‘Let the study of American secularisms begin!’

‘Let the study of American secularisms begin!’ by Jacques Berlinerblau

There is no scholarly monograph entitled American Secularism. There is no magisterial multi-volume work that goes by the name of A History of Secularisms in the United States, or something on the order of The American Secular Traditions. ¹ I’d even settle for The Twisted Tale of Secularism: From Jefferson to Obama. But we don’t have anything like that either.

What we lack in weighty tomes, not coincidentally, we also lack in basic knowledge of our subject matter. We know few of the names of those who were the architects of the various secularisms that have existed in this country. We possess only the scantest resources for making sense of how the secular intuitions of the pre-Modern, early Modern, and Enlightenment periods coalesced into the subsequent political traditions that came to be called “secular.” Very little scholarly consensus exists as to what the term secularism means. And, perhaps most significantly, we are literally clueless as to what this multivalent and unstable word has meant to different actors situated in different periods of American history.

William Arnal, in his eloquent response to my book in this exchange speaks about “rarified scholarly discourses” which are failing to ask rude, albeit essential, questions about religion (Arnal, 2012). I concur and express solidarity with his project of articulating big, brash, crockery-breaking theories. Permit me to redirect Professor Arnal’s concerns to the problem I raised above for the same ‘rarified scholarly discourses’ are, in large part, responsible for the staggering poverty of research on, and public understanding of, American secularism.

For most of the twentieth century the subject of secularism was either an afterthought or an orphan. Of late, it has become an abused orphan. In terms of the afterthought, secularism has always been the understudy to the secularization hypothesis and the passionate theoretical debates it evokes. This is a field of inquiry that has produced an impressive and unimaginably large quantity of research. It will, I surmise, continue to do so until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. The problem is that all the smoke and fumes surrounding secularization theories tend to obscure secularism’s sovereignty as a conceptually distinct object of scrutiny.

Secularization, as early commentators such as Peter Berger and Harvey Cox argued, is a trans-historical process that has been millennia in the making (Berger, 1969; Casanova, 1994: 15; Casanova, 2001: 13787; Cox, 1966: 18; Wilson, 1983). Secularism may indeed be a dividend of that very process—assuming that process ever existed (Stark, 1999)—but it itself is not a process.

Many definitions of secularism have been advanced since George Jacob Holyoake apparently coined the term in the mid nineteenth century. There are conceptions that stress this-worldly ethics (such as Holyoake’s, Robert Ingersoll’s, and the writings of the late Paul Kurtz). There are approaches that emphasize anti-metaphysical and/or anti-clerical claims (one thinks of the British infidel Charles Bradlaugh, or our contemporary New Atheists). I survey these in my book, but I argue that a political understanding of the term “secularism” may be the most historically accurate. Such political definitions vary, but they usually posit two major institutions, church and state, and express skepticism and concern about their interaction.

All secularisms come replete with people who have ideas about proper governance, liberty, ethics, pluralism, religion’s role in the public sphere, and so forth. Anglo-Secularisms have been animated by ideas about freedom of expression (maintained by people such as the Victorian infidels), theological ideas about the dangers of government’s encroachment upon religion (endorsed by people such as Baptist dissenters at the time of America’s Founding), ideas about the separation of church and state (promulgated by people as diverse as Protestant anti-Catholic xenophobes in the late nineteenth century and First Amendment loving Jews in the mid-twentieth century).

Secularization theorists, with their longitudinal, macro-structural focus on differentiation and modernization (Bruce, 2002: 8), are not ideally positioned to study people and ideas. Many different types of people call themselves and/or can be retrospectively called secularists. For the most part, secularization theorists have been singularly uninterested in getting to know them. Few have undertaken a project on the order of Christian Smith’s The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (2003a). Smith attempted to understand how the process of secularization (which is one thing) resulted in agents who tried to secularize America in the waning decades of the nineteenth century (which is another).

