Religion and secularity as supersessionist categories

This article argues that the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews throughout history lies at the heart of the difficulties liberal societies are having today in accommodating religious diversity, but also more broadly, in discussing issues pertaining to religion and secularity in a nuanced way. After a brief summary of the characteristics of Christian supersessionism, the article first explores the modern concept of religion as a product of Protestant Christianity and thus as a category that inherently privileges a Christian perspective. Although the specific associations to Christians versus Jews have become less pronounced, the inherited dichotomies (archaic/enlightened, material/spiritual, particular/universal, etc.) live on and continue to shape attitudes towards what is perceived as more and less desirable forms of religion in contemporary Western societies – as mirrored in the widespread political rhetoric claiming that Islam is not ‘compatible’ with Western culture. However, to understand the full dimensions of the mechanisms guiding the public discourse on religion post-9/11, it is important also to recognize the extent to which not only the modern concept of religion but also of secularity is based on a supersessionary logic. Hence the second part of the article explores how the religious and the secular today jointly serve to uphold a hierarchical cultural order, where certain practices and values gain the upper hand by being associated with terms such as ‘rational’, ‘progressive’ or ‘Human Rights’, while other practices and values are framed as incompatible with these terms.

The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 are often depicted as a radical turning point in the recent history of the West.Yet the impact the attacks had on public attitudes towards religion in general and Islam in particular should not be overestimated.We do well to remind ourselves that the slippery equation of religion with violence and terror was common already in the reporting surrounding the Rushdie affair of 1989 and the Balkan Wars a few years later.Also, landmark publications such as Gilles Kepel's The Revenge of God (1993) and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1996) appeared already in the mid-1990s.Rather than signifying an absolute turning point in approaches to religion in the public sphere, it is more apt to say that 9/11 enhanced and reactivated attitudes and stereotypes that were already there.
In this article, I will engage with some of the ways in which these deeply engrained attitudes and stereotypes continue to shape discourses on diversity and otherness in contemporary Western societies.However, to fully understand the logic underpinning these discourses, it is important to reveal the historical roots of the supersessionary patterns on which they rely.Following a growing number of scholars today, I will argue that these patterns can ultimately be traced back to the hierarchical oppositions that were first deployed by early Christian theologians in their efforts to distance the church from its Hebraic origins.The basic argument of this ancient anti-Jewish polemic was that the church as the 'New Israel' had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people and thereby inaugurated a higher stage in history.While this pattern has determined the relationship between Jews and Christians throughout history, it has also fostered supersessionary ways of thinking more broadly.In the Reformation era, similar juxtapositions between the old and the new, the material and the spiritual, were redeployed by Protestant theologians as they attacked the ritual economy of the medieval Catholic church.As the new era advanced, these inherited supersessionary tropes were generalized and became part of a broader narrative of progress, enlightenment and emancipation.
As I will argue in the final parts of the article, contemporary conceptions of both religion and secularity are largely the products of these intellectual developments.When the modern concept of religion took shape, it was in the context of Enlightenment Protestantism, which became the model for religion as such.Recognizing this historical genealogy is imperative for understanding contemporary attitudes towards what is perceived as more and less desirable forms of religion in liberal Western societies.However, while this is an argument that is commonplace among scholars of religion today, I want to go a step further by arguing that the same goes for the idea of secularity.In other words, revealing the extent to which both religion and secularity are modelled on modern Protestantism-including the supersessionary binaries on which it relies-sheds further light on why certain forms of religion are perceived as compatible with modern liberal societies whereas others are deemed not to fit in.This tendency is particularly prevalent in contemporary populist right-wing discourses in Western Europe, which are characterized by a concomitant investment in Christianity and secularism as a bulwark against Islam.A critical confrontation with these patterns, I will therefore conclude, requires more than merely a commitment to religious diversity.The fact that Christianity historically occupies a privileged K position in the Western context commands a particular responsibility on the part of the post-Christian majority culture.

