With his monumental study A Secular Age, Charles Taylor created a new highpoint in contemporary thought about historical processes of secularization and the relationship between the religious and the non-religious in Western modernity. As a comprehensive treatment of the nature and the philosophy of “the secular” in Latin Christendom, the book has since become a major reference point for students of religion in the public sphere. Sociologist of religion José Casanova goes so far as to describe it as “the best analytical, phenomenological and genealogical account that we have of our modern, secular condition” (Casanova Reference Casanova and Warner2010: 265).
In his magnum opus, Taylor offers a historically grounded account of the emergence of secularity as a contingent process in societies characterized by Western Latin (but explicitly not Eastern Orthodox) Christianity. This process is presented as “the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007: 22). Taylor identifies instead a series of departures from earlier religious life that have allowed older forms to be dissolved or destabilized in favor of new, diverse religious, spiritual, non- and anti-religious options around large questions of meaning of society, the cosmos, and the self.
A Secular Age
Taylor’s explicit focus on what he calls the “North Atlantic world” invites an exploration of secularity in other parts of the world. This is where our volume takes its starting point. Based on an international research cluster of country specialists interested in the nexus between politics and religion in countries of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, this volume comparatively investigates the place of religion and non-religion in countries outside the heartland of Latin Christendom. The case studies focus on the patterns of religion–state relations in the modern era, wherein each has created particular conditions of belief. Taylor identifies three notions of Secularity, of which he is most interested in the third. The first notion, Secularity I, is that of the classic differentiation theory (Casanova Reference Casanova1994): it emerges as political authority, law, science, education, and the economy are emancipated from the influence of religious norms and authority. Secularity II is the notion describing the decline of religious belief and practice, something some sociologists argued was the case in the Europe of the 1960s and which they predicted would be a universal trend. Today, European Secularity II, if religion really has been on the decline there at all, is regarded as the global exception rather than the rule (Berger Reference Berger1999, Davie Reference Davie2002).Footnote 1 But it is a third notion that particularly interests Taylor. Under Secularity III he understands a condition in which it is possible to not believe, and still aspire to live a fulfilled life; Secularity III emerges through “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007: 3). The shift to these new conditions of belief is reached by “a series of new departures,” in which earlier forms of religious life are dissolved and new ones created. The way meaning is perceived has changed: What was once a human’s “porous self” (going against God was not an option because life was lived in a social world peopled by spirits and fellow human beings) has been replaced by a “buffered self”: a self aware of the possibility of disengagement. For non-believers, “the power to reach fullness is within [the human self]” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007: 8). This condition of Secularity III, according to Taylor, developed uniquely in the North Atlantic world, where it prevails today, and he leaves open the question of whether it could be, or has in the meantime been, realized in other parts of the world.Footnote 2
Secularity (in all three conceptions) in turn must be differentiated from secularization and secularism. Secularization denotes the historical process of the emancipation (of the state, law, science,…) from religious authority and norms. Secularism usually denotes the ideology that legitimizes the separation of religious and political authority, the expulsion of religious law from the legal system, and sometimes even the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. The concept “secularism” rarely makes an appearance in A Secular Age, although Taylor has written about it extensively elsewhere.Footnote 3 For social scientists, the relationship between Secularity I (a predominantly political and legal condition) and Secularity III (a predominantly cultural condition) is of greatest interest, as it calls for an exploration of the institutional dynamics behind the changes in the conditions of belief.Footnote 4 A discussion of Secularity I, in turn, cannot in most cases be isolated from a discussion of a particular state’s policy of secularism, though as our chapters illustrate, the relationship between secularism and Secularity I is complex, and the two phenomena often intertwine in counterintuitive ways.
The intellectual stakes of exploring the meaning of religion and the secular outside the West are very high. Few scholars will dispute today the idea of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt Reference 31Eisenstadt2000), and upon further probing many will also embrace the idea that secularity is not a condition unique to the West, but this is where the deep disagreements begin: can one talk of secularity in environments where the notion of religion may be largely incomparable to that born out of Latin Christendom (a monotheistic, exclusivist notion)? Can one talk of secularity in environments where religious identity is something not voluntarily acquired but imposed by state policies or social pressures? Can one talk of comparative secularity at all, when no state today can be characterized as entirely secular, in the sense of enforcing a watertight wall of separation between religion and politics? And how well do conceptions of the secular and secularity travel if even when only applied to the West they are already so fiercely contested at their core?
The interplay between religious and political transformation has been a central theme in the social sciences and humanities, to a point where the sociology of religion was long regarded as the heart of the enterprise of sociological inquiry. As Philip Gorski points out in Chapter 2 of this volume, though the pedigree of secularization theory can be traced back for at least two centuries, its identifier is of more recent origin. Even Durkheim and Weber used the terms sécularisation/laïcisation and Säkularisierung, respectively, only in passing. It is only since the 1940s and 1950s that one can really speak of “secularization theory” as a dedicated research program in the social sciences. While the major premise – that “modernization” goes together with “secularization” – was widely accepted until the late 1970s, scholars disagreed over how to conceptualize secularization and what to regard as its proper indicators. For Bryan Wilson (Reference Wilson1966), secularization denoted the institutional decline of religion, while David Martin saw it manifested in declining levels of membership in religious communities (Martin Reference Martin1978), and Steve Bruce in declining levels and intensities of belief (Bruce 1992). Peter Berger argued in The Sacred Canopy (Berger Reference Berger1967) that a defining feature of secularization was that the plausibility structures behind religious belief were seriously compromised, while Niklas Luhmann (Reference Luhmann1977) spoke of the “privatisation of religious decision-making.” Scholars moreover disagreed over where these trends manifested themselves and whether one should regard them as universal or specific to particular geographies. Thomas Luckmann (Reference Luckmann1967) criticized that the diagnoses of declining levels and intensities of belief were premised on an impoverished notion of religion, and ignorant of the ways in which “invisible religion” continued to play an important role in modern society. David Martin (Reference Martin1978) cast doubt on the assumption of the universal character of religious decline and instead argued in favor of understanding differentiation as the one universal characteristic of secularization in the world. Despite these intense disagreements over what secularization meant precisely and how it manifested itself, secularization theory became the only theory, in the words of a major sociologist of religion “that was able to attain a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences” (Casanova Reference Casanova1994: 17).
