Abstract
What is the relationship between law and religion in the modern Western secular city? Has religion been effectively subdued by secularization, its effects limited by law? Is the law neutral in its regard and treatment of religion? Does law have any limits in this regard? How does it go about formulating the limits of the city itself, in this context? Though it would seem that historical projects of secularization intended to employ strategies to drive the religious into the private realm, separating it from responsibilities deemed to belong to secular state apparatuses, I argue that these projects were never able to reach an absolute point or state of finalization. A deeper investigation of this “incompleteness” can offer a kind of analytical key to understanding why it is that conflicts between the secular and the religious persist. There is another somehow parallel incompleteness to cities themselves if we approach them from a semiotic-spatial point of view that I think strongly informs these issues. Following modern philosophers, phenomenologists and geographers in their studies of space, I take the view that space is not an entity “out there,” existing a priori, but rather a social, sensorial and ultimately semiotic construction. Like secularization itself, then, the secular city is not (and cannot be) a “completed” entity but is rather a never-ceasing series of creations, disruptions and destructions. Understanding the religious in the secular city requires unbundling or unmasking its apparent material evidence to see how it is lived, and how it too creates, disrupts, destructs and resurges, eventually. The law of the secular city must engage the secular and the religious even as they fail to keep still. It may, however, have a strategic advantage in its own mutability, in the power of its semantic flexibility. The essay will attempt to show how the very mobility and changeability of law and its objects, once acknowledged, or brought to light, can empower processes of discomposition that trigger categorical shifts resulting in new outcomes to conflicts. In this way, the spatial limits of law could perhaps transform into unlimited possibilities for the agency of “secular” citizens.
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Notes
Cox’s 1965 book entitled The Secular City caused a tremendous stir and continues to be read globally. He describes his work as a “theology of secularization,” and his basic premise that the religious is much more diffuse and prevalent in our secular societies than is typically understood is certainly one I share. In his introduction to the 2013 new edition, he provides a very helpful summary of the literature that has emerged in response, describing many of the most important works on secularism and secularization of the last few decades that have deepened and expanded the discourse.[16: xi–xxxix].
See, indicatively, [4, 22,23,24]. For a recent approach to the post-secular with a specific view to the religious within urban contexts, see [12]. For an Italian analysis of the post-secular city and the secularization debates see [14]. An excellent recent analysis of modern secularism across several Asian contexts can be found in [17], while the “secular age” in the Middle East and North Africa is addressed in [30].
The production of space is by now nearly its own academic field, typically situated within Legal Geography. Among the most prolific and prominent scholars writing from this perspective with specific regard to the law is [35, 36]. An interesting, if perhaps overly simplified and sociological use of the terms “geographies of secularization” and “geographies of religion” can be found in [3: 9].
I attempted a more extensive treatment of the entwinement of the secular and the religious in Europe in [46]. See therein for further references to the literature on this topic.
[37] and many other works.
[34].
[31].
[32].
[2].
[2: 206].
[43].
More than 30 French towns banned the use of the “burkini” on their beaches during 2016, but the state eventually ruled against them.
[19: 81–83].
For a concise assessment of one of the more blatant cases, see [1].
Lautsi and Others v. Italy, European Court of Human Rights (Application No. 30814/06).
[29].
SAS v France 2014 European Court of Human Rights 695.
Ibid, “The Court is … able to accept that the barrier raised against others by a veil concealing the face is perceived by the respondent State as breaching the right of others to live in a space of socialisation which makes living together easier” (para. 122).
Ibid, “That being said, in view of the flexibility of the notion of ‘living together’ and the resulting risk of abuse, the Court must engage in a careful examination of the necessity of the impugned limitation.” (para. 122).
I intend exceedance in terms of spatial exceedance, a semiotic dimension read as a pragmatic dimension in a Peircean sense. For a deep exploration of the semiotic exceedances of sacred spaces, see [41].
Ricca has written extensively about the role of categories in cognition and their discomposition and re-composition as a methodology specifically applicable to law and cultural conflicts, but for an exposition focused specifically on categories see [40].
As Ricca writes, sacred spaces “function as a semantic point of confluence for all the pragmatic threads that believers interweave through their actions, inspired by the rites that sacred places dynamically host and embody.” [41:171].
[28].
The Guardian has created an online map of POPs, asking readers to contribute information. The list is up to at least 50 and these include many of the most prominent spaces in London. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/pseudo-public-space-explore-data-what-missing.
[21].
A succinct but thorough sociological overview of the Occupy Wall Street movement is found in [9].
This term is like a door that opens yet another entire field of modern academic research, presaged and perhaps first ideated by major philosophers including John Dewey, William James and the early American pragmatists and French phenomenologists, generally. In recent decades sociology, anthropology and cognitive science have all investigated the post-Cartesian view of an inseparable body-mind unit. For a recent multidisciplinary overview taking into account philosophy of mind, American pragmatism, neuroscience, psychology of aesthetics, literary studies, and art, see [44].
A history of the “Critical Mass” phenomenon has been written by its self-proclaimed founder, Chris Carlsson [11].
"Kay v. the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, EWHC 1536 (Admin)". Royal Courts of Justice. June 27, 2006.
"Kay v. the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis (appeal)". Royal Courts of Justice. May 21, 2007.
"Judgments - Kay (FC)(Appellant) v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (Respondent)". House of Lords. November 26, 2008, at para. 4.
Ibid at para. 21.
Para. 9/32 of the judgment.
Supra, note 38.
“Kidical Mass Dortmund: 1100 Teilnehmer wollen bessere Radwege.” VeloCityRuhr.
[32].
For an illuminating analysis of private/public debates in the making of city space from a “founding father” of Legal Geography, see [7].
[1].
[45].
[5].
[5: 43].
Rosenberg v. Outremont (City), 2001 RJQ 1556 para 14 (CS) as cited in [5: 44].
Ibid.
For a recent interdisciplinary collection of essays addressing the role of faith and religious practices as strategies for understanding and negotiating the migratory experience in urban settings (north and south), see [25].
The issue of the asymmetry of judicial access is addressed throughout Ricca’s oeuvre, but see indicatively, [39].
In 2013, the Council of Europe published a document entitled, “The Intercultural city step by step” [15].This is a kind of manual intended to promote the spread of ongoing efforts throughout Europe and beyond to confront culturally driven social malaise using an intercultural (as opposed to multicultural) approach. The argument made is that, “It falls primarily upon cities to design and implement policies that foster community cohesion and turn cultural diversity into a factor of development rather than a threat.” The text is empirical rather than theoretical but offers some excellent insight into many of the kinds of conflicts addressed in this essay and the ways space, law, and culture can interplay to find new and better long-term solutions.
Sassen’s compilation of essays by young scholars is conceived with precisely this desire to change the terms of debate and engagement [43], preface, emphasis mine.
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Vazquez, M.L. End of Secular City Limits? On Law’s Religious Neutrality in the City. Int J Semiot Law 35, 259–286 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09742-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09742-5