Reading “The Secular Outlook”
Wiley-Blackwell sent me The Secular Outlook by Paul Cliteur a few days ago. It has a blurb by Russell Blackford on the back, which is a good sign.
Cliteur says it’s important to distinguish between predictions of secularization, which are descriptive, and secularism, which is normative. There’s an amusing passage on page 4 where it becomes apparent that he does not think much of Karen Armstrong.
Armstrong, like some other authors writing on religion and secularization, mixes up “secularism” and “the secularization thesis.” A secularist to her is someone who believes in the secularization thesis. ..Armstrong and others may, of course, gleefully criticize the secularization thesis, but that is flogging a dead horse. Their argumentation has no consequence whatsoever for the viability of secularism as a moral and political philosophy or a vision of how the state should relate to religion. On the contrary.
Yes well – that’s Armstrong.
He makes a key distinction on page 5 between
tolerance as practiced by religions, not tolerance toward religions. Although both forms of tolerance are important, the first issue is a blind spot in the literature on this subject, the latter a sole preoccupation.
Ohhhhhhh – so it is. So religions are supposed to practice tolerance themselves! Who knew?
I hope you like it when you finish it. I read it in proof form and thought it was an important contribution to the debate.
I recently had a conversation with a Catholic which ended with me exasperatedly asking him if there was ever anything that he disagreed with but didn’t want to ban.
About time someone came out with a book that makes this distinction clearly. I’ve been flogging it for years, but for the religious it’s very different. In the sixties, all sorts of books came out from churchmen (and it was all men then) talking about the secularisation of the gospel, and that sort of thing, from which the religious took the idea that the purpose of the secular was to defeat religion, or at least to dilute it. The idea is still alive and well. But secularism, as a separation between governance and religion, and the toleration of personal belief, whatever it happens to be, is something that very few people seem to have understood, at least those sitting on the religion benches. Religion itself tends to be very intolerant, and so the religious did not fit comfortably into a scheme whereby their own world outlooks would be seen as of quite secondary concern in the public square. The pope is still driving this particular anxiety for all its worth, suggesting that things will simply fall apart if we take religion away from the centre of things. So, in short, I can’t wait for this book to come out. Can’t afford the hardback, so I’ll just have to be patient till September. I’m glad Russell thinks it’s worth the toll. That’s a high recommendation.
I should have added, Ophelia, that I look forward to reading your review.
Sounds interesting. I have been spending way too much cash on books recently, but I may have to shell out more.
Really “secular” always just has meant pluralistic toleration combined with (as necessary but not sufficient condition, separation of church and state). Nothing more and less. But it’s been twisted into standing for atheism. To give up that category to religious ideologues who actually only want to get rid of full toleration and replace it with religious respect (or just intolerance) is really bad and we need lots of books who push toleration to where it is supposed to be.
That’s a bit tendentious, Hitch. “Secular” means lots of things, not all of which have anything whatsoever to do with religion or irreligion.
The identification of “secularism”, as defined by Holyoake in 1851, with atheism was a result – perhaps a symptom – of intense arguments within the nineteenth century movement. It was an argument that Bradlaugh won, then, and Holyoake lost, because it was evident to most secularists of the time that any movement for radical social change would inevitably come into conflict with organised religion, and therefore have to engage in religious criticism. If secularism wasn’t synonymous with atheism, then atheism was at least the outcome of a consistent secularism.
In recent years “secularism” has come to be seen in some circles as a synonym for disestablishment or separation of religion and the state. That was only part of secularism for our ancestors.
Dan
Well I admit it’s slightly tendentious but not very. It is in fact less so than the false equation of secular and atheism that I see all over.
Locke, main theoretician of the secular state is nowhere near Bradlaugh’s notions. Nor is Voltaire, Jefferson or Paine. This essentialism towards a historicity of atheism as consequence of secularism becries most enlightenment thinkers and that it secular is universally made into atheism is actually damaging a pluralistic program. Or in other words, clearly Bradlaugh is rather an outlier than the norm among secular thinkers.
I resist that categories are defined by outliers rather than the norm.
That’s pretty much how I mean my comments. The problem is exactly that secular means a lot of things and that people misconstrue it to mean one, and how they construe it is actually damaging to a broader secular idea.
I follow a lot of religious blogs. I can tell you it is scary how “anti-secular” many are. That is a real problem, because it makes it hard to argue for toleration, because rejection of atheism is falsely merged with rejection of toleration.