A cesura in the debate was José Casanova’s 1994 book, in which the author took stock of how present empirical realities related to various aspects of secularization theory and in which he did the debate an enormous service by disentangling its various sub-theories. Casanova argued that the theory was only one-third defensible (Reference Casanova1994: 17–20): while it was right about the functional and institutional differentiation of the religious from the political, legal, economic, scientific, and other spheres, it had, in his view, been proven wrong in its claims concerning the decline of religious belief and practice, and remained deeply questionable with respect to the inevitable privatization of religion. More recently, in particular in response to an intervention by Talal Asad, Casanova has distanced himself from the one sub-theory he earlier on sought to salvage and conceded that it is almost impossible to heuristically distinguish the privatization from the differentiation thesis.Footnote 5
In the face of the continuing difficulties to analytically capture macro-social dynamics in the relationship between religion and its outside (whether social, political, legal, or economic) in comparative and theoretically meaningful ways, newer research has turned to concentrate on examining boundary formation around the religious and the non-religiousFootnote 6 and to revisit the question of path dependencies and critical junctures in Secularity I which were once David Martin’s primary field of interest. In this volume, we take up these two re-directions: issues of boundary-formation and -activation receive particular attention in the individual chapters, while the conclusion aims to identify broader parallels and divergences in the path dependencies that emerge in subsets of the cases, although no claims are made to propose generalizable theories on paths of secularization (not least because the number of cases does not permit such an endeavor, but also because as country specialists we are hesitant to engage in too crude abstractions).
In the following, we briefly introduce some of Taylor’s main insights about the etiology and ontology of Secularity III, and how our contributors have responded to these. We then outline the case selection and theoretical angle taken in this volume and the special emphases emanating from this choice as compared to the narratives proposed in A Secular Age. We close by drawing attention to four issue areas around religion that have emerged as common themes across the eleven case studies of this volume, often in contrast or in variance with Taylor’s account. We should note that these themes are necessarily synoptic, as we lay out a terrain of topics emerging from the comparative reflection that in our view would merit closer future examination.
The “What,” “Why,” and “How” of Secularity III
The contributors to this volume take Taylor’s work as their point of departure. A Secular Age has been praised for its achievement in fanning out the multiple fora, dilemmas, and processes of secularity, as opposed to positing a simple process of the retreat of religion in Western politics and society in the face of modern science twinned with economic and other changes (Taylor identifies the latter as “subtraction stories”). He argues that any satisfactory theory of secularization must be able to account for both religious belief and unbelief. In orthodox secularization theory, unbelief is tacitly assumed to be the most “natural” or “reasonable” default stance, because science and reason are assumed to stand on the side of secularity. Accordingly, the real task is to account for belief. In A Secular Age, however, Taylor turns the tables on the orthodox approach by arguing that it is unbelief, rather than belief, that is in need of explanation, since historically and across much of the contemporary world religious belief represents something close to a universal norm. What Taylor terms Secularity III is characterized by three phenomena: exclusive humanism (a humanism that does not appeal to transcendence), the availability of meaningful options between belief and unbelief (a belief in the self-sufficiency of human agency and a widening of the range of possible options [Reference Taylor2007: 19]), and the availability of these meaningful options to a large majority of people (not just elites).
Taylor interprets the emergence of Secularity III by addressing three general questions:
i) What does secularity mean today in the North Atlantic world?
ii) Why did secularity arise and come to take the forms it did, and what consequences flow from that?
iii) How did secularity come to command the space it did?
The contributors to this volume address how much, if any, of Taylor’s grand narrative can be found mirrored in the societies they study. They investigate whether the three dimensions of secularity that Taylor distinguishes enable interpretive accounts of the emergence of unbelief as a choice (Secularity III). They do so by tackling Taylor’s “what,” “why,” and “how” questions in the context of a range of cases in countries that have been historically located beyond the ambit of Latin Christendom. In doing so, they find the importance of political factors in almost all cases to be key to understanding the distinctive patterns of secularization and the types of religion–state relations emerging from it. The resultant focus on the political and legal histories of the cases studied leads to a number of contrasts with Taylor’s more phenomenological and genealogical treatment.
Taylor’s answer to the “what” question in the context of Latin Christendom is the emergence of “exclusive humanism,” a humanism that – unlike some earlier humanisms, such as the Christian humanism of Europe’s renaissance – no longer felt the urgency, or even relevance, of appeals to transcendence. Anthropocentric shifts in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century create a “buffered self” which in turn opens the gate toward the possibility of an exclusive humanism: “the buffered identity, capable of disciplined control and benevolence, generated its own sense of dignity and power, its own inner satisfactions, and these could tilt in favor of exclusive humanism” (Reference Taylor2007: 262). Though exclusive humanism heralds the birth of a secular age, religion does not wither away.Footnote 7 In his earlier work on the philosopher and psychologist William James, Taylor (Reference Taylor2002) elaborates on his conception of what has happened to religion in the modern world. Drawing inspiration from Durkheim, he distinguishes between different Durkheimian forms of religion-society relations. “Paleo-Durkheimian” relations can be found in societies where religion is not yet differentiated; fundamentalist movements often champion this type of undifferentiated relations. Second, there are relations where religiosity is transferred to a greater entity, such as ethnic entities (Mark Juergensmeyer’s “ethnic religions”), or class or state entities (Robert Bellah’s “civil religion”), which both are manifestations of “neo-Durkheimism.” But it is the development of the post-Durkheimian age – one based on “expressive individualism” (Taylor Reference Taylor2002: 80) – that Taylor wants to draw attention to. Unlike James, and later Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Taylor does not regard the post-Durkheimian experience of faith as a process of necessary individualization. Even though “the spiritual as such is no longer intrinsically related to society” (Taylor Reference Taylor2002: 102), and though “the new framework has a strongly individualist component, this will not necessarily mean that the content will be individuating. Many people will find themselves joining extremely powerful religious communities, because that’s where many people’s sense of the spiritual will lead them” (Taylor Reference Taylor2002: 112). Although no longer intrinsically related to society, the spiritual can, and often does, then unfold in the framework of a community.
The “what” question is central to our comparative endeavor because the very concepts of religion and its cognates on which the term secularity is parasitic “do not denote anything fixed or essential beyond the meanings that they carry in particular social and cultural contexts” (Beckford Reference Beckford2003: 5). How much in comparative secularization processes should be seen as sui generis – that is, rooted in particular religious and cultural contexts? Several of the contributors highlight the emergence of a neo-Durkheimian age, one where religion is tied to ethnic or national identity, rather than the emergence of an “unbelieving ethos” in the societies they portray. Nearly all contributors point to a core set of twentieth-century state policies and watershed political experiences, including the emergence of nationalism and struggles for independence and democracy, that played a key role in bringing this condition about.
Taylor answers the “why” question for the case of the North Atlantic world with reference to processes of differentiation, which ultimately lead to a plurality of outlooks, religious and non-religious, creating a modern citizen imaginary that “sees us all as coming together to form [a] political entity, to which we all relate in the same way, as equal members” (Taylor Reference Taylor2007: 457). For Taylor, the essence of Secularity III is plurality, characterized by multiple and competing types of belief and unbelief, and the availability of these as meaningful options to a majority, and not just the elite. The emergence of exclusive humanism as a widely available option in the eighteenth century created a new situation of pluralism, a culture fractured between religion and areligion (Reference Taylor2007: 21). The reactions not only to this humanism, but also to the matrix out of which it grew, multiplied the options in all directions. The consequence, for Taylor, of this pluralism and mutual fragilization “will often be a retreat of religion from the public square” (Reference Taylor2007: 532).
