William Connolly om sekularismen och metafysiken

By eschewing reference to controversial metaphysical assumptions in their own forays into public life, secularists hope to discourage a variety of enthusiastic Christians from doing so in turn. Sometimes, indeed, such an agnostic stance folds the admirable virtue of forbearance into public debate. But the cost of elevating this disposition to restraint into the cardinal virtue of metaphysical denial is also high. First, such a stance makes it difficult for its partisans to engage a variety of issues of the day, such as the legitimate variety of sexual orientations, the organization of gender, the question of doctor-assisted death, the practice of abortion, and the extent to which a uniform set of public virtues is needed. It is difficult because most participants in these discussions explicitly draw metaphysical and religious perspectives into them, and because the claim to take a position on these issues without invoking controversial metaphysical ideas is soon seen to be a facade by others. Academic secularists are almost the only partisans today who consistently purport to leave their religious and metaphysical baggage at home. So the claim to being postmetaphysical opens you to charges of hypocrisy or false consciousness: "You secularists quietly bring a lot of your own metaphysical baggage into public discourse even as you tell the rest of us to leave ours in the closet".

William Connolly. Why I am not a secularist. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.  s.37

Connolly raserar modernitetens murar ...

"The difference between philosophy and faith - which has formed the hallmark of secular thinking - is not recognized by either of us to be a distinction of type. It functions at best as a delineation of components within a religious/philosophical perspective. Every faith has a philosophical component. And every philosophy is invested with faith. The attempt to maintain a sharp line of distinction between the two is one of the things that has placed Catholic philosophy in limbo in academic life. And, I must add, it also encourages many philosophers and theologians to place a minority, non theistic faith in the West, advanced variously by Epicurius, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, in the same position. Once you come to terms with the element of faith in utilitarianism, Kantianism and Hegelianism, and then re-encounter the philosophical components of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, the academic marginalization of both Catholicism and Nietzscheanism loses much of its intellectual grounding. The modern, secular line of distinction between philosophy and faith begins to blur. By faith in this context I mean a lived interpretation which so far has not been subjected to definitive demonstration, one that involves both refined reflection and a gut commitment below the threshold of complex intellectualization. The human condition that makes faith unavoidable, plural, and effective is the same condition that makes the key question of ethics less how to resolve issues within a shared moral creed and more how to negotiate relationships between constituencies, within and across state lines, inhabited by different operational faiths."

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William Connolly ”Catholicism and Philosophy” in Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171.

William Connolly om sekularismens problem

 

“Several variants of secularism kill two birds with one stone: as they try to seal public life from religious doctrines they also cast out a set of nontheistic orientations to reverence, ethics, and public life that deserve to be heard. These two effects follow from the secular conceit to provide a single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of “personal” or “private” faith. To invoke that principle against religious enthusiasts, secularists are also pressed to be pugnacious against asecular, nontheistic perspectives that call these very assumptions and prerogatives into question.

[…]

For to adhere to a separation of church and state is not automatically to concur in those conceptions of public life most widely bound up with secularism. To put the point briefly, the secular wish to contain religious and irreligious passions within private life helps to engender the immodest conceptions of public life peddled by so many secularists. The need today is to cultivate a public ethos of engagement in which a wider variety of perspectives than heretofore acknowledged inform and restrain one another.”

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 William E. Connolly, Why I am not a secularist (U of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5.

William Connolly om problemen med sekularism

"... for secularists, religion is safely relegated to the private realm only because secularists also contend that there is an independent way of reaching authoritative public agreements without recourse to the diverse religious faiths of citizens. The problem is that different secular sects nominate different instruments to fill this role, and each instrument diverges significantly from the others on what that authoritative practice is or could be. Some place their faith in the dictates of public reason, others in deliberative consensus, others in transparent procedures, others in implicit contractual agreements, and others in a ‘‘myth’’ of equality citizens accept as if it were ontologically grounded. None of these images of public life folds the reflexivity needed into faith-practices themselves. They do not, in my view, because they pretend to identify a forum above faith through which to regulate diverse faiths. If the nobility of secularism resides in its quest to enable multiple faiths to co-exist on the same territory, its shallowness resides in the hubris of its distinction between private faith and public reason."

Vries, Hent de, och Lawrence Eugene Sullivan. Political theologies: public religions in a post-secular world. Fordham Univ Press, 2006., 292