New atheism and the hoary cliché of the 'God of the Old Testament'
Let me return to my initial claim that 9/11 served to galvanize inherited stereotypical patterns about religion.An obvious example of this was the new and yet not so new genre of 'New Atheism' that flourished during the 2000s.In several cases spearheaded by writers that were anything but experts in religion, this literature reactivated some of the classical arguments against religion that had been put forth by high-modernist analytical philosophy, while also seizing upon more recent political rhetoric on religion and violence.Before commenting further on this literature, it is important to recognize the liberal and democratic ambitions of writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens or Michel Onfray.All these writers were committed to defending free speech, diversity and tolerance against what they perceived, in Dawkins's words, as an 'overweening respect for religion' in today's Western societies (Dawkins 2006, p. 21).Yet there was an obvious ambivalence that permeated these ambitions.For all their liberal intentions, the New Atheist writers contributed, albeit inadvertently, to sharpening the tone of the public conversation about religion in ways that tapped into the surging nationalist and xenophobic sentiments following the 9/11 attacks.
Few scholars have captured this ambivalence better than Brian Klug in his excellent (2009) essay Offence-the Jewish Case.Before embarking on his own constructive reflection on the topic, Klug highlights the complexity of the free speech issue in relation to religion by briefly discussing a passage of Dawkins's bestseller The God Delusion (2006).The passage runs as follows: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindicative, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully (Dawkins 2006, p. 31).
When penning down these words, Dawkins most probably wished to place himself in the Enlightenment tradition of witty satire, striking a blow for free speech and the right to provoke.But this is precisely where the ambivalence occurs.For while Dawkins's words can be read as an exercise in free speech, they simultaneously invoke a stock figure of the 'God of the Old Testament' which, down the ages, has been used to uphold a disparaging image of Jews.Even after 'God' drops out of the picture, the negative attributes ascribed to this God (unforgiving, vindictive, etc.) continue to stick to the name 'Jew' and to foster antisemitic attitudes.For this reason, Klug comments, Jews-whatever their relationship to God or the Bible-have all reason to be discomforted by the passage in question.Yet this is not all there is to say about the passage.As anyone familiar with the darker strands of Christian history knows, the stock figure of the 'God of the Old Testament' has its counterpart in the 'God of the New Testament'.Whether he was aware of it or not, Dawkins thus K reactivated what Klug summarizes as the 'hoary cliché ... that inscribes the difference between Christianity and Judaism as the chasm that separates mercifulness from vengeance, gentleness from cruelty, unconditional love from pedantic legalism; in short, New Testament from Old' (Klug 2009, pp. 11-12).
Taking my inspiration from Klug's perceptive observations, I want to put forth the argument that this 'hoary cliché' lies at the heart of some of the difficulties we are having today in accommodating religious diversity, but also more broadly, in discussing issues pertaining to religion and secularity in a nuanced way.More specifically, I am suggesting that the age-old tropes that present Christianity as a higher stage of history which has replaced or superseded an earlier stage, represented by Jews and their scriptural legacy, constitute a fundamental pattern that continues to inform the ways in which Christianity is related not only to Judaism but to non-Christian traditions in general.

A very brief history of Christian supersessionism
This is, of course, not new knowledge.In the past half-century, a growing number of historians and biblical scholars have explored how supersessionary motifs first emerged as part of the early Christian theologians' struggle to regulate the relationship of the emerging church to its Hebrew sources.To this end, an array of rhetorical strategies were deployed, which can be detected in polemical writings from the second century onwards.While the boundaries of the Christian tradition had until this time been far from fixed, Christian theologians now began to contrast the synagogue and the church, the children of flesh and those of the spirit, the Old Covenant and the New.Theologically, their argument rested on the claim that the church was the 'New Israel', which had taken over the role as God's elected people (e.g.Fredriksen 2002;Boyarin 2004;Dunn 2006).These rhetorical tropes soon grew into an entire genre of Christian literature, variously designated as contra or adversus Iudaeos ('against the Jews'), which continued to exist all through the Middle Ages.Alongside the poisonous motif of Jews as the killers of Christ, the genre persistently depicted Jews as archaic and exclusive, obstinately attached to their ritual practices and regulations, while the Christian message was presented in terms of spiritual high-mindedness and universal salvation.Thereby a hierarchical pattern was established that underpinned and gave legitimacy to discriminatory practices and later outright pogroms against Jews up until the modern era (Fredriksen 2014).