Political secularism, he proposes, is best seen as a means of accommodating this pluralism (Taylor Reference Taylor2010). In Taylor’s view, democratic societies should be organized not around a civil religion, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought necessary, but instead around a strong philosophy of civility, enshrining the norms of human rights, equality/nondiscrimination, and democracy (Taylor Reference Taylor2010: 32). For Taylor, when it comes to contemporary democracies, the qualifier “secularist” ought to refer primarily not to bulwarks against religion but to good faith attempts to secure liberty, equality and fraternity of all positions, religious and non-religious (Taylor Reference Taylor2010). But is such a trajectory the only one imaginable? What if, as Talal Asad (Reference Asad and Orsi2011) asks, liberal democracy not only impairs the development of virtues necessary for dealing effectively with global crises, but also continually disrupts the conditions on which Taylor’s Secularity III depends, namely legal and political protection of religious plurality and religious freedom? And what if, paradoxically, it is precisely the continual feeling of disruption, of uncertainty, that feeds both the power of liberal democracy and the promise of liberal reform?
In Taylor’s account, century-long processes of gradual differentiation facilitate the emergence of a widening range of possible options of belief and unbelief, and, as such, Secularity III. These in turn nourish calls for the retreat of religion from public space: Secularity I. The cultural rise of Secularity III’s “conditions of belief” precede and create the original historic possibility for Secularity I’s institutional separation of religion and state in the West. The picture is rather different in most contributions to this volume. While differentiation played a large role in facilitating the emergence of a pluralism of outlooks, both religious and non-religious, it did so often as a consequence of sudden historical breaks, often disruptive and violent, such as the establishment of colonial administrations with all their consequent breaches in notions of authority, meaning, property rights, social organization, cosmology, etc. (Mamdani Reference Mamdani1996). With independence, political elites often created polities in which positions of exclusive humanism or the option to not believe were hardly publicly available. The corollary to Taylor’s narrative as regards the “why” question therefore lies in the central role of the state in shaping conditions of belief. Constitution-crafters and state makers usually tackled the challenge of plurality through institutional arrangements: some privileged one belief system (e.g. Shi‘a Islam in Khomeini’s Iran, Sunni Islam in Zia’s Pakistan, Orthodox and Conservative Judaism in Israel), others excluded religion from several aspects of public life (e.g. India’s Representation of the People Act 1951 excluded religious rhetoric from election campaigns), or any aspect of public life altogether (e.g. laiklik in early republican Turkey and atheism in communist China and the USSR). As can be seen from this classification, exclusivist arrangements occurred in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. In the cases discussed in this volume, they were more the norm than the exception. The emergence of Secularity III or its survival after the inauguration of post-colonial polities was often put in jeopardy by such exclusivist institutional arrangements.
Taylor’s answer to the “how” question (i.e. how Secularity III emerged) spans several histories, philosophies, and methodologies, and eschews the linear path often assumed in some cruder theories of secularization. Taylor’s account is a multi-faceted, historically complex narrative that moves in a series of zig-zag trajectories, where the role of contingency in producing the outcome of Western Christianity’s “Drive to Reform” is very important. The contributors share Taylor’s eschewal of a crude linear explanation and instead draw on Taylor to recognize and explain the contingencies in their specific country-contexts. As de-colonization, war or revolution created fundamental breaks in nearly all cases presented here regarding how religion and the state relate, Taylor’s grand narrative, stretching over several centuries, shrinks to a matter of decades in many of the cases, where the transitions of a porous to a buffered self, of meaning that is exogenous to one that is endogenous to the world, often took place within parts of just one, the twentieth, century. The contributors share Taylor’s strong emphasis on historical contingency, but their cases underline more forcefully than Taylor does for his case of Latin Christendom the political construction of religion which is partly shaped by the encounter with the West and Western notions of religion, and its subsequent political institutionalization in the second half of the 20th century.
Three variations to Taylor’s understanding of the trajectory of secularization in Latin Christendom stand out compared to the countries studied in this volume. First, in most case studies presented here, religion or patterns of practice and belief held in reference to more-than-human powers more often than not pervade the fabric of social life today, a fact also noted by Taylor as the contrast between the present-day North Atlantic and many other parts of the world. In the recent histories of these countries, the intensity of battles between belief systems led to partition in some (India and Pakistan in 1947), revolution in others (an ostensibly anti-religious revolution in Russia in 1917, and an ostensibly religious one in Iran in 1979), and coexistence in yet others (pancasila in post-1945 Indonesia). Second, the drive to reform internal to religious traditions has been highly impacted, in many ways limited, by political factors in the cases studied here. In some societies, elites have purposively harnessed religion to create a collective national identity; in others, religion was perceived as antithetical to modernization with the consequence that religious thought was marginalized from the public sphere and withdrawn from public deliberation. The link between authoritarian rule and its religious legitimation in Morocco, Iran, and Pakistan, for example, has meant that internal reform is viewed with suspicion (and indeed as undesirable) by most political elites as it invariably would bring the authoritarian nature of state-society relations into focus. The strong link between the majority religion and the state in Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Morocco, and Russia has moreover reinforced cohesion inside both the majority and minority religions of these societies and stifled the public expression of the pluralism in beliefs and practices internal to these religious communities. Third, the encounter with the West has in most cases created certain path dependencies in terms of how religion is understood and regulated. Very often, post-colonial administrations continued to use the very institutional mechanisms which colonial or imperial administrations had set up to regulate religious practice, religious law, religious space, and religious education. Conceptions of religion in colonial books of law carried over into the post-colonial period. Thus, what is evident from all country studies, whether democratic or not, is the impulse of the state to tame, suppress, co-opt, or mold religion in the name of “public order.”
Table 1.1 Differences between Taylor’s approach and the approach taken in this volume
Beyond the West
The chapter case studies focus on China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Israel. In an attempt to transcend dichotomies of West and non-West, which often boil down to elaborations on Christian–Muslim or West–East contrasts, case studies have been selected that ensure diversity in several respects: First, the chapters discuss societies where various types of belief systems dominate. Rather than featuring only one or two Muslim cases, on the basis of which broad conclusions about the “Muslim world” are then formulated, the collection includes a diversity of several case studies from the Muslim world, both Arab and non-Arab, from the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, and with considerable intra-Islamic diversity where variously Sunni, Shiʿa, and Sufi currents dominate. The volume also contains a chapter on Israel, which as the only predominantly Jewish country has received less attention in comparative studies of secularity than it should. Furthermore, the collection includes a case of that significant part of Christianity which Taylor omits, that is Eastern/Orthodox Christianity, and as such, the country that has most influenced the development of religion in the twentieth century Orthodox Christian world: Russia. Finally, with discussions of societies whose majorities identify themselves as non-affiliated and/or Taoist/Confucian (China), Buddhist-Shinto (Japan), and Hindu (India), the volume includes cases with predominantly poly- and nontheistic cultures.Footnote 8
Second, the countries studied differ in their arrangements for the relationship between religion and law; Israel, India, and the Muslim states place a strong emphasis on religious law in some or all domains, while in China, Japan, and Russia, questions about the jurisdiction of religious law play little part in the secularization debate.
