Abstract
In his monumental A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor distinguishes between three senses of secularity. Secularity 1 is about the demarcation of public life from religious norms and authority. Secularity 2 refers to the decline in religious belief and practice. And Secularity 3 concerns the condition whereby not believing becomes, for the large majority of society, one meaningful option among others. Taylor’s main focus is the last one. Featuring a grand narrative on the evolution of these three notions across multiple centuries, he presents an extensive phenomenology of Secularity 3 – a rare and relatively recent occurrence specific to the North Atlantic world.
To what extent is Taylor’s framework relevant or insightful when it travels beyond the West? The question was posed not long after the publication of A Secular Age (for a recent philosophical examination, see Bilgrami, 2016). More specifically, how does the relationship between the three senses of secularity unfold when they are taken out of the safe home of Latin Christendom? Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley and Shylashri Shankar’s edited volume addresses this question with a comparative-historical agenda featuring 11 in-depth case studies in the Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African geographies. Hence the title of the book.
The accomplishment of A Secular Age Beyond the West is difficult to overstate, especially given the immensity of the project undertaken. The amalgamation of conceptual and empirical rigor, geographical reach, and historical sensitivity the book offers, in my assessment, is unmatched in the latest generation of scholarship on secularization. Despite the multiplicity of authors (13 in total), the book manages to sustain a relatively coherent voice throughout, mainly thanks to the steadiness of its analytical scaffold.
Let me contextualize the contribution of the volume. For a long while in the postwar sociology of religion, secularization studies were locked in time and space. Time, because although history was at the core of the discussion, distinctly comparative-historical approaches were the road less taken (the most notable exception being Martin, 1978). And space, because the geographical scope of the conversation was restricted mostly to the Western world. The implicit assumption was that the non-West would eventually catch up: modernization would bring about secularization there as well.
As the century was coming to a close, the narrative changed – it had to. When religions made a global comeback in the public scene from the 1970s onward, it became clear that secularization could not simply be taken for granted as modernity’s sidekick. To better grasp its inner workings, increased calls were made to historicize secularization as a contingent/contentious process, and to pay more attention beyond Europe and North America (Casanova, 2006; Gorski, 2000). Since the last decade, many case studies and comparative works emerged to rise up to the task (some examples featuring non-Western cases are Burchardt et al., 2015; Kuru, 2009; and Saeed, 2018).
Positioning itself in this growing body of literature, A Secular Age Beyond the West stands out as the most ambitious study to date, likely to emerge as a reference source in the years to come. Between a theoretical overview by Philip Gorski and an afterword by Charles Taylor himself, the 422-page book covers the 20th-century histories of five post-colonial nations (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco) as well as six never-colonized (China, Japan, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Russia). The appendix complements the historical narrative with a quantitative take on the status of Taylor’s three secularities in these 11 countries. The editors’ extensive introductory and concluding chapters meticulously frame the book and underscore the emergent conceptual threads in engagement with the existing scholarship.
What do we learn from all this? Three contributions of the book are specifically noteworthy. The first insight is seemingly obvious, but its mechanisms are surprisingly undertheorized in the literature: the state greatly shapes the conditions of belief and practice, constantly molding the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This is all the more true in the non-West where secularization emerges more often through rapid political change than diffuse social evolution. The cases under scrutiny rarely manifest Secularity 3, partly because such conditions of belief are not engendered sufficiently by Secularity 1 – although the relationship between the two, we learn, is far from straightforward. Contrary to what one might think, for instance, the variables of democracy versus non-democracy, colonized versus non-colonized, or constitutional indicators of secularity do not always yield to significant differences in these outcomes.
The overwhelming tendency, instead, is that of a ‘marker state,’ whereby the degree of access to citizenship can largely depend on one’s religious belonging. Religiously marking individuals (de jure or de facto), the state tends to privilege certain religions over others via ‘differential burdening’: it interferes with the doctrines and practices of minority as well as majority religions in distinct ways. Burdening is also differential across cases, because world religions offer dissimilar ‘contact surfaces’ to state regulation. As the political apparatus modernizes, law emerges as the main site of religious contention in some cases (such as in Muslim-majority nations, India, and Israel), while in others, education and property may become more controversial (such as in China and Russia).
A second insight is on the global entanglements of secularity, particularly the decisive influence of European colonialism and imperialism on these geographies. Although it is conceded that internal factors turn out to be more determining than external ones, each chapter is also a ‘travel story’ of how secularity reached these polities through Western powers, where it took culturally and legally unique forms. Yet the West did not have a solely secularizing impact – through ideological/institutional emulation and legacies, or novel conceptions of the religion–secularity nexus. In many cases, politico-military conflict with (Christian) Europe also empowered the status of the local majority religion, leading to what Taylor calls a ‘neo-Durkheimian’ collective identity that blends religious and ethnic-national belonging. One reason for the continued prevalence of religious nationalisms in these regions today may be the deep-rootedness of their defensive relationship with the West.
Finally, the book’s comparative-historical methodology should be underlined as a major contribution to the prospect of an emergent field of global secularity studies. While anthropologies of secularism (Cannell, 2010) tend to emphasize the uniqueness and incommensurability of each country/tradition, A Secular Age Beyond the West works consciously towards developing a common vocabulary for cross-religious and cross-regional comparisons, seeking to overcome an essentialized ‘West and the Rest’ distinction. To do so, the book brings forth analytical tools with potentially universal applicability such as ‘marker state,’ ‘differential burdening,’ and ‘contact surfaces.’
Regardless of the religious tradition, the rise of the nation-state and colonial/imperial entanglements have been influential everywhere in shaping the boundaries and conditions of belief. Guiding ideas of leaders, moreover, constitute only a part of the story here. Be it in the form of political philosophies or religious doctrines, ideational frameworks need to be complemented, we are shown, by the analysis of the ‘interests and opportunities associated with variously placed actors.’ This is why studying past and current sociopolitical contentions matters. The book is particularly attentive to historical critical junctures, because ‘foundational moments . . . like the end of colonial rule, civil war, or revolution . . . create path dependencies in religion–state relations’ (p. 380). Comparative-historical sociology proves conducive for examining the varieties of the secular experience.
At the end, even Taylor’s three notions of secularity look different, as they have now been ‘translated’ from philosophy to sociology, and have left the North Atlantic world for the possibility of a globally oriented research agenda. In a world where politics and religions are assuming an increasingly transnational character, the task of developing a common lexicon for multiple secularities – without ignoring local cultural specificities – seems to me a worthwhile endeavor.