Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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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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
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
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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.
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)
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
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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)
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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