2013-2014 Faculty Research Seminar

In Search of the Secular

Seminar Facilitator: Adeeb Khalid, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History

Secular, secularism, secularization—these terms frame for many of us our sense of the world.  We live in a secular age, in a secular state, and we have a secular view of the world. Secularization has, after all, given us the separation of church and state and thus saved religion from the state (or was it the other way round?). Especially in our public discourse, we also premise our understanding of the rest of the world on the assumption of “a secular West.”

We are disconcerted when other peoples use religion to center their politics, whether in the form of violence or of mobilization (against “blasphemy,” for instance), and we wish they were like us. Indeed, the current world order is predicated on claims to the secular, and secular values are routinely proclaimed by Western states in their dealings with the rest of the world.

The U.S. State Department funds enormous numbers of foreign visitors to this country to observe the interaction of religion and state in a secular setting. Yet, at the same time, in large parts of the American public space, the word secular carries only the most negative connotations. Many Americans (and their numbers are larger than we in academe like to think) are anything but “secular,” and do not want to be. Whether in explaining the beginning of the world (the origins of the species, the age of the dinosaurs, the making of the Grand Canyon) or thinking about the future (climate change, End Times), they have little use of “secular” explanations, they detest “secularism,” and bemoan the “secularization” of society. The authority of science is less secure in the making of our public policy than our assumptions about our secular present might indicate. Beyond the United States, the relations between religion and the state in the West also range over a vast terrain that bears investigation.

What meanings do the term secular and its derivatives carry? How do those meanings change across time and space and across various global divides? What ideological work does the concept of the “secular West” do in upholding our view of the world? These are some of the questions we will explore in the faculty research seminar for 2013‑14. The seminar provides an opportunity for interested faculty to read about and discuss a number of issues related to the concept of the “secular” and its cognates, secularism and secularization. 

Rationale and Relevance

The seminar will start with two propositions: First, that secularism and its cognates have a range of meanings across time and space, across registers of discourse (academic, public, quotidian), and across the disciplines; Second, that our comfortable assumption of an uncomplicatedly “secular West” (let alone a secular United States) is unwarranted and needs to be questioned.   

The relationship of political power and the social order to religion and irreligion, belief and unbelief remains just as unsettled in “the West” as in the rest of the world. We need to investigate the various ways “religion” is defined, accommodated, managed, or repressed in different political systems. We also need to ask what secularization—the process of becoming secular—means in terms of politics and the individual. And to the extent that the concept of secularization, as the separation 0f church and state, has its roots in the history of Christendom, we need to ask how the concept works in contexts where there is no church or religious hierarchy, or when it becomes a coercive state policy. 

These questions lead us to inquiry in a variety of disciplines, from politics and the law, through history and anthropology, to the study of self and subjectivity. In the seminar, we can ask the following sets of questions:

• What is the range of political arrangements that self-proclaimed secular states have arrived at with religion? What are the relations among the varieties of secularism in the contemporary world (e.g., American secularism, French laïcité, the svetskost’ of post-Soviet states)? Is there a difference between a non-confessional state that is religiously neutral (is such a thing possible?) and a “secularizing” state? Where do states that seek (or sought) to expunge religion from public life stand in this regard? How does secularism as state policy operate
• What are the affective dimensions of secularism? What does being secular entail? A disenchanted view of the world? Lack of religion? Of faith? Of practice and observance?  What is the relationship between secularism and atheism or irreligion?
• What is secularization as a process? How does secularization as disenchantment differ from secularization as the separation of state and religion (“the church”)? Does one require the other? What when the latter is a coercive state‑driven process?
• How do “religious” voices affect “secular” politics?
• What is the relationship between modernity and secularism? When we were comfortable with the concept of modernization, we also assumed that it led to secularization (in the sense of disenchantment). How then do we account for the persistence of religions in public life or the re-enchantment of the modern in many societies? Can the modern be enchanted or does the enchantment disprove modernity?
• In what ways are claims to secular/ism imbricated in broader global struggles (civilizational arguments, immigration, humanitarian interventions, global feminism…)?

These questions are, of course, not new. They have provoked an enormous literature that sprawls across several disciplines, which, however, sometimes resembles the proverbial blind men examining the equally proverbial elephant.  This seminar will not be comprehensive, but will provide participants an opportunity to sample some of these riches.

We will devote the first few meetings of the seminar to reading selections from across the disciplines to (a) convey to participants a sense of the diversity of the literature; and (b) acquaint them with literatures they are not familiar with. Participants will read some of the classics as well as historically or thematically specific studies. For the balance of the seminar, participants will present their own work to the seminar, and the group will read materials suggested by the presenters. 

The preliminary bibliography contains the kind of materials the seminar will discuss. It is subject to change and will develop alongside suggestions from participants; the final selections will reflect the composition of the group of faculty who participate in the seminar.

Preliminary Bibliography

• Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.  Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2003.
• Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. Rethinking Secularism.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Chatterjee, Nandini.  The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830-1960. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• Connolly, William E.  Why I am not a Secularist.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
• Dressler, Markus, and Arvind Mandair, eds. Secularism and Religion-Making. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Hibbard, Scott W. Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India, and the United States. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
• Khalid, Adeeb. “A Secular Islam: Nation, State, and Religion in Uzbekistan,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35 (2003), 573-598.
• Scott, David, and Charles Hirschkind, eds. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006.
• Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Princeton University Press, 2007.
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2007.
• Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Faculty Fellows

Adeeb Khalid, Professor of Asian Studies and History (Seminar Leader), will be completing an article related to a new project: “When ‘Muslim’ is a Nation: Confessional Nationalism in the Muslim World.” The project will examine the articulation of “Muslim nationalism” in various contexts (Bosnia, Turkey, Pakistan, Uzbekistan) in the twentieth century and its various trajectories.

Peter Balaam, Associate Professor of English, will be finishing two articles on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s religious thought.  The first article puts Emerson’s journal and published poetry in the context of religious history through an analysis of the poet’s views on Terminus, the Roman god of bounds. The second piece will contribute an argument about Emerson’s later religious thought aimed to help readers understand the “secular” and allegedly market-embracing tone of Emerson’s post-Civil War lecturing.

Scott Carpenter, Professor of French, will use the Seminar to help him in his creative writing, as he works to complete two short stories that illustrate (among other things) conflict related to secularism “from the inside,” through creating a fictional character experiencing a traumatic cultural encounter.

Carolyn Fure-Slocum, College Chaplain, is researching the roles of secularity and religion in the liberal arts setting by examining a wide range of understandings and uses of secularism in different geographical, historical, political, and academic subject areas. 

Lori Pearson, Associate Professor of Religion, will work on her book manuscript, “Sexuality and Social Order: Marianne Weber on Religion, Modernity, and the Secular.” This research explores the origin and gendered dimensions of theories of religion, modernity, and secularization as developed among German intellectuals around the turn of the century.

David Tompkins, Assistant Professor of History, will complete an article on “Central European Jews and Israel in the Cold War: Religion, National Identities, and Secularism in Communist Poland and East Germany.” His project considers Jews who chose to stay in Central Europe after the defeat of Nazism (and the discrediting of its race theories). How did they define themselves with respect to religious and national identity?  What did it mean to be a Jew in a society where secularization was actively promoted?