This lack of a clear unified definition is problematic. Either secular gets a clear definition or should be replaced. Secular state does not and never has meant an atheist state. And it also never has meant a state whose outcome will be atheism. This is precisely how damaging the hard link to atheism (Kosmin tries to classify hard and soft secularism, a notion I don’t think anybody in pragmatic language use will adopt any time soon).
So yes, I’ll continue to remind people that Locke, Jefferson and Paine were a secular thinkers and that the US is a secular state. To do anything else (e.g. let the word secular errode into meaning religious freedom without religious toleration) is a really bad idea.
Dan, you said:
Oh dear, are we going to limit the meaning of a word to its origins? Etymology may be helpful, but it is not decisive, certainly. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, this is what secularism is all about, and explains why it opposes it so strenuously:
The Penguin Dictionary, however, defines it thus:
This is not about the debate between Holyoake and Bradlaugh which was carried out in very different circumstances. The churches are trying very hard to turn the hands of the clock back, and to engage the debate again about the role of religion in the public square.
I don’t think we should have that debate. If some people believe that it is wrong, for religious reasons, for women to have abortions, that’s fine, let them not have them. But no one has a right, for religious reasons, to intrude in the lives of those who do not accept those reasons, and it is a matter of incredible concern that these issues are once more being raised seriously on the spurious basis that to reject them is to undermine the foundations of our civilisation.
By all means, let us have a public conversation on the principles which should underlie our communities, but in that conversation the fact that someone thinks that a god has issued a commandment or that we can know the essential nature of man, and therefore know what the natural law is on these issues, which is just another way of talking about god, has no place. We must look to what is the basis for the best society, arguments that we can all share. Perhaps John Rawls original position is as good metaphor as possible for the kind of argument we can have in the spublic (secular) sphere, because in the original position no one knows what extraordinary beliefs he or she might hold in real life. That strikes me as true secularism. But I look forward to Paul Cliteur’s book on the subject.
I’m with Locke – the government should be about protecting or promoting the things of this world, such as life, health, and property. It should not be about imposing a comprehensive scheme of morality, virtue, or spiritual salvation. That’s what secular means to me “worldly”. Secularism is the idea that we want the exercise of the state’s power to be motivated solely by worldly concerns. That’s not sufficient for good government – it leaves a lot to argue about – but it’s necessary for it.
That reminds me of something I heard the conservative commentator Tony Blankley say on the radio the other day, in discussing the Prop 8 decision – he said the legality of gay marriage was a “very personal decision.”
I so wished I were in the studio so that I could pounce; nobody who was in the studio caught it. He meant that whether or not gays should have the right to marry was a “very personal decision” for everyone, not just gays considering marriage. What nonsense! No it isn’t! Whether or not to marry is a personal decision for the people involved, but whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal is not “personal” at all. Blankley was putting a bit of emotional spin on it, to make it sound like a Deep matter of Personal Conscience, when in fact it’s a matter of intrusive meddling in other people’s business.
My understanding of how we should live in a secular society involves a requirement that, in discussion of public policy, reference to religious traditions should not be part of one’s argument. I can offer a secular argument (with which I do not agree) against reproductive choice, and I expect others to be able to do the same.
Part of the American conversation this week centers on Ross Douthat’s NYT op-ed against same sex marriage. Although I disagree with Douthat, I’m grateful that his argument is (almost) strictly secular.
The second quote (from page 5, apparently) is particularly salient and well put.
Hitch #7 FTW!
Hitch, when I use “secular” what I mean is “free from religious authority.” I think it can apply to people, institutions, families, societies or state, pretty much any social entity. I am an anti-theist too, but that doesn’t mean I think religion should be expunged from the earth. I would say the ideal society is a secular one, where believers and non-believers of many different stripes can co-exist and engage in mutual critical discourse, equal in the eyes of one law. Religion is not a useful basis for decision-making, just about ever. The atheist movement is obviously a natural ally for the secularist cause, because both wish to dethrone religion.
PS. I MUST get my hands on a copy of that book! :)
Emily, absolutely. It’s no coincidence that secular enlightenment thinkers worried about how to do toleration, how to do individual agency and all that (think Locke on toleration, Paine on “Age of Reason” and “Common Sense” etc). It’s all about creating a discursive marketplace of ideas.
Belief does not have to disappear, but it has to play by the rules, i.e. it has to give up its claim to authority to just about anything and accept to being one of many ideas promoted and has to win the argument if it wants to get a point through.