Third, the country cases vary in terms of political contestation and public participation: while some governments, such as in communist China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, are thoroughly authoritarian and largely shielded from public pressure and accountability, others are long-standing democracies, such as contemporary Japan and India, where questions of religious freedom and religious identity may determine electoral outcomes.
Thus, the cases brought together in this volume showcase diversity in three dimensions: religious makeup of the population, the status of religious law, and the nature of the political regime.
What becomes apparent when comparing the encounters between religion and state across a variety of cases is the importance of capturing the fact that the contact surface religions offer to their regulation by the state differs markedly from case to case in scope and nature. One can hardly deny that with every act of state interference into religious belief and practice, violence is done to religion, but the scope and intensity of such acts of violence may differ significantly. For example, in most Muslim societies, it was Islamic law that experienced profound interference by the twentieth-century state, while in Orthodox Russia, it was control over church property and appointments. In Confucian China, in turn, law and property issues were far less prevalent as points of contention between state and religious leaders by comparison with the issue of education. Accordingly, comparative accounts of Secularity III need to consider the differences in the contact surface between a given religious tradition and the state, and the conflicts that emerge from them. We aim to do so with reference to the concept of differential burdening.
Burdening Religion
The concept we have found to be most useful in our comparative endeavor is that of “differential burdening,” a term adopted from US Supreme Court jurisprudence on free exercise, which captures the burden imposed through laws, regulations, court decisions, and practices by the state when regulating religion (e.g. Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398). This concept allows us to assess the extent to which a given religion (and religious beliefs) can(not) function freely, and also the space allowed for unbelief. Transposed to the sociology of religion, regulating a religion, and thereby privileging certain groups and dis-privileging others, is seen as burdening it (Finke). Privileging necessarily entails interfering with religious beliefs and practices, and thereby effectively endorsing some tenets and practices over others. Our case studies confirm the notion that state interference in religion can usefully be thought of as burdening the religious group concerned, even where the act is one of privileging: In a number of states discussed in this volume, the majority religion is ostensibly privileged by the state, in that state agencies finance places of religious worship, the salaries of religious dignitaries, and sometimes even the application of religious law. But this type of privileging also implies that formerly plural notions of religious law are reduced to one positive state-sanctioned law (e.g. inter alia, in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Morocco, and Pakistan), that religious dignitaries are trained in one state-sanctioned curriculum where formerly competing societal centers of learning offered a greater variety of curricula and interpretations (e.g. Turkey), and that places of worship follow state-sanctioned requirements (e.g. Buddhist temples in Japan). As the emerging modern state has increasingly interfered with religious life over the course of the twentieth century, all religions, including the majority religion, are being burdened. The extent to which they are depends in part on what can be called the “contact surface” they offer to their regulation by the state.
If we examine the processes of differentiation through the constitutional, legal, and bureaucratic apparatuses in our cases, pluralism is often contained by the state’s intervention in religious affairs. The state draws boundaries in location and permeability by limiting and circumscribing the multiplicity of beliefs (and unbelief) that can exist in the public sphere.
The contributors discuss how state projects of secularism and the concomitant burdening of religion had an impact on the development of secularity in those societies. In some, the state project burdened religion as such by controlling most aspects of its exercise to such an extent that free exercise was prejudiced, as was pluralism. In others, the state, through laws and public policies, burdened the majority religion while conceding more autonomy to minority religions.
Responding to A Secular Age
The challenge for social scientists wishing to engage with Taylor’s scholarship is that the explicit primary concerns of A Secular Age are not the institutional politics of religion and secularity, but what he calls “the conditions of belief, practice and doubt.” Because of this, recent volumes that have used A Secular Age as a major reference point for debating secularity and secularization have generally centered on philosophical and methodological discussion (Warner et al. Reference Warner, Van Antwerpen and Calhoun2010, Calhoun et al. Reference Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen2011) or, where they have broached important issues related to Secularity I, have remained broadly within similar geographical confines (e.g. Rosenfeld and Mancini 2015). Indeed, much of the recent relevant scholarship on politics and the secular continues to take the USA or other Western countries as the paradigm (exceptions are Burchardt et al. (Reference Burchardt, Wohlrab-Sahr and Middell2015) and Zemmin et al. (Reference Zemmin, Jager and Vanheeswijck2016)).Footnote 9 In depth case studies on religion and politics in non-Western cases tend to present rich country-specific ethnographic data but usually make little attempt to place the cases examined in a common comparative analytical frame. Other comparative works, such as Katznelson and Stedman Jones (Reference Katznelson and Jones2010) and Bilgrami (Reference Bilgrami2016), focus on questions of political philosophy and religious reform. While theirs are primarily contributions to comparative political theory and social thought, with Katznelson and Stedman Jones’ (Reference Katznelson and Jones2010) especially to the literature on toleration, our book has an institutional focus that highlights the relationship between Secularities I and III, and mostly so with a narrower focus on the second part of the twentieth century. The chapters in this volume focus on the patterns and singularities of the role of religion in public life and the respective states’ methods of addressing plurality and difference across a large geographical range, encompassing China, Japan, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Israel. As elaborated below, a commitment to a shared analytical framework relying on Taylor’s methodology of historically grounded analysis is combined with analytical tools emanating from the new institutionalist literature highlighted in Philip Gorski’s contribution.
Principal Themes of the Volume
The Legacies of Vision and Di-Vision
In considering the relevance of Taylor’s analysis for understanding the presence or absence of Secularity III beyond the West, the collective focus of this volume lies on the relationship between the diverse “conditions of belief” (Secularity III) and the distinctive political and legal traditions with which they appear to be associated, including formal public institutions and spaces (Secularity I). This focus enables us to test the intuition that Taylor’s work may underemphasize the significance of legal, political, and other factors in framing and influencing the conditions of belief that he foregrounds in his account. Each of the chapters makes a point of seeking to understand the role played by societal, economic, and political actors in channeling, curbing, and molding conditions of belief.
In the first chapter, Philip Gorski situates Taylor’s main contribution to the secularization debate in his development of the notion of Secularity III. He identifies conceptual tools in the sociology of religion that can complement Taylor’s by facilitating sociological rather than philosophical analysis. Drawing on Taylor, Niklas Luhmann, and Pierre Bourdieu, Gorski offers typologies to assist in the study of the relationships between Secularities I and III by distinguishing between various systems of Secularity I. For instance, his typologies help to point out why American secularism differs from Indian secularism, or how Turkish laiklik ought to be distinguished from French laïcité (compare also Künkler and Madeley Reference Künkler and Madeley2014). Gorski further proposes a set of sensitizing concepts to help give causal accounts for the type of secular settlements to religious conflicts he observed. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Gorski posits that one can also see secular settlements as the result of “classification struggles” over the dominant “principle of vision and di-vision” that governs relations between the religious and political fields: segmentary, functional, stratificatory, and center/periphery divisions. On the basis of the three Taylorian competing goods of liberty, equality, and fraternity (cp. Taylor’s concept of secularism), and Bourdieu’s classification struggles, Gorski then outlines four archetypal patterns of Secularity I: consociationalism, religious nationalism, radical secularism, and liberal secularism.
