Questioning the secular/religious divide in a post-Westphalian world

Observing the secular/religious divide

An increasing number of contemporary observers in the social and human sciences have been positing a changed or changing relationship between the secular and the religious within the world’s states and in the globalized society in which they are a feature. The situation begs at least two basic questions: how do we understand the secular and the religious that their changing relationship should be important? And why are we doing this now as opposed to, for instance, 40 years ago? Answering the first of these questions is quite complex and will occupy the bulk of the analysis that follows. Response to the second, I would argue, is much simpler: certain religious, political and cultural developments of the last 30 years have convinced many of us that the world has been changing or that our understanding of the world has to change. These developments include, first, the emergence of various quite powerful religio-political movements around the world since about 1979, beginning with the rise of the Christian Right in the United States and the Iranian Revolution and then continuing to the present day with various others in many parts of the world. Second is the virtual disappearance of state-centred and strongly secularist socialism, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’ in China. Third are the repercussions of the very high level of transnational migration in the post-Second World War period, especially into rich western states from non-western parts of the world. Fourth, various developments in the domain of religion around the world have caught many more observers’ attention than might otherwise have been the case, to the point that not a few are speaking about ‘religious resurgence’ (see e.g. Almond et al., 2000; Antoun and Hegland, 1987; Robertson and Chirico, 1985; Sahliyeh, 1990; Westerlund, 1996; Zeidan, 2003). Under this heading, global Christian Pentecostalism and what one might call global Islamic pietism appear to be attracting the most attention. Finally, the same period has witnessed a change in optics among a great many elite observers, especially in the powerful West: the default unit of analysis or observation is no longer the local, national, regional, and in most instances western society, but rather global society as a whole. In other words, the questioning of the secular/religious relation has the globalization of observation as a central prerequisite. The implication of this last point is worth stressing: changed observation of the world is not just a simple reflection of a changed or changing world. In fact, a very large part of the change may be a transformation in how we understand what has ‘been there’ for quite some time, even though that change in understanding was likely set in motion by some real changes in the world.

Against this backdrop, the interpretations of what these various developments signify are diverse, but quite a number of them detect or project the makings of a fundamental transformation of society, one that involves either a profound restructuring of what we enact and understand as religion, a ‘return’ to greater prominence and power of this religion, or both. In response, or as an aspect of these transformations, what is not religion, namely the secular, is also changing and maybe even being severely challenged. In order to look more closely at these interpretations and what they might say about my first question – namely, what do we mean with secular/religious that a changing relation between them is of significance – I want to examine very briefly a selection of six such offerings, with the express purpose of thereafter presenting, not so much an alternative, as what I hope is a useful supplement to them and to many important other perspectives that I am leaving aside.

The six offerings are those of Peter Berger, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, José Casanova, Rajeev Bhargava and Tariq Modood. I choose their work, not because they are necessarily the most important voices, but because they appear to me to represent variants on three rather different, but not necessarily contradictory, approaches to the question. Berger and Habermas I would put in what one can call the ‘religious comeback’ category, Taylor and Casanova in the ‘religious transformation’ category, and Bhargava and Modood in the ‘alternative scenarios’ category.

In his 1999 publication, The De-secularization of the World, Berger delivers that by now famous phrase that the ‘the world is as furiously religious as ever’ (Berger, 1999: 2), that secularization of society as the dominant trend is and was an incorrect assessment. His primary references in making that statement are the religio-political movements; that is what convinced him to do what appears to be an about-face with respect to his classic work of the 1960s. Unsaid in this context, however, is that the work of the 1960s did not have global society as its frame of analysis, but rather only western society. This then allows him to shift his perspective on Europe to make it the (secularized) ‘exception’ rather than the ‘standard’ (see Berger et al., 2008). Jürgen Habermas has been quite circumspect in his presentation of the idea of the ‘post-secular’, making it clear that not only is he talking only about countries that are arguably secular, but that post-secular really means ‘post-secularism’, that under post-secular conditions, a place must be made for religion in the public sphere (Habermas, 2010a, 2010b). The strength of religion globally is only part of his argument; a significant factor is also the presence of strongly religious minorities in western secular countries as a result of migration. One could interpret his argument as saying that such societies are post-secular precisely because the rest of the world – including its presence within those countries – has relativized secularism and made it clearly not the wave of the future.

