of hard naturalism. Finally, the tendency of global secularisms may be toward softer institutional secularisms within broad post-secular frameworks. For example, Islam has posed a challenge to France’s stringent laicism. Short of secular retrenchment in such settings, we should expect continued religious challenges and eventual accommodations of religious expression and practice. Of course, much will depend on the perception of Europe’s religious others, especially the figuration of Islam by the West more broadly. By and large, however, global secularisms may be becoming more labile, expansive, and pluralistic – resembling, that is, Taylor’s notion of secularity 3 – as they adapt to increasingly broadened and differentiated spheres of religious activity and expression. Perhaps what looks like a crisis of secularism is actually its evolution and diversification. Works Cited Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Balibar, Étienne. Saeculum: Culture, Religion, Idéologie. Paris: Éd. Galilée, 2012. Berger, Peter L. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999. Berlinerblau, Jacques. “Introduction: Secularism and Its Confusions.” In Secularism on the Edge: Church-state Relations in the United States, France, and Israel, edited by Jacques Berlinerblau, Sarah Fainberg, and Aurora Nou, 1 – 16. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Bhargava, Rajeev. “Political Secularism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, edited by John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, 636 – 55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bhargava, Rajeev. “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism.” In The Future of Secularism, edited by T.N. Srinivasan, 20 – 53. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bruce, Steve. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2002. Burchardt, Marian, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Matthias Middell. Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in a Global Age. Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.  Be Scofield, “Reason and Racism in the New Atheist Movement,” Tikkun Daily (January , ), http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily////reason-and-racism-in-the-new-atheistmovement/. 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