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Hitch:
Well I admit it’s slightly tendentious but not very.
I did say “a bit”.
Well, no. Not least because of course Locke wasn’t enough of a theoretician of the secular state.
Now, in his Letter on Toleration he does no small thing, which is to defend religious pluralism and to distinguish the business of religion from the business of government. So if you’re writing a history of the development of the idea of the secular state, Locke needs to be in there.
But he says, in Letter on Toleration:
Thus, when you, Hitch, say:
I dare say that might be true. But if so, mainly by virtue of greater consistency.
We can agree on something: that the secular state sought by most modern secularists is not State Atheism; it will not prohibit religion or promote atheism. To claim that a secular state would be a danger to religion is to betray the fear that without state patronage, religion will go into decline.
My problem with what you wrote was the over-general characterisation of the identification of secularism and atheism as “twisted”, when the relationship between secularism and atheism is a historically evolving one. When people talk about atheists having “hijacked” secularism, I get annoyed.
But I stand with you in insisting that secularism not be misconstrued as Albanian-style state-atheism.
Dan
Eric MacDonald:
I hope not. I said, you will recall, that “Secular” means lots of things.
What I object to is the ahistorical claim that atheists have “hijacked” secularism, or “twisted” it, as though secularism has always and only meant simply church/state separation. Secularists, certainly in my neck of the woods, and as represented by the UK’s National Secular Society, have never been State Atheists (Bradlaugh even criticised the French pioneers of laicite for being too vindictive towards the Church); but they have also tended to be anti-religious (without seeking an anti-religious state as a political objective).
I can agree with you as with Hitch about the need to defend the political disempowerment of religion as neutral between religion and irreligion; I only object to carelessness in use of language.
Dan
Locke’s conception of a state is virtually canonically secular. That he made bigoted statements against atheism doesn’t change that at all. The shift of power legitimacy from god-ordained law to people-deliberated law is the crucial step. It was in fact necessary historically because the authority of the monarchic state was divinely derived. Even though Locke was not an atheist, he understood that breaking the divine-authority claim of the ruler was essential in establishing deliberative democracy. This is what we call secular today. No church has authority over the process. That’s not “not secular enough” that is in fact canonically secular.
There is nothing more that needs to be defined, except a clear separation of church and state (strongly prefigured in Locke and solidified by Jefferson and Madison).
On the rest, fear and historicity are separate things. Surely people are historically afraid of atheism and of “secularization”. That is a sign of the category confusion, and of political movements that wanted people to be afraid of all things secular or irreligious. As said a few times, I see no point in conceding the category to those who want to confuse it.
I don’t see why we disagree at all if you write: “When people talk about atheists having “hijacked” secularism, I get annoyed.”, because we agree and I have nowhere claimed that either. That is exactly why I protect the term secular from being equated with atheism.
Hitch,
It’s treated as canonically secular, but to my mind if you exclude atheists (and not just atheists, in fact, he also denied “tolerance” to Catholics too) from citizenship you are simply not being sufficiently secular. I appreciate Locke’s historical position, and acknowledge its importance, but I am not prepared to overlook his inconsistency.
It was a crucial step. Other steps were also necessary. Such as seeing atheists as citizens too (and Catholics). Locke made a good start on the journey to a secular state, but to get to what we know call “secular” we had to continue from where he stopped.
No doubt. And yet…
Sure. And yet…
“Except”? That’s quite a large exception, in fact. As the actual experience of “separation” in the USA shows, of course.
I need to explain this a bit more, then. This will take a bit of time, sorry.
I’m associated with the National Secular Society in the UK. The NSS, founded in 1866, can trace its origins to Holyoake’s invention of “secularism” in 1851.
Disestablishment and separation of church and state was one of the aims of the secularist movement, but so was the advancement of science and ethics independent of religion. For Holyoake, this independence was not anti-religious. To Bradlaugh, this independence was built on criticism of religion. Holyoake’s secularism was ethical reform, and he wanted people to shut up about religion for the greater good. Bradlaugh’s secularism – the secularism of the NSS – was a radical liberal manifesto which saw the church as a major opponent of social progress: arguments attacking the theological basis of reactionary politics were therefore necessary.
After Bradlaugh, “secularism” evolved and by the 1960s it was seen as the “militant” (i.e. antireligious, meaning prepared to be outspokenly critical) wing of humanism – or as a synonym for secular humanism.
