The myth of the Secular

Ideas är ett utmärkt radioprogram på CBC - den kanadensiska motsvarigheten till BBC. Jag upptäckte just att de i slutet av oktober kommer att sända sju program på temat The Myth of the Secular. Att döma av gäster och upplägg ser det fantastiskt intressant ut:

Monday, October 22
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 1
Western social theory once insisted that modernization meant secularization and secularization meant the withering away of religion. But religion hasn't withered away, and this has forced a rethinking of the whole idea of the secular. IDEAS producer David Cayley talks to Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics, and Rajeev Barghava of India's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. 

Tuesday, October 23
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 2
The secular is often defined as the absence of religion, but secular society is in many ways a product of religion. In conversation with IDEAS producer David Cayley British sociologist David Martin explores the many ways in which modern secular society continues to draw on the repertoire of themes and images found in the Bible. 

Wednesday, October 24
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 3
Early in the post-colonial era, politics in most Muslim countries were framed in secular and nationalist terms. During the last thirty years, the Islamic revival has dramatically changed this picture. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood talks with IDEAS producer David Cayley about her book, The Politics of Piety. 

Thursday, October 25
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 4
The Fundamentals was a series of books, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, which tried to set the basics of Christianity in stone. Fundamentalism now refers to any back-to-basics movement. Malise Ruthven's Fundamentalism asks what all these movements have in common, in this feature interview with David Cayley. 

Friday, October26
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 5
"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." So wrote German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in a book called Political Theology. American legal theorist Paul Kahn has just published Political Theology: Four New Chapters in which he argues that the foundations of the American state remain theological. He explores this theme with IDEAS producer David Cayley.

Monday, October, 29
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 6
In 1990 British theologian John Milbank published a five-hundred-page manifesto called Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The book argued that theology should stop deferring to social theories that are just second-hand theology and declare itself, once again, the queen of the sciences. The book led, in time, to a movement called "Radical Orthodoxy." IDEAS producer David Cayley profiles John Milbank. 

Tuesday, October 30
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 7
IDEAS producer David Cayley concludes his series with three thinkers who believe that division of the world into the secular and the religious both oversimplifies and impoverishes political and religious life. Political philosopher William Connolly argues for a richer and more inclusive public sphere; historian of religion Mark Taylor calls for a new philosophy of religion; and Fred Dallmayr presents the case for a deeper and more thorough-going pluralism.

Tune in!

Om religion som möjlighet snarare än hot

Today’s political culture is characterized by a growing opposition between political secularism and religious fundamentalism. I take it this is a fruitless opposition that  can be overcome by a more thoroughgoing awareness of what it means to be secular. We can no longer act as if religion is an unequivocal explanation of the crisis of modern democracy. It might as well be the the lack of religion that threatens modern democracies by making democracy a purely formal system, without inherent value and purpose.
[...]
The secularist rhetoric that fears the presence of religion in society, is also misleading because we can not simply repeat the arguments from the nineteenth century in which both the state and the Church had a firm seat. Today’s challenge is not primarily to save the state from religion, but even more of saving the state as such. The crisis of democracy is the crisis of weak states and powerless governments. The state is not threatened more by religion, than by market parties, a failing public system and media
manipulation.

HJ Prosman. The Postmodern Condition and the Meaning of Secularity. (Ars Disputandi, 2011), 240

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

Sluta försvara religion!

Margo Ingvardsson, tidigare riksdagsledamot för vänsterpartiet, skrev nyligen en debattartikel i DN där hon argumenterade för att "barn upp till tolv års ålder bör ´fridlysas´ från religiös utövning". Stefan Swärd är en av de som reagerat mot stolligheterna i Ingvardssons förslag och även debatterat mot henne i radio.

Jag menar dock att Swärds sätt att bemöta Ingvarssons förslag ytterst sätt gynnar den sekularism som Ingvarsson företräder. Problemet med Swärds resonemang är nämligen att han oproblematiskt tycks köpa religionsbegreppet, och därmed föreställningen om att "religion" skulle vara ett avgränsat fenomen urskiljbart från andra kulturella yttringar såsom exempelvis politik. Att hävda religionsfrihet som stöd mot Ingvardssons kritik blir problematiskt då det skriver under på distinktionen mellan "religiöst" och "sekulärt". Att denna uppdelning inte håller för en närmare granskning kan väl sägas utgöra kärnan i talet om det postsekulära samhället (för kort into till detta begrepp läs Göran Rosenbergs färska artikel i SvD: Religion och politik lika med sant). 

