Radical Secularization?

An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture

Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck, Guido Vanheeswijck, Stijn Latré, Walter Van Herck, Guido Vanheeswijck

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781501322686
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628921793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

What does it mean for a society to be secular? Answering this question from a philosophical angle, Radical Secularization? delves into the philosophical presuppositions of secularization. Which cultural evolutions made secularization possible? International scholars from different disciplines assess the answers given by many leading philosophers such as, among others, Löwith, Blumenberg and Habermas (Germany), Gauchet and Nancy (France), Taylor and Bellah (North America). They examine the theory that secularization cannot only be regarded as a cultural change that was forced upon religion from an external source (e.g. science), but should also be considered as a phenomenon triggered by motives internal to religion. If religions are indeed capable of inner transformations, the question arises whether religions can persist in the secular societies they inadvertently helped to bring about, and how secular societies may accommodate religion.

1

Introduction

Stijn Latré, Guido Vanheeswijck and Walter Van Herck

Secularization theory is a popular theme in social science. In sociology, the seculariza­tion paradigm has been amply discussed in the works of Berger, Bruce, Casanova, Davie, Inglehart, Luhmann and Norris, to name just a few. In philosophy, political theorists such as Habermas, Rawls, Barry and Audi have contributed to debates about religious accommodation in secular societies. Sociological, historical and philosophical perspectives on secularization have recently been brought together in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Warner et al. 2010) and Rethinking Secularism (Calhoun et al. 2011).

With these contemporary debates in sociology of religion and political philosophy in mind, this book wants to deepen the discussion by focusing on the genealogy of secularization. What are the cultural roots or radices of secularization?

‘Radical secularization’ indeed suggests two meanings of ‘radical’. First, ‘radical’ can refer to the ‘end’ of secularization, which in its turn can be understood in two different ways. The radical end of secularization either means that the process of secularization has now come to its terminus, and that there is no way back. Put differently, the irreversible process of secularization has reached its final destination. Or, the end of secularization may refer to the nowadays popular phrase of the ‘return of religion’, implying that religion is conspicuously present in the public sphere in material and symbolic forms such as headscarves, or that religion is back on the agenda of (academic) Western culture, and when considered on a global scale even has never really left the scene. These considerations equally include claims that secularization has been culturally adapted in non-Western contexts.

Second, ‘radical’ can also refer to the philosophical–historical roots (radices) of secularization. The authors of this book primarily look at philosophical and sociological theories of secularization and religion, continuing the traditions of Weber, Durkheim, Schmitt, Löwith and Blumenberg.

Since a philosophical study of secularization simply cannot neglect the classic debate between Löwith and Blumenberg, the first and smaller part of this volume is dedicated to the heritage of this debate in our days. Jean-Claude Monod sheds light on the reception of this debate in France, specifically in the writings of Foucault, Lyotard and Nancy. He also discusses Taylor’s rather cursory mentioning of Blumenberg towards the end of A Secular Age (Taylor 2007).

Willem Styfhals argues that the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg about secularization, in fact, points to a more fundamental debate about the problem of evil. If it is to be understood in an ontological way, as Löwith and Voegelin claim, the problem of evil is still radically tied to the modern idea of progress. In their view, the problem of evil is the real substance of every eschatological view of history. In view of their ontological nature, eschatology and the problem of evil are surviving in the modern idea of progress – they even make this idea possible. Consequently, modernity does not escape the Gnostic opposition between good and evil. By contrast, Blumenberg sees modernity as the ‘second overcoming of Gnosticism’: since, in his account, the problem of evil does not take metaphysical proportions, human beings do not need to become godly heroes in order to defeat the ‘god’ of evil. So the debate between Löwith and Blumenberg about secularization and eschatology ultimately revolves around different metaphysical and anthropological presuppositions.

