The State of Secularism

Religion, Tradition And Democracy In South Africa

Dhammamegha Annie Leatt

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781776141036
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

The Dutch Reformed Church, it was said in apartheid South Africa, was the National Party at prayer, and indeed, given that the Bible was so fundamental to much of the legislation that governed the apartheid state, that apparently satirical description had the ring of truth. 'Religion in South Africa's past', writes Dhammamegha Annie Leatt has been 'saturated by politics' and politics 'saturated by religion'. So how, she asks, was it possible for a new state to found itself without religious authority? Why did the churches give up so much of their political role in the transition? How can we think about tradition and the customary in relation to secularism? How can we not? In The State of Secularism Leatt guides the reader from a history of global political secularism through an exploration of the roles played by religion and traditional authority in apartheid South Africa to the position of religion in the post-apartheid state. She analyses the negotiations relating to religion in the constitution-making process, arguing, that South Africa is both secular in its Constitution and judicial foundations and increasingly non-secular in its embrace of traditional authorities and customary law. In the final chapter Leatt turns her attention to post-apartheid South Africa, examining changing relationships between churches and the ruling African National Congress and the increasing influence of traditional leaders and evangelical Christians in an anti-liberal alliance. This book makes a tremendous contribution to the literature on postcolonial politics on the African continent. It has wonderful insights into the founding of a constitutional democracy in South African and will appeal to students in history, politics, sociology and anthropology and constitutional law.

1

Thinking Secularism from South Africa

This project began with a few simple questions. Is contemporary South Africa secular? What does it mean to be secular? What kind of secularism does it have? I asked them because religion has been so saturated by politics in South Africa’s past, and politics so saturated by religion. The historical importance of religion and tradition to South African governance raises the question of whether and how it is possible for a new postapartheid state to found itself without their authority. Why did the churches give up so much of their political role in the transition? How can we think about tradition and the customary in relation to secularism? How can we not? Why do we have traditional leaders and customary law in a dispensation of democratic secular liberal constitutionalism? These are the questions that animate this book.

The African National Congress (ANC), religious groups, press and political commentators all say that democratic South Africa is secular. But religion and things that look a lot like religion continue to be important and visible in South African politics and public life. Traditional leaders wield state power in rural areas, sangomas and praise singers are found at inaugurations and public rallies, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) employed overt theology. Statecraft includes a ‘Moral Regeneration Movement’ that calls on religious partners, and Jacob Zuma likens himself to Jesus.

With the exception of the TRC, very little of this has been adequately researched or conceptualised. So what is to be made of the public and political presence of religion and tradition in postapartheid South Africa? And what is secularism if it is not the absence of religion? Charles Taylor (2007:15) said about the study of secularism: ‘It seems obvious before you start thinking about it, but as soon as you do, all sorts of problems arise.’ This is true. ‘What is secularism?’ has to be the biggest problem.

The forms and attributes of political secularism have often been settled at times of political transition and state formation. There is a double meaning in the title of this book, The State of Secularism. On the one hand, secularism is a mode of state. The second meaning opens an evaluation of the state secularism is in today. The book uses a framework developed here to characterise South Africa’s postapartheid secularism and understand how it came to be. My hope is that this framework will also prove useful in analysing other situations, particularly in the many other places in which Christianity has not been dominant, or where colonialism was the vehicle for the introduction of secularism.

What is Political Secularism?

A cluster of concepts – such as state, politics, religion, secular, church–state relations, differentiation and establishment – are essential to the notion of secularism, but they are difficult and ambiguous. They are complicated by the variety of ways in which they have been used normatively, descriptively and at different times, and by the fact that many of their usages are currently being challenged. To add to the complexity of understanding the relationship between religion and secularism, an investigation of this area in South Africa also requires attention to African traditions and the customary.

A polity, an individual, a form of subjectivity, an epistemology, a tradition, a text or a mode of reasoning can all be secular. And historically as well as normatively, the various objects of the secular are deeply intertwined.

A number of authors have sought to articulate the nature and characteristics of political secularism. Talal Asad, for example, in his influential Formations of the Secular, distinguishes between the secular, secularism and secularisation, referring to the secular as ‘an epistemic category’ (2003:1). Secularism, on the other hand, he conceives of as a political doctrine. In his analysis, secularisation is the application of this epistemic category and political doctrine to other forms of social and political life, a process he investigates in relation to Muslim and colonial law in British Colonial Egypt, among other systems. His principal object is secular political rationality and its effects on subjectivity, power and sociality.