William Cavanaugh är en av många som pekat på religionsbegreppets problem:

The first conclusion is that there is no transhistorical or transcultural concept of religion. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefor, helps to separate loyalty to God from one´s public loyalty to the nation-state. The idea that religion has a tendency to cause violence - and is therefore to be removed from public power - is one type of this essentialist construction of religion." (The Myth of Religious Violence, s.59)

Problemet är alltså inte bara att "religion" är en konstruktion som inte återfinns i verkligheten, utan även att det går att ana en politisk agenda bakom begreppet. Med Stanley Hauerwas ord:

Religion is the designation created to privatize strong convictions in order to render them harmless so that the alleged democracies can continue to have the illusion that they flourish on difference. (The State of the University, s.60)

Min önskan är att de som debatterar med sekularister som angriper religion i allmänhet, istället för att gömma sig bakom talet om religionsfrihet, först skulle be dem definiera vad de menar med religion. Jag tror att en mer fruktbar debatt skulle bli följden av detta; förhoppningsvis ett samtal som visar på att även föreställningen om ett neutralt sekulärt förnuft är en trosföreställning. 

John Gray om det sekuläras kristna rötter

“Secular thinking is a legacy of Christianity and has no meaning except in a context of monotheism […] Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought."
--
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 268.

Sekularismen är religiös!

The anthropologist Brian Morris, in the introduction to his book Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987), says that "the rubric 'religion', to me, covers all phenomena that are seen as having a sacred or supra-empirical quality: totemism, myth, witchcraft, ritual, spirit beliefs, symbolism, and the rest".

Now it occurs to me that all values are supraempirical, and if we include as values the American Constitution, the rights of man, and the concept of the civil society, then religion in Morris's usage covers what defines secular western society. In point of fact Morris's usage tends to make 'religion' identical with ritual, thus including many institutions that others would like to label secular.

__
Timothy Fitzgerald. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford University Pres, 2003. s. 12

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.”

---

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

Hauerwas om tro i allmänhet och sekularism

Nedanstående är ett utdrag ur en gammal intervju med Stanley Hauerwas i The Other Journal. Det första stycket kan med fördel läsas som en kommentar till Broderskaparnas beslut att bli ett förbund som samlar "troende" i allmänhet.
Det andra stycket läses med fördel punkt:





"And I think also, George Bush, his Christian faith, is the Christian faith of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can quite understand that. It never seems to occur to him what it would mean to be a part of a Church and under ecclesial authority, and to have your language tested by ecclesial authority. I mean, I’m sure he’s very genuine in his religious faith, I just don’t think very much of his faith. For someone like me to say that, you think well that’s very arrogant. And its true, it is very arrogant. And I think that one of the things that we suffer from in America is that religious people thinking secularity is such an enemy, that any religious faith is better than no religious faith. That is a deep mistake! There are very perverse forms of religious faith, that, give me a secularist any day compared to some of the forms of religious faith. And I must say, I think that Evangelicalism bares the brunt of a lot of this. I think that it is far to a-ecclesial and Evangelicals tend to turn the gospel in a system of belief rather than a body of people through which we are embraced through God’s salvation that makes us different."

(...)

"TOJ: Now would the imaginative Christian becoming engaged in these issues, would that mean being involved in policy writing…?

Stanley Hauerwas: It could, it could. I have nothing against that. You know I’m accused of being a sectarian fideistic tribalist calling Christians away from involvement in government. No! I just want them to be there as Christians. But you see as soon as you get involved in public policy issues the question starts being raised how then are you able to have a policy that isn’t going to be offensive to secular people because it’s based on some kind of Christian practice, so immediately when you get involved in policy you are asked to give up your Christian speech. And people say well this is a pluralist country and I say, if it’s a pluralist country then why do we have to give up our Christian speech. And so on and so on …"

Husförhör i den sekulära liberalismens kyrka

Den prisbelönte läraren Stavros Louca, känd från SVT:s skolprogram 9A har hamnat i blåsväder. Det har nämligen "avslöjats" att denne man som SVT kallar Sveriges bästa matematiklärare, SAMTIDIGT är "ett aktivt Jehovas Vittne och rentav församlingsledare och ansvarig för missioneringsarbete". Det är ganska roande att iaktta den kognitiva dissonans som flera journalister och tyckare nu ger uttryck för: Men, han som gav ett så intelligent och trevligt intryck - tror han verkligen att Gud har skapat universum?!?!