Charles Taylor’s suggestion is certainly by far the most complex, fitting as it does into a vast analysis of the modern history of western society and the changes in what Taylor calls ‘social imaginaries’. His parallel term for the transformation in social imaginaries in question here is the post-Durkheimian, an idea that significantly includes the reimagining and restructuring of both the secular, especially the political, and the religious (Taylor, 2007: 473ff.). Two aspects of his argument are particularly telling: first, under post-Durkheimian social forms, there is a de-linking of religious identity from national and even civilizational political identity and a de-linking of religious identity from collective religious authorities such as churches. Taylor also historicizes this shift, characterizing it as typical of a contemporary ‘Age of Authenticity’. Second, however, in the present world, there is a profound struggle between the post-Durkheimian and what he calls the neo-Durkheimian, which characterized the previous modern age, also analysed as the ‘Age of Mobilization’. In this age, the two links obtained or the linkages were dominant. This is how Taylor incorporates the religio-political movements as attempts to reassert the neo-Durkheimian, and both intra-state and cross-national differences in terms of which imaginary dominates or should dominate. In consonance with Taylor’s view (which is really far too complex to present adequately here), Casanova has maintained his earlier assertions about religion moving back into the public sphere (Casanova, 1994) – and here he is resonant with Habermas – but added the thesis of ‘global denominationalism’ by which he means quite expressly the de-linking of religious and political boundaries such that religions construct themselves trans-nationally, across and in spite of the secular boundaries of states (Casanova, 2008: 118; 2010).

Rajeev Bhargava and Tariq Modood add significantly to the picture by making explicit that the transforming situation is characterized by recognizable plurality as concerns the relation between the secular and the religious. ¹ There is no more dominant model, not even through the idea of a ‘leading model’, one that is destined to form the path that all will take in the future. Bhargava elaborates this idea chiefly through the Indian case, to some degree admittedly as a model, but more centrally as a place where the instability or ambiguity of the secular/religious divide manifests itself and that therefore shows alternative modelling in comparison with European or North American variants (Bhargava, 2011: 105ff.). Modood adopts a slightly different strategy, focusing on how relatively recently migrated religious minorities in Europe are challenging almost every country’s self-evidence in this matter, thereby generating a kind of laboratory for the imagination of alternatives within Europe itself (Modood, 2007, 2012; Triandafyllidou et al., 2012). Secularism is in flux in European countries, but it is not about to disappear. Both authors stress that continuity.

I have presented these different interventions into the debate to highlight their differences, but more importantly to show the strong interlinkage among them. Three points of continuity are particularly important for my purposes. First, there is the degree to which the secular is mostly identified with, if not precisely the state, then certainly the nation, the nation-state or the national society; in any case an imagined unit that uses state boundaries for drawing the salient difference among plural ‘seculars’. Second is the idea that we are witnessing not a simple transformation from one clearly characterized situation to another, but rather that the new situation exhibits ambiguity, plurality, struggle and uncertainty as basic features. The frequent use of words prefixed by ‘post’ points in the same direction: we are in transition, ‘after’ what we have come to know, but not simply already transformed. Third, is the idea that religion is not what it used to be; because it is transforming in terms of social form and occupying a new or at least different importance within society.

