I’ve been thinking a bit for awhile about the accelerating phenomenon in the West in which we are moving away from the demand that religion and religious values and discourses remain strictly in the private realm. It’s not just those in the margins — those vulnerable to denunciation of crackpottery, like fundamentalists and liberation theologians — who’re rejecting the demand that we religious folks “know our place” and leave religion at the door if we want to take part in civic society. From the recent spat over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments regarding the role of Islamic law in the British legal system, to the popularity of Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis, and not to mention the continuing role of “conservative” “evangelicals” (to use two nebulous terms), this is a major theme in our public discourses, but very little discussion of the fundamental issues seems to take place: should secularism change, and if so, how? How can we ensure that religious people are able to carry our values into the public square without trampling the rights of folks of other religious beliefs, and those with none? Is there a way between the implicit authoritarianism of both secularism and religious domination of public discourse?
With the issue accelerating but most dialogue centered on contrived controversy (let us all now pity Rowan Williams, the latest target of the deliberately ignorant tabloids) instead of their underlying issues, I was pleased to read an excellent post entitled “Cosmopolitanism and the ideal of postsecular public reason” by Craig Calhoun on the outstanding blog The Immanent Frame.
[T]he ‘privacy’ of religion has been bound up with the notion that religious convictions were to be treated as matters of implicitly personal faith rather than publicly authoritative reason [...] In [this] sense religious freedom could be recognized as a right, but it was implicitly always a right to be wrong or to have a peculiar taste, and thus not to have matters of faith arbitrated by the court of public opinion.
[...]
[O]f course secularisms are themselves intellectual and ideological constructs and traditions. They differ with different political histories – and also with different juxtapositions to religious claims on and in the public sphere. China is secular in a different sense from India and each from France. Attempts to suppress or at least manage religion, tot reat different religions equitably, and to ignore religion are different secularist projects – they are not merely secular. And of course there are more variations on this theme – states that fund multiple religions, states that grant all religions special privileges, states with established official religions that nonetheless demarcate substantial secular spheres within which religious claims or institutions are expected not to intrude.
[...]
Cosmopolitanism is not realistically imaginable as the transcendence of all forms of belonging. To propose a leap into traditionless secular reason is to propose the tyranny of the pure ought, and indeed, an ought without a can.
As I said, excellent, and well worth reading if you’re interested in these issues. And you should be.
This is all, for me, rather timely because at the moment I’m reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s 1983 Jefferson Lecture The Vindication of Tradition (1984) (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven). Perhaps I’ll post about that when I’m done with it.