Nu kallas det till inkvisition i den sekulära liberalismens kyrka. Alla skall avkrävas en vetenskapliga trosbekännelse. För, menar en kolumnist: "Lika lite som en anti-demokratisk nazist som förnekar Förintelsen kan fungera som samhällskunskapslärare kan en evolutionsförnekande kreationist vara lärare i naturkunskap." En annan debattör twittrar:
"en rektor eller sjukhuschef vore nazist eller kreationist. Total konflikt med uppdraget."

Frågan infinner sig om varför inte till exempel medlemskap och engagemang i det socialdemokratiska partiet skulle göra det omöjligt att samtidigt vara en skicklig och självständig statsvetare?

Om Skolverket och sekularismen

SR:s grävande journalistikprogram Kaliber har granskat den kristna organisationen Ny Generation. Indignationen över att det finns kristna organisationer som inte bara uppmanar kristna att vara kristna även på skoltid, utan dessutom uppmanar ungdomarna att sprida sitt budskap, vet inga gränser. Från Kalibers artikel om programmet:

"Ungdomsorganisationen Ny Generation uppmanar barn och unga att frälsa sina klasskamrater under skoltid. Deras kristna budskap sprids med hjälp av statliga bidrag. Men skolorna ska vara fria från religiös påverkan enligt läroplanen ."

"”Får jag använda dig på måndag?” Det är på måndag under skoltid som Ny Generation vill att ungdomarna ska berätta om – som de kallar det – det kristna kärleksbudskapet, för sina klasskompisar i korridorerna."

"Claes-Göran Aggebo, undervisningsråd på Skolverket, som är den myndighet som styr skolornas verksamhet. Han blir bekymrad av det han hör. – Det oroande är naturligtvis om man kommer att använda skolan som en plats för att försöka att frälsa andra elever och ha det som en plattform för en väckelseverksamhet, en missionerande verksamhet. Det är naturligtvis inte acceptabelt om det skulle bli på det sättet. Nej, skolorna ska inte användas för att frälsa andra elever, säger Claes-Göran Aggebo. För alla föräldrar måste vara trygga med den plats som de varje dag skickar sina barn till. Skolor som inte är fristående religiösa skolor, ska nämligen ha en, som det heter, icke-konfessionell verksamhet. – Det är rektorerna som måste vara uppmärksamma på den typen av inslag. Alla föräldrar ska ju kunna skicka sina barn till skolan och vara förvissade om att de inte blir påverkade av den ena eller den andra religiösa uppfattningen, säger Claes-Göran Aggebo."

Visst blir man nyfiken på Claes-Görans världsbild. En neutral värld som både kan och bör avgränsas från vissa former av tankar som stämplats som "religiösa". Aldrig har väl det postsekulära samhället känts mer avlägset ...

Som så ofta säger Hauerwas det bäst:

"Liberalism, in its many forms and versions, presupposes that society can be organized without any narrative that is commonly held to be true. As a result it tempts us to believe that freedom and rationality are independent of narrative - that is, we are free to the extent that we have no story. Liberalism is, therefore, particularly pernicious to the extent it prevents us from understanding how deeply we are captured by its account of existence."
- The Hauerwas Reader, s. 114

Charles Taylor jämnar spelplanen ...

Dagens postsekulära text:

"Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the end of the day that religion is founded on an illusion, and hence that what is derived from it less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason for greater suspicion being directed at it. The credibility of this distinction depends on the view that some quite “this-worldly” argument suffices to establish certain moral-political conclusions. I mean “satisfy” in the sense of (a): it should legitimately be convincing to any honest, unconfused thinker. There are propositions of this kind, ranging from “2+2=4″ all the way to some of the better-founded deliverances of modern natural science. But the key beliefs we need, for instance, to establish our basic political morality are not among them.

The two most widespread this-worldly philosophies in our contemporary world, utilitarian and Kantianism, in their different versions, all have points at which they fail to convince honest and unconfused people. If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God."

Läs hela inlägget här!

Om förnuftets brister

Stanley Fish skriver om Habermas, religion och upplysningstro i N.Y Times:

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.
(...)
The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.
(...)
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

Om modernitetens religiösa anor II

Under rubriken "Är det moderna sekulärt - eller religiöst", skriver Ola Sigurdson:

" ... ”religion” respektive ”sekularism” är helt enkelt inte särskilt användbara kategorier för att diskutera vilken politik som bör föras, vare sig här hemma eller där borta. Snarare fungerar de mystifierande, eftersom de felaktigt utgår från att det finns några väsensegenskaper som definierar ”det religiösa” eller ”det sekulära”. Om målet är en någorlunda fredlig samexistens i ett pluralistiskt samhälle måste vi befria oss från dessa förlegade kategorier – eller åtminstone använda dem på ett betydligt mer differentierat och nyanserat sätt – för att överhuvudtaget förstå i vilket kulturellt och socialt tillstånd vi befinner oss."