From Westphalian to post-Westphalian condition

In turning now to what I hope is a supplementary or complementary approach to the question of the current situation with regard to secular and religious, I begin with the contingency of the distinction and its two terms. For any of this to make sense, religion, at least, has to be understood and structured as something distinct in terms of which one can then profile its other side, the secular. The differentiation of something called religion (or roughly cognate ideas in other languages) has taken diverse forms and been accomplished to differing degrees throughout history and in societies around the world, and that includes the lack of such a differentiation in certain, perhaps most, societies (cf. Luhmann, 1989). Indeed, the clear conceptual and institutional differentiation of religion from its other side, the secular, appears to be a feature only of modern and now global society, with significant antecedents in European and Mediterranean society of the early Common Era. In western society of the last two millennia, therefore, as in civilizational centres in other parts of the world, the differentiation of religion has occurred in very particular ways. In the western case that included conceiving and structuring religion as a distinct social system and as a marker of collective identity (see Boyarin, 2007).

A critical theoretical point of departure for the argument developed here is the observation that, after about the 9th century, European society underwent a gradual but highly consequential transformation which, while very complex, featured the development and eventual socio-structural dominance of a plurality of peculiar societal systems centred on different logics or functions. ² Unsurprisingly, given the antecedent structures of this society, one of these was for religion and another one was for the state or polity. Other systems developed for law, economy and science; and eventually over the centuries for other functions like education, art, health, sport and mass information media. These societal structures arose in relation to one another, meaning that they were interdependent, distinguished themselves with reference to the other systems, while also modelling themselves on each other to a certain extent. This last point is critical, as I argue below. Moreover, their construction was mostly manifest, meaning that the socio-structural developments were constantly accompanied by semantic correlates, by discourses which expressed what was going on. Key aspects of these discourses included that religion, and more ambiguously the state, occupied special foundational functions, at the same time as the other systems declared their relative independence from religion, their own sui generis rationales which made them not only what they were, but also not religion. The long history of differentiated religious and political institutions in this society resulted in these two systems being understood as more foundational of social order than the others – at least until the 18th to 19th centuries, when economy and what one might call economistic foundationalism in ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ versions joined this group. Religious and political foundationalism is still reflected in the strong association of the secular/religious distinction with the distinction between state and religion. Yet the ‘secular’ in the sense of the not-religious domain of society included more than the state, and not least these other societal systems which became more and more powerful over the centuries, especially the economic, but also the scientific.

A peculiar feature of the developing European political system was its emergence and eventual stabilization as a set of plural, contiguous and competing states; not as another empire. At first this segmentation contrasted with the unified and single character of the strengthening religious system centred on the (Roman) Christian church. With the Reformation and its aftermath of protracted violence, however, a critical restructuring and reimagining of religion occurred, and with it a solidification of the segmented system of political states. This transformation had three central aspects: first, religion came to be seen and structured not only as systemic and as a distinct (foundational) domain, but as one that occurred as religions, in the plural, to only one of which people belonged, and this as individuals (one might say ‘by choice’) as well as attributed members of collectivities (this is also the core of Taylor’s neo-Durkheimian condition with respect to religion). Second, religion, while still foundational, could no longer be regarded straightforwardly as the source of societal cohesion and unity; the solution to this dilemma, enunciated essentially in the Peace of Westphalia, was to try to coordinate the foundational religions – now plural or, more precisely in the European context, ‘confessional’ – with the foundational polities in the form of the states. Each state would be a kind of society unto its own, and thereby the unity and cohesion – viable social order – question could be translated to that level. Politically, this was expressed in the idea of state ‘sovereignty’, religiously in the idea that each state would regulate religious unity, as in the famous Westphalian formula, cuius regio, eius religio. Third, in the one to two centuries after Westphalia the imagining and structure of the political realm moved from, to adapt Bendix’s title, ‘kings to people’, from states as the creatures of rulers to expressions of collectivities or nations (Bendix, 1978). The ‘cuius’ and the ‘eius’ of the formula changed, but the relation of ‘regio’ to ‘religio’ remained. Thus was generated what can be called the Westphalian model of the nature and relation of state to religion, in those terms of the secular to the religious.