The author focuses on sociologists who sought to eliminate religion from the “central concerns, practices, and discourse of higher education” (2003b: 101). Smith offers little evidence that the “secularizing activists” (2003b: 98) he studies understood themselves to be “secular.” It is Smith who conceptualizes these early sociologists as “secular.” Nowhere does he document that these secularizers self-consciously espoused something called “secularism.” Difficulties of this nature plague all students of American secularism. This is because the shifting semantic range of the term makes it difficult to pinpoint how agents construed its meaning. Nevertheless, Smith’s rigorous study is admirably cognizant of the distinction between secularization and secularism. Now let’s visit the orphanage.

In an insightful assessment of contemporary American secularism Wilfred McClay points to “a fascinating convergence of what might loosely be called ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘postmodern’ perspectives, each very hostile to secularism” (2003: 39). As far as the academic study of secularism is concerned this convergence has not only been fascinating but fatal. The story of American secularisms will only develop if and when it escapes from this pincer.

Professor Arnal and I have both long observed that scholars who study religion have been overwhelmingly religious themselves. The confessional cast of religious studies has overdetermined a troubling outcome for studies of secularism. Insofar as the latter has been (erroneously) assumed to be a form of religious hatred, if not atheism, very few religionists chose to study it. For most of the twentieth century the highly confessional field of religious studies operated as if secularism were, to borrow a phrase introduced to us by Professor Arnal, “an evil little thing.”

This brings us to the other pincer, the more menacing and more serrated one. In the final decades of the twentieth century secularism finally did become an object of sustained scholarly interest. Its interlocutors were the post-modern, post-Foucauldian, post-colonial theorists, whose school of thought I shall refer to as POMOFOCO. The characteristics of this school have remained remarkably stable across its quarter century of dominance in the elite Divinity schools and Religion and Theory programs.

Secularism is everywhere described as “a discourse,” a nomenclature that tethers these inquiries to Foucauldian epistemology. A noticeable value orientation pervades this school. Secularism is almost always construed as something that needs to be stopped. In the introduction to their volume Secularisms, editors Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini write: “we are concerned with secularism as a discourse that invokes powerful moral claims and evinces manifold political effects. We hope to intervene in the sets of binaries that give secularism as a discourse its moral force and that legitimate the political power deployed in its name” (2008: 7).

Understanding what the POMOFOCO School is after, other than the disappearance of secularism and, if possible, the liberal nation state, is not easy to grasp, for its own discourse is pitched in a specialized dialect of impressive complexity. Here is William Connolly in Why I am Not Secularist:

The Kantian achievement, however, is cast from fragile crystal. For what if one contends, as Gilles Deleuze does, that the ‘apodictic’ recognition by ordinary people upon which Kantian morality is grounded in the first instance is actually a secondary formation reflecting the predominant Christian culture in which it is set? (1999: 33)

Aside from the technical jargon, the most remarkable, and counter-productive, component of the POMOFOCO program is its self-conscious refusal to explain what secularism is. Reflecting on the secular (which he distinguishes from secularism), Talal Asad muses: “because the secular is so much part of our modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it is best pursued through its shadows, as it were” (2003: 16). As Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd note: “it is impossible to define secularism; rather one must track the diverse ways the insistent claims to being secular are made” (2010: 12). John Lardas Modern in Secularism in Antebellum America writes: “I assume, as a matter of analytical faith, that whatever we are talking about when we talk about secularism exceeds our capacity to name it” (2011: 10).

According to José Casanova, the theory of secularization “may be the only theory which was able to achieve a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences” (1994: 17). The POMOFOCO School must be the only one in the history of social science that explicitly refuses to define the very matter it has set out to study. I guess I would concede Modern’s point that, philosophically speaking, words can never properly define that which they purport to describe. Also, it is true that there are many forms of secularism. But what good does it do to refuse to define any of them? How can social-scientific or historical work proceed if researchers, as a matter of analytical faith, refuse to tell other researchers what they mean by a term or what its plausible range of meanings might be? Let’s leave aside the role of the researcher in all of this. How can we make sense of the lived experiences of secularists if we don’t bother to ask what “secularism” meant to them?

