Narratives of Secularization

Peter Harrison

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367892302
• eBook ISBN: 9781351348959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

It is increasingly clear that histories of secularization are not simply dispassionate descriptions of the decline of religious belief and practice in the West. Rather, such narratives often seek to celebrate secularization, promote some version of it, lament it, or otherwise oppose it in favour of a programme of desecularization or resacralization. The aim of this book is to identify some of the major genres of the history of secularization and to explore their historical contexts, normative commitments, and tendential purposes. The contributors to the volume offer different perspectives on these questions, not least because a number of them are themselves participants in the cultural-political programs described above. The primary purpose of this book, however, is the identification of such programs rather than their promotion. Overall, the collection seeks to bring analytical clarity to ongoing debates about secularization and help explain the co-existence of apparently conflicting stories about the origins of Western modernity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Intellectual History Review journal.

Secularisation: process, program, and historiography

Ian Hunter

ABSTRACT

Today’s dominant academic use of the term ‘secularisation’ refers to an epochal process that transformed a society based on Christian faith to one grounded in human reason. This paper argues that ‘secularisation’ had not been used in this sense prior to the 1830s, and that no such process has been shown to have taken place in early modernity. This new use of the term was in fact internal to rival secularising and sacralising programs. The notion of an epochal rationalisation of society was thus invoked by secularists seeking to turn a factional campaign into an historical process. Their sacralising opponents employed the same strategy when they claimed that this process contained a desecularising counter-current, or that secularisation was secretly grounded in an alienated religion whose de-alienation held the promise of a post-secular age. This suggests that until they can adduce evidence of an epochal rationalisation of society in early modernity, histories of secularisation should be regarded as disguised program-statements for rival cultural-political factions in the present.

Setting aside presently eclipsed sociological theories of secularisation, as a by-product of modernisation or the functional differentiation of social spheres, there are three main historical usages of the term ‘secularisation’ that are of interest to contextual intellectual history. The first usage, which became central to all twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions, refers to an epochal transition from a religious to a rational society, and appeared initially in the subculture of German philosophical history during the 1830s.¹ Second, emerging from the negotiations over the Westphalian treaties, is the usage of the term in European public and international law to refer to the transfer of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction to civil ownership and administration.² Thirdly, originating in medieval canon law, is the specialised usage referring to the transfer of cloistered or ‘regular’ clergy to uncloistered diocesan service, as ‘secular’ clergy, the synonym for which is ‘exclaustration’.³ It is striking that these usages have almost nothing in common.

While it does discuss the second usage in order to establish an important point of historical differentiation, this paper is principally concerned with the historiography of the first, philosophical-historical, use of the term, to name an epochal rationalisation of society. This is because, by the end of the twentieth century, philosophical history had become the dominant disciplinary idiom for formulating the topic of secularisation in academic discussions. Most modern discussions of secularisation thus presume themselves to be talking about an epochal process that transformed a religious society into a secular one. Those taking positions within these discussions differ over the dating of this process, with some locating its onset with the sixteenth-century Reformation, while others declaring it to begin only in the nineteenth century. So too there are marked differences regarding the character of the alleged process itself, with some writers ascribing it a religious foundation,⁴ others declaring it to be the product of Enlightenment philosophical rationalism,⁵ and still others regarding it as driven by advances in scientific knowledge and naturalistic understanding.⁶ Nonetheless, all of these debating positions presume that secularisation refers to an epochal process responsible for the transformation of a Christian into a rational society.

In this paper I show that someone wishing to develop an historical understanding of secularisation cannot do so by taking up a position within this field of debate. This is in part because there is no historical evidence that a process of secularisation of any of the envisaged kinds actually took place, while there is significant evidence to the contrary. But it is also because these various accounts of a process of secularisation are not themselves histories in the empirical sense. Rather, they constitute an array of competing theological and philosophical programs, each advancing what purports to be a history of secularisation, but only as a means of prosecuting various factional cultural-political agendas, some dedicated to secularism, others to sacralism. Driven largely by the great Kantian and Hegelian philosophical histories, rival cultural-political conceptions of an epochal rational transformation of Christian society first appeared in 1830s Germany, which was when the word was first used with this sense.⁷ Rather than beginning with any kind of process, then, a history of secularisation must begin with the array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theological and philosophical programs in which a variously characterised process of secularisation was advanced for rival cultural-political purposes.