Drawing on Gorski’s suggestion for the “translation” of Taylor’s grand narrative into sociological theory by way of complementing the latter’s analytical tools with those of other scholars, the subsequent chapters each present an account of particular secularization trends and processes outside the West. The combination of global scope and a commitment to a shared analytical framework relying on Taylor’s methodology of historically grounded analysis, together with Gorski’s conceptual addenda, constitutes the book’s principal claim to fill a niche in the study of comparative secularization. In assessing how political and legal structures affect the conditions of religious belief and practice, the chapters highlight four major themes, which in our reading distinguish our case studies from Taylor’s unit of analysis.
As we shall see, the overdetermining factor – in creating a major role for the state in formulating what religion is, and is not, and often intertwining it with loyalty to the nation – seems to be the experiences of colonialism and imperialism, and their legacies. Subsequent efforts by state elites and other actors to conceptualize and mark out the domains of the secular and the religious were shaped to a great extent by the encounter with the colonial powers and their religions, that is in most cases different forms of Christianity. The “imperial” encounter between Western powers and the rest of the world had a profound impact on virtually all traditions involved. During the half-millennium on which Taylor’s narrative concentrates, the Latin Christian West successfully imposed elements of itself on the rest of the world by means of its great maritime empires, so spreading its influence even where its missionaries failed to convert those of other traditions to one or another form of Western Christianity. Many traditions were destroyed and supplanted, others weakened, and transformed in different ways, while yet others appeared to emerge paradoxically reinforced from the encounter – but none remained unaffected.
Notions of the “Secular” and the “Religious”
The first theme emerging from the case studies is a questioning of the applicability of notions of the secular and the religious in some of the societies under review. What is “secular” depends to a large extent on what is perceived as “religious,” and vice versa (Duara Reference Duara and Yang2008; van der Veer Reference 32Van der Veer, Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen2011). Zhe Ji highlights the fact that pluralism, where faith is but one position among many, is an old story in China, rather than a particularly modern condition of belief. Laypersons could believe in and practice the available teachings in a pluralistic way: there was no sense of a clear-cut and exclusive religious identity according to established criteria of orthodoxy. Religion was conceived not in terms of the object or content of belief, but rather by the manner in which beliefs and practices are systematically stimulated, justified, maintained, and transmitted. In fact, both religion and education were conceptualized in traditional China by the same term: jiao; with no explicit semantic distinction between them. Accordingly, Ji argues, to this day “education” retains a primacy in Chinese notions of the sacred.
In Japan as well as in China, translated trade treaties with Western (and Christian) imperial powers introduced a Western-influenced concept of religion into the local lexicon. Simultaneously, as Helen Hardacre points out, the Japanese government enacted draconian policies against Buddhism, resulting in the latter’s loss of its former role in governance. The Buddhist authorities reacted with reform measures to conform the tradition to governmental notions of what religion proper ought to be, recasting the Buddhist belief system, and positioning it within the private sphere. It would be a mistake, suggests Hardacre, to imagine that the thinking of the ordinary, non-elite Japanese (other than Hidden Christians) was structured by a dichotomy between belief and unbelief. Ordinary people seem generally to have regarded the Buddhist clergy with respect, but the clergy was not called upon to demonstrate doctrinal orthodoxy and commitment as part of its temple affiliation. Not only was subscription to particular beliefs not axiomatic in Japan; belief or unbelief was not made a central issue. Instead, fulfilling the obligations of temple affiliation and showing deference to authority appear to have been key. Those in authority used Buddhism to regulate the populace, but for the most part did not regard it as binding on themselves. Thus, Hardacre shows, subordination of religion to the state meant that religious life could easily – though not inevitably – become formalistic, a matter of performance rather than an expression of personal conviction.
The lack of a clear dichotomy between belief and unbelief is also relevant to understanding the notion of “Hinduism” in India. Shylashri Shankar uses Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary” to highlight the interplay between three separate imaginaries of Hinduism – as a religion, a culture, and an ancient order – in the constitution and in subsequent interpretations by the apex court. These three partly competing and partly complementary imaginaries of Hinduism have generated a great deal of ambiguity about what constitutes “religion,” “religious rhetoric,” and “secularism” in contemporary India. In A Secular Age, Taylor differentiates between the social imaginary and social theory. While theory is often the possession of a small minority, the social imaginary is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. For Taylor, “imaginary” refers to the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, in images, stories, legends, etc. It is that common understanding which makes possible common practices (Reference Taylor2007:171–172) and therefore belongs to the background understanding of the normal expectations people have toward one another. Shankar suggests that the imaginaries of Hinduism as a culture and as an ancient order are forms of lived experience which pertain to a person regardless of whether she or he is a believer or not. The immanent frame of the imaginary of someone like the Brahmin savant who views Hinduism as an ancient order or someone who talks about “Indian culture” would not include Taylor’s trio of secularities but could fit into Taylor’s notion of transcendence in Secularity III. This ambiguity has both complicated the state’s efforts to manage the diversity of beliefs and aggravated the crisis of secularism in India. But by creating a “zone of ambiguity” for the state, it has prevented the state from being torn apart in the fierce battles between majority and minority religions and between co-religionists.
These considerations make it difficult in China, India, or Japan to draw the boundaries between the “religious” and the non-religious. Notably, all three have no dominant monotheistic tradition. In all the other cases included, whether shaped by Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, or Islam, conflict lines revolve more around the borders and gray areas of particular religions than around definitions of religion itself.
The “Secular” and the “Religious” According to Whom?
Related to the question of what constitutes religion and its absence is the question of who it is who draws the boundaries. Taylor observes, “secular societies are not just mankind minus the religion … They produce not unillusioned individuals who see the facts of existence nakedly, but people constituted by a distinct set of ethical goods, temporal frameworks, and practical contexts” (Warner et al. Reference Warner, Van Antwerpen and Calhoun2010: 25). In the cases studied here, this set of ethical goods, temporal frameworks, and practical contexts is strongly conditioned by state policies – of what is recognized as religion and what is not, which ethical goods are stressed in public education and which ones are not, and how the state defines practices as public, thereby differentiating between private and public practices (by constructing and maintaining places of worship, establishing public religious holidays, etc.). As such, models of Secularity I are distinctively molded by political elites, the policies they devise, and the regulations they apply. Taylor’s pointing to Secularity I as a project shaped by elites is a concern for several of the contributors. In Japan and Russia, state projects aimed at molding the secular citizen, while in Indonesia and Morocco the model citizen was a religious one. The cases of Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and India combine aspects of both, oscillating between more religious and more secular notions of citizenship. The case of Iran exhibits both models in subsequent fashion with the 1979 revolution representing the cesura between the two.
