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