The Post-Secular in Question

Religion in Contemporary Society

Philip Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, Jonathan VanAntwerpen

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814738740
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Post-Secular in Question considers whether there has in fact been a religious resurgence of global dimensions in recent decades. This collection of original essays by leading academics represents an interdisciplinary intervention in the continuing and ever-transforming discussion of the role of religion and secularism in today’s world. Foregrounding the most urgent and compelling questions raised by the place of religion in the social sciences, past and present, The Post-Secular in Question restores religion to a more central place in social scientific thinking about the world, helping to move scholarship “beyond unbelief.” Contributors: Courtney Bender, Craig Calhoun, Michele Dillon, Philip S. Gorski, Richard Madsen, Kathleen Mahoney, Tomoko Masuzawa, Eduardo Mendieta, John Schmalzbauer, James K. A. Smith, John Torpey, Bryan S. Turner, Hent de Vries.

CHAPTER ONE
The Post-Secular in Question

Philip S. Gorski, David Kyuman Kim, John Torpey, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen

Are we living in a post-secular world? That question has surged onto the academic agenda, marked by the increasing scholarly use of the notion of the “post-secular.” From the writings of Jürgen Habermas on the role of religion in public life to a host of more theoretical reflections on religion in contemporary society, the idea of the post-secular has acquired increasing currency in contemporary academic discussions.¹ The outpouring of books and journal articles on the topic signals an important shift in scholarly thinking about religion and secularism. Yet it should also give us pause; the term has at times been used uncritically, and we should be wary of its deployment simply to signal a contested claim about the resurgence of religion. That said, there is no doubt that the notion raises a number of important issues concerning both the place of religion in twenty-first-century society and its status as an object of study in the academy.²

Why the renewed interest in religion? The notion of the “post-secular”—suggesting that we have left a secular era behind—implies a tectonic shift in the Zeitgeist. But here some caution is in order. Amid the proliferation of “post-” terms in recent academic discourse, it is important to consider whether the concept of the post-secular refers to an actual shift in the social world, or whether its growing deployment results, instead, from a zealous need to detect epochal turning points in every minor twist of the historical road. (The brief career of “post-nationalism”—a term that garnered much attention in the social sciences just a decade ago but now appears wildly overdrawn—provides a cautionary tale.³) The inquiries into and assessments of the postmodern that have had staying power were engaging, in part, because they called sharply into question the ethical and epistemological certitude and purported superiority of the modern project. In other words, the disputes over postmodernism revolved around the naming of a diminishing and even dying core of modernity—Fordist capitalism (e.g., Jameson, Harvey); truth, rationality, and knowledge (e.g., Foucault, Lyotard, Feyerabend); European culture and Orientalism (e.g., Said); and so on.⁴ The development of postmodern discourse is instructive for making sense of the post-secular, insofar as postmodernism can be read in at least two different ways. In one reading, postmodernism claims that modernity is over and hence that we live in a “postmodern” era; in another view, postmodernism insists that the universalistic claims associated with modernity can no longer be sustained without demurral.

And so it goes with the post-secular. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Peter Berger argued that “the world is just as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.”⁵ While some would claim that there has been a simple resurgence of religion, Berger saw both continuity and upsurge. In so doing, he was reversing his earlier judgment of the matter: earlier in his career, he had been one of the main promoters of secularization theory. Bearing in mind such shifts in the thought of a major sociologist and social thinker like Berger, we ask: Is it the social scientists’ vision that is crooked, while the historical road is straight? To what other constructive narratives about the secular and the religious do scholars and everyday people alike appeal in order to help make sense of the world?

The question of the post-secular poses two lines of inquiry: first, determinations about the state of religiosity in the world; second, understanding the new ways that social scientists, philosophers, historians, and scholars from across disciplines are and are not paying attention to religion. In other words, the question is: Which world has changed—the “real” one or the scholarly one? To some degree, the contributors to this book argue that the answer is “both.” By many measures, there is, in fact, a religious resurgence of global dimensions, but this resurgence is not taking place with much uniformity around the globe.⁶ Rather, it is taking many forms—not all of which fit into an easily codifiable definition of “religion.” The recent out-pouring of academic work on religion in the social sciences and philosophy is partly a response to this resurgence—but only partly. A growing unease with “Enlightenment fundamentalism” and broadening skepticism about scientific naturalism in many quarters have also made it easier for many academics to take religion seriously again.⁷ In the context of claims about religious resurgence, the essays in this volume grapple with the legacies of secularism and secularization theory, the contested categories of religion and the secular, and the diverse claims associated with the concept of the post-secular.

In the remainder of this introduction, we offer an overview of the shifting patterns of scholarly attention to religion; the relations between the religious and the secular; the history of philosophical and social scientific understandings of religion; disciplinary differences in the study of religion; and a brief consideration of the future prospects for the social scientific study of religion.

Patterns of Scholarly Attention to Religion: Causes, Connections, Consequences

The Iranian revolution, the Moral Majority, the Pentecostal explosion, the post-socialist Buddhist revival,⁸ faith-based initiatives, communal violence, the politics of the veil, the inconclusive “Arab spring,” and, of course, 9/11: In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand why religion has found its way back to a central place on the scholarly agenda over the last decade. More puzzling, perhaps, is why religion took so long to return, and why it was pushed to the margins in the first place. (Disciplines such as religious studies and, to a lesser degree, anthropology—for which religion has always held center stage—are notable exceptions.) While the contributors to this volume all share this perplexity, they propose different answers.