The Westphalian model did not undo the differentiation of religion and polity, but rather structured them in a particular way or, more correctly, in particular ways. In the aftermath of Westphalia there was no simple or strict isomorphism between religion and state. The difference between the two manifested itself in a number of ways. These included that religious boundaries were not simply isomorphic with political boundaries, most obviously in the case of the Roman Catholic church, but also in various Protestant movements ranging from the Anabaptists and Quakers to the Moravians and Methodists. That situation – which obtained from the time of Westphalia already – helped ensure that the ‘establishment’ of a religious confession in a particular state always also introduced the question of how to ‘tolerate’ religious ‘minorities’, of other ‘confessions’ and of ‘dissenting’ minorities, including that of the Jews. On the side of the state, one witnesses a progressive ‘secularization’ of this system as most states after about the late 18th century progressively established formal distance from their dominant confessions. That distancing took several forms, perhaps as many as there were states. Most prominent were the shifting of establishment to a ‘denominational’ form or the ‘laicization’ of the state that included the substitution of a kind of political ‘Ersatzreligion’ in the form of secularist or atheist national ideologies. Here is the historical beginning and source of today’s ‘varieties of secularism’.

In the context of these developments, however, the structuring and imagining of states and religions did maintain important parallelisms which constituted their mutual modelling. Prime among these were two features. First, the religious system structured and conceived itself as religions and as subdivisions within those religions; the political system structured and conceived itself as nation-states and (sometimes) as subdivisions within those states. Second, people within ‘national societies’ were expected to ‘belong’ exclusively (‘loyally’) to one state as ‘citizens’ and to one religion as ‘believers’. That belonging, although deemed as chosen, should be total, one might say in each case designating a ‘disciplined’ (well-defined, coherent, consistent, encompassing) ‘way of life’. ³ Moreover, until the 20th century, the dominant tendency in both systems was, on the political side, to ‘regulate’ more and more of citizens’ lives and, on the religious side, for churches to expect more and more churchly and orthodox ‘practice’ of its believers, in religion’s case continuing a trend that already began in the later Middle Ages (Délumeau, 1983). This feature of the differentiation of these societal systems is to be emphasized: as religion and state – and other systems – differentiated, they came to have more and more presence in the total society, and thus in the daily lives of almost everyone.

The rise to structural dominance of these function systems did not remain a European affair. It would be more accurate to say that from early in this development, the construction of the systems involved their spread beyond Europe: as the Europeans spread their influence around the globe, these systems were appropriated, further developed and thus transformed in diverse regions around the world. As in the European sphere, this appropriation was uneven and varied, but by the late 20th century it included the incorporation of all the world’s land regions into the global political system as formally sovereign and precisely contiguous states, the significant construction of religion as religions, including more variants or ‘confessions’ of the Christian religion, and, most importantly in the present context, the same sort of approximate coordination of religion and state identity and structure that was developed in the Westphalian model. The reconstruction and reimagination that this required, and the degree to which it was produced, varied a great deal from region to region. By and large, however, it is arguable that the model was ‘imported’ and appropriated in most of the world’s countries.

On the basis of this analysis, I want now to suggest that what is happening currently, and what the authors I introduced at the beginning are also discussing, is the greater and now incontrovertible shift to a ‘post-Westphalian’ condition. Since this is another ‘post’ word, it implies that we are shifting away from what was dominant, but as yet cannot see clearly what any new dominant circumstance will be. Among the various implications, therefore, is that the Westphalian model has not disappeared and may in fact continue strongly in some countries or regions. Yet, overall, its hold is weakening. It has arguably been weakening for some time, but the current historical, more intensely globalized, context has provided the conditions in which it is much more likely that this weakening will be observed. Where and when the historical ‘tipping-point’ towards a post-Westphalian condition occurred is difficult to say; but for the reasons outlined at the beginning, it may be that the current era has provided the ‘tipping-point’ for its more likely observation. It is thus losing its role as the more or less self-evident and thus prevailing socio-structural and discursive pattern and ceding to or being increasingly balanced off by alternative ways of structuring and imagining both the religious and the secular. Here, I concentrate primarily on the symptoms and signs of this post-Westphalian condition on the side of the religious system.

