Abstract
This chapter introduces the theme of postsecular Enlightenment. It does so by arguing that we need to reverse the anti-spiritual bias of the European Enlightenment and to apply reason to both the reform of human affairs and to human spiritual performances. Specifically, I argue that the Enlightenment’s critique of religion is flawed and leads to a misguided exclusion of spirituality from serious concerns. I then evaluate and reject postreligion as a possible response to the inadequacies of both secularism and religion on the grounds that it lacks the relevant organizational specificity. Finally, I have offer an initial draft of a postsecular approach to contemporary governance.
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Notes
- 1.
There are also studies arguing that religions are mythic constructions which bring diverse phenomena within a European preconception of spiritual activity (see, for example, Jensen 1997).
- 2.
- 3.
Here account needs to be taken of recent developments in Enlightenment studies which draw attention to multiple enlightenments. See Hunter (2001) and my two monographs on the English deists (Hudson 2009a, b), a major reinterpretation of deism and the English deists and a study of these writers’ contributions to reform.
- 4.
Although a generic approach persists among cognitive science and evolutionary approaches. See, for example, Atran (2002).
- 5.
Among a vast literature works by Derrida, Vattimo, Richard Rorty and John Caputo are important.
- 6.
Theologians, of course, have long been sensitive to the possibility of conceptions of religion which emphasise anti-mundane experience without positing mythical entities. They have been less quick to grasp the issue of organizational evolution.
- 7.
Apart from a vast empirical literature, see the useful discussion in H. Fingarette, Confucius The Secular as Sacred (1972).
- 8.
Sociologial studies of the postsecular are emerging. McLennan argues that the recent postsecular turn in social and cultural theory is mostly intra-secular. For postsecularism and international relations see Barbato and Kratochwil (2009).
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For a very different approach, see I. Stenhouse, and B Knowles eds. Christianity in the Post-Secular West (2007).
- 10.
Critics might argue that Dostert’s rich discussion, Beyond Political Liberalism: Toward a Postsecular Ethics of Public Life (2006), tends in this direction at times.
- 11.
Dostert (2006) advances a version of postsecularism which qualifies liberalism. However, in my view he does not allow sufficiently for the need for religions to pass through Enlightenment in terms of practical learning.
- 12.
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Hudson, W., Hudson, W. (2014). Towards Post-Secular Enlightenment. In: Sharpe, M., Nickelson, D. (eds) Secularisations and Their Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_12
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