In Japan, Helen Hardacre suggests, it was in the Meiji Period (1868–1912) when secularity came to dominate public discourse. Recasting well-known aspects of modern Japanese history and religion in the light of Taylor’s account, she shows that Japan may be seen as an early example of an elite-driven, westernizing, secularizing project undertaken in reaction against Western imperialism, preceding similar developments (“defensive developmentalism”) in Turkey, Iran, India, Indonesia, and China. Challenging the view once dominant in Japan and elsewhere that secularity was a largely neutral by-product of modernization, her chapter reveals how debates among elites shaped the bureaucratic means through which the populace would be indoctrinated with secular morality.
For Russia, John Madeley discusses the paradoxically abortive attempt by Soviet elites to bring about the birth of secularity “as if by means of a virtual caesarian procedure.” In January 1918, the revolutionary government issued a Decree on the Separation of the State from the Church and the Church from the School. The decree deprived the Russian Church of legal personality, thereby rendering it incapable of holding property in its own right.
In a way, the opposite project of an elite-driven formation of the religious and secular was at work in Indonesia. Mirjam Künkler shows how, in the post-independence period, state elites channeled their efforts toward creating not the secular but the “religious citizen” of Indonesia, the manusia agama. From the beginning of the constitutional era in 1945, the state was defined as a religious rather than a secular state, albeit without specifying a particular religion. To promote the religious citizen without specifying the religion was a way to transcend inter-religious divisions and to create a religious morality that was not uniquely Islamic, Hindu, or Christian. In contrast to the secular nation-building project of Japan, Indonesian nation-building involved the state promotion of a pan-religious ethos, the so-called pancasila, as well as the molding of the country’s major mono- and polytheist religions in its light. The Ministry of Religion became the pivotal player in imposing these reforms. Religions that did not adapt were denied recognition, and their adherents lost the rights of full citizenship as a result. To profess one of the state-recognized religions was made a requirement for citizenship; non-religion, or Secularity III (where religion and non-religion are both viable options), was and is still today not a legal possibility in Indonesia.
The project of political elites forming a particular religious, rather than secularized, public sphere is also evident in Morocco’s post-colonial history. Jonathan Wyrtzen discusses how the Moroccan monarchy, which claims the politico-religious title “Commander of the Faithful,” has attempted to monopolize public religion since independence in 1956. Islam is recognized constitutionally as the official state religion, and the palace has reinforced the public presence of Islam, partly in order to pre-empt an Islamist challenge.
Israel, Turkey, Egypt, and India provide more mixed systems. Here, too, state elites took a leading role in delineating the public conception of religion, but state policies were not always aimed at reinforcing religious over secular notions of citizenship, or vice versa.
While the Israeli state formally recognizes thirteen non-Jewish religions, it grants official status to only one particular definition of Orthodox Judaism for purposes of conversion and marriage. The state thus continues to reject alternative religious (e.g. Reform and Conservative) or secular definitions of “who is a Jew.” Moreover, within the territory of Israel, the state recognizes conversion into Orthodox Judaism only, while recognizing any type of conversion (e.g. Reform/Conservative) made abroad. As Hanna Lerner shows in her chapter, the problem is particularly acute for 300,000 immigrant Jews from the former Soviet Union. The Orthodox rabbinate, which enjoys exclusive authority in matters of Jewish marriage and divorce, does not recognize these immigrants as Jews, thereby denying them any chance of lawful marriage.
Kemal Atatürk went further than leaders in most other Muslim-majority states in monopolizing for the state the right to define religion and to privilege specific Islamic teachings over others. Unlike Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, and Pakistan, whose courts continue to recognize Islamic law in some areas, Mustafa Kemal entirely eradicated religious law after the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and erected a wholly secular legal system based on the French model. Religious education was prohibited for several years, as were religious political parties and organizations. After the 1950s, religion was gradually permitted to re-enter the public sphere, but only on state terms. Until today, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (diyanet) trains and certifies Islamic preachers and determines the content of sermons. Islam can be studied only in state schools, and all personnel of the mosques, including preachers, are civil servants. Alevism, which as much as 20 percent of the Turkish population may profess, remains unrecognized by the state and, as such, is discriminated against. Islam, as a state-defined religion, only includes Sunni Islam, though beyond the state’s purview alternative forms of Islam continue to be practiced.
Egypt’s history, too, exhibits an oscillation between religious and secular notions of citizenship and sometimes a combination of policies furthering both at the same time. Gudrun Krämer points out that Ottoman modernizer Muhammad Ali who introduced European legal codes without abolishing religious ones, sought to produce pious subjects, not secular ones. After independence, the state projected itself as the guardian of Egyptian identity, which would include the religions of the demographic majority and minority. Since the 1970s, the state elevated Islam to a source of law and promoted public professions of Islamic piety while at the same time invoking the concept of secularism to repress and control political Islam.
In India, some political elites worked to secularize the public sphere while others used religious motifs to “Hinduize” it. The colonial administration used the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian elites to codify personal law regimes. These laws continued to operate after independence, but the scope of religious freedom was carved out mainly by the judiciary, and in a few instances by the democratically elected parliament (for Hindu personal law) as well as civil society-religious group discussions (Christian personal law). The approach of Jawaharlal Nehru (the first Prime Minister of independent India), which incorporated a normative project of secularization into the constitution and removed religion from politics, would contain the hope of moving from Secularity I to III. But the Hindu nationalists, who rose to power in the 1990s, aimed to use religious motifs to win elections. The courts, as Shylashri Shankar points out, were drawn into these battles and through their judgments further muddled the notions of secularity and religion.
The Iranian case exhibits best the transition between both extremes. During the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), the Iranian case resembled the Turkish and to some extent Russian cases, insofar as the clergy was deprived of its monopoly over education and jurisprudence. Institutions of Shiite Islam were pushed out of the public sphere and relegated to caring for the hereafter, without any remaining necessity of contact between the citizen and the clergy. Yet in contrast to the Russian case, the Pahlavi secularization policies were lost on the larger society; rigorous enforcement of secular policies legitimized the Shiite clergy and inspired a revival of religious practice. In 1979, social mobilization toppled the secularist monarchy and reversed the policies of differentiation by binding political and religious authority. What was once relegated to the private sphere was brought back into the public realm, specifically religious law, religious education, and religious authority. What remained the same, as Nader Hashemi shows, was that even after the 1979 revolution, state policy toward religion was driven by an elite that imposed its notions of “religious” and “secular” onto the populace.