Given the way religion structured itself under the Westphalian model, a post-Westphalian condition implies a relative de-linking of religion from how states have been structured, and specifically the lessening of the association between religious and national identity, the decline of religious exclusivism, the relative increase in religious ‘bricolage’ and the shifting of the ‘disciplined’ religious life to the status of a personal option that has no expected connection with disciplined citizenship (i.e. one can be a good citizen without being a good religious citizen and vice versa). One particularly important consequence is that the construction of the religious system will follow the lines of a division into religions less, rather than more, meaning that Casanova’s ‘global denominationalism’ will not or no longer be the most important structural feature of the religious system, although one can hardly imagine that it will for the foreseeable future not continue to be an important one. A post-Westphalian condition relativizes the Westphalian model and does not eliminate it; just as talk of multiple modernities relativizes the idea of modernity without eliminating it. Such relativization nonetheless represents, in these listed developments, the (relative) de-linking of the structural modelling of religion and state. And, to repeat, this transformation will consist in some portion as actual transformations and in some portion as the renewed observation of religion, as noticing what in many respects may have been happening for quite some time already. As with the idea of globalization (and indeed modernization before it), aspects or phases of the process precede the invention of the concept to talk about it.

At least as important as the lessening of the self-evidence and dominance of the Westphalian religion–state modelling is alternative modelling. In terms of the secular/religious distinction, what this amounts to is the increasing – but thereby not necessarily new – adoption by the religious system of other ‘secular’ partners than the political system as models; all of which very much includes, of course, the continued construction of religion in contrast with all the ‘secular’ systems. Such alternative modelling has to some extent been going on for as long as the systems have been mutually differentiating, whether in just western or in global society as a whole. Examples of this include the tendencies to style religious knowledge, not just as knowledge, but as having the structure of true and false statements; the translation of religious determinations into law (an area in which Islam provides among the clearest example and antecedent); the parallelisms established between religious insight and art; the conception of religious faith development and increase as a process of education in the context of schools and curricula; and the structuring of religious performance along quasi-medical lines as a ‘cure of souls’ which involved religious equivalents of diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of specific spiritual ‘ills’. All these trends are, of course, continuing and even strengthening, but comparatively new is the degree of modelling of religion on two other systems, that for economy and that for mass information media. Symptomatic of these, on the economy side, are the higher and deliberate degree to which religion is being ‘produced’, ‘marketed’, ‘consumed’ as if religion were a source of (scarce) goods and services (cf. Carrette and King, 2005; Einstein, 2008; Kitiarsa, 2008; Twitchell, 2004), and the more or less recent observation of religion precisely in these terms, as in the religious economy model of religion made famous by the likes of Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987; Stark and Finke, 2000) and to some extent well before them in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s work of the 1960s (Berger, 1967; Luckmann, 1967). In the latter cases, however, and even in some of the more recent ones, the observation of religion behaving/structuring more in tune with economy was (typically) still seen as a ‘weakening’ or even an unfortunate ‘degeneration’ of religion. With respect to mass information media, it is perhaps remarkable how religion has in the 20th century, and increasingly since the advent of television and cyberspace, ‘taken to’ being formed as ‘show’, as media performance, as cyber-community and cyber-ritual; and these things not as a ‘faute de mieux’, as a way of doing what one would ‘properly’ do at home or in physical religious locations in a kind of supplementary of substitute way. Mass media religion instead takes on its own peculiarities, which include a heightened de-localization as local, physical sacred space matters less; and a heightened de-temporalization as the recording of religious performances can continue to operate after the initial performance in a way analogous to what ‘sacred writings’ (another and perhaps original [mass] mediatization of religion) began to do more than two and a half millennia ago (see e.g. Babb and Wadley, 1995; Campbell, 2010; Dawson and Cowan, 2004; Hoover, 1988).