And to be sure, these patterns did not disappear with modernity.To the contrary, the Reformation, in particular Lutheran theology, in a number of regards reinforced the contrast between Jews and Christians, associating Jews and their ritual practices with legalistic zeal while the Christian gospel was presented as a generous offer of grace.As the new era advanced, several of these inherited anti-Jewish tropes underwent a process of secularization and politicization.These shifts, as Micha Brumlik (2000) has argued, were particularly evident in German Enlightenment philosophy, which in many respects was steeped in the Protestant tradition (e.g.Mack 2003;Vial 2016).In this way the theological stereotype of the Jew as bound to the law found an echo in the philosophical stereotype of the Jew as the embodiment K of heteronomy, as evident, for instance, in Immanuel Kant's later work The Conflict of the Faculties (1992Faculties ( [1798]]).While Kant was in no doubt that Jews, by virtue of being individual human beings, were included in the emancipation that would follow upon the establishment of a universal order of reason, his tone was nonetheless ambivalent with regard to Jews' capacity to attain autonomy.More precisely, he suggested that Jews needed to distance themselves from their particular rituals and archaic traditions if they were to be fully assimilated into European culture.Jews, in other words, needed to leave behind their Jewish particularity if they were to join the project of an enlightened future-a process for which Kant used the infamous phrase the 'euthanasia of Judaism' (Euthanasie des Judentums) (Kant 1992(Kant [1798]], p. 95).
This brings me back to my argument that the hoary cliché of the 'God of the Old Testament' lies at the heart of some of the difficulties we are having today in accommodating religious diversity.In recent years, an array of scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which this deeply engrained trope has continued to shape notions of historical progress and cultural difference into the present day.1While this pattern has been emblematic in relation to Jews as the crucial symbolic others of Christian history, it has continued to foster supersessionary ways of thinking which reverberate in colonial, orientalist and secularist discourses throughout Western modernity.In all these instances, a purportedly less evolved stage of history or culture is narratively juxtaposed with a purportedly more mature, enlightened or civilized stage.If it is true then, as Gil Anidjar (2006), Talal Asad (2003Asad ( , 2018)), Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (2015), and others (e.g.Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar 2005; Yelle 2011) have argued, that the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews lies at the very root, not only of antisemitism, but also of orientalism and secularism, then this certainly offers significant clues to some of the quandaries we are grappling with today in relation to diversity, tolerance and potentially conflicting rights.In the remaining parts of this article, I shall point at two strands of critical reflection that emerge from these observations.The first has to do with the concept of religion, and the second with the concept of secularity.

Religion as generalized Christianity
Among the most significant theoretical developments of recent decades is the growing awareness of the extent to which the modern idea of religion as a distinct and private sphere of life is shaped by Protestant Christianity.2This is not to deny that similar ideas have existed prior to the modern West.As Rushain Abbasi (2021) has recently argued, the claim that the idea of religion is a unique invention of the modern West needs to be nuanced and modified.By means of a careful philological analysis of the Arabic term dīn, Abbasi demonstrates that premodern Muslims did indeed possess a concept akin to the modern idea of religion.The most important parallel is that the analytical discourse surrounding dīn included ontological and epistemological distinctions between matters of 'religion' and the realm of the 'nonreligious'-where dīn was associated primarily with ritual practices and observance of the divine law.However, while dīn can rightly be perceived as an analogous category to the modern Western idea of religion, it is important to recognize the limitations of the analogy.Although the discourse surrounding dīn relied on a distinction between 'religious' and 'non-religious', this distinction was operationalized in different ways than in the modern West.Above all, it was not organized along the binaries of private versus public, experience versus practice, or individual versus collective.
Claiming that the prevailing understanding of religion is shaped by Protestant Christianity is also not to deny that similar ideas have existed in the ancient and medieval cultures on which Euro-American modernity draws.Ancient Greek as well as Latin both possess words that are routinely translated as 'religion'.However, as Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin (2016) have shown, the Latin word religio and the Greek word threskēia only vaguely share the connotations of what we today call 'religion'.Just as is the case with the Arabic concept of dīn, the concepts of religio and threskēia relied on distinctions between, for example, 'pure' and 'impure' or between 'sacred' and 'profane'-but not in a way which corresponds to the modern distinction between 'religious' and 'secular'.Consequently, even in those cases where there is an earlier concept which in some respects overlaps with the modern Western term 'religion', it is still not this particular concept of religion, including all the associations that come along with it.
