Abstract
Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because it enables sharing and, hence, community, across the cultural boundaries erected by religious belief. For this reason, some governments have embraced the concept and incorporated it into official state discourse. Other governments, in turn, have copied the language of secularism not for its intended meaning but for pragmatic purposes—namely, to proclaim a position within the community of modern nations. State discourse, however, irrespective of the reasons for which it was adopted, affects how ordinary people reason about religion. Reasoning from the possibility of alternative religions opens a space for unbelief. Through an analysis of constitutional language, census data, and interviews, the paper concludes that secularism has more to do with the circulation of discourse and the reasons behind it, than with an immanent versus transcendent solution to the puzzle of existence—the transcendent solution being the foundation for the circulation of religious belief itself.
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Notes
Notably by Spiro (1959), who referred to such constitutions as “facades,” and Loewenstein (1957), as well as others. For a similar view of constitutions in the Arab world, see Brown (2002), although his conclusion is not as dismissive as the earlier ones, and, indeed, echoes the argument here for a complex chain linking state discourse to cultural beliefs and practices.
Cited in the US Department of State (2007) in the section on France.
In fact, the interviews done in connection with this research turned up statements like those in the French survey about belief. Here is an example:
Questioner: Can you state any religious affiliation, if you have any?
Respondent: I'm a recovering Catholic I guess you would say.
Questioner: And what does that mean?
Respondent: It means my mother was Catholic and I was raised Catholic but very actively no longer practice.
Questioner: Do you still believe in Catholic ideas or no? Are you actually not catholic?
Respondent: Yeah.
All of the currently in effect constitutions cited here can be found on the internet, many through Wikisource “Category: National Constitutions” (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:National_Constitutions). I have also consulted the individual government websites, which, in some cases, have an official English translation. While a number of the constitutions are originally in English or have official translations and while I have endeavored to crosscheck those that are translated into English from other languages, I have per force had to rely on translations in numerous instances.
While there is no use of freedom together with religion in the French constitution, in fact the Law of 1905 makes explicit reference to “freedom of conscience,” an expression used for freedom of religion elsewhere, as I will discuss below. The Iranian case seems to be the only true exception.
The Indian constitution of 1950 uses the term “secularism” in a sense broader than that of religious freedom under the auspices of a state religion but narrower than the French concept. The Indian constitution mentions specific religions so frequently and with such specificity that it does not seem to promote a sphere independent of religion, so much as it does the cooperation among people of different religions in all spheres. For example, Article 25 states that “the wearing and carrying of kirpans [knives of a particular kind] shall be deemed to be included in the profession of the Sikh religion.” Of course, secularism here builds upon what is undoubtedly the world’s longest continuous history of the idea of “toleration,” going back to the Emperor Asoka in the third century BC.
Interestingly, some of the interviewees believe the idea of alternativity to be implicit in the notion of freedom, even when it is not explicitly stated as a right, as in the case of the fourth test alternative above. One interviewee commented:
Um, I think four is important because it’s, well the state guarantees the freedom of belief and the freedom of practicing religious rights, so it doesn’t necessarily say that it’s ok to not have a religion but I think it’s implied in its statement even though it doesn’t express it as explicitly as number two.
It seems not so implausible—special as this experimental interview situation is—that individuals could reason from a statement, such as No. 4 above, to the conclusion that freedom of unbelief and the freedom of not practicing religion is implicit in “the freedom of belief and the freedom of practicing religious rights.”
I am aware that there are, in theory, different ways in which states and be connected to or disconnected from religion. Loren P. Beth (1958: 124 ff.) argues for seven distinct ways: “Pure Theocracy, Total Separation, Mixed Theocracy, Total Identification, Total Conflict, Erastianism, Totalitarianism, and Partial Separation.” The British model of establishment can be thought of, in these terms, as Erastian, with the state controlling religion through the Church of England rather than promoting religion per se, which aligns it with the secular states and differentiates it from those where the state actually promotes a religion or religion generally. My discussion here will per force gloss over the subtleties at the theoretical plane in favor the tendencies at the formal level of discourse.
The phrase “separation of church and state” was used as early as 1802 by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. He describes the establishment clause from the Bill of Rights as “building a wall of separation between Church & State” (Jefferson 1802).
The 1791 Polish constitution, one of the three earliest modern constitutions, contained the clause: “…we guarantee freedom to all rites and religions in the Polish lands, in accordance with the laws of the land.” However, it also proclaimed: “The dominant national religion is and shall be the sacred Roman Catholic faith with all its laws. Passage from the dominant religion to any other confession is forbidden under penalties of apostasy.” Thanks to Dr. Karolina Szmagalska for bringing this to my attention. The formulation of metaculture to seal off boundaries of religions was a not an uncommon practice in early constitutions. For example, the 1814 constitution of Norway declared: “the Evangelical-Lutheran religion shall remain the official religion of the State,” and it stipulated that “the inhabitants professing it are bound to bring up their children in the same.”
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Thanks to Rachel Higgins and Julia Brinjac for their research assistance. This paper benefited from a lively discussion with members of the Culture and Interaction Cluster of the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, to whom I presented a draft version. I also acknowledge the help given to me by participants in the fall 2007 Cultural Motion seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, with whom I brainstormed the ideas presented here.
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Urban, G. The Circulation of Secularism. Int J Polit Cult Soc 21, 17–37 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-008-9040-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-008-9040-x