José Casanova, in the book Public Religions in the Modern World, differentiates among three versions of secularisation theory. The first, he suggests, is the ‘differentiation and secularisation of society’ – the emergence of autonomous spheres of state, market and religion (1994:21). The second is ‘the decline of religion’. The third is what he calls the ‘privatisation thesis’, which posits a marginalisation and interiorisation of religion in the modern world. By separating out these three meanings, he is able to assert the validity of the first while questioning the second and third and positing a contemporary ‘deprivatisation’ of religion (1994:211). His principal object is the wave of recent Christian movements that seek to reoccupy the public realm, and he develops a normative argument for their validity.

Any discussion of the relationship between religion and politics must identify the basis on which the two can be distinguished from one another. For example, by what signs are we to know that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a religious leader and Nelson Mandela a political leader, especially when Tutu is engaged in political critique and Mandela is understood to be a miracle and source of transformation? Without this distinction, secularism is impossible.

The roots of the secular differentiation between religion and politics lie within Christianity. Political secularisms of all kinds developed in predominantly Christian contexts and it is impossible to narrate the emergence of the secular without taking Christian history into account.

To plot it rather crudely, Christianity started off as a Jewish messianic cult. Originally, Christianity was separate from and persecuted by Rome. It was, to quote Mark Lilla (2007:43), an ‘apocalyptic sect in a pagan empire’. After the death of Jesus and under the authority of the Apostle Paul, the early church split from Judaism and asserted itself as a vehicle for universal salvation. This transformation took place in its spread to the many non-Jewish groups in the Roman Empire; the communities to which Paul wrote his Epistles. It was only with the conversion of Constantine and many of the Roman elite in the fourth century that Christianity was Hellenised, became a state religion, acquired its empire and thus became Christendom (Lilla, 2007).

In Western Europe the traces of the earlier differentiation between a messianic cult of Jesus and the politics and culture of the Roman Empire can be mapped in tensions between the Christological Kingdom of God, the papal realm of church authority and the monarchs. Relations of power and authority between the church and the princes were both administratively and theologically contested. As Casanova (1994) puts it:

The theocratic claims of the church and spiritual rulers to possess primacy over the temporal rulers and, thus, ultimate supremacy and the right to rule over temporal affairs as well, were met with the caesarapopist claims of kings to embody sacred sovereignty by divine right and by the attempts of temporal rulers to incorporate the spiritual sphere into their temporal patrimony and vassalage.

While there were clearly differentiations between prince and cardinal in Western Europe until the seventeenth century, the exact terms and location of this differentiation between religion and politics were contested.

One of the ways in which to trace a history of secularisation is through changes in the meaning of the words that refer to it within Christian Europe. The etymological root of the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’ – the Latin word saeculum – means time or age. As a theological term it designates the time from Jesus’s incarnation until his second coming (Casanova, 1994; Lilla, 2007). Paradoxically, therefore, it refers to a time without the Son of God; a worldly time, but within the context of a broader theological narrative and cosmology.

In the Canon Law of the Middle Ages, sarcularisatio came to designate the release of a cleric from the obligations of his order and into the status of a secular priest in order to work ‘in the world’ (Asad, 1999; Blumenberg, 1966; Casanova, 1994). This ‘world’ was nonetheless thoroughly Christian. Once again the term had the double meaning of a worldliness that was asserted from an ecclesiastical point of view. Unlike the temporal meaning mentioned above, this one has a spatial dimension that refers to the worldliness beyond the monasteries’ walls and religious participation in that worldliness or laity.

This secularisation as laicisation was part of the major upheaval in medieval Christianity. The medieval Catholic Church sought, as Asad (1993:37) suggests, the ‘subjection of all practice to a unified authority’ that could discern truth and falsehood. This authority was policed by accusations of heresy and excommunication, tantamount to social and political as well as religious banishment. Heresy was not only about incorrect belief; it was also about a refusal to cede to the church the power to authorise truth. A manual for inquisitors in 1248 refers to a heretic as ‘he who believed in the errors of heretics and is proved still to believe them and because, when examined or when convicted and confessing, he flatly refused to be recalled and to give full obedience to the mandates of the Church’ (Lopez, 1998:25).

The diocesan borders of the medieval church marked both polity and population. Its functions and privileges included ‘the allocation of administration of judicial matters, education, the documentation of life cycle events (such as birth, marriage, death) and social welfare responsibilities’ (Casanova, quoted in Gill and Keshavarzian, 1999:460). In practical terms, the parish was the functional mode of tax collection (Taylor, 2007). It had, in other words, what would now be considered a wide range of governmental functions and roles.

