In pursuit of the postsecular

Abstract

This article explores the various uses or – according to some authors, such as the sociologist James Beckford – misuses of the term ‘postsecular’. The variations in its use are indeed so broad that the question is justified whether the terminology as such has much analytical value. The prominence of the ‘postsecular’ in present-day debates in my view primarily indicates the inability among scholars, intellectuals and religious interest groups to come to grips with what – for some at least – is an unexpected presence and resurgence of religion in the public domains of presumably secular societies. The work of the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad shows that the secular does not preclude the religious. All kinds of religious arguments, organizations, and agents are very much present in modern ‘secular’ societies. From this perspective, the emergence of the ‘postsecular’ refers to very real phenomena, most importantly the intertwinement of the secular and the religious. For instance, religious actors do not accept the barriers of secular society and claim a role for religion in public and secular arenas. This insight could be one of the most important driving forces behind the popularity of the term ‘postsecular’ in recent years.

Keywords:

• postsecular
• Jürgen Habermas
• secular & religious; public & private; Talal Asad
• James Beckford

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers of this journal, the contributors to this special issue and Hetty Zock.

Notes

1. Featherstone, “In Pursuit of the Postmodern,” 195.

2. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” 1163: ‘La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent’.

3. “The Talk of the Town,” 19.

4. http://wien.gbw.at/wien/artikelansicht/beitrag/goethes-velozifer-oder-beschleunigung-als-alter-hut.html; http://www.fremdwort.de/suchen/bedeutung/Veloziferisch

5. Casanova, Public Religions, 221.

6. Ibid.

7. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 2.

8. http://www.jnani.org/postsecular/contexts.htm. This website of Mike King has a somewhat esoteric and oriental ring to it; cf. King, “Towards a Post-Secular Society,” 10–11: ‘What the postsecular begins to question is the assumption that the spiritual impulse itself has to inevitably create the presecular religious hierarchies that we so rightly reject as inimical to freedom and democracy’.

9. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 2; and Knott, “Cutting Through the Postsecular City,” 20.

10. Jedan, Constellations of Value. For further references, see the bibliography at the end of this contribution.

11. Knott, “Cutting Through the Postsecular City”. I use Knott’s contribution as a complement to that of Beckford.

12. Theologians such as Richard Kearney also explore these dimensions. Kearney invokes the ‘sacramental imagination’ to overcome theism, as Rick Benjamins shows in his contribution “Postsecular and Systematic Theology” to this special issue.

13. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 6. Beckford does not give a specific reference here to McClure’s book, where I could not find it.

14. McClure, Partial Faiths, 3.

15. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 6.

16. McClure, Partial Faiths, 6.

17. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 7.

18. Bretherton, “Religion and the Salvation of Urban Politics,” 207.

19. Bretherton, “A Postsecular Politics?” 358.

20. Bretherton, “A Postsecular Politics?” 354 (italics original).

21. Beaumont, “Transcending the Particular,” 6.

22. For an overview of the impact of globalization on religious movements, see Wilson and Steger, “Religious Globalisms in the Post-Secular Age”.

23. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 3.

24. Knott, “Cutting Through the Postsecular City,” 20f., with reference to Knott, Location of Religion, 74–76, 163–9.

25. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular”, 4, who refers to Braidotti, “In Spite of the Times,” 2; cf. Boeve, “Religion after Detraditionalization”.

26. Caputo, On Religion, 60f.

27. Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society” (2008), http://www.signandsight.com/features/1714.html. This text is – with minor revisions – reprinted as Habermas, “What is Meant by a ‘Post-Secular Society’?”

28. Habermas, “A Reply,” 78.

29. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 9.

30. Taylor, “What Does Secularism Mean?” 320; cf. Mendieta and Vanantwerpen, Power of Religion.

31. See also the contributions in the last part, ‘Public uses of religion’ in: Molendijk et al., Exploring the Postsecular, 311ff.

32. Habermas, “What is Meant by a ‘Post-Secular Society’?” 63.

33. Ibid., 63. Habermas quotes here his famous lecture ‘Glauben und Wissen’, which he held in 2001 – just after 9/11 – on the occasion of his receiving the prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. The lecture was translated with the title “Faith and Knowledge,” 104. The term ‘postsecular’ (postsäkular) was used here in a discussion of the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

34. Joas, Braucht der Mensch Religion? 124, where Joas asks the rhetorical question whether it would not have been better if Habermas had admitted in a self-critical way that in the past he had underestimated the persistence of religions in the modern world.

35. Habermas, “What is Meant by a ‘Post-Secular Society’?” 63–65.

36. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 10.

37. For a further discussion of Habermas, see Petruschka Schaafsma’s contribution “Evil or Violence” to this special issue, particularly the section on the tension in the postsecular reassessment of religion.