This brings me back to the complex historical relationship between the Jewish and Christian traditions.If most languages throughout history and across the world simply do not have a word which can routinely be translated as 'religion', this is also the case with ancient Hebrew as well as Aramaic.Consequently, the category of religion is absent in both the Hebrew Bible and in the Talmud.When Jewish theologians in the modern era were increasingly prompted to consider their own tradition as 'a religion', they were thus confronted with a category which was foreign to their own history and scriptural sources.3Above all, they were confronted with a category which already bore the traces of the Christian intellectual culture in which it had been moulded.The strong association of religion with belief offers an illuminating example.While this category is central to the Christian tradition-as reflected in the essential role assigned to creeds and confessions ever since antiquity-this is much less the case in the Jewish tradition.Rather than adhering to a set of beliefs, many Jews would conceive of their tradition as a way of life, a shared history and a particular way of studying sacred texts (e.g.Klug 2009, pp. 7-9).In other words, when religion is primarily understood in terms of beliefs and creeds, Jewish 'religion' will always appear as a less sophisticated form of religion, more focused on deeds than on faith, more concerned with the 'material' (purity rituals, kosher restrictions, brit milah, etc.) than with the 'spiritual' (creeds, confessions, baptism, etc.) and so on.
To summarize, the emergence of the modern concept of religion entailed that the inherited supersessionary patterns were brought to a new and more subtle level, where the characteristics previously associated with Christianity were now projected onto religion as such, or, more precisely, onto the notion of an ideal religion compatible with the emerging liberal societies.In the same manner, the characteristics associated with Judaism were projected onto any religion judged not to measure up to enlightened European culture.Hence we find the familiar nineteenth-century evolutionary scales, according to which various mythologies and religions were ranked as nearer or further away from the most advanced form of religion, which unsurprisingly always turned out to be Protestant Christianity (Masuzawa 2005;Vial 2016). 4 This brings me to the first of two critical remarks that I wish to make in relation to our own time and context.Although the specific associations to Christians versus Jews have become less pronounced, the dichotomizing stereotypes live on and continue to shape attitudes towards what is perceived as more and less desirable forms of religion in contemporary Western societies.They live on, for instance, in seemingly innocent satire such as the passage by Dawkins discussed earlier.They also live on in more sinister forms, such as in the widespread political rhetoric claiming that Islam is not compatible with 'Western culture' or 'European values', a claim which has become increasingly commonplace in the twenty years that have passed since 9/11 (e.g.Roy 2019;Strømmen and Schmiedel 2020).
Why is it that Islam is regularly presented as incompatible with liberal societies-societies that otherwise celebrate diversity, including religious diversity?I believe that an important clue to the answer lies precisely in the concept of religion.When Islam is claimed not to fit in because it is too 'ritualistic' (khitan, halal restrictions, etc.), too 'eye-catching' in the public space (the hijab, public prayer, etc.), and so on, Muslims find themselves in the position in which Jews have found themselves throughout Christian history (and still to some extent do, as becomes apparent in the recurring debates on brit milah and kosher slaughter in several Western European countries).Muslim religion, in other words, is perceived as awkward in today's liberal societies for the same reason that Kant perceived Jewish religion as awkward in the emerging liberal society of his time: it simply did not meet the standards of the prevailing idea of what religion should look like. 5The problem, now as then, 4 Although (especially liberal) Protestant thinkers contributed to smuggling assumptions of the supremacy of Christianity from theology into the emerging scholarship on religion (Religionswissenschaft), history is more complex and the picture can be nuanced.As several scholars have recently shown, leading Protestant theologians also engaged in a theological critique of the supremacist tendencies of purportedly nontheological discourses on religion.This was clearly the case in Karl Barth's early critique of the category of religion, as demonstrated by Filip Rasmussen in a forthcoming dissertation (forthcoming).Moreover, as Ulrich Schmiedel (2021) has argued, even someone like Ernst Troeltsch-often pinpointed as the figurehead of supremacist liberal Protestantism-could be presented in a more favourable light.Exploring Troeltsch's writings on Islam, Schmiedel reveals how Troeltsch concurrently constructed and collapsed the supremacy smuggling for which he is so often criticized. 5As Farid Hafez argues in his contribution to this special section, these patterns are also played out in the ways in which Islam post-9/11 is regularly framed as a political ideology rather than a 'religion'-whereby Muslims are effectively stripped of agency and represented as 'fateful and blind followers of the scripture of the Islamic religion'.Here too, there is an intriguing parallel to the fate of 'Judaism' within much Enlightenment thinking.As David Nirenberg (2013, p. 395) contends, Kant emblematically treated 'Judaism as a nonreligious system of mere earthly life', even as 'his philosophy was designed to take [Christianity] one giant step further away from the Judaism and materialism that still haunted it'.