Secularity, Religion, and Nationalism
The third theme is the link between secularity and nationalism in a state’s conceptualization of the place of religion in public life. In Indonesia and India, the national project soon after independence became contrasted in the public imagination with the majority religion; nationalism therefore also stood for equality of the citizenry irrespective of religious identity – it served as an ideology to integrate a culturally and religiously diverse society. In other countries, such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Morocco, the national project in the 1950s and 1960s became coterminous with the identification of the nation with the majority religion. In Israel and Pakistan, the link between the nation and religion was particularly strong as both consolidating states defined themselves against, and experienced wars with, neighbors of other religious backgrounds. In Japan, the link between religion and the nation was strong, too, although after 1945 it was no longer only the majority religion which was mobilized in favor of allegiance to the nation. From this comparative vantage point, India and Indonesia stand out for formulating decidedly inclusivist notions of the nation meant to embrace religious diversity. Some authors have pointed to the strong impression Indonesia’s pancasila had on Nehru in this regard (Six Reference Six2017: 39).
In Indonesia, upon the country’s independence in 1945, constitutional debates circled around the question of the proper place of Islam in the emerging state. Against calls for the introduction of Islamic law, opponents objected that the proclamation of an Islamic state would cause the Christian-majority islands in the East to secede. Over the years, the latter defined themselves as the “nationalists” and branded their opponents as “Islamists.” Nationalism became linked to pancasila, the pan-religious ideology conceived by the country’s first president, Sukarno. Although a rapprochement between Islamic elites and the state occurred during the last years of Suharto’s presidency, the national project has to this day been defined as an inclusive project under which Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists have equal rights.
In India as well, a major concern for the Constituent Assembly was how to douse the flames of post-Partition strife between Hindus and Muslims. The notion of a Hindu India was rejected by the framers and while the debates recognized the need to separate those aspects of religious dissentions that could demolish democratic stability, there was little agreement on how to achieve this objective. Some saw a secular state as the separation of state and church (religion would not be permitted in the public sphere). Others saw it as neutrality of the state toward religion, which could function in the public sphere. A third view maintained that while the state would treat all religions equally, the state had a duty to reform religious practices in line with principles of equality and justice (what Rajeev Bhargava [Reference Bhargava1998] refers to as “principled distance”). The constitution ultimately did not define the terms “Hindu,” “religion,” “secular,” and “minorities,” and left it to the courts and legislature to do so. Hindu nationalists continued to call for “Hindu India” over the decades, but others challenged this view and advocated a “secular” India.
In Turkey, religion, modernization, and the national project were closely interwoven early in the republic. With the end of the caliphate in 1924, Istanbul ceased to function as the center of a transnational Islam, and a new, national kind of Islam was conceived. This new Islam would complement rather than hinder Atatürk’s modernization vision. As Aslı Bâli shows, far from conceiving nationalism as an anti-religious project, Kemal Atatürk spent the better part of his tenure developing a particular kind of state-sponsored Islam that could be put in the service of the national project.
In Iran, ideas of national self-definition and independence from the West nourished the 1979 revolution. Revolutionaries sought to regain the sovereignty they believed their nation had lost through the Shah’s military and economic dependence on the United States and Britain in particular. In 1963, the Iranian government granted legal immunity to US citizens within the country, sparking a series of protests and demonstrations coordinated by the Shiite clergy through their tight religious and educational networks. Mosques became rallying places, and in 1979 they provided sanctuaries from the Shah’s police and military. The Iranian case also points to the tension between nationalism and transnationalism in the Muslim world. Islam can be a potent force for national unification and mobilization, but its universalist message and global interconnectedness can also undermine nationalist movements. The post-revolutionary Iranian elite thus tried hard to portray the 1979 revolution not as an Iranian or Shiite revolution, but as an Islamic revolution representative of a more universal struggle which many Muslim societies at that time were fighting against despotism, dependency, and injustice. It is in this light that contemporary Iranian elites claim the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world are part of the same struggle against secular despotism that the 1979 Iranian revolution established.
In Morocco, Arabic-speaking elites struggling against colonialism defined the nation as Arab-Islamic. For these nationalists, policies of Arabization of the citizenry and the Islamization of the legal code were the chief instruments of nation-building. After independence, the Arabic triptych “Allah [God], al-Watan [the Nation], and al-Malik [the King]” was adopted in the constitution as the national motto. Over the past five decades of independence, the monarchy has defined Moroccan national identity, portraying itself as the embodiment of the united nation. Since 2001, King Mohamed VI has promoted pluralism and tolerance, diluting the Arab-Islamic character of national identity. The state now recognizes its own Arab and Berber heritages (in addition to secondary Saharan-Hassanic, African, Jewish, Andalusian, and Mediterranean influences). In terms of religion, this shift has involved a continued emphasis on Islam as a shared Moroccan identity, but also the promotion of tolerance and mutual understanding among faiths in Morocco.
Gudrun Krämer points out that the Egyptian resistance to Ottoman rule, and from 1882 on British colonialism, mobilized both secular and religious sentiments. The union between the crescent and the cross, and between Egyptian nationalism and religion remained supple and ambiguous in the inter-war period.
In the Israeli and the Pakistani contexts, religion became particularly strongly intertwined with nationalism, as the concept of the nation here hinges on the continuing centrality of Jewish and Muslim identity, respectively, for its citizens. In both states, symbols, metaphors, and the rhetoric of religion are often blended with national tropes meant to teach citizens that the survival of the nation’s religion depends on the survival of the state. The political adversary is conceived also as a religious adversary. Disagreements about whether Judaism is an ethnic, national, or religious identity infuse the debates that Hanna Lerner analyzes in her chapter on Israel.
In the case of Pakistan, the ulama have reinvented themselves as the “custodians” of true Islam in light of the fact that the Sunni authorities of the Middle East have, so they argue, been corrupted by state elites, and Middle Eastern Islam has been “diluted” by politically driven reinterpretation projects. The survival of the religious tradition, so the argument goes, therefore requires the continued existence of Pakistan and the safe haven it grants to its scholars and religious leaders. Christophe Jaffrelot outlines how the intelligentsia defined religion as a collective identity in order to create a unified, modern citizenry. The shift from religious belief to religious identity – also emphasized in Nader Hashemi’s chapter on Iran – is a variant of the secularization process that eventuated in an alternative form of secularity not captured in Taylor’s conceptualization. Jaffrelot terms this “Secularity IV,” a condition where religion has become a signifier for ethno-national identities. Secularity IV is epitomized by the “Pakistan movement,” an ethno-religious nationalist movement fusing Islam with language identity. In Israel, similar arguments can be heard by Orthodox religious authorities who deem Judaism impossible without Jewish control over the principal religious sites.
In Japan, the relationship between Shinto and the sacralization of the emperor and the nation was particularly strong during the Meiji restauration, but even after 1945 religion was often put into the service of mobilizing imperial loyalties on behalf of modern nation-building. Village headmen and wealthy local gentry regularly sponsored lectures for the peasantry by Confucian teachers, popular Shinto preachers, and (late in the period) some of the leaders of the lay-centered new religious movements of the mid-nineteenth century. Authorities hoped to shore up allegiance to the social order by calling on preachers of all stripes to extol the conventional morality of filial piety, loyalty to the lord, modesty, frugality, and diligence.