Only in recent years has “secularism” come to mean, narrowly, “separation of church/religion and state”. So what you have now are people for whom separationism is secularism, alongside people for whom separationism is part of secularism.
It’s important to note that the NSS has never had atheism per se as a membership qualification, but constitutionally it rejects the supernatural and condemns the historic record of religion. Bearing in mind the evolution of meaning above, this means that it contains people who support separationism because it’s the best way of protecting freedom of and freedom from religion, and people who support it because they think that religion depends for its survival on state sponsorship and legal privilege and protection, but don’t want State Atheism.
The NSS is attacked on several sides, and here we get to root of my annoyances.
First of all, the NSS is accused of being an atheist front. A majority of our members might well describe themselves as atheists, although we don’t ask, but note what this claim means. It means, and this is sometimes stated outright, that atheists have hijacked the words “secular” and “secularism” for their own nefarious purposes. “Atheism”, of course, is taken to mean “anti-religious”. And anti-religious is taken to mean coercively anti-religious, not just argumentative or critical or angry.
When the NSS says it wants a “secular state” or a “secular society”, it is accused of really meaning that it wants an atheist state or an atheist society. This despite the clear position of the NSS that its political objectives in terms of church/state relationships are disestablishment and separation, not State Atheism. And that it has always defended both freedom of and freedom from religion. “Wanting an atheist society”, to these critics, doesn’t just mean “keen on reducing religion and increasing irreligion”, but “wanting to take away people’s faith”: again there are coercive implications.
That’s why I’m sensitive to the language being used in this discussion. I think, first of all, that the attack is repressive of perfectly ordinary atheism and/or atheist advocacy; and secondly, it is founded on ignorance of the historic right of the NSS to describe itself as “secular” in a sense that includes rejection of religion. The NSS has tried to deal with this in recent years by distinguishing its naturalistic ideological stance from its political aims, so that it doesn’t quite so much cut across some modern understandings of the meaning of secularism.
So your desire to “protect the term secular from being equated with atheism” is a double edged sword in my house, because the flipside might be that a lack of studied neutrality on religious questions is incompatible with a commitment to liberty and equality for all in a religiously diverse society. While it is important to insist that separation (a secular state) is not necessarily anti-religious – indeed may benefit religion – I think it is important to defend those who advocate separation as a secularizing measure, perhaps as one of its many benefits. If I think that one of the social benefits of disestablishment/separation will be that it increases social irreligiosity or atheism or rationality in government, that does not make me a bad person, whatever else it makes me. The NSS used to emphasise such considerations much more than it does now – times have changed, positions have evolved and hopefully got more sophisticated – but don’t let’s protect the secular from the atheist to the extent that we demonise atheism.
I don’t say that’s what you were saying, only explaining why I’m sensitive to what you were saying.
Dan
Dan, thanks. That’s really interesting stuff. I certainly don’t deny the complexity of the category and the history of branding of certain labels is really important.
I think you really assume more about what I am saying than I have. I nowhere for example have indicated that I would agree with “a lack of studied neutrality on religious questions is incompatible with a commitment to liberty and equality for all in a religiously diverse society”. In fact it is obvious that certain religious doctrines are in direct conflict with a liberal and egalitarian society.
And you will find me nowhere near demonizing atheism, in fact almost all of my commenting efforts online are to counter demonizations of atheism and atheists.
But I hear your clarification. Frankly I don’t think we have disagreement at all. Yes I wish Locke would have been even more enlightened than he was (or perhaps he was scared of being branded an atheist, or pro-catholic (which was equated with authoritarian structure, and hence was in conflict with his proposals)), but alas I cannot really let that get in the way of him being right structurally how a working democratic secular state might look like, despite his own inconsistencies.
US-style Separation of Church and State is the exception and I do not want to belittle the efforts to move there elsewhere at all. In fact even in the US it is constitutionally a fairly clean affair, pragmatically it’s still contested territory.
But just a quick closing remark on the branding thing. It really shows that we did move some since Holyoake, but not very far. After all he was very concerned with removing the branding from atheism hence invented non-theism. Luckily atheism is less loaded today than it was back then, but the branding is still life and well, but rather than brand the whole endeavor, more of the discourse is delegated to brand supposed fringes. But there is a lot of gratitude to be had to people and organizations that at least got us this far.
My point is really quite simple. We indeed shouldn’t concede to the branding of others, and I think I’m in perfect agreement with you on the sensitivities on that point.
Looks like we understand each other, which is nice.
Dan