is that this idea of religion is not neutral or universal but built on assumptions that inherently privileges a Christian perspective.When we celebrate diversity in our liberal societies, we therefore need to bear in mind that religions are not judged by the same standard.Or, more accurately, they are judged by the same standard, but is a standard which is tailored for Christianity.

Secularism as generalized (Christian) religion
At this point someone might object that I am overlooking central aspects by framing the discussion as a tension between Christianity and all other religious traditions.For someone like Dawkins it was not, after all, a concern about the Christian gospel that prompted him to attack the 'God of the Old Testament'.To the contrary, as anyone who has read Dawkins's works knows, Christians find themselves in the dock just as much as Jews and Muslims-all of whom remain, in his view, attached to the same archaic deity (e.g.Dawkins 2006, pp. 250-253).At stake for Dawkins and the other New Atheist writers was, as already hinted at, the commitment to a secular society, defined by tolerance, diversity and equal rights.
Recalling Klug's critical remarks about the unintended effects of Dawkins's satirical musings, one may, however, ask whether this secularist agenda really escapes the supersessionary logic addressed above.In line with Asad, Anidjar and others, I want to suggest, instead, that several of the key dichotomies that underpin contemporary secularist discourse mirror the oppositions that have historically been used to pit Christians against Jews, and which reverberate, as I have shown, in the modern concept of religion.This claim may seem counterintuitive, since secularists usually define themselves in contrast to religion, including Christianity.Secularism, as a normative vision (unlike the more descriptive concept of secularization), is the commitment to the ideal of a society in which religion has been replaced with a rationalist and scientific approach to the world and to human life. 6However, it is precisely this assumption of a replacement of a purportedly less advanced social and cultural stage with a more evolved one that rings a familiar bell, especially for those acquainted with the flipside of Christian history.It is therefore perhaps not a coincidence that the most pertinent critique of secularism's complicity in orientalist and colonial discourses has come primarily from thinkers who hail from a Jewish or Muslim background. 7In a landmark article on the topic, Anidjar summarizes his concern with the imbrication of religion and secularity in the following manner: 6 It should be emphasized that the formal declarations issued by secular humanist associations (such as the 'Secular Humanist Declaration' issued in 1980 by The Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism [today The Council for Secular Humanism] or 'The Amsterdam Declaration' issued in 1952 by the IHEU [today the Humanists International] and reissued in 2002) are much more nuanced than the polemical writings of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheist debaters.While explicitly rejecting religious dogma and supernatural beliefs, these declarations generally refrain from using disparaging or ridiculing language about religion and religious people. 7Several scholars and works could be added to those already mentioned (Anidjar 2006;Asad 2003Asad , 2018;;Raz-Krakotzkin 2015), notably the late Saba Mahmood (2015).And, to be sure, critique has come from scholars hailing from other non-Western backgrounds as well, for example the British-Japanese sociologist Mitsutoshi Horii (2022).

K
I propose to take for granted that the religious and the secular are terms that, hopelessly codependent, continue to inform each other and have persisted historically, institutionally in masking (to invoke Asad's term) the one pertinent religion, the one and diverse Christianity and Western Christendom in their transformations and reincarnations, producing the love (or hatred) of religion.[...] The two terms, religious and secular, are therefore not masks for one another.Rather, they function together as covers, strategic devices and mechanisms of obfuscation and self-blinding, doing so in such a way that it remains difficult, if not impossible, to extricate them from each other-or us from either of them-as if by fiat (Anidjar 2006, p. 62).