38. McLennan, “The Postsecular Turn,” 12.

39. Kong, “Global Shifts,” 755–56, quoted in Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 12.

40. Beckford, “Public Religions and the Postsecular,” 12.

41. Blond, “Introduction,” 1.

42. Ibid., 54; see the perceptive comments of Matthew Engelke, “Rethinking Secularism”.

43. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 380.

44. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 72.

45. Joas, “Social Theory and the Sacred”.

46. Caputo, On Religion, 112f.

47. Ibid., 136.

48. See note 16 above.

49. Timothy Fitzgerald and others have argued that the category of ‘religion’ makes no sense (certainly not with reference to non-Western ‘religions’) and should, therefore, be abolished. Theoretically this critique may make sense, but in practice this proposal is useless because binaries such as those between the secular and religious have travelled all over the world in the process of imperialism and globalization, and are ingrained even in constitutions of non-Western states; see Molendijk, “Der Kampf um die Religion”.

50. Moore, Touchdown Jesus, 166.

51. Troeltsch, “Religion,” 534: ‘Das “Rein-Religiöse” existiert nur für den Theoretiker und für wenige innerlich tief empfindende Seelen. Auf dem Markt des Lebens gibt es kein Interesse, das nicht durch Verkoppelung mit der Religion gestärkt würde’.

52. Calhoun et al., “Introduction,” 21; cf. 54.

53. Nijk, Secularisatie; Lübbe, Säkularisierung; cf. Tschannen, Les théories de la sécularisation, and the excellent books of Ernst Feil on religio.

54. Taylor, “What Does Secularism Mean?” 306.

55. Ibid., 313.

56. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 1008; cf. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren, 982: ‘Die Seelen der Völker entgleiten den Kirchen, und ein guter Teil ihrer Funktionen ist an Schule, Literatur, Staat und Vereinswesen übergegangen’.

57. Troeltsch, Protestantisches Christentum, second, revised edition, 341.

58. Ibid., 347f.

59. This is not to deny that in recent decades the private sphere has been more and more invaded by the state and the expanding power of commercial (Internet) enterprises.

60. See the Erfurter Programm of the German Social Democrats (1891): Grundsätze und Forderungen der Sozialdemokratie, 42f.

61. Weintraub and Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice.

62. For a discussion of ‘religious economics’, see Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter, 19–30.

63. Asad, Formations of the Secular.

64. Scott, “The Trouble of Thinking,” 298 (italics original).

65. See Asad, “Religion as an Anthropological Category,” 53–4: ‘Religious symbols … cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with nonreligious symbols or of their articulation in and of social life, in which work and power are always crucial. My argument, I must stress, is not just that religious symbols are intimately linked to social life (and so change with it), or that they usually support dominant political power (and occasionally oppose it). It is that different kinds of practice and discourse are intrinsic to the field in which religious representations (like any representation) acquire their identity and their truthfulness. From this it does not follow that the meanings of religious practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their possibility and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of historically distinctive disciplines and forces. The anthropological student of particular religions should therefore begin from this point, in a sense unpacking the comprehensive concept which he or she translates as “religion” into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character’ (italics original).

66. Shaikh, “Interview with Talal Asad,” [1] (italics original). The text is available at http://asiasociety.org/islam-secularism-and-modern-state (accessed 28 October 2014).

67. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 201, 254–6 and passim. I will quote Asad’s book by referring to its page numbers in the main text; cf. Introvigne, “Religion as Claim”.

68. Asad, “Responses,” 228.

69. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 182.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Arie L. Molendijk

Arie L. Molendijk, Ph.D. University of Leiden (1991), is full professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy at the University of Groningen. He was a Humboldt Fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich (1992–1993), a resident scholar at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton (NJ) in the Spring of 2008, a senior fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe” in Bochum (May 2010–April 2011) and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar (September 2012–June 2013). He has extensively published in the history of ideas, particularly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology, religious studies and philosophy. Among his writings are a book on the German theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch: Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie. Ernst Troeltschs Typen der christlichen Gemeinschaftsbildung: Kirche, Sekte, Mystik (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1996) and a monograph The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Brill, 2005). Molendijk is also engaged in research on religion, identity and the public sphere, which led to a co-edited volume Exploring the Postsecular. The Religious, the Political and the Urban (Brill, 2010). Furthermore, he participated in a research programme on new sacred places and emerging rituals, which resulted in two co-edited volumes Holy Ground. Re-inventing Ritual Space in Modern Western Culture (Peeters, 2010) and Sacred Places in Modern Western Culture (Peeters, 2011). Presently he is working on a new book about Max Müller’s mega edition of The Sacred Books of the East, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016.