Once secularisation as an epochal process of rationalisation has been quarantined to the cultural politics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical history, then it becomes possible to constitute secularisation and the secular as objects of a different kind of historiography. At this point, the history of secularisation breaks down into an open-ended series of mid-range regional inquiries, into how the notion of the ‘secular’ has been understood and used within particular intellectual and institutional domains; which subcultures characterised themselves or their objectives as ‘secular’ and for what purposes; and how they envisaged their relation to the non-secular or religious. Here, certain intellectual-historical developments might well be characterised as ‘secular’ or ‘secularising’. Rather than referring to an epochal process of rationalisation or de-Christianisation, however, these terms will refer to the manner in which those taking part in particular regional developments – in such areas as biblical criticism, ecclesiastical history, public law, philosophy, theology, and natural philosophy – characterised them as secular for particular purposes, or against a particular non-secular backdrop, assuming that they had any use for this term at all. This approach forbids presuming any general relation between the secular and the religious, and instead requires the investigation of how these terms are used in historical contexts that have distinguished and related them for some set of local reasons or purposes. It is in this spirit that the paper first turns to the use of secularisation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical histories.

1. Process

The conception of secularisation as an epochal process that was transforming a Christian into a rational society first emerged in the Protestant universities of early nineteenth-century Germany. Over the course of that century and into the next, this conception would assume a variety of forms, serving cross-cutting religious, cultural, and political objectives. For present purposes, though, it is possible to isolate five such conceptions. First, although Kant himself did not use the term secularisation in either its Latin-based (Säkularisierung) or German form (Verweltlichung), he developed a metaphysical anthropology and theology that would give rise to a distinctive philosophical-historical conception of secularisation. In deploying a metaphysical conception of man as a double-sided intellectual (noumenal) and sensible (phenomenal) being, who was capable of governing himself through pure thinking once he had overcome his ‘sensuous inclinations’, Kant launched a doctrine of individual moral self-governance that in effect rendered the salvational role of the Christian churches redundant.⁸ In his rational theology and ecclesiology, Kant thus developed a philosophical history in which biblical Christianity and the confessional churches amounted only to external training-wheels for the inner capacity of moral self-governance, to be discarded once ‘history’ had brought that capacity to maturity in a ‘pure religion of reason’.⁹ This process of maturation, in which confessional religion was displaced by a rational philosophy that maintained religion’s transcendental ideals, was typically called ‘enlightenment’ but would later also be called ‘secularisation’.¹⁰

It was, however, a second philosophical-historical projection of a rational transformation of Christianity that would give rise to the first uses of the term secularisation to name this transformative process. One of the earliest such uses occurred in a philosophical history of religion published in 1837 by Richard Rothe, an Hegelianised Lutheran theologian and ecclesiastical historian. Improvising on Hegel’s account of a dialectical process in which spiritual ‘Christian life’ externalised itself in worldly institutions, which it then spiritualised, Rothe argued that this process would culminate in the emergence of a ‘Christian state’. In this moment the church would be rationalised or secularised and rendered redundant, precisely because the worldly state would be desecularised, being transformed into the rational organ of Christian moral freedom:

In the same relation by which Christendom brings into existence a Christian state – which is likewise a state that is self-perfecting in and for itself – the church becomes superfluous. Because in just such a state Christian life finds the only worldly existence and organ of historical efficacy that is truly suited to it. The church is thus secularised [säcularisirt] in the same measure as the state is desecularised [ent-säcularisirt] ….¹¹

The third construction of an epochal rational transformation of Christian society was also deeply rooted in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, but developed in a different, so-called ‘left-Hegelian’ direction. In his Essence of Christianity of 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach thus transposed the Hegelian dialectic into the register of ‘human anthropology’, treating the split between man’s mental and sensory sides as the source of a process of self-alienation: ‘Man – this is the mystery of religion – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject’.¹² Here the mind projected its own supra-sensory capacities into externalised sensory beings – God, the church, the sacraments – which it allowed to suppress its own freedom. On this view, secularisation was thus understood as the process of de-alienation through which human reason would re-absorb the superstructure of confessional Christianity that it had set above itself, giving rise to an ethical religion and, eventually, a democratic politics that would displace Christianity altogether.¹³ In 1844 Karl Marx would thus characterise ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Narratives of secularization
• 1. Secularisation: process, program, and historiography
• 2. The one or the many? Narrating and evaluating Western secularization
• 3. Science and secularization
• 4. A heavenly poise: radical religion and the making of the Enlightenment
• 5. Narratives of de-secularization in international relations
• 6. The History of Political Thought as secular genealogy: the case of liberty in early modern England
• 7. The politics of disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet and the French struggle with secularization
• 8. Is absolute secularity conceivable?
• Index