Between 1450 and 1640 a fire of religious reformation swept through the Catholic world, eventually leading to the emergence of Protestantism. During this period a series of reformers attempted to raise ‘the quality of spirituality of the masses’, as Taylor (2007:65) puts it, by focusing increasingly on the Passion of Christ and on pilgrimage. The gap between the laity and the priesthood was breached and what had previously been an elite theological concern over divine judgement, for example, became laicised.

Among these Catholic movements were various attempts at institutional as well as dogmatic reform. These included the founding of new orders such as the Jesuits in 1534, the intensification of practices of individual piety that began with the medieval mystics, and church approval for the study of Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts (Lilla, 2007) that had been preserved by Muslim scholars through the Christian Dark Ages.

Many writers have identified the origins of both modern political thought and modern interiorised subjectivity in these developments. The rediscovery of the classics animated the Enlightenment. Michel Foucault (1986), for example, examined the laicisation of confession practices, their intensification and spread, locating the reflexive subjectivity that authorised the novel and psychology’s talking cures in these forms of discipline. The seeds of church reform were to bear fruit in the emergence of secular modern subjectivities.

The late fifteenth century also saw the development of the natural sciences and the invention of the microscope and telescope. Geological sciences cut away at the biblical foundations of creationism and the early modern states engaged in exploration and early mercantile colonialism (Anderson, 1991). Expanded trade routes became a source of information that was hard to reconcile with biblical narratives. China, for example, proved to be verifiably ‘older than any civilisation mentioned in the Bible’ (Lilla, 2007:60). All these developments undermined the authority of the church as purveyor of truth about God and nature and gave authority to newer sources of knowledge. They also led to the historically unprecedented emergence of atheism, the possibility of no belief or relation to God, along with a profound scepticism about religion as institution and mode of knowledge.

The politics of Christian pluralism

The Reformation was launched when Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517. His was the first heretical movement the Catholic Church was unable to suppress and it led to a split in Latin Christendom. The complex monopoly of the Roman Church was broken (Casanova, 1994). For the first time Western Europe became the site of Christian pluralism, a split that was to have far-reaching consequences.

The Reformation was to liberate the spheres of economy, society, science and politics from religious control by breaking the monopoly of the Catholic Church. As Louis Dumont argues, ‘medieval religion was a great cloak. Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacity and became one among other apparently equal considerations, of which the political was the first born’ (Quoted in Asad, 1993:27).

In the thinking of Luther and John Calvin and under the later Enlightenment critiques of religion, the centre of gravity in Christian practice moved from sacraments and rituals and other collective practice to inner transformation or salvation through ‘personal faith’. In Luther’s fiery movement it was only the inner realm that could guarantee freedom and the possibility of salvation. The outer person was subject to systems of worldly power that could only corrupt it (Casanova, 1994). Many sacraments, the doctrine of intercession by saints, and celibate priesthood were abandoned.

Much of the Enlightenment’s conceptualisation of freedom, maturity and rationalism comes from the anti-Catholic polemics of Protestant reformers. But the critique of Catholicism was not only ideological or theological; it was also a reaction against the Roman See’s political role and the consequent weakness of the republican princes. According to Anthony Gill (2008:77):

When Luther nailed up his theses, the north-western German princes and electors had no legal power to staunch the flow of funds to Rome or to limit the expansion of Church lands … By turning Protestant and confiscating church property and income, as Luther advocated, they reversed their unfavourable situation vis-à-vis the church …

Until the Reformation, Western European religious and political communities and territories had been almost entirely coterminous. As a consequence, the split in the church had violent repercussions. The wars that broke out after the Reformation were fought not only over individual souls or the rights of conscience and confession, but also over the affiliation of polities and territories. France, for example, suffered a series of civil wars from 1562 to 1598 over this matter. Religious conflicts fed into the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651. All across Western Europe, the Vatican, the princes and the new Calvinist and later Congregationalist, Quaker and Lutheran reformers sought to assert their truth and power over territories and subjects as well as souls. Unlike the Catholic Church, Protestantism was profoundly fissiparous: continually splitting and founding new denominations that were in competition with each other as much as with the Catholic Church (Weber, 1978).

There were a number of attempts to pacify the violence. The Netherlands supported religious tolerance after its independence in 1579, becoming a haven for Protestant dissidents from across Europe. The Dutch Declaration of Independence asserted that ‘no man may be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship’ (Gill, 2008:81). In 1598 King Henry IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes, giving Huguenots, the minority French Protestants, ‘a guarantee of non-persecution for their fai...