The history behind Blumenberg’s ‘secularization theorem’ is further illuminated by Herbert De Vriese. He observes a paradigm shift in sociological debates about secularization, namely, from the ‘exit from religion’ half a century ago, to a ‘return of religion’ in our times. At the same time, philosophical debates seem to stick to the old secularization theorem, linking the origins of modernity to Christianity. However, Blumenberg’s analysis of secularization as a rhetorical category of illegitimacy, depicting modernity as a ‘historical wrong’, has lost its vigour, precisely due to sociological debates about the ‘return of religion’. The meaning of secularization, instead of being a category of historical wrong denouncing the shortcomings of modernity, now shifts to a category of historical entitlement with regard to Christianity and other religions. If modernity is partly the result of religious transformations, religion may vindicate its rights within secular societies.

De Vriese’s thesis about secularization as a category of historical entitlement is amply attested in the second part of this book, ‘Secularization in Christianity and Beyond’. André Cloots examines the pivotal role ascribed by Marcel Gauchet to Christianity as the ‘religion for the departure from religion’. Andreas Michel confronts Gauchet’s and Vattimo’s views on the Christian dogma of Incarnation. Whereas the former emphasizes the dynamics of transcendence endemic to Incarnation, the latter highlights the immanent aspects of Incarnation. Gauchet’s and Vattimo’s views nonetheless converge in regarding Christianity as the end of society’s sacred foundation.

The most lengthy and arguably the most thought-provoking chapter of this book is John Milbank’s essay on the legitimacy and genealogy of secularization. According to Milbank, secularization has unduly displaced a metaphysics of participation in Platonic style by a univocal understanding of being. Secular society came about by nominalist and Protestant theology, and by its procedural and rationalist Enlightenment heirs in philosophy. In the course of his essay, Milbank touches on almost all subjects and protagonists present in other chapters of this book: Löwith and Blumenberg, de Lubac, Ratzinger and Habermas, Taylor, Gauchet and Bellah. His criticism of Gauchet is equally insightful as well as being open to contestation. In his essay on Gauchet, André Cloots anticipates Milbank’s views about orthodoxy and the metaphysics of participation, by making use of Gauchet’s interpretation. Milbank’s view of participation questions the autonomy of the secular world and hence threatens to render the world second hand. It is just one example of intertextual references in this book which may be compelling to the reader.

Milbank’s defence of Christianity in its radically orthodox form is also questioned in the next chapter of the book by Guido Vanheeswijck. Radical orthodoxy as an alternative for radical secularization may invoke what Leszek Kolakowski has called ‘metaphysical horror’. Charles Taylor is well aware of this danger in speaking about the need for ‘subtler languages’ that are more prudent in articulating deep ontological commitments. Hence Taylor cannot be seen as just another advocate of ‘radical orthodoxy’, as Milbank likes to present him.

The essays by Charles Lockwood and Gerbert Faure dwell on Taylor’s A Secular Age. Lockwood provides a very neat analysis of the reception of Taylor’s trail-blazing book. Just like Taylor himself tries to lay bare presuppositions of narratives about secularization, including his own, Lockwood articulates so-called apologetic and ‘non-apologetic’ presuppositions in Taylor’s book. His conclusion is that Taylor’s account of secularization cannot be discarded on grounds of its being a reduction to apologetics, since he explicitly warns against exclusionist positions, either on the side of believers or on the side of unbelievers.

Faure starts off with Taylor’s criticism of Gauchet, in the foreword to the English translation of Le désenchantement du monde. He argues that the disenchantment of the world may be compatible with subtler languages of ‘re-enchantment’, including religion. Nonetheless, since religion also entails claims about the ‘objective’ nature of reality, it remains vulnerable to disenchanting criticisms of science.

