The Problem of Secularism
How to manage religious pluralism without secular logic
I am teaching a group of students about the epistemic and practical structure of the shari’ah. They asked about secularism, and we had a long discussion about it. This post is a result of that discussion.
Secularism as a Historical Phenomenon
In the modern world, secularism is like a hammer used to on a screw. Concepts are not historically neutral; most concepts are born within particular historical contexts and are meant to address the serious problems that pervade their socio-intellectual environments. They cannot be divorced from that context, and they are only useful within those contexts. Secularism is one such concept. It has its conceptual genealogy that situates it within the context of early modern Europe, and, divorced from that context, it ceases to be useful.
The genesis of secularism as a concept begins in the aftermath of the extremely destructive wars of religion – a series of wars that resulted from the political instability caused by the Protestant reformation – most notably the Thirty Years War. The scale of suffering resulting from the war is hard to overstate. Between 1/4th and 1/3rd of German-speaking populations lost their lives, and the war spread disease, destruction, and political collapse across the continent. The war was unprecedented in Europe, and nothing matched its scale of destruction until the First World War.
Accordingly, the wars of religion were a deeply traumatic experience for Europe, and its inconclusive result left the significant question of managing religious pluralism. Europe was thus faced with three unprecedented and simultaneous challenges: industrializing economies, mechanizing militaries, and religious pluralism (something that hadn’t been a problem of Europe by-in-large for almost a thousand years). European thinkers had to theorize forms of governance that allowed for efficient centralization of economic and military management while ensuring that the resulting expansion in government involvement in society did not result in instability due to religious repression.
This laid the groundwork for conceptualizing secularism, which began as a niche concept of mutual Catholic/Protestant “tolerance” and eventually expanded into a socio-political value of “public” agnosticism. What was meant to be a governance tool for managing religious difference evolved into an overarching ethic governing all of society. Contrary to popular opinion, however, secularism did not rapidly secularize society; rather, for the majority of modern history, secularism as a governing ethic coexisted with a deeply religious and devout population. The logic of secularization – the process by which all society becomes areligious – exponentially expanded after the Second World War. As such, secularization and secularism need to be treated as separate phenomena. The first is not a natural process resulting from the second; rather, it is as much a historical phenomenon as any other, such as fascism, rather than a historical process like industrialization.[1]
The Logic of Secularism
The core logic of secularism was not simple social harmony; rather, it was the consideration that governance is the meeting point of interests of a religiously divergent populations; as such, those populations must negotiate governance in a language that exists outside their religious commitments. What it assumes (without recognizing the assumption) is that the religious pluralism is, in fact, not very plural; that is, it is negotiating between religious groups that inherit the Christian spirito-intellectual heritage, not religious groups that are divergent in every aspect of their theology, law, practice, and intellectual heritage. To put it simply, negotiating between Catholics and Protestants in England is significantly different than negotiating between Hindus and Muslims in India.
Secularism assumes interreligious intelligibility and subsumes overlapping ethics and values in Christian society under the umbrella of “reason.” This is because, as religion retreats from governance as the common language of negotiation, a new language must take its place. The Enlightenment provided that language, which was a language of rationality and reason. The Enlightenment was, in many ways, the philosophical defense of an early modern Christian culture, and, as such, the “reason” put forward by Enlightenment thinkers was a kind of secularized Christianity. Thus, “reason” was less a philosophically universal concept and more a highly sophisticated theorization and systemization of early modern Christian culture.[2]
This underscores the core problem of secularism as it is expanded into non-Christian environments. Secularism assumes two things that are, like it, not universal: the establishment of a “public” square and the dominance of “reason” over “religion” in that public square. What iterations of the secular outside of the European and American context have highlighted, however, is that “reason” is not, in fact, a universally intelligible language of negotiation; and that “reason” as an Enlightenment concept is as much an imposition on non-European populations as any other historically contextual concept.
The Problem of Secularism
How do populations with entirely different religious traditions and intellectual heritages negotiate if the shared language of “reason” is equally alien to and predatory of them?
Secularism in such circumstances creates greater chaos than it prevents, as every religious community becomes anxious about the predatory nature of secularism. In these environments, unlike the European environment where secularism is highly co-existent with Christianity, secularism does necessarily secularize. This is because, in order to adopt secular governance, one must adopt secular logic of “reason” and “public,” which necessarily forces non-European populations to negotiate in a language born of a Christian and European heritage. Secularism in India and Egypt and Turkey is necessarily secularizing where secularism in England and America may not be.
The result of this secularizing logic is a rubber-band effect where religious communities are made to feel existential anxiety over their spirito-intellectual sovereignty. There is also much to be said about majority/minority discourse within secular logic: by insisting on monolegalism (that is, one law for the entire land negotiated by an assumed neutral “reason”), secularism necessarily creates a “majority” community that is entrusted with the rights of a “minority” community. Thus, the “minority” communities have greater incentive to secularize, whereas the “majority” communities have a greater incentive to resist secularization.
How, then, can religious pluralism be managed without adopting secularism as a mal-adjusted mode of governance for modern pluralistic societies? The Islamic tradition offers us a possible model: religious communalism. Communalism moves beyond trite notions as “tolerance” and “coexistence” governed by a logic of secularism and moves instead towards communal sovereignty of religious traditions. It does not see religion as inherently dangerous, an inherently emotional affair that is opposed to “reason;” rather, it views religion as an inextricable part of human nature and its perseveration as central to social stability.
Religious Communalism
The foundational principles of religious communalism is: recognition of religious communities; multi-legalism – that is, the ability of communities to govern according to their own laws independent of acquiescence to those laws by other communities; and a political language of interest rather than reason – that is, intercommunal relationships are negotiated based on shared or compromised interests rather than assuming a language of “reason” that is independent of “religion.” Lastly, religious communalism entails a right to offend that is entirely different than the right to blaspheme.
Religious communalism entails the right to offend sensibilities of practice without affording the right to offend sensibilities of belief – whereas secularism affords the right to offend sensibilities of belief without offending sensibilities of practice. Hindus can practice sati (the practice of burning widows alive with their deceased husbands); Zoroastrians can practice intrafamily marriage; and Muslims can practice polygyny; all without needing to appeal to the sensibilities of other religious communities based on an opaque sense of secularized “reason.” In order for such a system to come about, however, governance must be detached from a much larger conceptual problem than secularism: nationalism.
National identity is necessarily threatened by pluralistic religious communities unless national identity is thoroughly secularized. The only mechanism of governance by which a state can embrace religious communalism is by the abandonment of nationalism. The abandonment of nationalism as a governing logic for political sovereignty, however, comes with it a reimagining of right to rule, legitimacy, and political systems. A country that is not legitimated by nationalism has no logic to its claim over territory nor for choosing its leaders.
Secularism, thus, is a necessary embedding in a larger structure of “nationalized” politics. To move past the problems of the first, one must first theorize solutions to the second: how does a modern state, which is necessary for the efficient centralized governance of highly industrialized economies and militaries, legitimate itself and create a political system without appealing to ethnic or geographic nationalism? It is only when that question is answered that the question of secularism be answers.
If you enjoyed this piece, click on the buttons bellows to subscribe for free or upgrading to a paid subscription and sharing with others who may enjoy it.
[1] One of the great mistakes in historiography is treating the present as the telos of the past. The past is not a necessary, purposeful march to the present; rather, the present is a result of a meeting of purpose, providence, accident, and coincidence.
[2] As distinct from a theoretical defense of Christianity as dogma and practice.