Imperialism and Other Encounters with the West
The fourth common theme emanating from the case studies pertains to how the historical encounter between the West and other parts of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa shaped the present struggles over modernity and the process of secularization. In all case studies, this encounter appears to be the single most important factor in structuring later public conceptions of religion and its desired role in the public.
South Asia’s encounter with the West and its passage through colonialism resulted in an attempt to emulate Western science and rationalism, but only by a miniscule intellectual elite. In India, three elements are identified as central to the role played by Europeans in the construction of Hinduism as a religion: a Western Christian concept of religion, the idea that Indian religions formed one pan-Indian religion, and the needs of the colonial enterprise (Bloch et al. 2010: 7). These moves to create a unified religion in India were closely linked to the legal codification of the colonial subject (Iqtidar Reference Iqtidar2011), and as Shankar shows, were retained after independence in the country’s constitution and laws, thus significantly shaping the new social imaginaries of how religion and non-religion are experienced by India’s diverse communities.
In the chapter on Morocco, Wyrtzen examines how the French imposition of a protectorate form of colonial rule from 1912 to 1956 established conditions for a specific form of “Moroccan secularity” through processes of pluralization and differentiation at the political, economic, and social levels that continued into the post-independence era. French rule introduced a special form of Secularity I, dividing between a modern bureaucratic and traditional state. Religion was used to legitimate the nominal maintenance of the spiritual and political sovereignty of the Sultan, but, at a practical level, Islam’s public role was prescribed within the confines of the newly created ministry of religious affairs (awqaf or habous). The colonial state also partly reified pre-existing ethnic and religious classifications, and partly created these anew, by imposing separate judicial, educational, and administrative structures for Arabs, Berbers, and Jews. In the aftermath of constitutional reforms initiated in response to the Arab Spring protests in 2011, colonial legacies and Western exemplars have been relevant in ongoing debates about the outlines and boundaries of Moroccan secularity with regards to religious freedom, women’s rights, ethno-pluralism, and the separation of powers between the monarchy and the parliament.
In Indonesia, the efforts by the post-independence governments to unify the various legal systems that had differentiated the colonial subject population based on ethnicity and religion were primarily driven by the desire to counter the colonial pluri-legal framework and instead provide “one law for all.” Those favoring a law blind to religious identity were able to associate in the public imagination the advocates of Islamic law with a “colonial mindset,” re-producing colonial divisions in the law instead of embracing an inclusive notion of the people irrespective of religious background. Institutionally, too, post-independence religion–state relations were shaped by imperial and colonial legacies: The bureaucratic basis laid during the Japanese occupation for the state regulation of religious affairs evolved into the key institution of managing religion after independence, the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
Japan’s first encounter with secularity, argues Hardacre, was inseparable from mid-nineteenth-century Western imperialism. The Japanese were acutely aware of China’s degradation and defeat in the Opium Wars, and they saw clearly that if they failed to strengthen Japan, Western powers would colonize the country.
In each of the case studies, the relationship between the process of secularization and that society’s encounters with the West are embedded in and exemplified by the respective local debates about modernity.
Conclusion
In the Devil’s Dictionary, the American satirist Ambrose Bierce describes religion as “a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable” (Reference Bierce2001: 266). The contributors to this volume have attempted to make the unknowable a little less inscrutable. What emerges from the analysis is the multiplicity of processes and the variations in Secularity I that make “secular regimes” or “secular states” – so often an underlying concept in the humanities and social sciences – problematic and reductionist terms. If anything, the case studies assembled here speak to “multiple secularities” or “varieties of the secular,” thus continuing the nuancing of the term “secularization” used in Katznelson and Stedman Jones’s volume (Reference Katznelson and Jones2010). While the social sciences have started to think of Secularity I as a continuum rather than some fixed quantity, determined by the level of regulation of religion by the state (Fox Reference Fox2008), these case studies illustrate the need for additional heuristic dimensions able to capture the impact on religion of state policies. This effect differs markedly across different civilizational contexts, depending on the realms regulated by religious authorities prior to the emergence of the modern state. Accordingly, in Islam it is religious law that experiences profound interference by the twentieth-century state; in China’s Confucian traditions, it is education. The importance of capturing this variation in “burdening” (how expansive is the contact surface of religion that can be affected by states policies?) in an account of Secularity I becomes apparent especially when comparing such encounters across various monotheistic and polytheistic, as well as non-theistic traditions.
What of the emergence of Secularity III that lies at the center of Taylor’s story? In some states, such as Russia, the Taylorean trajectory has unfolded recognizably; in others, such as Pakistan or Iran, some elements are similar but the local conditions have given birth to yet other types of secularity that cannot be captured by either Secularity I, II, or III. While the answers to the question of why religion has in recent years persisted in challenging its exclusion from the public sphere appear to be country-specific, one of the most striking observations emerging from all chapters is that religion has in fact never been excluded from the public sphere, with the possible exception of Russia in the 1930s and China during the so-called Cultural Revolution; by contrast, all case studies testify to the manifold ways in which the modern state, far from marginalizing religion, put it into its service, often in order to legitimize national, developmental, and sometimes even economic goals. Counter-intuitively, this, as our contributors suggest, is the case even in Soviet Russia after 1943 and Atatürk’s Turkey.
This latter insight challenges us to rethink how the struggle between religion and state is conditioned. Gorski reviews the line in political thought that conceives of secularization as a segmentary form of differentiation, in which “church” and “state” have identical structures and equal powers but separate jurisdictions. He notes that “from Augustine’s ‘two cities’ through Marsilius’ ‘two swords’ to Luther’s ‘two kingdoms’, this was a common and recurring position in the history of Latin Christendom. The segmentary principle still has champions today, both amongst political liberals, advocating a strict ‘separation of church and state’, but also amongst religious sectarians, defending the autonomy of their communities” (Chapter 2: 44). The case studies of this volume point to the fallacy of this position, insofar as it conceives of “church”/organized religion and state as possibly equally strong competitors. In no country studied here do the institutional manifestations of religion and the state hold equal power. Indeed, it is unfeasible for organized religion to express demands vis-à-vis the state that could lead to a segmentary form of differentiation. The institutional means of the state, ranging from law to coercion, preclude a situation in which organized religion and state would have equal powers but separate jurisdictions. The stratificatory conflicts between principal actors in the religious and political fields have been won by the latter. Given this alternative account of Secularity I (regulation of religion by the state rather than mere differentiation), the conflicts to which the modern state, with its means of coercion and consent, is a party are not limited to conflicts concerning the proper relationship between the religious and non-religious fields, but also concern conflicts between and within religious communities. We return to this point in the concluding chapter. Accordingly, the case studies presented here suggest that the conditions of belief (Secularity III) need to be recognized not only as a product of internal reform within religions which must be their starting point, but also the enabling conditions of state policies, which necessarily produce and shape the conditions of belief – whether such policies stem from parliamentary decisions, executive decrees, or judicial rulings.
