Introduction: Secularities, Religiosities, and Subjectivities

Abstract

What has become of secularism following the so-called postsecular turn? As a consequence of the demise of modern twentieth-century secularization theory (as per Peter Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’), we live in an interesting intellectual moment in which the so-called postsecular (understood descriptively rather than theoretically, see, e.g., Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson 2012; Rosati 2015) coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized (see, e.g., Taylor 2007; Agrama 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). On the other hand, if, as Habermas argues, the secularist paradigm has learned to cohabitate with the religious, we also witness the conflictual anti-religious stance of ‘new atheist’ movements, which claim a ‘scientific’ argument for the removal of the religious from the public sphere (see Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Blanes 2015). This cohabitation of the secular and the postsecular is revealed, as the new atheism example above shows, mainly through political dialectical processes (see also Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Sullivan et al. 2015). This in turn makes us, editors of this volume, feel that (1) those political statements overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression; and (2) for that same reason, they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the pragmatics and empirical dimensions of secularism. We argue that one such move toward the concrete and the subjective will allow us to know more about the plural, heterogeneous, and processual character of the secular/religious conundrum, and thus move beyond the monolithic, immobilized configurations that often flourish in the public sphere.