On one account, the collapse of structural functionalism in the social sciences precipitated the marginalization of religion.⁹ Under the reign of Talcott Parsons in sociology—a dominant mode of the ancien régime of modernization theory in the social sciences—“norms” and “values” were seen as the woof and warp of social order, and religion as their raw materials. But by the 1960s, the old regime had met with a general rebellion, and other approaches and perspectives began displacing structural functionalism. Among the new approaches and perspectives was the amalgam of Marx and Weber known as “conflict theory,” which highlighted the role of “power” and “interests” in social life while relegating religion to the category of “ideology,” when not ignoring it altogether.¹⁰ Allies in revolution, “neo-Marxism” and “left Weberianism” became enemies in power. Social scientists found common ground with philosophers, perhaps most distinctively in the discourse generated by the Frankfurt School. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that Habermas has played such a pivotal role in these revolutions of thought.¹¹ The ensuing debate over the nature of social class, the “relative autonomy” of the state, and, more broadly, the relative importance of capital and states in determining the fundamental shape of modern social phenomena “in the last instance” was eventually superseded in another palace coup known as “the cultural turn.”¹² The renewed attention to culture in history and the social sciences beginning in the late 1980s reopened the door for the return of religion.¹³ Religion could now be conceived not merely as an “ideology” but as “a cultural structure,” “a social organization,” or “a movement frame,” among other things.¹⁴ Let us call this the “post-Parsons interpretation.”

An alternative view holds that the erasure of religion from the social scientific agenda actually occurred a good deal earlier, during the opening decades of the twentieth century, and resulted from the retreat of religious conservatives from public life and the declining influence of religious elites and institutions on higher education—which is to say, from the secularization of public life and academic institutions. Just as Baptist congregations withdrew into their “hard shells” and Congregationalist ministers were banished to divinity schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the academy saw the eventual formation of departments of “religious studies.”¹⁵ Subsequently, religion was rendered invisible—and risible—to many academic researchers. On this account, the return of religion to the scholarly agenda is traceable to the upsurge of “public religions” in the late 1970s and to the prodigious inflow of foundation monies for scholarly pursuits related to religion in the decades that followed (as documented by John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen Mahoney in chapter 9 in this volume).¹⁶ Notwithstanding the prodigious efforts of Robert Bellah—and, in a different vein, Peter Berger—in shoring up the sociology of religion in the American academy, this disciplinary formation remained an outlier for researchers and institutions alike.¹⁷ One might call this the “secularization interpretation” of the decline of religion’s perceived importance in the social sciences.

A third view maintains that the return of religion to the academic agenda is an interesting but minor subplot in the recent history of higher education, whose main story line is the increasing marginalization of the humanities and social sciences within the modern research university.¹⁸ Because universities are increasingly reliant on private and public largesse, and because such funding goes disproportionately to research in the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine, little of this money finds its way to researchers working on religion. Accordingly, while there may be some upsurge of interest in religion on American college campuses today, it is likely to be and to remain quite limited. This might be dubbed the “materialist interpretation.”

Yet another interpretation suggests that the decline in overall scholarly attention to religion correlates with a decline in individual religious commitments among social scientists (there was not much room for decline among philosophers). If the rise of the social sciences was closely connected to religiously motivated reform projects—such as the Social Gospel, for instance—and if some form of religious belief was still quite common just a few generations ago, most social scientists have now moved to a position somewhere “beyond belief.” Personal irreligion intersects with scholarly insecurity, as Robert Wuthnow has argued, insofar as social scientists have a certain anxiety about the scientific status of their disciplines, which leads them to distance themselves from religion. It is possible that these forces combined to reduce academic attention to religion in the social sciences. This might be referred to as the “secular intellectual interpretation.”

Whatever the causes of this scholarly inattention to religion—and they are many and varied—the consequences are clear enough: some of the most important features of modern life have been misapprehended or ignored entirely.¹⁹ States and bureaucracies, revolution and reform, voluntary associations and social movements, human and civil rights, corporations and welfare states—these and many other building blocks of Western modernity have religious genealogies.²⁰ Whatever differences they may have in terms of approach, the contributors to this volume share the view that it is impossible to make sense of the world without taking account of religion and that a social science inattentive to religion cannot hope to be adequate to the realities that it seeks to elucidate.

The essays gathered here thus address a number of urgent issues concerning how scholars approach religion today. They ask: What is the place of religion in the contemporary academic scene? How and when did religion decline as a matter of scholarly concern? How does the scholarly status of religion vary according to location in the institutional field of higher education? How are research and teaching on religious matters funded, and what impact do funding patterns have on what gets studied? Inevitably, among the central themes of their reflections are the nature of the religious, the increasingly contested character of the secular, and their interrelations.

Relations between the Religious and the Secular: New Understandings of an Old Distinction

Throughout the twentieth century, the “dominant paradigm” in the social scientific study of religion was secularization theory.²¹ Over the last two decades, the “secularization thesis”—roughly, that modernization undermines religion—has been subjected to searching reexamination.²² While the old orthodoxy still has its defenders, particularly in Western Europe, the general drift of the commentary, especially in North America, has been moving in the direction of skepticism, particularly with regard to two key predictions of the secularization paradigm: that religion would undergo decline, and that it would become subject to privatization.²³ In truth, the fate of “churchly religion” (let alone personal spirituality) has been far more varied and complex than secularization theory suggested, even in secularism’s Western European strongholds.²⁴ Meanwhile, the place of religion in public space and debate is now the subject of energetic and sometimes vitriolic debates, among pundits and philosophers alike.²⁵ Witness the ongoing debate about integrating Muslims in Western Europe, or the intellectual combat betwee...