Let the deconstruction begin!

Om modernitetens religiösa anor

"For churches in Europe, by way of conclusion, post-secularity means reclaiming its own embodiment, but at the same time, the vertiginous experience of meeting an echo of its own message, disseminated, improved on but also distorted by a liberal politics that has long since survived, if only barely, on the illusion of having made a clean break from the religion of its ancestors. A post-secular society would be post-secular even in the absence of churches or any other religious embodiments, inasmuch as post-secular here would mean the recognition of the religious ancestry of modernity."

Den som är intresserad post-sekulär politisk teologi bör kolla in senaste nummret av Modern Theology där Ola Sigurdson skriver under rubriken: "Beyond Secularism? Towards a Post-Secular Political Theology".

Om religionens återkomst i den sekulära staden

Tänk att få åka till Berlin på teologikonferens med temat Religion and Modernity in the Secular City:

"Writing from Vichy, France in early 1940, Walter Benjamin articulated what many theologians secretly feared in his Über den Begriff der Geschichte by portraying theology as the hunchback that must keep out of sight. However, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that it is time to reverse Benjamin’s first thesis on the philosophy of history: “The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time”. This startling reversal reveals that the extent to which Enlightenment secularization imagined it could map the rational world onto a manipulable grid, manifested in the global spread of political, economic and social structures that have attempted to inscribe the sacred within a strictly private sphere, is increasingly being called into question by the continuing public presence of political theologies. However, the question of what this new visibility of religion might mean in the context of the supposedly secular city remains less than clear."

... och Graham Ward kommer!

Cavanaugh om religion

I sin bok The Myth of Religous Violence, argumenterar William Cavanaugh bland annat för följande:

"The first conclusion is that there is no transhistorical or transcultural concept of religion. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distict from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefor, helps to separate loyalty to God from one´s public loyalty to the nation-state. The idea that religion has a tencdency to cause violence - and is therefore to be removed from public power - is one type of this essentialist construction of religion." s.59

Tänk vad annorlunda debatten om religion i den liberala demokratin skulle låta om dessa insikter fick sjunka in bland politiker, journalister och tyckare.

Charles Taylor reder ut begreppen ...

"The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?"
(...)
Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation.
(...)
If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God. Of course, our being capable of suffering is one of those basic unchallengeable propositions, in the sense of (a), as our being creatures of God is not, but what is less sure is what follows normatively from the first claim."

Charles Taylor - Secularism and Critique

Samtal om yttrandefrihet och religionsfrihet

Tidningen Dagen rapporterar om en (i många stycken typisk och delvis ganska förvirrade) debatt om yttrandefrihet och religionsfrihet. Här krockar den liberala föreställningen om det sekulära samhället (företrädd av Nyamko Sabuni och Dilsa Demirbag Sten) med föreställningen om religionen som något som inte kan begränsas till en "privat sfär".

Se en videoupptagning av debatten här!

Charlers Taylor om sekularism

“We think that secularism (or laïcité) has to do with the relation of the state and religion; whereas in fact it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity." An argument justified by reference to Marx or Kant, he suggested, is no more universal than one justified by reference to scripture.

- Charles Taylor (från anförande vid konferensen Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Square

Om religionsfobi som ett hot mot demokratin

Missa inte Ola Sigurdsons recension av José Casanovas senaste i dagens GP:

"Genom att ställa demokrati och religion mot varandra begår man alltså både ett historiskt och ett samtida praktisk-politiskt misstag. Casanovas ärende i sin bok är inte religiöst - att fler människor skall tro eller att religionerna skall undantas från kritik - utan politiskt: om en lyckad integration av människor från andra kulturer och religioner än den egna skall vara möjlig krävs ett erkännande av att det finns annorlunda sätt att vara modern på än det egna."

"Sekularismen riskerar i hög grad att bli en ideologi i den mån som den utgår från absolutistiska föreställningar om hur en rätt tänkande människa bör vara funtad. Den religionsfobiska retoriken - till skillnad från den religionskritiska hållning som kan delas av både religiösa och sekulära människor - bidrar till att öka spänningen i samhället genom att tillskriva människor med ett visst slags tro en per definition kritiklös hållning; "du är en öppensinnad person och är nog inte vidare religiös", som en antireligiös kampanj nyligen uttryckte det."