Adopting this critical perspective proves fruitful not only in relation to orientalist and colonial discourses throughout modernity.It is also helpful for understanding some of the mechanisms that govern discourses about diversity and otherness in contemporary European societies.This is the case perhaps especially in North-Western Europe, where several countries have been shaped by a centuries-long cultural interaction between Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, resulting, as I have shown, in the sublimation of key features of liberal Protestantism into the Enlightenment concept of religion.What Anidjar and others add to this perspective, is the observation that the very same features were also, at the next step of this historical process, sublimated into liberal secularism.Hence Anidjar's claim that 'the religious' and 'the secular' jointly serve as masks, obfuscating the ways in which Western liberal societies, intentionally or not, continue to privilege a Christian perspective.
This brings me to the second critical remark that I wish to make in relation to our present time.Revealing the extent to which secularism is intertwined with a concept of religion modelled on Protestant Christianity sheds further light on why certain forms of religion are perceived as compatible with modern liberal societies whereas others are deemed not to fit in.This is particularly evident in populist right-wing discourses in Western Europe, where a recurring feature is the concomitant investment in Christianity and secularism as a bulwark against Islam.Thus, for example, several right-wing nationalist parties profess their commitment to a secular state and to religious freedom, while simultaneously stressing the unique status and role of Christianity in their various societies. 8More subtly, a similar tendency pervades certain liberal discourses on religion and diversity, where the 8 A typical example of this dual investment in Christianity and secularism is offered by the official program of the Swedish nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats.While the program clearly states the nonconfessional nature of the party as well as its commitment to religious freedom, it also stresses the unique status and role of Christianity in Sweden.The presumed harmony between secularism and Christianity is reinforced by a statement that comes in tandem with the party's underlining of the unique position of Christianity in Sweden: 'Islam, and in particular its strong political and fundamentalist branch, is according to the Sweden Democrats the religious attitude which has proven least capable to co-exist with Swedish and Western culture in a harmonious way' (Sverigedemokraterna 2019;my trans.).As Ov Cristian Norocel and Katarina Pettersson (2021) have recently argued, this dual investment is particularly prominent in the party's engagement with gender issues, where a commitment to gender equality is used strategically to strengthen the polarization between the 'the people' and the allegedly backward and patriarchal Muslim others.While this commitment to 'modern' and 'progressive' values is regularly set in contrast to Islam and New Atheist writers, again, offer a case in point.While these writers scorn any kind of religion associated with the 'God of the Old Testament' (including manifestations of Christian religiosity which, in their view, comes close to this notion), they are generally indulgent with the disarmed cultural Christianity representative of the Protestant majority churches of North-Western Europe. 9 Let me briefly illustrate this tendency with an example from my own Swedish context.About a decade ago, a profiled feminist minister of the Church of Sweden started to co-author debate articles with the then chairman of the Swedish Humanist Association, who was also the author of the major Swedish contribution to the New Atheist genre (Sturmark 2006).In a first article, titled 'The Church ought to make peace with the critics of religion', the two authors urged representatives of the Church of Sweden to acknowledge the 'common democratic heritage' of modern Protestantism and secular humanism.Although Islam or Muslims were never mentioned explicitly, the authors argued that the great divide today was not between religious and non-religious perspectives, but between those who tended to blur the boundaries between religion and politics, and those, like themselves, who advocated a strict separation between religion and politics and took an 'uncompromising stance with regard to Human Rights' (Borg and Sturmark 2011;my trans.).One implication of this allegedly 'uncompromising' stance was spelled out in a second debate article, in which the two authors (and yet some contributors) pleaded for a legal prohibition against male child circumcision.Alluding to the established narrative of Sweden as modern and liberal nation, they argued that Sweden cannot claim to be 'a progressive country with regard to Human Rights if we continue to compromise the bodily integrity of children' (Borg et al. 2011;my trans.).In order to further enhance the conception of circumcision as a barbaric practice that does not belong in a modern society, the authors employed terms such as 'mutilation' (stympning), and compared the practice to cutting off the lobe of children's ears, thus echoing-albeit inadvertently-age-old tropes about Jews and Muslims and their purported practices of harming children (Rosenberg 2012).