I do not have the space in such a short essay to explain and document these possible transformations beyond simply introducing them. A critical aspect or consequence that they have in common, however, is their implications for what one may call the ‘pluralization’ of religion, namely its tendency to take on multiple forms. In the increasingly post-Westphalian circumstance, ‘religious diversity’ goes significantly beyond its modern manifestations. In particular, the difference among ‘religions’ or even among sudivisions of religions (‘confessions’, ‘denominations’, etc.) is more and more but one sort of plurality, not the only important one. Plurality now includes greater variations in degree and kind of inclusivism or exclusivism of ‘belonging’; greater variation in the location of religion in society in terms of privatized or in the so-called ‘public sphere’; variations in sheer presence in strength without the dominance of one trend or another (i.e. ‘resurgence’ OR ‘secularization’); multiplication of centres of authority and authenticity, irrespective of subdivision; and, of course, variation in the sort of modelling that I have just discussed. Religion in consequence becomes a far ‘messier’ system, one that one could say more and more resembles the system for art, with its fluid world of media, genres, tastes and criteria of authenticity, than it does the seemingly neat Westphalian divisions of sovereign states with their precise boundaries. And a critical observational effect of these transformations is that religion appears to be ‘shifting’ to the level of the individual as the centre of authenticity and authority, even though individualization of religion is also a process that has been going on since the medieval centuries in Europe (Nelson, 1981; Taylor, 2007); that we are witnessing, for instance, a shift from religion to spirituality, a ‘spiritual revolution’ or that where religion is ‘really’ located is as the ‘lived religion’ of individuals (Chandler, 2008; Hall, 1997; Heelas et al., 2005; Luckmann, 1967; McGuire, 2008; Roof, 1999; Shimazono, 2004; Woodhead, 2010).

Variations in post-Westphalian restructuring: The examples of Canada, Turkey and India

In order to illustrate the shift in the dominance of the Westphalian arrangements to a post-Westphalian condition, I want now to look briefly at three very different countries in different parts of the world, countries that each developed a different relation to the Westphalian model (that is, the three ‘variants’ are quite different) in the process and in the aftermath of their formation as modern states; and which correspondingly are showing rather different manifestations of a post-Westphalian condition. The three countries are Turkey, India and Canada, countries which have formed at different times, on very different cultural or ‘ethnic’ and thus ‘national’ bases, with a different ‘colonial’ history, with different dominant religions and thus religions that have formed as modern religions differently, and therefore different relations between religion and secular, specifically between religion and state. Correspondingly, the symptoms of a shift to post-Westphalian conditions are also different.

Conclusions

These illustrations from three different countries show a number of things, but among them is the degree to which any of our talk of ‘post’ or ‘re’ is highly tenuous: there is solid evidence that something important is happening semantically and structurally with religion, and probably the state (although I have ignored that half of the argument here). However that evidence does not yet point in a very clear direction, especially when we take into consideration that the whole world is involved, and not just the so-called West. As I tried to show with my three examples, this West should not be taken as the putative standard in the effort to understand these transformations since the degree to which the non-West did not follow the exact same paths as has the West means that these regions have in a sense a head start on moving in new directions; they were never as determined or determined in the same way by the old dominant models as were the European and colonizer society countries (which here includes Latin America). And the way that they nonetheless particularized those models was in many cases sufficiently different that their path-dependent present and future will also be different. The most important upshot of the analysis I offer here is therefore that post-Westphalianism means more than anything else a pluralization of options, for the relation between the so-called ‘secular’ and the so-called ‘religious’ as for anything else. This is the conclusion also of Modood and Bhargava in their contribution to the debate. Yet such pluralization does not exclude the possibility that eventually a new global model in this arena will become dominant. At the moment, however, it is impossible to discern the clear outlines of such a model, let alone give it a name, even if it were to develop. Post-Westphalianism is thus a lot like somewhat cognate ideas like postmodernism and multiculturalism: all we know is that they represent a plurality of options and voices; but we really have no clear idea of what they mean because the new self-evidences at which they hint are not yet present. Minerva’s owl, as it were, will only fly at dusk, which is to say when the light of the present day is gone but the new dark (in comparison) has not yet taken hold.