The relation between science and religion is also implicitly present in Walter Van Herck’s essay about the history of the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’, as it was described by W. C. Smith. It is only when ‘belief’ started to refer to a propositional content, believing that such and such is the case, that religious belief became vulnerable to competing outlooks such as science. However, the original and cross-cultural – and hence more universal – meaning of belief points in the direction of ‘believing in’: belief as an attitude of confidence, faith in a person, rather than in some propositional truth. The future of religion in a secular society may well depend on the recognition of this original meaning of belief.

Though philosophers like Gauchet and Taylor refer to the crucial role of Christianity in the process of secularization, they also embrace Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Achsenzeit, the period of axial religion. The penultimate essay of this book by Stijn Latré dwells on the meaning of axial religion in Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World (Gauchet 1985) and Bellah’s more recent Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah 2011). The eventual convergence between the ‘transcendental’ Gauchet and the more ‘empirical’ Bellah is striking. Though the latter fails to fully articulate the different layers of the meaning of transcendence throughout his book, both Bellah and Gauchet are to be admired for their comprehensive views on religion and society.

Axial religion is also at the centre of Laurens ten Kate’s essay on the deconstruction of Christianity by Jean-Luc Nancy. Ten Kate argues that, just like the past hegemony of religion could only exist by reference to the world or the ‘secular’ as its counterpart, the ‘secular age’ or ‘immanent frame’ of our days is equally questioned and rendered unstable by a ‘return’ of religion: not religion in its old forms, but transformations of religion; religion in a new guise, a secular guise. The secular contains its own limit, a limit that has nothing beyond it, that is, no border that can be transgressed. This ‘limit’, this otherness of the secular makes the secular possible, and may be called ‘religious’. Hence conceptual demarcations between religion and the secular are unstable and ultimately fail. The ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ mutually support each other; their interdependence fosters their independence. Future debates about religion and secularity may well go in that direction.

References

Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds). 2011. Rethinking Secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Oscar Burge, 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds). 2010. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Part One

In the Wake of Löwith and Blumenberg

2

Heaven on Earth? The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate

Jean-Claude Monod

1 Introduction

If one thinks of secularization as the name of a historical process, several questions immediately arise: Is this process still going on? At what intermediate point of this process do we stand? What would mean an achieved, or a radical, secularization?

As to the first question, one finds in the contemporary international discussion about secularization at least two different answers:

1. Secularization has passed, we live in a post-secular world. The most powerful trends nowadays go in a direction opposite to secularization, at least in many parts of the world – Europe being partly an exception.
2. Secularization is certainly not a steady and continuous process, without backlash effects, but rather an ongoing struggle. It continues even in regions marked by strong political–religious movements, by new anti-secularist political theologies, Christian or Jewish fundamentalisms, Islamism, and so on.

If answering empirical questions about secularization requires a sociological diagnosis, the last question – what would an achieved or radical secularization mean – calls for a more projective and philosophical answer.

And here again we encounter several answers which have already been developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the discussions of various secularist thinkers and in connection with social forces moulding the future.

A first answer was to say that a radical secularization would not only imply the move to free society from clericalism, hegemonic Churches and coercive religions, but also to dismiss all theological or religious concepts. We can find this answer among some scientist thinkers, sometimes inspired by Darwinism (such as Clémence Royer in France), among some branches of socialism and, for instance, in a text by the young Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage (Marx 1982) ‘On the Jewish Question’ – but here, the emancipation of the world from religion implied doing away with the social roots of what Marx regarded as a collective alienation.

In France, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an opposition inside the socialist movement, between those (like Vaillant and Allard) who promoted a ‘destruction of the Churches’ and those, like Jaurès, who were defending a liberal laïcité, in which the liberty of consciousness and liberty of cult would be guaranteed.

The second position suggests a different view of what could be called a radical secularization: not the destruction of religions, but the refusal of the hegemony of any institution, including those which could appear as the new sources of authority and power – not the Churches, but also nations, the state, science itself.

We find this position among phi...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on the Editors
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 In the Wake of Löwith and Blumenberg
• Part 2 Secularization in Christianity and Beyond
• Index
• Copyright