This brings me to Professor Lofton’s rather caricatural assessment of my book. The “Berlinerblau” she sketches is a panting, excitable fellow. He wants to “incite us and unite us,” “to provoke,” to call people out, and “to arouse your concern.” In his “ardency,” “puckish,” Berlinerblau “wants us to dig deep into ourselves, and recognize the universal ethos of good will that underpins our privilege as secularists.” “What Berlinerblau really wants,” Lofton avers, “is for everyone to rally around a better revival.”

Permit Berlinerblau to demur. Aside from the fact that my tone is more plangent than it is ardent, what I really wanted to do in How to Be Secular was to frame and engage basic questions about American secularism—questions that a quarter century of POMOFOCO research has failed to illuminate for me. Among my objectives were to figure out: (i) how secularism might best be defined; (ii) who its intellectual progenitors were; (iii) what comprised its canonical texts; (iv) how it compares to other secularisms (i.e. in France and the former Soviet Union); (v) why it is confused with atheism; (vi) when it crested as a force in American political life; and (vii) when it bottomed out.

As for the bottoming out part, my conclusion was clear. Although many of secularism’s wounds were self-inflicted, the Christian Right played a crucial role in secularism’s late twentieth century collapse. This does not sit well with my critic. She speaks of the “constant iteration and reiteration of the lurking potency of the Christian Right.” For Professor Lofton all of this analysis is just hype, “a red herring.” I want to linger on her argument because it highlights the drawbacks of the POMOFOCO approach, with its animus towards liberalism and the blind eye it turns to religious extremism (see Asad, 1993: 239−268; Asad, 2003: 159−201).

Professor Lofton remarks: “the discursive circulation of the Christian Right is undeniable; its sociological presence is harder to track.” This is a bit of a head-scratcher. Is the Christian Right’s triumph merely one of “discursive circulation”? If abortion clinics are veritable military zones in some states and nearly non-existent in others, then this is the handiwork of the Christian Right. The clever legal maneuvering that has made everything from military service to matrimony difficult for gay Americans is the result, in large part, of the skilled activism of conservative Christians. If statehouses across the country are advancing increasingly strident anti-secular interpretations of the First Amendment’s religion clauses—and if the government in Washington dares not stand in their way—then guess who has paved the path for the weakening of federal authority?

What would Professor Lofton make of the two cases discussed by Professor Arnal? In one, a teenage girl is literally demonized for protesting a church/state trespass. In the other, an Evangelical Christian has a full-blown secular epiphany. Yes, Valerie Hodges of Livingstone Parish, Louisiana—there really is a downside, for all of us, to excessive entanglement between government and religion! For all of its missteps and tragic blunders, secularism got that one right. I share Professor Arnal’s concerns about accommodationist secularism. But one of the reasons I explored its potential is precisely because of the challenges it presents to Revivalists, like Hodges, who wish to align the state with one faith tradition. Accommodationism, in theory, recognizes all faith traditions, which may serve as a stepping stone towards the government's recognition of non-believing groups while de-centering the Christian Right on the backstroke.

This same complex and internally diverse Christian Right, incidentally, has taken an admirable stand on human sexual trafficking. It has evinced a sincere interest in global AIDS and devoted great energy to combatting famine and poverty here and abroad. Throughout my book I insist that its rise has been wholly lawful and its strategies have been nothing short of brilliant. The movement is filled with decent people, no more or no less concerned about this country than I am or Professor Lofton. Yet How to Be Secular was not a meditation on the niceness and humanity of individual Bible-believing Christians. My goal was to understand what led to the breakdown of separationist secularism at the end of the twentieth century. That’s where I found the Christian Right—in the courts, in the legislatures, on K Street, school boards, in popular culture and beyond. How does Professor Lofton conclude that any of this is merely “discursive”? This is what happens when everything is construed as that gilded blur which is a “discourse.”