This episode invites an array of critical reflections, 10 but what interests me here is the moral and ideological unanimity between the two debaters.Recalling Anidjar's observation that the religious and the secular function together as strategic devices that obfuscates an underlying supersessionist agenda, I want to suggest that the reason why a Lutheran minister and a New Atheist debater find themselves in such unanimity is that they share, consciously or not, this specific agenda.This brings me back to my basic argument, that the dichotomies of Christian supersessionism continue to shape discourses on diversity and otherness in contemporary liberal societies.More specifically, these dichotomies continue to uphold a hierarchical Muslims, it is simultaneously presented as fully compatible with the Lutheran Christianity of the 'native' majority. 9Indeed, as Hannah Strømmen notes in her contribution to this special section, even Dawkins is prepared to sign up to the cultural importance of the Christian Bible when push comes to shove.Innocuous as the claim about the cultural significance of the Bible may seem, Strømmen goes on to reveal how this claim today is seized upon by nationalist grouping (such as Britain First) with a view to stoking divisions and drawing contrasts between a 'Christian West' and an 'Islamic other'. 10I offer more substantial analyses of the episode in Svenungsson 2013 and2020.cultural order where certain practices and values gain the upper hand by being associated with terms such as 'rational', 'progressive' or 'Human Rights', while other practices and values are framed as incompatible with these terms. 11Above all, these discursive structures imply that different religious traditions-and the people associated with them-are not on equal footing in the sphere of public debate.In the decades that have passed since 9/11, this has become increasingly apparent in the recurring debates on the displaying of religious symbols in the public sphere, the right to pray in public spaces, but also on the issue of free speech and the purported right to offend (e.g.Gustafsson Lundberg 2018; Schmiedel 2019). 12 Brian Klug captures this predicament well when he returns to the question of free speech in a more recent essay, written in the wake of the Paris attacks of January 2015.Without in any way toning down the monstrosity of the massacres that were perpetrated at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, Klug expresses his hesitance towards the ensuing calls for 'the right to provoke', regardless of the nature of the provocation or the impact it has on those affected.Why? Because, 'there is a world of difference between, say, affronting church-goers by using an obscenity, and, say, humiliating a group that is already demeaned, accentuating their deep sense of alienation from the nation' (Klug 2018, pp. 81-82).The crucial aspect that Klug points to is the role of context when we debate the complex issue of free speech: Christians are simply not vulnerable in the same way as Muslims (and, to be sure, Jews, as well as an array of other minorities) are in a society where Christianity, in more and less secularized shapes, constitutes the norm.
For this reason-and this will be the conclusion of this paper-it is not enough to simply profess a commitment to religious diversity if we are to come to terms with the hierarchical structures that still inform many debates surrounding religion and secularity in today's Western societies.Christianity is not a religion among others in the Western context-it is the very form in which both the concept of religion and the concept of secularity have been moulded.With this comes a particular responsibility, perhaps especially on the part of theologians and representatives of the Christian church.As experts on the biblical inheritance, theologians (including biblical scholars and church historians) are uniquely skilled to reveal and reflect upon the complexity of the Christian tradition.This implies, on the one hand, a responsibility to critically expose the problematic aspects of Christianity throughout history, as I have tried to do in this paper.On the other hand, it also involves the task of exploring the constructive impulses of Christian theology, because Christianity should, of course, not be reduced to the supersessionary features that have been in focus here.On the contrary, Christian theology contains rich resources for articulating an ethics 11 Indeed, as Atalay Omer shows is her contribution to this special section, these patterns are by no means limited to intra-Western contexts but are being played out globally, for example, in the ways in which policies for engagement with religion (interfaith dialogue, partnership projects, etc.) often operate on premises that ultimately serve to reinforce neocolonial structures and epistemic forms of violence. 12Yet another example is offered by Ulrich Schmiedel's article in this special section, in which he investigates how William Cavanaugh's influential critique of 'the myth of religious violence' fails to recognize the differential treatment of religions in the public sphere post-9/11-whereby he also obscures the fact that the War on Terror has been about targeting Muslims, not religious people in general, as uniquely prone to violence.K