Abstract
The presence and accommodation of post-immigration religious communities, especially Muslims in Western Europe, has made what seemed like a settled issue, re-emerge with a new controversy and vitality. Indeed, this challenge to political secularism may be one of the long term consequences of these new communities.
Secularism is often defined in terms of a separation of church and state, freedom of religion or toleration. The problem with such definitions is that they do not bring out how, say, the USSR was a secularist state. I begin with a minimalist definition of secularism as the political doctrine that religion and politics constitute two distinct modes of authority, and that the latter should not be subordinate to the former. Building outwards from this minimalism we can understand different kinds of secular states, past and present and that there are ‘multiple secularisms’. Liberal versions, for example, add to the minima that neither the state nor religion should dominate the other, thus making the initial one-way autonomy into mutual autonomy of religion and politics. Equally fundamental to liberal secularism is freedom of individual conscience. Note however that this mutual autonomy does not amount to an absolute separation of organised religion and state, a very rare phenomenon.
While political theorists have taken US constitutional ‘wall of separation’ and French republican exclusion of religion from the public sphere as the two paradigms of western secularism, neither of them adequately capture the version dominant in Western Europe. I call this ‘moderate secularism’, whose institutional and public culture characteristics include: i) religion is recognised as a public good, not just a private good; ii) the national Church(es) belongs to the people and the country, not just to its members and clergy; iii) a legitimacy for the state to be involved in eliciting the public good that comes from organised religion, not just to protect the public good from dangers posed by organised religion.
Moderate secularism offers a more promising basis for accommodation of minorities than a liberal concept based on individualism and ‘belief’, which does not extend to ‘practice’ and community, dimensions central to the understanding of religion amongst the new minorities (and in the global South generally, from whence they have come). The chapter explores what such accommodation may look like and what implications it may have for rethinking contemporary secularisms.
Secularism is often defined in terms of a separation of church and state, freedom of religion or toleration. The problem with such definitions is that they do not bring out how, say, the USSR was a secularist state. I begin with a minimalist definition of secularism as the political doctrine that religion and politics constitute two distinct modes of authority, and that the latter should not be subordinate to the former. Building outwards from this minimalism we can understand different kinds of secular states, past and present and that there are ‘multiple secularisms’. Liberal versions, for example, add to the minima that neither the state nor religion should dominate the other, thus making the initial one-way autonomy into mutual autonomy of religion and politics. Equally fundamental to liberal secularism is freedom of individual conscience. Note however that this mutual autonomy does not amount to an absolute separation of organised religion and state, a very rare phenomenon.
While political theorists have taken US constitutional ‘wall of separation’ and French republican exclusion of religion from the public sphere as the two paradigms of western secularism, neither of them adequately capture the version dominant in Western Europe. I call this ‘moderate secularism’, whose institutional and public culture characteristics include: i) religion is recognised as a public good, not just a private good; ii) the national Church(es) belongs to the people and the country, not just to its members and clergy; iii) a legitimacy for the state to be involved in eliciting the public good that comes from organised religion, not just to protect the public good from dangers posed by organised religion.
Moderate secularism offers a more promising basis for accommodation of minorities than a liberal concept based on individualism and ‘belief’, which does not extend to ‘practice’ and community, dimensions central to the understanding of religion amongst the new minorities (and in the global South generally, from whence they have come). The chapter explores what such accommodation may look like and what implications it may have for rethinking contemporary secularisms.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Contested Concepts in Migration Studies |
Editors | Ricard Zapata Barrero, Dirk Jacobs, Riva Kastoryano |
Place of Publication | Abingdon and New York |
Publisher | Routledge |
Chapter | 13 |
Publication status | Published - 15 Nov 2021 |