Without noticing it, Lofton pivots from the argument that my emphasis on the Christian Right was a straw man to a second position: its power is on the decline anyway. She cites the morose post-Election Day plaint of a Southern Baptist leader to the effect that the nation has rejected his worldview. Perhaps. But forecasts of the Christian Right’s demise are not uncommon. In 1998 no less a mainstay of this movement than Paul Weyrich similarly lamented that, “I believe that we probably have lost the culture war” (1999: 44). Then came the two elections of George W. Bush then came the “Values Voters,” etc. Given all that this diverse and dynamic cohort has accomplished in the past half century, it might be prudent not to predict their total defeat five minutes after Election Day. It might also be prudent to recall the distinction between the federal and state levels. Nothing indicates to me that the Christian Right’s control of statehouses across the country is coming to an end soon.

As for the 2012 election, it has, apparently, invalidated my analysis. “How,” Professor Lofton asks, “does Berlinerblau explain the success of Obama in an era of the suffering secular?” For starters, let me re-deconstruct the following claim: The Democratic Party is the party of secularism. Secular organizations, I argued, have been irritated by Obama’s Faith-based Office, his God Talk, and his boisterous prayerfulness. The president has disappointed secular Americans again and again. He has not, however, terrified them—as have so many Republicans. Still, I went to great pains to note that Obama’s Democrats are not Kennedy’s Democrats. Obama’s success does not necessarily alleviate the suffering secular.

If I understand Professor Lofton, she argues that the victory of Obama was a vindication of secular America. I am not so sure about that. In my seventh chapter, I observed that the mid-century coalition that fought so successfully on behalf of church/state separation was a small, diverse and acephalous group of unlikely bedfellows. Many of the actors involved (e.g. Jews, anti-Catholic Protestants, teachers unions, artists, pornographers, religious minorities) had little interest in secularism outside of separationism. “Secularism,” I concluded, is “one of the few isms out there that arose on the backs of individuals and groups devoted to other isms” (Berlinerblau, 2005: 112).

Let’s try and apply this to the 2012 election. Did secularists win the election for Barack Obama? Or was it more likely, women, Latinos and African Americans who lifted him past Mitt Romney (who, I hasten to add, still received nearly 61 million votes)? What I wish to say is that the 2012 victory was less a victory by secularism, than it was a victory for secularism (as so many of its victories have been).

There was, of course, the undeniable impact of the “nones,” 70 percent of whom voted for Obama (Pew Forum, 2012). But lost in the din of Obama’s victory were two curious facts about the religiously unaffiliated. First, their support for Obama decreased five percentage points from 2008 (Pew Forum, 2012). Second, and more importantly, their voter turnout was comparatively low (they comprised just 12% of the 2012 electorate; Public Religion Research Institute, 2012). Yes, the religiously unaffiliated have great secular potential. But, no, they did not hand the election to the Democrats; other constituencies were responsible for that.

After making a series of dubious claims about where the “historiography of U.S. religions” stands on secularism, Lofton concludes: “I largely agree with Berlinerblau’s popularizing account of what secularism is, and how it came about.” This conclusion surprises me, and not only because of the reference to “popularizing”—an unexpected invocation of Heidelbergian probity coming from a scholar whose published monograph is entitled Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. That work, however, does not largely agree with my definition of what secularism is. There, Lofton defines secularism as “a way of conveying a condition in which theism is an option, rationalism is the logic, and liberation is the universal ambition” (Lofton, 2011: 11).

This approach, which as best I can tell is a riff on Charles Taylor’s conception of “secularity” (2007: 3−22), is dramatically at odds with my own definition developed at length in How to Be Secular (itself a renovation of an inadequate attempt in my 2005 The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously). The reader is free to judge whether my reconstruction of the secular project is original and whether my account is “popularizing,” or merely written in clear prose.

The neglected child that is the study of American secularism has many needs. It needs fewer abstract philosophical treatises and more concrete studies of demography. It needs greater attention to case law and less concern with “discursive formations.” It could use more researchers whose express motivation is not to de-legitimate secularism and less input by scholars of secularity and secularization.

Clear, precise definitions sure would be nice. And above all we need a linguist. It has become clear to me that the semantic range of the term has varied diachronically and synchronically. Until we understand what Americans across historical time and space believed secularism to be, we will never make sense of all the things that American secularisms are.